Feb 1st, 2010 | Business Tools, Translation | 2 Comments
BY JOST ZETZSCHE
Before we explore Microsoft’s new operating system, here are some language-related pieces of information that you might not have read about so far: The new glossary for Windows 7 is available. You probably know some of the history of the so-called “Microsoft glossaries.” These were never really glossaries but large translation memories with the translation data of the user interface for many of Microsoft’s software products. From 1994 through the summer of 2006 they were available for free on one of Microsoft’s FTP sites. In July 2006 the free offer was replaced with a multilingual glossary, which now is gone as well. What still remains is the Microsoft Language Portal. → continue reading
Feb 1st, 2010 | Business Tools, Translation | No Comments
BY YVES AVÉROUS
- Early iteration of the Mac OS X Aqua interface.
We’ve already lived 10 years past the end of the world and gosh, how quaint 2000 sounds already! Remember Y2K? What I also remember from 2000 is the Windows flavor of the same name. It was the marriage of professional NT robustness with the friendlier interface of Windows 98… Ten years later, that line ended with XP and is finally tweaked to the point of usability with 7. In this issue’s column by Jost you can read about how so many Mac-like features finally made it to the PC with Windows 7 but still on a patched, tired architecture.
→ continue reading
Feb 1st, 2010 | Conferences, Literary Translation, Reports, Translation | No Comments
Expectations were surpassed at the ALTA Conference in November. BY MARGARITA MILLAR
This was my first time at the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference, which took place in Pasadena in November of 2009. When I registered for the conference in July, I didn’t know what to expect. The program seemed really interesting and I could not make up my mind about the panels I wanted check out. The topics were diverse, ranging from song translating to finding ways to publish literary translation. The pre-conference reception was auspicious. Held on the outdoor patio of the Pacific Asia Museum, it was the stage for the presentation in song of Vietnamese poetry performed by Lê Phanm Lê, a poet and resident of Oakland, and her translator Nancy Arbuthnot. To be outdoors listening to poetry, with plenty of food and wine to go with it, was truly a magical moment. The festive evening set the mood for the rest of the conference for me. → continue reading
Dec 1st, 2009 | Business Tools, Reviews, Translation | 3 Comments
An ever increasing number of translation tools on the market means more choices and decisions for translators. Here, a review of STAR Transit NXT Version 4.0. BY MICHAEL SCHUBERT
The Swiss STAR Group was founded in 1984 as a technical editing and translation services company and now has 48 locations in 31 countries. STAR initially developed Transit as its in-house translation tool and began marketing it worldwide in 1991. The latest version, STAR Transit NXT, was released in November 2008.
The 150 MB download installed in under five minutes with no reboot required and also uninstalled quickly and cleanly. Comprehensive PDF user manuals are available in German or English (of sorts). The program user interface can be displayed in U.K. English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Czech, Swedish, Chinese or Japanese. → continue reading
Dec 1st, 2009 | Business, Reports, Translation | No Comments
Monica Moreno and Naomi Baer will be speaking at the NCTA General Meeting on December 12.
Monica Moreno and Naomi Baer
The term “crowdsourcing” was created just three years ago and is already causing much discussion and experimentation in the translation industry. What does crowdsourcing mean in the context of translation, and what does this new wave of translation crowdsourcing projects look like? How do community translation projects that predate the invention of this term relate to the trends today?
As a rapidly growing international non- profit organization, Kiva faces the challenge of how to efficiently handle translations and has developed a unique translation crowdsourcing methodology. Kiva’s approach integrates volunteer resources, a mentoring program, and a professional translation agency, Idem Translations.
Monica Moreno, of Idem Translations, and Naomi Baer, of Kiva, will discuss emerging translation crowdsourcing projects at both not-for-profit and for- profit organizations, provide insights into why organizations are interested in this approach, and what can be gained. → continue reading
Dec 1st, 2009 | Business, Perspective, Translation | 1 Comment
The often dysfunctional relationship between project managers and freelance translators may stem from a simple lack of communication. BY SUSAN AYOOB
In a fast-paced, deadline-driven industry, freelance translators and project managers communicate constantly, yet there is often a lack of true communication between both parties. In a way, this is understandable, since there is often little time to discuss details when a project has a short turn-around time. Call, confirm, translate, and deliver. Yet regardless of a project’s scope—be it the translation of a few sentences in Word or a file consisting of thousands of words and involving the management of a hefty translation memory—clear project instructions are an absolute must in order to ensure an on-time, accurate delivery (as well as the avoidance of headaches on both sides). I have worked as both a project coordinator and a freelance translator, and I know that there are certain things that project managers would love for freelance translators to know, and likewise, translators often wish that project managers could do some things a bit differently. → continue reading
Dec 1st, 2008 | ATA, Business, Continuing Ed., Translation | No Comments
A report on a workshop for candidates planning to take the ATA certification examination. BY NORMA KAMINSKY
On August 23, Tuomas Kostiainen, NCTA President and member of the ATA Certification committee, who has been an ATA exam grader, once again stepped up to share his knowledge, experience, and advice with translators contemplating taking the ATA Certification Exam. Tuomas’ presentation included a discussion of the exam itself, reasons to take it, explanations of eligibility requirements, skills tested in the exam, grading, preparation, planning, types of errors, and tips for success. → continue reading
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.
