May 1st, 2008 | Education, Perspective, Translation | No Comments
In September 2007, Princeton University launched what it hailed as “the largest, most extensive effort in the country to educate students about the important role that translation plays across academic fields and in cultural understanding.” We check it out.
By Stafford Hemmer
Officially, as News at Princeton reports, the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication seeks to “allow students to develop skills in language use and in the understanding of cultural and disciplinary difference. Translation across languages allows access to issues of intercultural differences, and the program will encourage its students to think about the complexity of communicating across cultures, nations, and linguistic borders.”
Certificate, certified—and totally certifiable
In the blush of its novelty, Sandra Bermann, chair of Princeton’s Comparative Literature department and a member of the program’s Executive Committee, eagerly elucidates that “words like democracy or constitution mean different things in different parts of the world,” reflecting the optimism of yet another translation certificate program to arise in American academia. “Certificate” and “Certified” also mean different things in different parts of the world, too.
In order to call oneself a “translator” in a country like Germany, for example, one is required to study the discipline at a University and/or pass certification examinations administered by the state or federal government. In the USA, by contrast, no such government-sanctioned qualifying body can recognize a “certified translator” who can offer “certified translations.” It falls upon many US-based translators to educate clients about what constitutes certification, and even then, fellow translators have still had to ask each other—more than once on the NCTA list, for example—”How do I certify a translation?” A not-insignificant concern when dealing with clients who need transcripts, diplomas, immigration documents, divorce decrees translated … you get the picture.
Certainly the ATA imprimatur is a powerful endorsement, despite the deserved criticisms about the quality, nature, and prevarication of its testing practices. Still, ATA is merely a private, non-profit organization, acting on its own interests and on behalf of its members. A truly objective, government-run certifying body, administering U.S., or better yet, international, standards, is woefully absent in this country.
What about that Berkeley program?
To those of us NCTA members who graduated from the now defunct Certificate in Translation and Interpretation Studies Program offered by the University of California at Berkeley (through its Extension campus), whether as students, instructors, administrators, or conspirators, the philosophy, approach, structure—and optimism—behind the new Princeton program is hauntingly familiar. Princeton’s curriculum lends itself to ready comparison with that of Berkeley/Extension. For Princeton undergraduates already proficient in at least one foreign language, the newly christened “Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication” brings the art of translation to the plethora of disciplines represented by the 17 departments involved in the program. Berkeley’s students, who demonstrated their language proficiency upon application, benefitted from a program structured by professionals in the fields of both translation and interpretation, along with a renowned university’s staff and administration representing diverse fields of study.
Like Berkeley, Princeton offers a two-year program which began this fall with one of two core courses entitled “Thinking Translation: Language Transfer and Cultural Communication” (also called “Issues in Translation”), followed, in the succeeding semester, by the collective “Senior Seminar in Translation and Intercultural Communications.” Berkeley’s infamous first semester “Survey of Linguistics” managed to weed out just under a third of the first cohort’s initial 66 participants. The seemingly directionless second-semester course did little for student retention. This drop-out rate is unlikely to happen at Princeton, because that program is not designed for adults seeking continuing education credentials on top of their busy home and work lives, but instead for current undergraduates (mostly juniors and seniors) who are complementing their degrees in the humanities, sciences, or engineering.
The rest of the program also resembles Berkeley’s program structure: in the second year, the Princeton students gradually refine their course of study first by selecting from a menu of courses in “Translation Practice”—such as “Cultures and Critical Translation”—followed by a final semester of additional, pre-approved electives that are likely to be language- and discipline-specific. And, just as with the Berkeley program, the Princeton undergrads complete the program after submitting a “Senior Thesis.” One other requirement of the Princeton program is that participants must spend between six weeks to one year abroad, whereas most of Berkeley’s enrollees had already studied abroad when they themselves were undergraduates, or lived abroad when they were being raised.
So what happened?
There are important differences between both Princeton and Berkeley that augur well for Princeton’s future. The reasons for Berkeley’s past are too complex to cover here. Princeton runs an executive committee of department members or chairs. Berkeley’s program was ultimately controlled by the Board of Regents for the University of California—making it virtually impossible for administrators to respond to important program changes or student demands, simply because they could get not get on the Regents’ quarterly meeting agenda.
The Princeton program also offers the structured environment of an undergraduate setting, with students eager to succeed, whereas the Berkeley program had to be fit in with the responsibilities of work, family, and the rest of everyday post-graduate, real-world living. It was frustrating to see so many Berkeley students who held immense potential to be so discouraged for a number of reasons—whether they had been out of college for too long, whether they had to commute three hours each way for class twice a week, or whether they were simply enraged at the administration’s inability to advocate for the changes the program needed. The program was terminated in 2002, after graduating a mere three cohorts. May Princeton enjoy a greater success.
Dec 1st, 2007 | Essays, Machine Translation, Opinion, Translation | No Comments
By Paula Dieli
Mention the words “machine translation,” and a translator’s thoughts will range from job security to the ridiculously funny translations we’re able to produce with so-called online translation tools. Should we be worried that machines will take over our jobs? Paula Dieli thinks not, and explains why in this report.
I recently attended a presentation on “Challenges in Machine Translation,” sponsored by the International Macintosh Users Group (IMUG), at which Dr. Franz Josef Och, Senior Staff Research Scientist at GoogleResearch, presented some of the challenges Google is facing in its machine translation (MT) research, and how some of these challenges are being addressed. Excitement about successes in machine translation research initially came to a head back in 1954 with a report in the press regarding the Georgetown University/IBM experiment which had used a computer to translate Russian into English. Since then, over the past 50 years, we have continued to read about the great advances that will be possible in “the next 20 years,” but these great advances never came to pass. When the Internet came of age, online translation tools surfaced and we translators amused ourselves by seeing what crazy translations we could come up with by entering seemingly simple phrases.
The linguistics of MT
So why did the research never produce anything really viable? It was based on a linguistic approach; that is, an analysis of the structure of a language followed by an attempt to map it into machine language such that one could input a source language text and out would come a wonderful translation in the target language, albeit with a few minor errors. As we all know, a language is filled with so many cultural, contextual, idiomatic, and exceptional uses that this task became virtually impossible, and no real progress has been made with this approach in the past 50 years.
Dr. Geoffrey Nunberg, Adjunct full professor at UC Berkeley, linguist, researcher, and consulting professor at Stanford University, had this to say at a recent NCTA presentation: “I asked a friend of mine, who is the dean of this [MT] field, once, ‘if you asked people working in machine translation how long it will be until we have perfect, idiomatic machine translation of text …?’, they would all say about 25 years. And that’s been a constant since 1969.”
The data-driven approach
In recent years, MT researchers have begun to take a different approach, which can be loosely compared to the work you do as a translator when you use a tool such as SDL Trados WinAlign or Translator’s Workbench. That is, you use a data-driven methodology. As you translate, you store your translations in a translation memory (TM), so that if that same or a similar translation appears again, the tool will notify you and let you use that translation as is, or modify it slightly to match the source text. The more you translate similar texts in a particular domain, the more likely it is that you will find similar translations already in your TM.
Similarly, if before you began to translate a weekly online newsletter of real estate announcements, for example, you searched the Internet for already existing translations in your language pair and then aligned them and input them, via WinAlign, into your TM, you might find that much of the work had already been done for you. Imagine now if you were to input 47 billion words worth of these translations. Your chances of being able to “automatically” translate much of your source text would certainly increase. This is the approach that Google is taking.
Google’s goal, as stated by Dr. Och, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Now before you go thinking you’re out of a job, their data-driven approach has proven successful only for certain language pairs, and only in certain specialized domains. They have achieved success in what they call “hard” languages, that is from Chinese to English, and from Arabic to English in domains such as blogging, online FAQs, and interviews by journalists.
Dr. Och reported that their reasons for progress were due to “learning from examples rather than from a rule-based approach.” He admits that “more data is better data.” He went on to say that adding 2 trillion words to their data store would result in a 1 percent improvement for specific uses such as the ones described above. They see a year-to-year improvement of 4 percent by doubling the amount of data in their data store, or “corpus.” The progress reported by Dr. Och is supported by a study conducted by the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) in 2005. Google received the highest BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) scores using their MT technology to translate 100 news articles in the language pairs mentioned above. A BLEU score ranges from 0 (lowest) to 1 (highest) and is calculated by comparing the quality of the target segments with their associated source segments (a penalty is applied for short segments since that artificially produces a higher score).
Challenges and limitations
So what are the limitations of this data-driven approach? When asked by a member of the audience if Google’s technology could be used to translate a logo, Dr. Och instantly replied that such a translation would require a human translator. It’s clear that Google’s approach handles a very specific type of translation. Similar data-driven MT implementations can be used to translate highly specialized or technical documents with a limited vocabulary which wouldn’t be translated 100 percent correctly, but which would be readable enough to determine whether the document is of interest. In that case, a human translator would be needed to “really” translate it.
The Google approach described above deals with a tremendous amount of data and a very targeted use. It works only for some languages—German, for example, has been problematic—and in order to improve in more than just small increments, human intervention is required to make corrections to errors generated by this approach. One example that Dr. Och provided—the number “1,173” was consistently incorrectly translated into the word “Swedes”—confirms that a machine can’t do it all.
And if you think for a minute about the amount of Internet-based data being generated on just an hourly basis, it’s great to have machines around to handle some of the repetitive (read: uninteresting) work, and let us translators handle the rest. That still leaves plenty of work for us humans.
Alternative technologies
There are other approaches to MT, including example-based technology, which relies on a combination of existing translations (such as you have in your translation memory) along with a linguistic approach that involves an analysis of an unmatched segment to a set of heuristics, or rules, based on the grammar of the target language. Some proponents of this approach concede that large amounts of data would be needed to make this approach successful, and have all but abandoned their research. Once again, we can see that any approach that relies even partially on linguistics has not met with a reasonable level of success.
Other advances occurring in the MT arena include gisting and post-editing. MT can be used successfully in some settings where the gist of a document is all that is needed in order to determine if it is of enough interest to warrant a human translation. There are also MT systems on the market that produce translations that require post-editing by human translators who spend (often painful) time “fixing” these translations, correcting the linguistic errors that such a system invariably produces. While this may not be the translation work you’re looking for, I know of at least one large translation agency that provides specific training for this type of post-editing to linguists willing to do this kind of work. This is another example that shows that while machines play a part, there is still a role for human translators in the overall process.
Still other advancements include the licensing of machine translation technology based on a data-driven approach, which can be tailored to work with existing translations and terminology databases at a specific company. As with the Google solution, such technologies typically work on a limited set of languages. However, if they can help translate some of the less interesting, repetitive information out there, with more information being produced at a continually increasing rate, have no fear; there will still be plenty of work for human translators to do!
The road ahead
Where does that leave us? From the typewriter to word processors to CAT (Computer-Assisted or Computer-Aided Translation) tools and the pervasiveness of the Internet, our livelihood has been transformed, in a positive way. We are more productive and able to work on more interesting translations than ever before.
I encourage you to embrace technology; understand how it is helping to make information accessible, and learn how technology can help translators do the work that only humans can do.
more information
The calendar of the International Macintosh User Group (IMUG) upcoming presentations can be found at http://www.imug.org.
You can get the official results of the 2005 Machine Translation Evaluation from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at http://www.nist.gov/speech/tests/mt/doc/mt05eval_official_results_release_20050801_v3.html.
Dec 1st, 2007 | ATA, Conferences, Reports, Russian, Translation | No Comments
By Nina Bogdan
How are changes in a language over the years noted and measured? One little-considered way is to identify the presentations made on it at successive ATA conferences.
One role of ATA in our modern world is to follow certain trends in the evolution of language use. These trends are linked to the commercial need for translators and interpreters in certain language pairs. The evolution of language in general is a fascinating topic, but love of language alone is not enough to ensure a language professional’s economic survival. The varied selection of Russian language workshops at the ATA conference this year covered many of its “flavors,” from “1001 Ways of Translating Children’s Poetry from Russian into English” to “Chemistry 1: Basic Nomenclature of Organic and Inorganic Compounds.” The latter workshop was, unfortunately, cancelled, but deserves mention as it represented the far end of the specialty spectrum.
The last twenty years have been significant for the Russian language. The breakup of the Soviet Union has actually caused a decrease in the use of Russian, as many former republics have moved to revive use of their own native, and neglected, languages and to discourage the use of Russian as the primary means of communication. In fact, according to Nicholas Ostler, in his book Empires of the Word, A Language History of the World, Russian is the only current top ten language which is “…set to lose speakers in the twenty-first century.”
The rejection of Russian is not difficult to understand if one is at all cognizant of the role of the Soviet Union on the stage of world politics in the 20th century. Nevertheless, it was during Soviet rule that literacy rose to unprecedented levels in Russia and its republics, and the success of this policy was due to the standardization of Russian in the schoolroom and beyond.
The ironclad control of the Soviet government over every facet of its citizens’ lives is no more, and the evolution of Russian continues as Russian society itself and its institutions continue to evolve. One of the workshops offered at the conference, “Translation and Corporate Governance in Russia,” would not have been offered twenty years ago, simply because there were no corporations in Russia—as the Western world knows them—until relatively recently. With the vocabulary of the commercial and financial worlds having become an integral part of the Russian language, terms such as “Joint-Stock Company” and “Limited Liability Company” are now commonly used and known. Nevertheless, the word “business,” which is directly transliterated into Russian, still does not have positive connotations for most Russians.
A workshop that delved into the vocabulary of the world of law was titled “Translating Court Forms: Lessons Learned.” Legal terminology in general is another evolving branch of the Russian language. The main idea of this particular workshop was that, to better serve the Russian émigré community in the U.S., the Russian language must be manipulated and massaged to encompass American legal terms and concepts—no easy task, to be sure.
Workshops on grammar are, by necessity, ubiquitous, and this year was no exception, with the offering of “Aid for the Imperfectly Articulate: Tips on English Article Usage.” The Russian language does not have articles such as “the” and “an”, which can make translations into English rather challenging. This is unlikely to change no matter how much Russian evolves.
Finally, a workshop at the conference titled “The Susanne Greiss Lecture: Lost in Translation—the Verbal Content of Visual Art,” discussed the concept that works of art are deeply rooted in verbal culture. This particular topic had a specific interest for language professionals but the topics of Russian art and literature in general are of endless and timeless interest. Interestingly, even during the Soviet era, when the Russian language was undergoing what might be termed forced or unnatural change (the language of political repression or the penchant for acronyms to disguise real meaning, for example), there was never any real attempt to negate the contributions to language by Russia’s greatest 18th and 19th century writers and artists, specifically, of course, Alexander Pushkin, who is generally acknowledged to be the creator of modern Russian.
Of course, “modern” Russian is a relative concept like anything else, since the Russian of Eugene Onegin, one of Pushkin’s most famous works, is not the Russian of today’s high-tech, computer-driven world. The opening of Russia to the West by Peter the Great gave impetus to the introduction of many “foreign” (that is, Western European) words which unquestionably changed the language but also made it richer. And today, few, if any, people will say “электронно-вычислительная машина” (electronic calculating machine) rather than the English import “компьютер” (computer). Some may argue that this is a pollution of “real” Russian by imported words, but what is Russian, if not the culmination of centuries of linguistic imports and infusions, adopted and adapted, that have served to create the multi-faceted, complex and uniquely beautiful language that we speak today?
As we move forward in the 21st century, we wonder with interest what new presentations will be offered on the language at upcoming ATA conferences.
Sep 1st, 2007 | Interpretation, Mentoring, Translation | No Comments
By Christopher Paul Queen
Last April 23rd, in a one-evening back-to-back outreach effort, Jacki Noh offered her insights and advice on translation and interpretation to students at both San Jose State University (SJSU) and The National Hispanic University (NHU). Certificate, upper-division, and graduate students in attendance at both locations learned about the pitfalls of complacency and the need to constantly update their skills while actively pursuing networking contacts in order to become truly in-demand translators and interpreters. Many already had translation or interpretation experience on some level, while others were looking to find a way to break into the field.
The first session of the presentation packed the SJSU Clark Hall classroom with students eager to learn about translation and interpretation, and how they can use their foreign language skills to supplement their income while in school or as a career after graduation. The audience at the second session, at NHU, comprised members of the 2007 Translation Studies Certificate Program class.
Volunteering her experience in the form of personal anecdote, Jacki pointed out the need to be affiliated with as many translation organizations as possible, specifically ATA and NCTA. “I would attend all events I could go to in any combination of languages that included English, just to learn the principles of translation,” she stated. As Korean is Jacki’s source language—considered a “Least Commonly Taught Language“ that has few associated exams with which to demonstrate competency, no academic training program to learn the craft in the U.S., and scant translation and interpretation events in the Korean- English combination—Jacki inferred that translation skills aren’t always learned in a classroom. A lesson that translates to life, as well.
Sep 1st, 2007 | Essays, Interpretation, Translation | No Comments
By Stafford Hemmer
In the May issue of Translorial, we learned of the history and mission of the Civilian Language Reserve Corp., the U.S. government’s 2004 initiative to widen the scope of qualified volunteer language professionals in the wake of the September 11th attacks. In this concluding segment, we hear from representatives of the program and the president of ATA about this unusual effort to invigorate American foreign language abilities.
On May 8, 2007, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs) for the Department of Defense issued an official News Release: “DoD Announces Pilot Language Corps.” Initially proposed to Congress shortly after the devastation of September 11, 2001, the U.S. Department of Defense was one of several agencies working jointly to originate “a vital new approach to address the nation’s needs for professionals with language skills … an integral component of the Department of Defense’s language roadmap, and the President’s National Security Language Initiative.”
According to Gail McGinn, Deputy Undersecretary for Defense for Plans, “the department is confident that a successful Language Corps will not only address gaps in federal preparedness, but also serve to reinforce the importance of language skills in the American population and the U.S. education system.” Yet true to the Leviathan nature of the U.S. bureaucracy, organizing, funding, approving, revising, debating, and moving forward with the Corps has turned into a multi-year process. Even the name of the group—originally the “Civilian Linguists Reserve Corps”— has been changed several times and is now the “National Language Service Corps.,” according to Robert Slater, Director of the National Security Education Program.
Further, while the original charter stated that “the pilot Corps will include no fewer than 1,000 members drawn from all sectors of the U.S. population,” to date no volunteers have been recruited; enrollment is not likely to start until 2008.
According to DoD information, the newly christened NLSC, which “will be an entirely civilian organization managed by the DoD for the federal sector, composed of members who will voluntarily join and renew their membership,” begins with a pilot effort involving approximately 10 languages (see Part I). Although not able to indicate which languages have been identified for the pilot project, Mr. Slater confirmed that “the final list of languages is still in development, and will be announced in the fall.”
Organization and structure
The NLSC is basically divided into two groups of participants: the “national pool” and the “dedicated pool.” All volunteers will have their skills certified by the NLSC, and it is likely that renewal procedures will involve coursework or projects that hone or elevate current skill sets. But while the national pool of volunteers is intended for deployment in the event of “war, national emergency, or other national needs,” the dedicated pool will consist of a smaller number of participants, who will serve specific federal agencies on a contractual basis, and “agree to perform specific responsibilities and duties.”
According to Mr. Slater, “the major difference between the two pools is the nature of the contractual relationship involving the individual member. In the case of the national pool, members are not obligated to serve. They will be activated only depending upon their availability. In the case of dedicated members, they will actually enter into contractual relationships with specific federal agencies. They will be expected to be available up to the days specified in their contract.” Volunteers in both pools will be expected to travel, both within the U.S. and abroad.
When asked if volunteers in either pool will be involved in the interrogation of enemy combatants, or other individuals detained by what the U.S. government deems to be terrorist-related activities, Mr. Slater replied “we are not nearly at a point where this question can be answered.”
The ATA viewpoint
Back in July 2006, ATA President Marian Greenfield announced to the organization’s membership that the government would soon be enrolling volunteers in the CLRC. Since that message, Ms. Greenfield reports that “there was no measurable response from membership, other than members who were grateful to know about such translation/interpreting volunteer opportunities, particularly those that could potentially lead could lead to paying jobs.” Compensation for the “volunteer” work, in fact, is still intended under the NLSC. “Compensation plans are still under development, explained Mr. Slater. “The assumption at this point is that national pool members will be compensated only if they are activated. However, all members will derive other benefits from membership in the Corps.”
Ms. Greenfield remains optimistic about the prospects for the NLSC and interested linguists, although there is no official ATA position on the project. As Ms. Greenfield explains, “If the [NLSC] works as planned, it will be of tremendous value to those who need help during times of local and/or national emergencies. It has the potential to possibly create jobs for ATA members. And, once again, the important role that professional translators and interpreters play in bridging the languages, customs, and cultures of different communities will be highlighted.”
May 1st, 2007 | Essays, Interpretation, Translation | 1 Comment
By Stafford Hemmer
In an attempt to widen the scope of qualified volunteer language professionals in the wake of the September 11th attacks, the U.S. government in 2004 instituted the Civilian Language Reserve Corps. In this first of a two-part series, we examine the CLRC’s history and mission. In the concluding segment, in the September Translorial, we’ll hear from many parties involved in this unusual effort to invigorate America’s foreign language abilities.
In July 2006, NCTA members who also belong ATA received an email appeal from ATA President Marian Greenfield. As a follow-up the ATA’s successful response to the Red Cross request for volunteers, Ms. Greenfield extended an invitation to interested translators and interpreters to consider joining the national Civilian Linguist Reserve Corps. “CLRC volunteers may be called upon during a national crisis of one sort or another, such as supporting preparations for evacuations before and after natural disasters,” she explained. According to the CLRC’s own mission statement, the Corps aims “to provide and maintain a readily available civilian corps of certified expertise in languages determined to be important to the security of the nation.”
History
The Corps is operated today under the auspices of the National Security Language Initiative, launched by the Bush Administration in 2004 as an endeavor to “dramatically increase the number of Americans learning critical-need foreign languages.” In this context, “critical need” refers to nine specific languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindu, Korean, Urdu, and Farsi. The NSLI is a department of the U.S. Departments of State, Defense, and Education, as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The initiative is comprised of: 1) programs to encourage the learning and teaching of foreign languages; 2) scholarships, exchanges, and projects to promote international learning and exposure; 3) the creation of “feeder programs” to educational institutions, from kindergarten through university level; and finally 4) “strategic partnerships” between the national government and U.S. universities to promote instruction in “critical languages.” The CLRC itself falls under this latter prong of NSLI agenda. In fiscal year 2007, the Bush administration requested $114 million from Congress to fund this program.
The National Guard model
On the face of it, and as reflected by Ms. Greenfield’s email, this battalion of linguists should operate like the National Guard, except that it will take command of language-related issues instead of public disorder during national crisis situations. Its genesis actually precedes the NSLI itself, in a proposal to Congress in 2001 by the National Security Education Program of the Department of Defense’s National Defense University. Following the government-funded initial feasibility study, NSEP’s Dr. Robert Slater, in his testimony of April 1, 2004, asked the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to “consider how effective and beneficial it would have been for the nation if, on September 12, 2001, the Director of the FBI had been able to request an immediate call-up of a select number of Arabic specialists who were commissioned as part of a Civilian Linguist Reserve Corps.”
Dr. Slater’s words had their effect on Capitol Hill. When the feasibility study, operational plan, and implementation plan were completed, the time had come in mid-2006 to launch the CLRC’s pilot program. Over the next three years, the Corps’ goal is to assemble a list of no fewer than 1,000 linguists by the year 2010 in the nine critical-need languages. Enrolled language professionals would be matched to the requirements stipulated by the more than 80 federal government departments, bureaus, and agencies that need their service. Reservists have to be certified not only in terms of language acumen, but also in terms of their national loyalty, in order to garner the necessary U.S. Government security clearance. With that imprimatur, members of the Corps would be available to take on sensitive defense-related work. Skills will have to be maintained and certified on a consistent basis. In exchange for the demanding level of paperwork, background clearance, and ongoing skills maintenance, the candidates in the program would be treated as federal civilian employees, receiving pay, benefits, and other incentives when finally called into service.
Mobilizing the Corps
According to a press release during the feasibility stage, the Corps was touted as an opportunity for U.S. civilians to help out during national emergencies—hurricanes Katrina and Rita being recent examples of such situations. To be clear, the CLRC would not be a military reserve; its members would have the right to refuse deployment, but should they do so, they would be required to reimburse the government for their training and education. Despite the non-military nature of the Corps’ charter, however, there appears some evidence that the Department of Defense’s intentions for this program may include grooming these language specialists to work on more delicate security matters—such as, for example, interrogations of so-called “enemy combatants” in the war on terror. Whether this falls within the purview of a “volunteer” corps is a matter for further investigation. 3
May 1st, 2007 | Localization, Reports, Translation | No Comments
By Farah Arjang
On February 24th, four professional translators from the localization industry gathered at the Monterey Institute of International Studies to talk about their experiences in the localization industry. This session was one of the many in the roundtable series that Romina Marazzato, head of the Master of Arts in Translation and Localization Management program at MIIS, has been organizing to familiarize students and freelance translators with real world of translation and localization management.The presenters at this roundtable were Jean-François Vanreusel of Adobe, who works as an Internationalization Engineer, Moon Ju Kim, a technical translator and Project Manager at Apple, Lutz Niederer, a technical translator at eBay, and Stephan Lins, CEO of Medialocate.
Translation vs. localization
The translators first talked about internalization and localization as the most important aspect of globalization, and then they explained the difference between localization and translation. Translation is just translation, with no consideration for any local audience, whereas localization is modifying the translation so that it makes more sense to the local audience who are the eventual recipients of the translated document.Lutz of eBay takes pride in the localized German eBay website, whose success, he believes, is due to the company’s local translator in Germany—who is in contact with eBay in real time—and to the three to four times a year that Lutz travels to Germany for an update of the culture and language, as well as working in person with the local German translator.
In order to correctly incorporate all provisions when a program or web content is initially created, there needs to be a close relationship between the localization team and the software developers, programmers, or the original designers of the websites. When the format and the content in the source language are created, the programmers need to consider all the limitations that the target language translators might have in conveying the same idea in the same format. None of the four companies represented by the panel is currently using machine translation in localizing their websites or products, but they do use proprietary software programs for their translation memory.
Trial runs
To tackle some of the problems of localization before a program is developed, Adobe, for one, has a process called “pseudo” programming, in which a fake program goes through the process of translation to catch problems or issues such as the differences in the alphabet or use of a particular string that might arise in the real translation.“Sim Release” (simultaneous release) is another challenge for the localization team. Every product at Adobe, eBay, and Apple is released simultaneously around the world, which means extra pressure for the translators and the localization team, who always receive changes at the last moment. Software companies are now planning to sell their shrink-wrapped products online, which means yet more pressure on translators and localization teams.Translators also need to know the ins and outs of the product being localized. Jean-François pointed out that anyone localizing Adobe Photoshop is expected to know digital imaging and basics of photography; similarly, the translator working on Adobe InDesign localization should know the program well and be familiar with the basics of the publishing world.
Moon Ju Kim of Apple, a graduate of the Monterey Institute, talked about her experiences as a technical translator and project manager at Apple. While she agreed with most of the other speakers, she also could not emphasize enough the importance of communication among the translators working on the same localization project. Her advice on work ethic was to be a team player, have a problem-solving attitude, and be up for working in a fast-paced environment, as the localization industry is changing in large ways almost every day.
Lutz, in fact, was amazed at how much the industry has evolved over the past five years since he first started working at eBay, and added his advice to be multi-tasking, detail-oriented, and persistent in order to be a successful localization team member. His last word was “Believe in yourself and make the engineers or content writers develop the programs in a way that works for any other language!”
Feb 1st, 2007 | British English, Essays, French, Spanish, Translation | No Comments
By Jonathan Goldberg
We have of course all been exposed to various—if not many!—examples of the differences between British and American vocabulary, but can we ever get enough? The answer, thankfully, is “no.” So let’s explore some bathroom … well, terminology, if not exactly humor (with help from the French and Spanish).
Restroom
This word, most commonly used in the United States, is a euphemism for lavatory, because it eschews any mention of toilet activities performed there. Lavatory, meaning a place where one washes (as well as the apparatus itself), is itself a euphemism, as is W.C., which is short for water closet. Both of these terms are more prevalent in Britain than is restroom.
Bathroom is another word used in the U.S. to mean a restroom, toilet, lavatory, or W.C. Other synonyms in American English, although far less frequently used, include lav, john, loo, and can. Spanish displays the same modesty in the expression cuarto de baño, literally bathroom (or simply baño). In some Spanish-speaking countries, the term W.C. is adopted as is from the English, although pronounced differently. But Spanish has three other words used to indicate public toilets. One is servicios, meaning services, obviously a euphemism. Another is aseos, which without the s has a variety of meanings in Spanish, including cleanliness. The third is lavabo, from the word lavar, meaning to wash.
The common denominator of all these low-key words is that they suggest only the bodily cleaning-up activities performed after the toilet has been used for its primary purpose. The English word toilet is derived from the French toilette. Originally, the French word meant “a cloth on which items used for grooming are placed,” vaguely similar to the present-day (British) English toilet or toilet-bag—“a waterproof travel bag for holding toiletries (soap, toothpaste, etc.).” Later, the French cabinet de toilette came to mean the room in which one washed, from whence its present-day meaning of a W.C., or restroom. British English has adopted the word toilet to mean also the act of dressing and preparing oneself, as in “he made his morning toilet and went to breakfast.”
Queue
In the U.S., one stands in line; for example, waiting to use the restroom at a sporting event. (Although in New York, one stands on line.) In Britain—and indeed in English-speaking countries where British English is in use—one waits in a queue. Queue is, in fact, used in the U.S. in this sense, but only in the field of information processing, to mean “an ordered list of tasks to be performed or messages to be transmitted.”
French has the same word, queue (pronounced differently). This has at least two meanings. The first is that of a line or queue, identical to the British use. (In French you don’t stand in line, you make the line—faire la queue). The second meaning is “tail”—as of an animal. The visual similarity between a line of people and the tail of an animal is clear.
A further use of queue, “a braid of hair at the back of the head” (albeit a somewhat arcane definition) also bears that visual association. The Spanish word for queue (line of people) is cola. As in French, this has the additional meaning of “tail.” However, the word tail in English is used not only to denote the wiggly protrusion of animals but also (among other interpretations) the tail end of an animal or object—such as the tail of an airplane.In the latter respect, the meaning is similar to that in French and in the Spanish of some Spanish-speaking countries, because queue and cola are both used in those two senses of tail. (The Spanish word cola has the additional sense of glue. Cola also exists in English, as in the brand names Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, having acquired the meaning of a carbonated soft drink, but it has its origin in the fact that Coca-Cola was originally composed of an extract from the kola nut, as well as from the leaf of Peruvian coca. Kola is also a language spoken south of Lake Chad, in Africa.
Underwear
Many Americans might be unfamiliar with the term knickers, commonly used in England to mean women’s panties. Paradoxically, the word from which it is derived, knickerbockers, has its origin in New York. (The New York Knicks basketball team takes its name from this word.)
In England, women’s underwear is probably more typically designated today by the more chic French word lingerie, originally used to mean anything made of linen but now well ensconced in English as women’s underwear. The word bra is a short form of brassière, imported into English and still used in French. But the common French word is soutien-gorge, meaning literally a throat-holder, devised presumably by someone with a poor knowledge of female anatomy. (Brassière should not be confused with brazier, meaning “a container for holding hot coals,” or brasserie, a restaurant serving alcohol—although certain men might be excited by all of these concepts.)
There are many words in Spanish meaning bra, depending on the country of use. Sujetador—literally a subjugator—sounds daunting enough to make any woman want to burn her bra. Sostén, literally a support, also stays well clear of mentioning that part of a woman’s body which the bra serves to keep in place. Vive la modestie! As for men’s wear, knickers was originally used to denote men’s as well as women’s underwear, but the expressions in vogue today are shorts (boxers and briefs) in America and underpants in England.
This article appeared in an abridged form in the Dec. 2004/Jan. 2005 issue of Toga, the newsletter of the Plato Society of UCLA (www.uclaextension.edu/plato). NCTA is grateful to the Plato Society for granting us its permission to reprint.
Feb 1st, 2007 | Essays, French, NCTA Info, NCTA Members, Translation | No Comments
By Danièle Heinen
A new opportunity, half a continent away; an exciting job, an exotic locale, a chance to make a difference for a company relatively new to the intricacies of translation. What could be better? Well, read the story of our intrepid reporter, NCTA member Danièle Heinen, to find out exactly what could have been better.
I guess I could mimic Lauren Bacall who recalled “How I went to Africa to shoot the African Queen and nearly lost my mind” and say, “How I went to Brisbane, Australia to create and run a translation department and nearly lost my mind!”
In February of 2005, a long-standing client of mine referred me to the position of translation manager for a Canadian-based mining company located in Brisbane, Australia. Inco, at the time the world’s second-largest producer of nickel, was constructing a nickel mine and processing plant on the island of New Caledonia, a French overseas territory that holds about 30% of the world’s nickel reserves.
With the Project Engineering Office in English-speaking Brisbane and the mine facilities in French-speaking New Caledonia, the need for translation services—even more, for a structure for translation services—was obvious. Business practices in New Caledonia follow a variety of customs and regulations, most of which are European or French in origin, and which therefore require documents in French, including work permits and visas. On the other side, the requests for translations into English came from managing engineers in Brisbane responsible for the various portions of the project; these engineers were mostly monolingual English speakers, and it was often only at the last minute that they realized a translation was needed—on topics that ranged from mechanical to electric to fire protection and more—which then compounded the urgency. Most of these engineers, obviously, had no idea of what translation entailed.
Translation? What’s that?
Prior to my arrival, the translation requests were handled by a competent, yet already overworked administrative assistant who acted as translation coordinator within the Contract and Procurement Department. Although she had no experience with translation and did not know French, she nonetheless developed a useful translation request form and tracking worksheet. Still, hers was purely a processing role. The local translation vendors were two French women who lacked translation training, and yet who were asked to handle virtually any subject and work in both directions.
The quality of the locally delivered translations was variable and unreliable; there were also spelling and grammar mistakes, and accents missing: a case of “I didn’t know I could reconfigure my keyboard under Windows,” and blaming the Microsoft Word spellchecker. Termium was unknown, while the GDT and the use of an electronic bilingual dictionary was known by one translator only.
Reviews, both technical and linguistic, were done by the requesting department, provided there was a bilingual (French or Canadian) engineer in the department. The translations came back with a number of terminology queries, but reviewers lacked time, and so coped as best as they could, amending the translations themselves.
A low level of support
Process problems were compounded as the technical documents went through a review cycle within the Engineering Department, where the translation requests would often be made at different steps of the process without anyone noticing that there might be only the equivalent of five to six pages of changes from one revision to the next; the entire set of documents was retranslated, sometimes by a different vendor.
In addition, the source and the target documents would sometimes be amended separately; to deal with this, a bilingual document format, with English on the left and French on the right, was designed to ensure matched text. The lack of secretarial staff that could read French, however, worked against the best intentions of this system. Problems with converting text from PDF documents further complicated things.
As if the existing process at the mining company were not difficult enough, the translation scene in Australia posed further obstacles. Translation and interpretation in Australia is mostly linked to immigration and medical concerns, not mining and engineering. AUSIT, the Australian translators association, includes members whose primary profession is not necessarily translation. NAATI, the national translation certification body, has three levels of certification, and very few translators working from English to French had reached the advanced level listed on the NAATI website; understandable, perhaps, as this was a paid listing. Finally, French is not the lead foreign language in Australia.
Digging in
Where to start? During my first trip to the country, I made a number of recommendations on procedures, looked at resumes, and interviewed people. I found one excellent professional translator with a translation degree from an institution in Belgium (but who could only work part-time), and set out to find freelance translators in the various technical fields that the project covered. In terms of tools, I decided that a translation memory tool would be in order, and also made lists of dictionaries in both paper and electronic format to order for in-house use.
Back in Canada before returning to Australia the second time for the duration of my commitment, I put a call out to ATA’s French Language Division and to NCTA to look for certified translators with technical knowledge. I also contacted professional colleagues from Canada and Europe (the time difference would be much easier to deal with from Brisbane). I also found a lone French Canadian translator who had been working in Brisbane—and who had connections with New Caledonia and mining for some years—and was very knowledgeable about various translation tools. My final team incorporated members from California, Canada, Australia, and France: a truly international effort!
Seeds of change
Once in Australia for good, I implemented SDLX with the use of both Elite and Professional licenses and encouraged the freelancers to use SDLX Lite to start with; some already used WordFast or Trados so we swapped TMs in TMX format. As I was far from knowledgeable about all the intricacies of SDLX (which resulted in a few nightmares!) I enlisted the help of the local translator I had found who already knew SDLX, and trained the newly hired inhouse translator/reviewer and the translator working on our HR documents. In turn, we offered training for the local freelancers.
My colleague put herself to the task of developing a TermBase, starting with an excellent glossary put together independently by some of the Canadian and French engineers. We also installed various electronic dictionaries and a French spell and grammar checker as standard tools for inhouse use. We also researched and purchased various software programs to deal with the PDF issues, all the while arguing for the need for native source files.
Administratively, we redesigned the translation request form and tracking spreadsheet, allocated a sequential number for each request, insisted on the need to nominate a native speaker for each translation request to review the translation from a technical point of view, and initiated searches for possible existing translations before assigning any work. Those searches—and the building of libraries from what we found—turned out to be extremely time-consuming, as there was no reliable archiving system of the matching source and target files. Eventually we started building translation memories, which were still quite rough because there was no manpower to do much review of the texts we decided to process. We deemed a number of them unusable and had to discard them.
The final tally
There were other issues: procedures that someone else had to establish and implement as I had my plate full; the impossibility of planning the workload as there never was an estimate of the number of documents that would require translation; the inability to find another professionally trained inhouse full-time translator (our normal working week was 45 hours); the need to deal with new types of documents for translation, as often is the case when a new translation department is established; and more into-English translation than had been expected, which created the need to find more translators in other fields and in a different language direction.
Above all, the main challenge and frustration came from having to constantly educate our internal clients as to the translation process, explaining that we were, like the engineers, university trained, and that a mistranslated document could pose huge risks.
Like Lauren Bacall, I almost lost my mind. But I survived, and the new system we put in place is now humming along—thanks mostly to my first colleague and the good people who have followed.
Still, having learned a bit, I’m ready for another assignment.
Dec 1st, 2006 | ATA, Medical Translation, NCTA Info, NCTA Meetings, Reports, Translation | No Comments
By Raffaella Bushiazzo
This year our fall general meeting was a very special event, as translators and want-to-be translators were able to dedicate an entire weekend to increasing their professional knowledge and exchanging business cards and tips with fellow translators and agencies in an elegant environment.
To coordinate with ATA’s Medical Translation Seminar and our own NCTA MultiTerm Workshop for Trados users, we moved our quarterly meeting to Sunday, September 17th at the Embassy Suites Hotel in South San Francisco. The NCTA general meeting started with the traditional New Member Orientation, to help those who have recently joined NCTA learn more about the association.
Trials and questionnaires
Since the ATA seminar was on medical translation we chose to present on a connected topic. We invited David Himmelberger from Health Outcomes Group in San Francisco (http://www.healthoutcomesgroup.com/) to explain how clinical trials and health care questionnaires are designed and translated for multinational use; the translators role in this process; and what is expected from translators. Dr. Himmelberger’s presentation was rich in practical examples, detailed guidelines, and, not least, hilarious anecdotes.
Since the mid-1970s, Mr. Himmelberger has been involved in analyzing the results of medical treatments in terms of cost and quality of life. After many years as a biostatistician at Stanford University and experience in the pharmaceutical industry in strategic planning, international marketing research, and outcomes evaluation, Mr. Himmelberger founded Health Outcomes Group in 1987.
Today, there are no medical tests to prove that a treatment for a disease is working. For this reason, questionnaires are needed, to calibrate medical procedures to a common standard. But often these questionnaires need to be translated before they can completed by patients in different environments.
The translated documents must be absolutely true to the source, but at the same time in readable, natural-sounding language. Typical projects involve twenty countries at a time, where English is almost always the source language translated into other target languages, and adapted to each culture. The translation process is usually lengthy, involves a number of people, and presents difficult challenges to be solved.
The person who writes the original questionnaire, the source author, has an interest in staying involved at each step of the translation process—both to ensure accuracy and to make sure he or she shares in any additional fees. Two translators will then translate the text, working independently of each other. The resulting translations are sent to a linguist living in Italy who combines the two versions into one. This version is then back-translated back into English. At this point the translation is reviewed by the author, as well as by doctors and experts for a linguistic validation.
They take a small sample of users and conduct a dialogue with the patients to see if they fully understand the questionnaire and all of its nuances.
To be effective, a translation of this kind needs to meet two nearly paradoxical requirements, which is what makes the task so challenging. First, the source text is fixed and unalterable; since the developer doesn’t want to change the questionnaire in the original language, the linguist has to work around that to come up with solutions. Second, the translation also needs to sound natural in all the target communities and cultures!
How do we know what patients understand when they answer a questionnaire? Several techniques are used, often involving putting the patient at ease, listening to the vocabulary he or she uses, watching for visual cues, having questions prepared that address issues identified in the translation process, and the use of different interview techniques. Lastly, the translation is sent back to the target language linguist for a final approval.
Networking and goodies
Dr. Himmelberger’s fascinating talk was followed by a treat—a buffet of delicious cheeses and exotic fruit, elegantly served on the hotels fine china. It was a landmark weekend for NCTA, because we were able to offer our members so many professional enrichment events in such a short time. I was pleased to see the enthusiasm shown, as well as the number of first-time NCTA attendees and attendees from outside Northern California who joined us for this first-class event and presentation.
