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Learning a foreign language is hard enough. But if that language is riddled with weird slang terms and ever-changing funny phrases, you may wind up lost in translation.

That’s exactly what happened to former Maryland resident Jared Romey, author of Spanish slang books “Speaking Argento,” “Speaking Boricua” and the most recent “Speaking Chileno” (RIL Editores) — guides to understanding current slang in Argentina, Puerto Rico and Chile, respectively.

Back in 1997, Romey moved from the U.S. to Chile thinking he could get by solely on the years of Spanish language classes he had taken. He was wrong. So wrong.

During those first few weeks in Chile, Romey said he found himself second-guessing his Spanish skills, constantly confused over the correct words for simple things like popcorn, underwear and traffic jam.

Luckily, a concerned friend slipped Romey a copy of “How to Survive in the Chilean Jungle,” a popular Chilean slang guide written in 1996 by John Brennan and Alvaro Toboada. From there, he started getting hip to the native tongue.

Romey wasn’t kidding when he said Chilean slang is a language in and of itself. Here are some examples of weird words that could leave anyone scratching their head:

• A calzon quitado: Literally, this translates into “taking off your underwear.” In Chilean slang, this is an expression that means to get straight to the point; to hold nothing back.
• Chupar: This word means “suck.” In slang, chupar refers to drinking booze — lots of it.
• Anda a lavarte el hoyo: This phrase translates into “go wash your hole,” as in your — well, you know. In slang, this phrase is used to tell people to scram or go away.
• Andar con el dragon: Roughly translates into “being with the dragon.” Colloquially, it means you’re so hungover from drinking all night that your breath is kicking. You’re practically breathing fire, much like a dragon might.
• Rayarse la pintura: A Spanish translator might tell you this means to “scratch the paint.” However, a hip, jargon-speaking Chilean would tell you it actually means to rub up against someone sexually.
• Lumami: This happens to be one of Romey’s favorite Chilean words. It’s a creative slang term used to describe leftovers in your fridge, a combination of the first two letters of the words “lunes,” “martes” and “miercoles,” or Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Lumami refers to a meal made of leftovers from those days of the week.
• Hilo dental: This could mean one of two things. It literally means “dental floss.” In slang, it refers to a woman’s tiny, barely there panties, like a G-string or thong.
• Pelo choclo: Translates into “corn hair,” which makes no sense whatsoever. Hip Chileans, however, use the term when describing a blonde.
• Gordo or Gorda: In traditional Spanish dictionaries, this translates into a fat man or woman. In Chilean slang, it’s a term of endearment used to refer to your boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse or kids. It’s as common as calling your loved ones “babe” in America.
• Pokemon: No, not the little yellow anime cartoon. In Chile, a pokemon is the term given to alternative, edgy teenagers who dress in skater tennis shoes and baggy pants that are about to fall off. Pokemons usually sport long hair, lots of piercings and listen to Reggaeton music.
• Tragarse un tony: This means to “swallow a clown.” Um, awkward. In slang speak, however, this actually means to die of laughter.
• Mas doblado que Chino con visitas: Another Romey favorite. It translates into “more bent over than a Chinese man with visitors.” In slang, it means you’re so drunk, you’re tipping over, much like a Chinese man bowing to visitors. “This one is hilarious,” Romey said. “It really captures the Chilean spirit and the playfulness of the language.”

Read more.

See: Aol News

Interesting article on finding the right (transliterated) name for doing businesss in China. Unfortunately only available in German.

See: Welt Online

PTIGlobal, a provider of localization, interpretation and translation services, has released an industry white paper entitled, “From Globalization to Realization: A Product Launch Roadmap.” The paper outlines the steps involved in launching a product to the global marketplace and covers the processes of globalization, internationalization, translation and localization.

For the first time this year, the Swarthmore College commencement ceremony will be interpreted into Spanish. For several years the ceremony has been translated into American Sign Language, but the college recently purchased the equipment necessary to make verbal simultaneous interpreting possible.

This year parents and other family members of graduating students will have the option of requesting a translating device. The devices are small and hand-held, with headphones. The listener puts on the headphones and then chooses a channel that will correspond to an audio feed in a certain language.

This year the translation will only be in Spanish. But the devices do have multiple channels, so in the future the ceremony could be simultaneously translated into more than one language. The user would simply set the device to the channel with their language of choice.

The Spanish interpretation will be done by Spanish Professor Aurora Camacho de Schmidt. She explained the process of interpreting, saying that the interpreter receives through headphones a very clear feed of the speaker’s words and then translates it, speaking into a microphone which will broadcast to the hand-held devices.

She said that it is much easier to translate a person reading a prepared speech than someone speaking freely, as they speak more slowly, but she still described the process as exhausting and is looking for an alternate interpreter to work for part of the graduation ceremony. Read more.

See: The Swarthmore Daily Gazette

The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz is among roughly half a dozen novels and a short story collection published after Jules Verne died. The problem is Verne’s son rewrote many of them, recasting plots and adding characters. The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz is emblematic of this. When first published, Verne’s son placed the story in the 18th century rather than the 19th and changed the ending. Now, though, Peter Schulman, a professor of French literature at Old Dominion University and a trustee of the North American Jules Verne Society, brings the first English translation of Verne’s original manuscript. Read more.

See: Seattlepi

lobally speaking, HootSuite is on the move. We previously profiled its crowdsourced translation environment – along with 103 others – in a report on how organizations are harnessing the talent of linguistically diverse online communities. The company is making several announcements this week about enhanced access for users who speak different languages and reside in different parts of the planet. We spoke with HootSuite’s Marketing Director, Dave Olson (@daveohoots) to learn more.

Yesterday, HootSuite heralded the arrival of the Spanish version of its web dashboard with a bilingual blog post.  The company also released an infographic depicting usage in numerous parts of the Spanish-speaking world.

Why did HootSuite choose crowdsourcing over conventional translation methods?  “We did try them,” Olson explains, “but HootSuite includes a lot of specialized social media-specific vocabulary which our users understand best since they use and talk about the tool with their local friends and colleagues. We think this real-world knowledge provides the best translations.”

According to Olson, the crowdsourced translation project was launched in August 2010, and the company quickly saw traction in Spanish for localization of the mobile platforms.  However, major movement did not begin with the Spanish version of their web platform until they hired a Spanish-speaking employee to rally the troops and ensure progress. Our report discussed the fact that HootSuite is doing some unique things with crowdsourced translation – for example, they allow users not only to suggest languages for crowdsourcing, but to actually vote on which languages to do next.

HootSuite’s crowdsourced translation work also has broader social importance. As Olson points out: “Before we had the translation tool built, our iPhone developer (@richerd) noticed that someone wanted an Arabic version and offered to translate it. Richerd programmed the right-to-left display and worked around some unique pluralization conventions and we released the first localized dashboard for Arabic. Months later, when the crisis in Egypt erupted, our tool was a huge help to people on the ground.” As we noted in a previous post, crowdsourced translation is what enabled social media to play such an important role in Egypt.

Olson shared another compelling example. Shortly after HootSuite released the translation tool, the company was contacted by a group in Wales that wanted to work on the translation as part of a special day to preserve the Welsh language.  “They didn’t make too much progress, but the idea of combining this traditional language with modern technology was inspiring to us,” he said, adding that the long Welsh words were tough on the product layout.

The power of technology to breathe new life into endangered languages is a phenomenon we’ve been writing about for years, most recently in our discussions with Google and Microsoft in the run-up to International Mother Language Day and in a longer interview with David Harrison.

See: Common Sense Advisory

In this interesting feature on the Huffington Post, Nataly Kelly states that “the supposedly elusive goal of automatically converting information from one language into another — commonly known as machine translation — was not the end goal. That was only the beginning of a content transformation revolution.”

Here are some excerpt of the article:

“What we’re already seeing in society is a proliferation of options for rendering information into our preferred formats.commonly known as machine translation — was not the end goal. That was only the beginning of a content transformation revolution. What we’re already seeing in society is a proliferation of options for rendering information into our preferred formats.

The improvements in automatic, real-time, inter-language communication that we’re seeing today mark an important moment in history. But when this technology gets personal and affects the average person, that’s when we’ll really see expanded interest, widespread adoption, and integration. It will become part of our everyday lives, to the point that we’ll even take it for granted. Imagine the implications for teaching children — or adults for that matter — when they can receive information in ways that are highly relevant and customized to their learning styles and preferences. Humankind’s ability to process and use information will vastly improve as a direct result of language conversion technologies.

Someday soon, we won’t talk about machine translation. We’ll discuss “language preferences,” of which translation will be just one little part. Until then, people all around the world will be waiting for these advances in technology to reach them and enrich their lives. It’s the end of machine translation as we know it. Let’s just hope we don’t have to wait very long.” Read full article.

See: The Huffington Post

Language professionals take breaks too (or, at least, they should!). This week the site opened an area called the Translator playground, for translators to have fun, to network, to learn, and to hone their translation or linguistic skills. The area consists of a collection of games, memes, quizzes, trivia, anecdotes, discussions, and other items of interest and, principally, fun!

The area is just getting started, but already some interesting and fun interactions are taking place. For example, this discussion on translating a comic.

When you take a break today, stop by the Translator playground and check it out. Everyone is welcome to participate and to add what they find fun and of interest.

Here’s some suggested take five music for your break, unless Jazz isn’t your thing:

Translator playground >>

See: Translator T.O.

Dusseldorf – A typographical error compounded by a translation error converted a music-awareness campaign in city schools into a ‘Gays’ Day of Action’ in the German city of Dusseldorf as it prepares to host this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.

City officials owned up to the error Wednesday, in which the city printed 35,000 English-language brochures containing the goof.

The mysterious ‘Gays’ Day of Action’ is described on page 45. But as the national newspaper Bild revealed, the planning actually calls for city school classes to spend the day learning about the Eurovision show, a kind of Europe-wide battle of the bands.

Officials traced the translation error to a spelling mistake in the original German brochure, where the German word for homosexuals, Schwulen, appears in place of the German word for schools, Schulen.

Both brochures are being corrected by hand, with stickers to be placed over the incorrect text. The correction crew must also strike out a spelling error in the word ‘Welcome’ on the front cover of the brochure. It was printed to say ‘Wielcome.’

See: Monsters and Critics

Also see: Spiegel

Yesterday an announcement went out that the European Telecommunications Standards Initiative (ETSI) “has agreed to accept responsibility for the LISA open standards works.” This statement has raised a lot of questions about whether this means that yet another group is wanting to take on some of LISA’s mantle and work on standards for the localization industry. Others have seen this is presaging a rift between GALA and TAUS on the one hand and ETSI, an established standards body, on the other. As someone who has been closely involved with the events referred to in the announcement, I wish to clarify the situation and what it means in practical terms.

Since the announcement that LISA was ceasing operations, LISA has been trying to find an appropriate home for its standards portfolio. Initially LISA had planned to simply put the standards into the public domain, but for legal reasons this action was not possible and LISA had to pick a successor to donate the standards to. I was charged with soliciting feedback about where the standards should go. Public opinion in our community was divided between ETSI and OASIS, with larger users tending to support ETSI and tech developers tending more to support OASIS. In the end, it seemed that ETSI had more flexible policies with regard to participation (it is possible to work actively on standards in an ESI Industry Specification Group (ISG) at no fee and ETSI has good relations with OASIS) and the decision was made to donate the standards themselves to ETSI.

Note that this donation has not actually taken place yet as there are still some legal issues to resolve, but it is expected to take place very soon. What that means is not that ETSI is taking over LISA’s mandate, but rather that current versions of the LISA standards will have a permanent home where they can be obtained free of charge under the same royalty-free, open access policies that LISA supported. If ETSI wishes to undertake development of new versions of the standards, ETSI may do so, and we expect that ETSI’s new ISG will work on at least some of the standards. On the other hand, if another group, such as OASIS, wishes to take up one or more of the standards that ETSI is not working on, it may do without hindrance, so the current arrangement allows for maximal flexibility in standards development and is a positive step. Read more.

See: GALA Blog

Google Translate and other free online translation tools can be great for instant, informal translation. When expectations are properly set, particularly for low-value text, unedited machine translation can be quite useful. However, when a user overestimates machine translation capabilities, the results can be confusing at best.

When one online machine translation tool apparently mistranslated a common Chinese word as “Wikipedia,” Chinese menus began popping up everywhere with English translations for menu items like “stir-fried Wikipedia” and “barbecued Congo eel with Wikipedia and fermented bean curd.” Though odd, the error is relatively harmless. However, when the text has important implications in law, finance or marketing, the results can be terribly costly.

Potential customers reading marketing materials may get the gist of a translation, but successful marketing text usually needs to convey more than just a general idea. Wayne Bourland, a senior manager on Dell’s global localization team, noted, in a recent usability study conducted in Germany, Dell observed that… “buyers who needed to form an emotional connection as part of the purchasing process were both distracted and disappointed by translation errors.”

When a Moscow-based marketing firm asked my company to review some previously translated marketing Web pages, we had to tell the company it paid a lot of money for what was actually a very crude machine translation. If this marketing company and its clients had expected machine translation, the news would have been acceptable. Unfortunately, the firm and its customers were expecting high-quality translations that captured the nuances of the original marketing text. The need to pay for a complete retranslation by professional human translators was a bitter pill to swallow.

In a 2010 legal mishap, “a Russian trucker in (the Netherlands) involved in a bar brawl was released because the (court) summons he received was poorly translated from Dutch into Russian using Google Translate,” reported the Dutch-English news blog 24oranges. Instead of reading, “you are to appear in court on 3 August 2010,” as it should have, the summons said something more like “you have to avoid being in court on 3 August 2010.” Read more.

See: Deseret News

According to International Data Corporation (IDC), the European software industry is mostly clustered in the largest European countries: Germany, the U.K., and France. This might not come as a surprise given the size of these markets, but even when taking into account country size, the largest European countries, as well as countries in the Nordic and Benelux regions, are clearly the most ISV intensive. A software industry requires a large home market in order to build scale, reduce unit costs, and thereby increase competitiveness. Furthermore, countries with advanced domestic customer requirements and open, export-oriented cultures generally have a strong software industry.

Another trait of the European software industry is its focus on applications as opposed to development tools, middleware, and system infrastructure software. In core applications (ERM, SCM, and CRM) and industry applications, the European top 100 ISVs had market shares in excess of 20 percent of the global market in 2009. In middleware, information management, and infrastructure software, the corresponding market shares were 5 percent or less. IDC believes that the local nature of enterprise applications with respect to legislation, business practices and structures, languages, currencies, and so in is the main factor behind the strength of European ISVs in applications.

IDC has also examined Europe’s emerging software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor community. The European SaaS vendors are interesting because the segment grows in excess of five times faster each year than software overall. So, while the European SaaS vendor community is much smaller than the traditional ISV community today, the SaaS vendor group is a critical barometer of the future of Europe’s software industry. Read more.

See: SaaSmagazin.de

Thanks to Erik Hansson on Twitter

The Best Poems Encyclopedia would like to call poetry translators for submissions to their second annual Poetry print Anthology for the best 303 poems written in the year.

The deadline for submission is 25 Oct. 2011.

All current members and those who join in advance of the deadline are eligible. Best Poems is an educational resource and Anthology and membership is free.

Best poems hope to receive submissions of creative work that deal in some way with modern poetry of any genre and from any language when a translated copy to english is available.

The approach may be primarily sociological and inspirational, or literary in nature. Submissions that address the theme(s) of Love, Life & Death, Inspiration and Human Relationships… in new and exciting ways that allow readers to see the multiplicity of angles and issues these broad headings generate are welcome.

Submissions are open to all poets and translators from any country and from confirmed ones to young emerging ones.

More information can and the guidelines can be found on the website best-poems.net

See: best-poems.net also see http://www.proz.com/topic/197569

The state Senate has passed a bill that proponents say will better protect California’s foreign language speakers and opponents say will subject small businesses to shakedown lawsuits.

SB 111, authored by Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, would make it a violation of the state’s civil rights law for a company to require that a specific language be spoken at the business unless it has a narrowly defined business necessity.

Such discrimination is already prohibited against employees or renters under the California Fair Employment and Housing Act. Yee’s measure would extend the protection to customers and allow them to sue privately and receive minimum damages of $4,000 per violation.

SB 111 would add language to the Unruh Civil Rights Act, which already prohibits discrimination within business establishments based on sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, marital status and sexual orientation.

According to a Senate Judiciary Committee analysis, the bill is supported by some minority legal and business groups, unions and Consumer Attorneys of California. It is opposed by some business trade groups.

See: The OC Register

Microsoft Style Guides are collections of rules that define language and style conventions for specific languages. These rules usually include general localization guidelines, information on language style and usage in technical publications, and information on market-specific data formats.

See: Microsoft Language Portal

Thanks to @babatabita on Twitter

Work to translate European Union legislation into Icelandic will provide 85 jobs all over Iceland — including 10 in rural East Iceland. The project will last for three years.

A company called Sagnabrunnur in Seydisfjordur is one business participating in the project which was franchised out by the translation centre at the Icelandic Ministry for Foreign Affairs. According to the company’s director, Rannveig Thorhallsdottir, her company in East Iceland will employ 8-10 translators, RUV reports.

The project will see EU legislation, such as directives and regulations, connected to Iceland’s accession bid translated into Icelandic. Read more.

See: Ice News

Alan Champion, a sign-language interpreter who opened up hundreds of Broadway and regional theater productions to deaf and hard-of-hearing audience members over the last three decades, died on Friday in Ramona, Okla. He was 55.

The son of deaf parents and himself a singer and actor, Mr. Champion was part of the team that delivered the first signed interpretation on Broadway in 1980, under the auspices of the nonprofit Theater Development Fund, for a performance of “The Elephant Man” starring David Bowie. Signed performances were not formally coordinated with Broadway producers, actors and lighting technicians before then; most deaf theatergoers relied on friends in adjoining seats to interpret.

Mr. Champion worked as an interpreter at community colleges and theater companies in Tulsa and St. Louis before heading to New York in 1980. A month after arriving, he said, he received a letter from the Theater Development Fund announcing auditions for interpreters for Broadway shows. Read more.

See:  The New York Times

Blogs, forums, tweets and industry events are awash with opinions, heated debates, and often disputes about the changing role of the translator, the threat of machine translation, and lately the purpose of open standards and interoperability.

It’s easy to get confused, it’s almost impossible to get the full picture, it’s sometimes difficult to get your voice heard.

Join the ProZ.com & TAUS Great Translation Debate Virtual Event on 7 July to ask questions, discuss, agree and disagree in the spirit of gathering all our collective wisdom to decide whether:

• Translation automation is good for the translation profession
• Interoperability important for the translation profession
• It makes sense for translators to share translation memories
• Higher education courses prepare translators sufficiently for life in industry

The hashtag to follow this event on Twitter will be #Greatxl8debate

See: ProZ.com Virtual Events and TAUS

A new and improved platform has been made available by ProZ.com for jobs posted by Translators Without Borders, an independent, non-profit association that since 1993 has been providing free, professional translations to humanitarian NGOs, enabling them to spend the saved funds in their field operations.

This new platform displays Translators Without Borders’ look and feel and has several new features such as the possibility of uploading supporting material files when creating a new work order. These files are optionally provided to support the work; they do not need to be delivered or translated. Examples include glossaries, translation memories, dictionaries, templates, etc.

When a project is posted, this platform identifies the pool of translators who are enabled for the assignment, rank them in accordance with a predefined criterion and notify them in batches separated by fixed delays. Default values are batches of 5 translators separated by 15-minute delays, but both parameters are configurable.

These notifications include a link to a page dedicated to the job, with optional descriptions of the client, the project and the job, plus the file to be translated and any special instructions provided when posting the job. The translator can review the offered file and all the information and decide to accept it or not.

When one of the notified translators accepts the job, it immediately becomes unavailable to all other translators and no further notifications are sent out.

This interface includes a communications feature for the exchange of messages (with notifications) between the translator and the job poster, and also a feature to deliver the translated file once the job is completed.

New features will be added soon. They will for instance enable NGOs the direct posting of their projects in the platform and support the roles of project manager and editor.

In the near future this platform will be made available to translation outsourcers to offer a low-overhear workflow tool to process their translation jobs. If you outsource translation work and are interested in having access to this tool please contact ProZ.com staff by submitting a support request.

GoodPlanet’s webpage localized into 20 languages by Translators Without Borders volunteers!

As reported on March 28 the NGO GoodPlanet asked Translators Without Borders for help to localize their new website into as many languages as possible beyond English, French and Spanish (which were already available).

In that post it was reported the localization of that page into 13 languages: Italian, Slovak, Romanian, Polish, Hungarian, Turkish, Persian, Greek, Russian, German, Swedish, Arabic and Simplified Chinese.

Now 7 more languages have been delivered, taking the total to 20 languages and oven 180K translated words. These new languages and the corresponding credits are:

Slovenian, German, Slovak: Vito Smolej (Slovenian) joined Sabine Winter (German) and Jana Novomeska (Slovak) in the rank of single translators who produced the localization of the whole website into their native languages.

Indonesian: the localization was done by a strong trio: Meidy Maringka, Jamina Yap and Trias Noverdi .

Portuguese: the localization was performed by five colleagues: Thais P., Fernanda Rocha, Tais Faulkner , Thaiane Assumpção and Ana P Carvalho.

Dutch: The localization was performed by a team formed by Roel Verschueren, Iris Shalev, Esther van der Wal , Marcel Palmen and one other translator who asked to remain anonymous.

Serbian: The job was done by Ivan Vatovic, Miomira Brankovic and Danijela Pejcic .

Croatian: The team that localized the web page into Croatian included Andreja Ciković, Martina Culin , Jadranka Popović Tumpa, Iva Halbauer and the Crotext Team.

Japanese: The job was done by Yoshiko Bedillion and Michiko Kobayashi.

GoodPlanet has granted permission to all of the translators who participated in this project to use a part of the translations they performed as sample translations in their portfolios.

In addition, translators who participate in any project handled by Translators Without Borders are kindly invited to enter the relevant projects in the project history section of their ProZ.com profiles and these projects will be validated by Translators Without Borders (send request to http://www.proz.com/profile/1352791 ).

There is still room for translation into additional languages, and some additional volunteers would be more than welcome in several of the pairs where localization is still in progress. Source language is English or French.

Any members of the Certified PRO Network who are willing to collaborate with Translations Without Borders in general, and with GoodPlanet in particular, are welcome to contact Translators Without Borders via their ProZ.com profile at http://www.proz.com/profile/1352791

For those interested in forming part of the Certified PRO Network, please visit http://www.proz.com/cpn

See: Translator T.O.

Royal Pingdom has summarized a number of Internet-related metrics comparing the two remaining superpowers China and the United States. These include  number of Internet users, Internet penetration, the speed of Internet connections, the number of domain names, favorite websites, web browsers, and operating systems.

Another perspective is the picture of Internet growth from 2000 to 2010. It shows the speed at which China is closing in on the US in terms of online usage. While the United States has had a 152% growth in the number of users; China has seen a growth rate of 1767%. (This article shows Nigeria with an internet growth rate of nearly 22000% over the same period, but I’ll save that for another entry).

Their conclusions regarding the online duel between China and the US:

• China’s Internet user base is bigger, much bigger (1.76x that of the United States).
• The US Internet infrastructure is still way ahead of China’s, at least for end users.
• China has much more potential for growth in spite of already being the largest country on the Internet.
• China’s Internet users run older versions of software than the US Internet users are, at least when it comes to operating systems and web browsers.
• The strong hosting industry in the United States keeps that nation ahead, especially since Internet users from all over the world use its services.

See: IBM blog