Consequences of "frictionless communication across languages"

iSpeak.net has an article about the future impact of machine translation: hopes, dreams, possibilities, etc. One thing that jumped to my eye was this sentence:

"Some even believe that frictionless communication across languages would help different cultures and religions to see eye to eye, helping to bring about peace on earth"

Whoever said that, must not have paid much attention to Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel Fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

BBC America - Dictionary of Slang

When I studied English, I was more familiar with the British variety, including accents and slang. Now I've been living in the USA for a dozen years, and what I've not forgotten, is woefully out of date.

Help is at hand, however, from the web site of BBC America: they have an online dictionary of contemporary slang, so if you are puzzled by what they are talking about when they say "This place is quite a good battle", or "I don't know what's up with the telly...it's all over the shop", give it a look: it might help.

(Hat tip: scotsman.com)

Article Done

With a lot of back and forth between Franco and I, we managed to trim it to slightly more than 3,000 words.

Final step is copyediting by an English native speaker (Franco's wife). Tomorrow we'll send it to Multilingual.

Article on Translation Quality Mesurement Almost Ready

I am currently working with Franco Zearo of Lionbridge on a final draft for an article on translation quality measurement, to be published on Multilingual Computing.

Much of the work is trimming what we have written to a maneageable size. One of the things we had to cut (because it would deserve its own article, or series of articles), is a section on the six phases for setting up a robust quality system:

1. Design
   
2. Calibration
   
3. Sampling
   
4. Measurement
   
5. Statistical Analysis
   
6. Process Improvement
   

If you are interested, there is a bit more about what goes in each of the six phases in a post I just published in post I just published in Translation Quality Blog.

How To Argue with an Umpire

ESPN.com has a fairly funny piece about the problems of arguing with the World Baseball Classics umpires through a translator:

[OH SHOUTS INSULTING DESCRIPTIONS OF DAVIDSON'S ANCESTRY INTO HIS FACE]

TRANSLATOR: "Oh-san respectfully inquires how your family is doing, particularly your mother."

...then it continues for a while.

Website Localization

ISEdb.com published a couple of days ago a very interesting and detailed article ("Translating Web Sites Considerations for Multilingual Online Businesses") on what to consider when deciding whether and how to translate a business web site.

There are a few things I disagree with, for instance

"If at all possible, if your company employs local salespeople or marketing staff in that country then you might consider having them write or translate the copy on the web site—they know the product and any important selling points and local “slang” that is important to include."

Local salespeople or marketing staff should certainly be more knowledgeable about the products they are selling, and possibly may be more up to date with their industry's jargon than us mere translators... but they are not translators, and I have seen time and again that translations done by non-professionals very quickly run into serious problems.

Much better is when translations are entrusted to qualified professional translators, and the in country technical and marketing staff freely support the translation team(s), answering their questions and checking the draft translations.

But other than that, the article is very informative, and could be a valuable resource when advising a customer what to do when localizing a web site.
(Hat tip: iSpeak blog)

Tags: localization

First "Translation Summit"

From yahoo! Finance:

This apparently has to do with providing translation to the government in the post 9/11 world.

If the press release is any indication, it should prove a bonanza for anybody who enjoys cliché-ridden content-free jargon, for example:

"...augment existing government translation capabilities" "...acting as a clearinghouse for facilitating interagency use of translators..."
"...mission..." "...think out of the Beltway box..."

That's on a par with the business claptrap we used to have to suffer through during the obligatory frequent meetings at the business software company I used to work for.

After reading that stuff I think I'll need a dose of Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" as an antidote.

Tags: translation events

Real-Time Human Translation?

From: PRWeb.

TranslationBooth.com, an online translation company, has apparently set up a system for providing rapid low-cost translations online.

I have some doubts, however, about the quality one can expect from such a service: digging a bit in their website ("How to work for us"), one finds that, among the types of jobs available there are

• NonNative - People who are fluent in a language pair but do not have certification and are not a native speaker of that language

• Native - People who are fluent in a language pair AND are a native speaker in that language pair

• Professional - People who have had at least 5 years industry experience in that language pair

"Native speaker in that language pair", is a bit unclear, but probably due to no more than some sloppy writing (native speaker of what: SL?, TL?, both of them?), but what is clear is that translations would be done by many people that are neither professional translators nor native speakers of the target language.

Non-native non professionals doing rapid translations: I think that doubts about the resulting quality are legitimate.

UPDATE Margaret Marks is also blogging on this: "...I am thinking of starting a service to deliver translation in less than real time, for instance yesterday."

New Website of ATeLP - Association of Translation in the Portuguese Language

From newswire:

"The ATeLP is a cultural and scientific association which has the aim of cultivating, developing, promoting and disseminating information about the practice, study, teaching-learning, research and application of general translation and, more particularly, of specialized translation from and into the Portuguese language".

You can find the new website here.

Blogger and Spam

I apologize for not posting anything since last week.

Unfortunately, this blog had been locked by Blogger, as their algorithms had somehow deemed it a "spam blog" (no idea why: it is clearly a legitimate blog, but until some human person took the time to look at it, it remained locked)... so, although the blog was still up, I could not post anything new.

The blog has now been looked at by a human member of blogger support and whitelisted.

Before saying that all's well that ends well, I'll wait a little while, since, apparently, a number of blogs that had been similarly locked and then whitelisted, afterwards completely disappeared.

So, let's keep our finger crossed.