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One of the things they don’t tell you about when you start freelancing is the art of staying calm while being in limbo. I finished a job last night. It is currently at my proofreader’s and is due back to the client later today. In the meantime, I have had three different job queries in the last week or so, and they are all pending approval by the client or still haven’t been finalized. So here I sit, trying to fill my time while I have nothing to translate. With my luck they will all be approved (although I have a feeling that one of them won’t) and will all be due on Friday or Monday. Or none of them will materialize. You never know as a freelancer. Because it is impossible to evenly distribute workload when you freelance. There is a lot of feast or famine – or waiting in limbo. November and December were extremely slow months for me. It had me questioning my decisions and toying with the idea of getting a 9-to-5 job or even a part-time job. Not having income coming in can make me panic pretty easily. My office was reorganized, my finances were in order, and I had run out of projects. I had decided to start a marketing campaign after the holidays, but luckily things improved. It still frustrates me waiting for work to be approved, but that’s the business I guess. I’m hoping the return of work will return my zest for blogging. It’s been hard to stay motivated. Anyway, I hope you all had a good holiday season and are busy with work through this new year. May we all stop being in limbo!

A tool which could radically improve the diagnosis of language delays in infants in the UK is being developed by psychologists.

A £358,000 grant to develop the first standardised UK speech and language development tool means that for the first time, researchers will be able to establish language development norms for UK children aged eight months to 18 months.

The tool will plug an important gap which has left UK researchers, education and health professionals at a disadvantage.

Until now, UK language experts have been forced to rely upon more complicated methods of testing child language development, or on methods designed for American English speakers which can lead to UK babies being misdiagnosed as being delayed in language development. More.

See: Science Daily

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From January 7-11, 2013, twelve indigenous language activists from across Latin America gathered at the Santiago Library in Chile to explore how digital technologies can play a key role in documenting and revitalizing their native tongues as part of the “Enduring Voices” workshop.

Organized and sponsored by the Enduring Voices Project, which is a collaboration between theLiving Tongues Institute and the National Geographic Society, the workshop provided hands-on training about the use of digital tools in their work. Rising Voices also participated and provided a workshop in the use of citizen media for promoting the use of indigenous languages online.

The workshop’s primary activity was the creation of Talking Dictionaries. This platform provides for a searchable multi-lingual online dictionary that contains digital audio clips recorded by language activists currently working with the Living Tongues Institute. More.

See: Rising Voices

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The Chinese version is no easier to read than the original, the loyal-minded translator assures, but James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” has still sold out its initial run in China — with the help of some big urban billboards.

Wang Weisong, chief editor of the Shanghai company that published the first Chinese translation of the Joyce classic, coyly said at a recent forum in Shanghai that he wasn’t expecting any success for the book, but that the modest initial run of 8,000 copies has sold out since it went on sale Dec. 25. He said more copies are being printed to meet demand.

Dai Congrong, who spent eight years translating it, told the same forum that she didn’t fully grasp the novel but that it was supposed to be difficult, and that she kept the Chinese version that way. More.

See: US News

Also see Chinese translation of James Joyce becomes best-seller

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Google seems to have integrated Google Translate into the web version of the Google Play Store. When viewing an app in a foreign language, Google Translate will let you know it’s willing to translate the description to your default language.

The Google Play Store app was doing this back in November, but this is the first time it has been seen on the web version. Other than that, nothing seems to be new. Google Chrome users are used to having Google Translate pop up on foreign websites asking if the user wants the page translated to their language.

See: Android Authority

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Is there an English language spoken by non-native English speakers? Lots of people from different countries work in the European Union institutions and English is the working language the most widely used among them. Over the years these institutions have … Continue reading →

The NATO interpretation service is celebrating its 60th anniversary. The profession has moved forward, but the interpreters carry on their primary task of ensuring that diplomatic messages pass between high-level officials.  This video depicts their role.

See: You Tube

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LA TRADUCCIÓN Y SUS DESCONTENTOS

He elegido el título de «La traducción y sus descontentos» por razones que me gustaría explicar y que son menos banales de lo que a primera vista puede parecer. Tengo, efectivamente, una larga experiencia en el mundo de la traducción por activo y por pasivo, no solamente por las traducciones que he hecho y por mi actividad como traductor y como intérprete en las Naciones Unidas, sino porque toda mi vida he estado interesado en la traducción. Aunque es obvio que otras actividades profesionales que también he llevado a cabo han tenido más repercusión pública, nunca he considerado que fuera en primer lugar autor de novelas y traductor de una manera subsidiaria, o provisional,. Es verdad que durante un tiempo me he ganado la vida como traductor, pero eso no significa que haya considerado jamás la traducción como un ganapán mientras no alcanzaba un determinado nivel de éxito en otras actividades. Por el contrario, cuando estas otras actividades me han permitido una mayor independencia económica, he seguido ejerciendo la traducción porque me interesa y porque me gusta mucho.

Casualmente se presenta hoy en Barcelona la última novela del escritor Javier Marías, que es, probablemente, uno de los grandes traductores literarios que hay en España, y con el que algunas veces he tenido ocasión de hablar de estos temas. Tanto él como yo hemos coincidido en que lo que más nos gusta es traducir y, subsidiariamente, escribir, puesto que la traducción nos brinda unas satisfacciones muy especiales. Es más, esta última novela de Javier Marías está presidida por la obsesión de la traducción, no tanto por lo que se refiere al oficio de traductor -al que dedicó una de sus novelas más conocidas, Corazón tan blanco– sino por la necesidad cada vez mayor de vivir inmersos en un mundo donde la traducción es una presencia constante. No me refiero solamente al hecho de que en las grandes aglomeraciones urbanas existan de una manera oficial o, de hecho, dos, tres y hasta cuatro idiomas en la calle. No me refiero al monolingüismo, bilingüismo o trilingüismo, sino al hecho de que todos vivimos perpetuamente en un mundo donde estamos traduciendo la información y los contactos que recibimos.

Creo, pues, que la traducción es algo más que un simple trabajo, unas técnicas aplicadas a la búsqueda de unos resultados, creo que la traducción es algo que envuelve nuestra vida cotidiana. Sin embargo, también es -y a esto quiero referirme- un trabajo, un trabajo para el que la mayoría de los presentes se están preparando. Y a esto es a lo que me quiero referir: al trabajo del traductor.

Mi experiencia ha hecho que encontrara a lo largo de los años entre los traductores una característica común, que era el descontento. Entre todas las profesiones, la de traductor es la que ofrece el porcentaje más alto de personas malhumoradas. Al principio pensé que eran gajes del oficio o alguna cosa parecida; luego investigué un poco más la causa de esta perpetua queja en la que vive el traductor profesional y descubrí que no faltan razones prácticas.

See: A Word In Your Ear

As I mentioned in my recent people who rock the industry interview, I think that subject area knowledge is one of the most important trends we’ll see in translation in the next few years. To read a thorough explanation of how subject area knowledge relates to what we do, check out Kevin Hendzel’s fantastic blog post on the topic.

Translating involves three main knowledge areas: the source language, the target language and the subject matter. I think that the translation industry has evolved from emphasizing knowledge of the source language (when the conventional wisdom was that anyone who knew another language could be a translator), to emphasizing the target language (when we realized that you also had to be a really good writer in your target language) to realizing that subject area knowledge matters a lot as well. Some translators, who started out as financial analysts or microbiologists or patent attorneys are all set when it comes to subject area knowledge. For the rest of us, it’s time to think about deepening our knowledge of the areas in which we translate.

I do a lot of international development translation. The blessing and the curse of this work is that it covers a huge range of subject areas; on any given day I might be translating about how to grow organic sesame plants with less water, how to keep vaccines cold in areas without electricity, or how to convince semi-nomadic populations to purchase land titles. So there’s a lot to learn, and that’s part of what I love about this specialization.

A lot of what I translate falls into the general topic of public health, so I was interested to find a Principles of Public Health course offered by Coursera, an online learning platform started by two Stanford professors. At the moment Coursera’s classes are free, although the company is not a non-profit. The classes are non-credit, although for many of them (including the one I’m taking), you receive a certification of completion if you earn a certain score on all of the online quizzes associated with the class.

Principles of Public Health started yesterday, with–get this–15,000 students. Hence the neologism MOOC, for “massive open online course.” As such, it’s a given that there’s no individual interaction or feedback from the professor. But so far it’s really interesting. The class consists mostly of video lectures, recorded during the in-person version of the course that the professor (Dr. Zuzana Bic) teaches at UC Irvine. This adds some interest to the video lectures, since instead of a “talking head”-style presentation, you get to hear the discussions that happened during the live class. Also, Dr. Bic is a really engaging lecturer who clearly loves her job, so that livens things up as well. The video lectures are broken down into modules of about 10 minutes, and at some point during each video, the presentation pauses and you answer a question to make sure that you’re paying attention. The class also has multiple online discussion boards, and each week there’s a quiz, for which you get two attempts. I haven’t taken the first week’s quiz yet, but I’ll report back after I do.

After watching the first half of the first week’s video lectures, my impression of this class is extremely positive. It’s obviously for an educated audience, but you don’t need a science degree to understand it. Also, it relates very well to the kind of translations that I do: focusing on how to prevent or reduce the occurrence of diseases within a community as a whole, rather than how to cure a specific person of a specific disease. It’s also the first self-paced online course I’ve taken, and I think that if you have the discipline to work on your own schedule, it’s a very pleasant flexible option.

Of course the catch is that Coursera is a for-profit company and the classes likely won’t be free forever. In fact, they’ve already started rolling out fee-based classes, at approximately $90 each. Even at that price, I think that Coursera and similar MOOC outlets provide a nice medium between studying something on your own and enrolling in a much more expensive course through a brick and mortar university. Has anyone else tried them? Oh, and–Coursera offers classes in *one* language besides English–French! The Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne professors offer some classes in English, but also teach two computer science classes in French.

IT’S HARD to escape awards season in Los Angeles. The Golden Globes were given out two weeks ago. The Screen Actors Guild celebrated its members at the weekend. The Academy is gearing up for next month. I can’t wait. Others might bet on who will be named best actress or best director, but I place wagers on a more offbeat award: the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Johnson doesn’t usually crunch numbers, but the patterns in this award’s language distribution deserve some attention.

This year’s five nominees have dialogue in French (two films), Spanish, Danish, and a combination of English and Norwegian. The language breakdown isn’t too surprising. French is easily the dominant language in this category. Fifty-three French-language films have been nominated for the foreign-language Oscar in 57 years (see chart). French-language movies alone count for nearly 20% of nominees. Spanish comes second, with 38 Spanish-language nominees. Tied for third are Italian and German (27), followed by Russian and Swedish (14), Japanese (12), Dutch (10), and Danish, Hebrew, and Polish (9 each). Norwegian is farther down the list, at 4 nominations. All of this year’s languages are old news.

French might be the most nominated language, but it has a middling success rate: 53 nominations but just 12 wins. French fans, take heart: that number could soon be 13. Amour, one of this year’s French-language nominees, won the foreign-language Golden Globe Award earlier this month. Spanish has an even lower success rate than French (38 nominations, 6 wins). But at least Spanish and French aren’t perennial losers like Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, and Serbo-Croatian. These languages (not depicted on the chart) have each been nominated at least four times but have never won.

Other languages have had much higher success rates. Bosnian, Slovak, and an Afrikaans-based creole called Tsotsitaal have each been nominated once and won once. (It’s hard to argue with perfection.) In stronger showings, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Italian, and Russian have each been nominated at least five times and have won at least 25% of the time. Predictably, the Indo-European language family has the most nominations as well as nominated languages. Twenty-three Indo-European languages have been nominated at least once (out of 34 languages), for a total of 243 nominations (out of 285). Eight of the 10 most-nominated languages are Indo-European. More.

See: The Economist

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The Harvard African Language Program is seeking abstracts for the fourth annual African Languages in the Disciplines (ALD) conference to be held at Harvard University on April 25, 2013. This conference will build on the important conversations of the previous three years as well as celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the African Language Program at Harvard.

This conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines as well as African heritage communities to discuss the vital role that African languages play in the study of Africa and the diaspora. Possible themes include, but are not limited to, the contribution of African languages to the study of literature, music, film, performance, visual arts, media studies, history, philosophy, religion, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, political science, psychology, economics, education, geography, environmental science, legal studies, and public health. Past conferences have also engaged in larger conversations about issues of translation, regional languages, new orthographies, and indigenous literary and historical genres, among others.

Please apply via e-mail to harvardald at gmail.com by February 28, 2013. We ask for a 250-word abstract outlining a 15-minute presentation as well as a brief biography. Please contact the conference organizers at the same e-mail address with any questions.

See: H Net

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Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin was included in kist of finalists of the prestigious Man Booker International Prize.

Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, along with 10 other novelists: U. R. Ananthamurthy (India), Aharon Appelfeld (Israel), Lydia Davis (U.S.), Intizar Husain (Pakistan), Yan Lianke (China), Marie NDiaye (France), Josip Novakovich (Canada), Marilynne Robinson (U.S.), and Peter Stamm (Switzerland).

Vladimir Sorokin received a Man Booker Prize nomination for his novel “Day of the Oprichnik” (2006), which was published in English in late 2011. Apart from Russian and English translations, the novel has also been translated into almost 20 other languages. More.

See: Russia Beyond the Headlines

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Books on Terminology.

See: TermCoord

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Corsican MEP François Alfonsi (EFA-Greens) discussed his new Report on European endangered languages in the European Parliament Culture Committee on Wednesday.

Mr Alfonsi highlighted the continuing, and in some cases increasing, problem of endangerment. “This issue has been largely ignored at EU level over the past decade and this has to change”, he said, adding, “There are examples of good practice where intervention has been able to reverse the decline in some languages. But others are in a more delicate state, and without intervention and support they will struggle to survive in a globalised world.”

Alfonsi promised that his report will praise those EU member states that are most successful in protecting endangered languages, while those European states which don’t come up to scratch could be named and shamed. More.

See: npld

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The foundation will hold six workshops on literary translation open to the public. Read more.

See: Granada Hoy

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(…) It may have been this experience that caused me to write an article for a British newspaper titled, “Translation Is Impossible.” I was supposed to be reviewing a bunch of English-French dictionaries, but I happened to cite the classic Groucho Marx joke, which goes (in one of its variants), “You’re only as old as the woman you feel,” as an instance of the untranslatable. At least as far as French is concerned. You need a verb, “feel,” that functions both transitively and intransitively, and means something like “caress” and “my current emotional status” all at once. It doesn’t (so far as I know) exist in French. A couple of months later – inevitably – some friend in Paris sent me “La Traduction Est Impossible,” the French translation of my original article, which had been published in a Paris magazine.

Naturally the first thing I looked for was the translation of the Marxian pun. I was genuinely interested – I really wanted to know how the translator had pulled it off. And to think I had claimed it was impossible – I was about to be proved wrong! But translation is always an interpretation. In this case, the translator had written something like this, updating New York ’50s sexist humor into ’90s Parisian political correctness: “Here is an example of a sentence that is manifestly impossible to translate: ‘A man is only as old as the woman he can feel inside of him trying to express herself.’” So, in some sense, I felt vindicated, but also — as usual — betrayed by a graduate from the school of translation.

In my opinion, you don’t have to be mad to translate, but it probably helps. Take, for instance, the case of the late, great Gilbert Adair. He was translating into English the brilliant novel by Georges Perec, “La Disparition” – a lipogram written entirely without the letter “e.” (I had had a tentative go at eliminating the most frequently occurring letter in both English and French and failed utterly.) Adair even succeeded, for a while, in deleting “e” from his vocabulary. I met him for tea in London, while he was in the midst of it, at the Savoy hotel (it had to be the Savoy, not Claridge’s or the Grosvenor, obviously). When a waitress came around and asked if he would like “tea or coffee,” he frowned, gritted his teeth, and replied, “Lapsang souchong.” More.

See: New York Times Blog

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ProZ.com free webinars offer registered ProZ.com users to attend workshops and informational presentations on CAT Tools and products for free. See the dates and register here.

See: ProZ.com webinars

Maeve Walsh of Loreto High School Beaufort in Dublin has won the Irish section of European Commission’s annual translation competition for 17 year old secondary school pupils.

The Juvenes Translatores (Latin for ‘young translators’) competition is organised annually by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation, whose translators mark the entries received from secondary school pupils from all over Europe and select a winner from each country.

The aim of the competition is to promote language learning in schools and give young people a taste of what it is like to be a translator.

More than 3,000 pupils from 750 schools across Europe took part in the competition in November last year when they translated a one-page text from any one EU official language into another.

Maeve chose to translate from Irish into English and her translation was judged to be the best from all entries received from the 12 Irish schools taking part. More.

See: Business and Leadership

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Xu Liangying, a renowned Chinese rights advocate, physicist and translator of Einstein, has died in Beijing. Xu was 92.

Xu’s death on Monday was widely reported on academic discussion boards and confirmed by a doctor reached by phone at Haidian Hospital’s intensive care unit in Beijing’s university district where Xu lived for many years. The doctor declined to be identified by name and no cause of death was given.

Xu began translating Einstein in 1962 after being forced to leave his job as editor of a leading science journal for having criticised the policies of the Communist Party led by Mao Zedong.

In all, Xu was the main translator of the three volumes of “The Collected Works of Einstein in Chinese,” and initiated or wrote numerous letters and petitions defending human rights. More.

See: South China Morning Post

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8 European institutions comprising 4300 translators to use SDL Trados Studio

SDL (LSE: SDL), today announced that Trados GmbH, legal subsidiary and entity of SDL, has signed a framework agreement with the European Commission. SDL Trados Studio 2011, SDL’s flagship translation memory system, has been chosen as the computer-aided translation (CAT) tool of choice by the European Commission on behalf of a group of 8 European Institutions. The EC has awarded SDL the contract to revitalize its existing translation memory infrastructure.

The European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the European Court of Auditors, the European Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of the Regions of the European Union, as well as the Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union will equip approximately 4300 internal translators with the SDL Trados Studio system.

SDL Trados Studio provides a suite of tools necessary to create, edit and review high quality translations in the quickest possible time and is the de facto market leading translation software to increase translator productivity. SDL Trados Studio was chosen as the winning solution on the basis of over 100 requirements, given its open architecture, extensive API, and software maturity. The award of this contract was reviewed by a large group of evaluators and follows a 2 year evaluation process beginning in October 2010.

“We are pleased that the European Commission has chosen SDL to support the European Union translation supply chain with training, certification and special licensing,” says Keith Laska, CEO of the SDL Language Technologies Division. “This is an exciting opportunity for us to extend and enhance a long term and successful partnership between our organization and the European Union. We look forward to supporting these 8 European organizations on a long-term basis.”

To learn more about the solution selected by the European Commission, visit: www.translationzone.com/studio2011

See: Translation Zone