TAUS is currently running a survey on translation innovation. In his letter to all with an interest in the global translation industry: translation buyers, agencies, tool developers, translators, institutions, Jaap van der Meer shares his opinion on LISA’s recent shutting down and makes a call for action. Here are some excerpts of his letter:

“LISA is gone, but its mission is not completed. Unlike industries such as travel, telecommunications, banking and transportation, the translation industry has still not found a common ground on which to build truly efficient operations. The lack of interoperability costs the translation industry a fortune – 40% of respondents to a recent TAUS survey say it costs them more than 10% of their budgets. That is a giant bite out of our margins.

I am sending this urgent call for action to everyone with an interest in the global translation industry: translation buyers, agencies, tool developers, translators, institutions. Please forward this email to your peers, customers and suppliers. We’d like to reach everyone. We want standards to work and unwanted friction to be removed from our processes.

TAUS is stepping forward as an industry watchdog for interoperability. It is a natural extension of our role as an industry innovation think tank. We don’t want to own the standards or create new standards. LISA delivered good interchange format standards, that may require some fine-tuning and extension. Our focus is really to channel the demands for interoperability and standards requirements, and to unify the buyers in making interoperability compliance a purchase criterion.”

Those interested can download TAUS extended Annual Plan for 2011 and complete the short survey thereafter to provide their feedback.

See: TAUS

Oneword puts a quick-fix end to your writer’s block by providing a one-word writing prompt, on an online platform where you can sprinkle out your thoughts in just 60 seconds.

The site is easy-to-use and discrete in appearance. Its succinct text gives the clearest of directions:

• simple. you’ll see one word at the top of the following screen. you have sixty seconds to write about it. click ‘go’ and the page will load with the cursor in place.
• don’t think. just write.

(And, apparently, don’t worry about capital letters.)

After clicking the “go” button, a word pops up with a space to write whatever you want, and a low-tech timer ticks off 60 seconds at the bottom of the page.

The site could easily become addictive, but it fortunately proposes only one word a day.

THE BASICS Recently relaunched as OED Online, the Oxford English Dictionary is the authority on all word referencing and is the definitive record of the English language. It contains more than 600,000 entries that have been in use over the past 1,000 years, focusing on their origin, meaning and pronunciation, using ancient quotations to modern-day examples to define them. Could come in handy over a game of Scrabble.

WHAT A GREAT IDEA. WHO THOUGHT OF IT? In 1857 the Philological Society of London decided, with some reason, that the dictionaries then in existence were deficient, full of inaccuracies and out of date. Full of Victorian confidence, they determined that a full review of the English language from Anglo-Saxon times was warranted and gave themselves a generous decade to complete it.

HOW DID THEY GET ON? Headed by James AH Murray, an academic with a keen intellect and interest in languages, after five years they had reached only “ant” and the suspicion arose that perhaps 10 years would not be enough. In fact it would take 71 years before the first edition landed, with a thud, on the shelves in 1928. Poor Murray never saw the completed work before his death 13 years prior to the 10 volumes being published.

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH? The OED’s sister dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary Online, focuses more on modern language, citing 21st-century references so one can see today’s usages. It is free to access. If you fancy an actual book, the 20 volumes of the OED cost £750 (Dh4,440). A two-volume abridged version runs £250.

WHAT ELSE TO REFERENCE? Merriam-Webster is the premier dictionary of American English. Macquarie is the Australian and New Zealand reference of choice, but one must subscribe to it. Collins and Chambers dictionaries provide shorter versions, free on the internet. OneLook is a website that trawls through over a thousand dictionaries to bring you a definition.

See: The National

There have been several voices talking about the demise of TM recently, most notably Renato Beninatto who has made it a theme of several of his talks at industry conferences in the true agent provocateur spirit. More recently, apparently Jaap van der Meer said the same thing (dead in 5 years no less) at the final LISA standards summit event. (My attempt to link to the twitter trail failed since @LISA_org is no more). This resulted in comments by Peter Reynolds and some commentary by Jost Zestche (soon to be published in the Translation Journal) questioning these death announcements and providing a different perspective.

Since there have been several references to the value of TM to statistical MT which by the way are all pretty much hybrid nowadays, as they try to incorporate linguistic ideas in addition to raw data, I thought that I would jump in with my two cents as well and share my opinion.

So what is translation memory technology? At it’s most basic level it is a text matching technology whose primary objective is to save the professional translator from having re-translate the same material over and over again. The basic technology has evolved from segment matching to sub-segment matching or something called corpus-based TM.(is there a difference?) In it’s current form it is still a pretty basic database technology applied to looking up strings of words. Many of the products in the market focus a lot on format preservation and this horrible (and somewhat arbitrary quantification, I think) concept called fuzzy matching, which unfortunately has become the basis for translation payment determination. This matching rate based payment scheme I think is at the heart of marginalizing professional translation work, but I digress.

It makes great sense to me that any translator working on a translation project be able to easily refer to their own previous work, and possibly even all other translation work in the domain of interest to expedite their work. My sense is that the quality of the “text matching technology” is still very primitive in the current products, but the basic technology concept could be poised for a significant leap forward to be more flexible, accurate and linguistically informed in other parts of the text-oriented tools world, e.g. Search, natural language processing (NLP) and Text Analytics, where the stakes are higher than just making translation work easier (or finding a rationale to pay translators less). Thus, I would agree that the days are numbered for the old “klunker-type TM” technology,  but I also think that new replacements will probably solve this problem in much more elegant and useful ways.

The old klunker-type TM technology has an unhealthy obsession with project and format related meta-data and I think we will see that in the evolution of this technology that linguistics will become more important. We are already seeing early examples of this next generation at Linguee. In a sense I think we may see the kind of evolution that we saw in word-processing technology, from something used by geeks and secretaries only, to something any office worker or executive could use and operate with ease. The ability to quickly access the reference use of phrases, related terms and context as needed is valuable, and I expect we will move forward in delivering useful, in-context material to a translator who uses such productivity tools.

It is clear that SMT based approaches do get better with more TM data and to some extent (up to 8 words) they will even reproduce what they have seen in the same manner that TM does. But we have also seen that there are limits to the benefit of ever growing volumes of data and that it actually matters more to have the “right” data in the cleanest possible form to get the best results. For many short sentences, SMT already performs as a TM retrieval technology, and we can expect that this capability will become more visible and more controls may become available to improve concordance and look-ups. We should also expect that the growing use of data-driven MT approaches will create more translation memory after post-editing, so TM is hardly going to disappear but hopefully it will get less messy. In SMT we are already developing tools to transform and change existing TM for normalization and standardization related reasons, to make it work better for specific purposes, especially when using pooled TM data. I think it will also be likely that many translation projects will start with pre-translation from a (TM+MT) process and hopefully a better, more equitable payment methodology.


The value of TM created from the historical development of user documentation is likely to change. This user documentation TM that makes up much of what is in the TDA repository is seen as valuable by many today, but as we move increasingly to making dynamic content more multilingual I think it’s relative value will decline. I also expect that the most valuable TM will be that which is related to customer conversations. Also, community based collaboration will play an ever increasing role in building leverageable linguistic assets and we are already seeing evidence of MT and collaboration software infrastructure working together on very large translation initiatives. It is reasonable to expect that the tools will get better to make collaboration smoother and more efficient. Read more.

See: eMpty PAges

The Monterey Institute recently hosted its annual career fair. Around 100 employers, mostly from the translation, interpretation, and localization industry, came to recruit students. Ryann Hoffman, an MPA student, asked localization employers about the MATLM program at MIIS and summarized her findings. Tyler W Smith,  a Russian language teacher, MA Candidate in Translation and Localization Management, was intrigued by what she discovered, and shares it here with her permission.

• Those who currently work in this field fell into it unintentionally, with no formal training, and don’t really know where the “industry stands.”
• MIIS’s TLM program is the only one they’ve ever heard of, ever, and it isn’t taken incredibly seriously, as experience is the most important asset a candidate for employment can have.
• ANYTHING that would give the students more experience would do them well.
• The best way to promote MIIS’s TLM program would be to elevate the profiles of its successful alumni. Read more.

See: Smart Localization

As part of the “British Library’s project to “capture the sounds of spoken English” everywhere  people all around the world are reading a text from Mr. Tickle (10,000 voices have already contributed.) You can hear the voices recorded here.

See: Guardian.co.uk

No matter how well-prepared a country is, and no matter how advanced its infrastructure and technology, no nation could have anticipated the devastation wrought by the recent tsunami and series of earthquakes in Japan. In the race to respond to urgent needs in the aftermath of a disaster, communication across languages is critical.

When disaster strikes, there is always a need to communicate across languages both for internal and external purposes. Within a country’s borders, relief workers must make sure that critical safety instructions can be understood by members of linguistically diverse populations. Like many economic powerhouses, Japan is a “pull country” for immigrants. More than two million foreigners – hailing from countries like Brazil, China, Korea, Peru, the Philippines, the United States, and Venezuela – live and work on Japanese soil. Whenever a disaster takes place, individuals in other countries begin trying to reach their loved ones in the affected location, generating an influx of communications in other languages.

Given the need for language services support, the Japan Association of Translators (JAT) is serving as a central point of contact for requests for interpreters and translators.  The JAT is also welcoming volunteer interpreters to contact them.  Even if you don’t speak Japanese, if you speak one of the languages of the countries listed above, you might be able to help.  In times of emergency, “relay interpreting” is quite common.  In this type of interpreting, a Spanish<>English interpreter renders the words of a Venezuelan worker in Japan into English, whereupon an English<>Japanese interpreter transfers the information into Japanese. In some cases, the second interpretation might not even be needed – for example, if a Japanese doctor speaks English and has a Korean-speaking patient, a Korean<>English interpreter might be sufficient to assist with critical and potential life-saving language support. Read more.

See: Common Sense Advisory

Also see: Japan Association of Translators (JAT) assembles list of volunteer interpreters to help in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami disaster

With high-profile companies like Facebook and Twitter implementing crowdsourcing solutions to manage volunteer translators, many companies are wondering if they can obtain volunteer translation for free. For the answer and additional details on translation crowdsourcing, including its risks, read Adam Wooten’s column, “Can Companies Obtain Free Professional Services through Crowdsourcing?”

…crowdsourcing is not all roses and daisies. Various inaccuracies on Wikipedia have made news, and translation crowdsourcing faces similar challenges that must be overcome to create a reliable product. For example, professionals have been quick to point out when volunteers have unintentionally or maliciously blundered translations on Facebook. In one case in 2010, a group of Turkish “translators” banded together to game the system and play an obscene prank. The result was a Turkish user interface on Facebook filled with expletives and insults. Similarly profane “mistranslations” have sneaked through in other languages, too.

“You can’t be sure of what you will get from strangers or crowds as they contain experts as well as opinionated non-experts. It’s a mixed bag,” wrote Utah-based localization management professional Michael Cox and translation technology expert Kirti Vashee. “The counterpoint to this is that with the right process, technology and oversight, you can corral the efforts and knowledge of the crowd to produce a quality product, in many ways better than any subset of people could create. Wikipedia, Apache, OpenOffice and Linux have proven this.”

See: The International Business Edge!

In her blog Catherine Jan explains why having a part-time day job enhances her experience as a freelance translator.

She also lists other perks of having a day job. See the list below:

1. She gets out of the house. She talks to humans using her voice, not her keyboard.
2. She brushes her hair.  Her shoes get shined, her face gets powdered, her shirt gets ironed.
3. She marches.
4. She parts from her computer. This gives her arms, back and eyes a rest. Anyone else translate using a font size of 20?
5. She networks.
6. She learns.

See: Catherine Translates

What about you? What’s your experience? Do you also have a part-time job?

Le Xuan Giang, a veteran translator of Hungarian literature into Vietnamese, has been awarded the Gold Cross Medal, one of Hungary’s highest honours.

Giang was the only foreigner among 54 recipients of the medal this year in the fields of culture, education, health and science, and he became the first Vietnamese to win the honour.

Giang has translated into Vietnamese such Hungarian works as The Eghe Stars by Gardonyi Geza, which became a bestseller in Viet Nam in 1972. In subsequent years, he successfully translated dozens of works of classic and modern Hungarian literature.

See: Vietnam net

Getting consumed with work is easy to do, especially when you spend most of your waking hours working. But people who only talk about their jobs are boring and one-dimensional. Here are three ways to detach yourself from work and create a more reasonable balance:

1. Assess how much time you spend at work. You may need to put in long hours at times, but make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. Don’t stay late to impress others or because you can’t manage your time well.
2. Banish time-hogs. If something or someone is wasting your time, get rid of it. Stop attending unnecessary meetings, limit face-time with your demanding direct report, or stop visiting distracting websites.
3. Treat non-work time as sacred. Protect your time outside of work for your health and sanity. You will only feel refreshed if you truly disconnect and recharge.

See: HBR tips

Which of these tips apply to your job? Are you satisfied with your time management?

Medical translators and interpreters need to start by understanding medical terminology in their own language – or languages, in the case of bilinguals.

Medical terminology ranges from highly scientific language to on-the-job “lingo.” Translators who produce written renditions of scientific papers need to be especially familiar with the former, whereas interpreters, who work principally with oral language, must be highly aware of the latter.

In between the two extremes lies what we could call “medical vocabulary” – the terms for diseases, symptoms and conditions that are part of everyday usage in healthcare settings, but that can sound like a foreign language, even to students studying for medical careers.

Medical vocabulary, like trivia, has become the subject of online games and quizzes.

In fact, my Google search for “medical terminology quiz” turned up an astounding 243,000 results.

For example, Sheppard Software offers 20-item quizzes on 340 medical terms – all in English (or Latin, as the case may be.)

If you have any doubt that medical language is a linguistic world unto itself, check out this “pretty easy” medical terminology quiz.

See: Language Translation Inc. Blog

AgEdWeb’s online glossary generator. This online tool lets you use a tab-delimited Word or Notepad glossary to create an HTML glossary with a hyperlinked letter index.

See: Thoughts on Translation

Thanks to @corinnemckay, @RSchiaffino and @fidusinterpres

Twitter can be a great resource for translators.  It gives you better access to potential clients and other translators than Facebook or LinkedIn.  Here are some tips to get the most out of the site.

Use your profile to establish your credibility.  When you write it, think of who you want to follow you.

Find interesting people to follow.  They can be fellow translators, translation companies, people who live in your area, Twitter “experts”, friends, and people who have the same interests you do.  Use the search box on the right side of the page or advanced search (keywords will bring up tweets, not someone’s bio.)

Start by listening to the conversations around you before you jump in.  When you do start to tweet, limit your tweets to 3 to 5 a day unless you are chatting with someone.  If the conversation is with someone you follow and who follows you back, consider moving the exchange to direct messages.

Keep your tweets interesting. Read more.

See: Twitter tips

Are you an expert on Twitter? Share your experience so far! Any other tips to add for you fellow translators?

Lexicalist  is a Chinese/English dictionary that shows who’s talking about what on social networking sites in mainland China and . The result is a demographic picture of language in actual* use today.  By using it one can:

• See the current trends at the right to explore what gender and geographic populations are behind today’s rising topics in Chinese.
• Explore language to see the regional variations in written Chinese, and how different populations use certain words more characteristically than others.
• Search for Chinese words by their English.

Also see Lexicalist US
See: Lexicalist

Sarah Dillon posts her review of a new book on translation. Here are some excerpts of her review:

“The Prosperous Translator: Advice from Fire Ant & Worker Bee, compiled and edited by Chris Durban, is simply jam-packed with wisdom. It answers questions on every imaginable scenario under the sun, including many you may recognise but would never dare to admit. It’s not a guide to translation, nor is it a manual on getting up and running in business. What it does offer though, is a realistic, well-balanced view of the profession and the wider industry in which we operate.

The book is based around problems, yet these sticky wickets are transformed into golden opportunities. Challenges are re-framed in a practical and insightful way. Advice usually comes with suggestions of concrete actions or scripts, which apply regardless of language combination, specialism or circumstance. Every path, every option, every scenario is considered with the following in mind: Is this where I want to be as a professional translator? And I kid you not, this mindset alone could change your life. (Or your bottom line, at the very least.)” Read full review.

—————–

Update: The Prosperous Translator is now available through the ProZ.com Books section.

In her article published on March 10, Nina Sankovitch,  author of ‘Tolstoy and the Purple Chair’ reflects on the role of literary translators and  goes back through all her hundreds of reviews of the past three-plus years to make sure that the translators of each foreign tome are acknowledged for their hard — and largely hidden — work.

She believes that what translators achieve through their hard work, done in obscurity and anonymity, is enlightenment and lucidity and understanding. She thinks that literary translators break down borders of unknown languages, allowing readers to enter at will into worlds that are new in setting, landscape, and atmosphere, and yet familiar in the explored experiences of love, loyalty, duty, humor, deceit, betrayal, fear, despair, and resilience.

She thanks all literary translators, for clearing the way for her to explore new places populated by foreigners speaking in unknown tongues; by making their language clear and their places known. With borders broken down and empathy ignited, the potential for global unity grows. Translators work to make anything possible.

See: The Huffington Post and Read All Day

Nice to see translators’ work is publicly recognized.

MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language — so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment of his son’s life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch “gaaaa” slowly turn into “water.” Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.

About Deb Roy

Deb Roy studies how children learn language, and designs machines that learn to communicate in human-like ways. Watch this video.

See: TED talks

When Madonna was in Budapest, Hungary filming the movie Evita, she was interviewed by the Budapest newspaper Blikk. The questions were posed in Hungarian, then translated into English for Madonna, whose replies were then translated back into Hungarian for the article. Shortly thereafter, at the request of USA Today, Madonna’s comments were then retranslated from Hungarian back into English for the benefit of that paper’s readers. To say that something was lost in the process is to be wildly ungrateful for all that was gained.

Those of you having trouble following the interview due to the mangled language and laughs from French & Saunders can read the original print of the interview here. Enjoy!

See: Musings from an overworked translator

In her blog Thoughts On Translation,  Corinne McKay addresses the topic of freelance translators’ income and poses the following question ” What do freelance translators earn?”  She thinks that the issue with most of the surveys by organizations such as the The American Translators Association and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is that they are not specific enough to individual situations. For example, is someone who works 35 hours a week and takes 6 weeks of vacation full time or part time? Is someone who works at a client’s office 2 days a week and works for freelance clients 3 days a week self-employed or in-house? Should translation volume be taken into account? If you earned $130,000 last year but you worked 70 hours a week with no vacation, should your income be pro rated to a 40 hour work week with 4 weeks off?

Here are some excerpts:

But the real question when it comes to income is: is it enough? The “is it enough” question involves a lot of subjective factors, because it ties into the subsidiary question of whether you’d be doing better if you had a different job. Here’s where the subjectivity comes in. For example in my case:

• I’m reasonably happy with my income as compared to how much I work. I earn more than the ATA average and my sense is that I work less (maybe even a lot less) than most freelancers do, partly because of my family and non-work commitments and partly because I think I’m more productive at 30ish hours per week. However when I look at how the benefits of my husband’s in-house job (company-funded retirement plan, insurance, paid vacation, and so on) add up, it’s a reality check. If I deduct 15.3% self-employment tax (which I only pay on about half my income since I have an S-Corp), 4-6 weeks unpaid vacation and my self-funded retirement plan from what I make, the bottom line is decidedly different.
• But, then there are the subjective factors. I love where we live, and there are very, very few in-house jobs in our area for what I do. The only reasonable option, working for a government agency, would involve driving over an hour each way and a relatively inflexible schedule. It’s very important to me to have a work schedule that meshes with my daughter’s school schedule at least until she is old enough to be home alone. Realistically, if I wanted an in-house job that was close to my house and that would offer a similar level of flexibility to freelancing, I would probably be looking at earning less than half what I make now.

“Enough” also depends on where and how you live. $75,000 sounds like a decent chunk of money, but if you are not incorporated and thus pay self-employment tax on that entire amount, live in a nice apartment in a major city, have a car loan or student loan or credit card payment and fund your own health insurance and retirement, that amount goes pretty quickly. On the other hand if you live in a fairly rural area, are debt-free or close to it and practice freelance frugality, you could probably be saving 50% of your after-tax income if you gross $75,000 or more.

See: Thoughts On Translation