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The European Commission announced the launch of #DiscoverTranslation, a campaign aimed at emphasizing the pivotal role the translation industry plays in the global economy. Releasing an informational statement this week, the European Commission provides a brief report on how a world without translation would function.

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The European Commission today announced the launch of its annual translation contest for secondary school students from across Europe, Juvenes Translatores. From midday on 2 September, schools from all EU countries will be able to register online so their students can compete with peers from other EU countries. This year, the participating teenagers will have to translate a text on the topic “Navigating in challenging times – together we are stronger”.

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Theme: Joining forces for a stronger language industry

Place: Brussels, Charlemagne Building, Rue de la Loi 170

DG Translation will host a 2nd forum for the EU language industry to discuss the sector’s added value and industry best practices which may help to enable further economic growth and to create more jobs.

We aim at bringing together language industry stakeholders (language service providers, both SME’s and large companies which require or buy language services, associations of professionals, …).

The event goes together with the Translation Studies Day. This will allow participants to meet and exchange thoughts with players from the language industry and the academia.

Anyone can follow the speeches and debates live via web streaming here. Conference videos will be available after the event.

• Watch the conference live — 24/10 (live until 18.00)
• Watch the conference live — 25/10 (9.15 – 16.45)

See: European Commission

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The British Academy, in collaboration with the European Commission, has released a new booklet for undergraduates and school pupils (but it’s really interesting for all of us!) called “Talk the Talk: A Guide to Maximising your Prospects Using Languages”, which promotes languages as a “long-term investment for you, your career and for society”.

The guide includes 24 profiles of linguists in a range of sectors, including: the Chair of UBS; a police constable; the Deputy Director-General and Chief Operating Officer of the Confederation of British Industry; various television and sports personalities; the Head of the UK Representation of the European Commission; and a partner at the law firm Lewis Silkin.

See: From words to deeds

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The European Commission has proposed to slash red tape for citizens and businesses by doing away with bureaucratic rubber-stamping exercises currently required to get public documents like your birth certificate recognised as authentic in another EU Member State. Currently, citizens who move to another Member State have to spend a lot of time and money in order to demonstrate that their public documents (such as birth or marriage certificates) issued by their Member State of origin are authentic. This involves the so-called ‘Apostille’ certificate which is used by public authorities in other states as proof that public documents, or the signatures of national officials on documents, are genuine. Businesses operating across EU borders in the EU’s Single Market are also affected. For instance, they will often be required to produce a number of certified public documents in order to prove their legal status when operating cross-border. These requirements date from an era when countries would only trust a public document if it came from the foreign office of another country. However, just as we trust in each other’s court judgements, we should be able to trust a Member State’s Registry Office issuing birth certificates, without needing their foreign office, justice ministry, or other authorities to vouch for them. Today, the European Commission is therefore proposing to scrap the ‘Apostille’ stamp and a further series of arcane administrative requirements for certifying public documents for people living and working in other Member States.

Under the Commission’s proposals, adopted today, citizens and businesses would no longer have to provide costly ‘legalised’ versions or ‘certified’ translations of official documents when, for example, registering a house or company, getting married, or requesting a residence card. Twelve categories of public documents¹ would automatically be exempted from formalities such as ‘Apostille’ and ‘legalisation’ – which are currently required for around 1.4 million documents within the EU each year. Abolishing these requirements will save citizens and businesses in the EU up to 330 million euro, not counting the saved time and inconvenience that is avoided. More.

See: Europa

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SDL 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 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.

See: Translation Zone

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Introduction

The largest interpreting service in the world is becoming even larger following the enlargement of the European Union.

BBC News Online spoke to Philippe Gratier, an interpreter at the European Commission for over 30 years, about how this is changing his professional life. More.

See: BBC

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The European Commission offers 650 traineeships for professional translation. To access the application procedure page click here.

What’s in it for you?

A paid traineeship of 5 months with the European Commission (or some executive bodies and agencies of the European Institutions like, for instance, the European External Action Service or Executive Agency for Competitiveness and Innovation), starting on either 1st March or 1st October.

You will receive a monthly grant of some €1,000 and reimbursement of travel expenses. Accident and health insurance are also provided.

Every year, there are about 1300 places available.

If you are one of the selected candidates you get hands-on experience in the international and multicultural environment. This can be an important enrichment for your further career. More.

See: News in Spanish at Universia

Also see European Commission

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Below are two videos posted on YouTube by the Directorate General for Interpretation at the European Institutions (i.e. the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice). They are excerpts from a DVD that the DG distributes to interpreting schools around the world, showing how freelance interpreters are tested. In this particular case, a candidate must interpret a 6-minute speech from French into English. It may sound amazing that someone is supposed to be able to take notes during a 6-minute speech and then translate the speech in full, but it is possible if you learn the techniques. Watch the test and see why the candidate was not successful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=InpIBvAVRXE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NQ0CMyey5V8

See: Fidus Interpres

• WCO – World Customs Organization
• CJEU – Court of Justice of the European Union
• ICAO – International Civil Aviation Organization
• IMF – International Monetary Fund
• Government of Canada – Translation Bureau
• EC – European Commission
• EP – European Parliament
• OECD – Organisation for economic co-operation and development More.

See: aiic

Chris Ledgard visits Brussels, a melting pot of European languages. He meets interpreters, language planners and voice coaches to discover how the European Commission operates “interpreting on an industrial scale.” We find out why officials fear a looming shortage of interpreters, and we meet the man who teaches people how to speak and behave in a multilingual setting.

See: BBC

The European Commission has tried to respond to grumbling in the French press about the preferential use of English in EU institutions, saying it is doing its best to maintain multilingualism in the face of budget constraints. More.

See:EurActiv

There is trouble in DG Translation, the arm of the European Commission that enables the EU to provide information in the language of each member state.

Acting Director, General Martikonis has pushed through reforms to cut costs and improve efficiency, but the staff are unhappy, especially with the 10% staff cuts. The Solidarity-Independence-Democracy (SID) union is up in arms. ”

The union continues, in a message to staff, “Had the DGT’s staff been consulted they would have pointed out that they have more senior management than could possibly be justified and that this would be the obvious area to start to make cuts. At present there are six directors. In the future it is proposed to keep all six directorships. This number could easily be halved, particularly as several of the present directors are nearing or have already reached retirement age.” More.

See: New Europe

To work on the permanent translation staff of one of the EU institutions, you must become an EU official — which means being successful in an open recruitment competition.

Minimum requirements

You will need to meet a few basic requirements to take part in a recruitment competition for translators.

Formal qualifications

You must have completed a full university-level course of at least three years and obtained a degree.

Professional experience

No professional experience is required — and there are no age limits.

Language skills

You must:

• have a perfect command of your mother tongue/main language (language 1)
• have a thorough knowledge of English, French or German (language 2) and be able to translate out of it
• in addition to languages 1 and 2, have a thorough knowledge of a second language (language 3) and be able to translate out of it.

All three languages must be official languages of the European Union. Specific language requirements will be indicated in the competition notice. More.

Google, Microsoft, Baidu, Yandex and Yahoo! are either getting paid or getting ready to be paid for translation through advertising revenue. Giving access to multilingual information increases their user base and raises cash. Lots of it. They are setting an example that many others would like to emulate.

Anyone who fails to see the fundamental shift in the demand for translation from the traditional buyer to the billions of citizens, patients, tax payers and consumers, is just scratching the surface of the vast potential for the global language industries.

The European Commission tell us that each EU citizen is paying on average €2 per year to fund the one Billion Euro translation budget of the Directorate General of Translation, by far the largest in the world.

We can rightfully say that translation is already being paid for in different ways than the word-price model.

Data-driven machine translation is still in its infancy and the language industry is only just starting to work with this technology on a material scale. We are only at the beginning of an innovation journey that will include game changing shifts for both buyers and providers of translation as they seek to adapt their models to the 21st century.

By 2020 English will already have lost its status as a lingua franca. And no new lingua franca will replace English as a language of commerce. Linguistic diversity is the new reality and machine translation technology will help us to communicate despite all its shortcomings and the inevitable partial understanding.

We can expect that by 2020 automated translation tools will be embedded into every device, application and website. Imagine a web of hundreds of thousands of automatic translators trained not only for a few languages and industry sectors but tuned to a myriad of language pairs, many sub-domains and customized for every company and offering. Such large-scale, if basic translation can only be paid for in ways that don’t exist now.

We can expect a whole new technical infrastructure and service base for our industry. A layer to provide access to language data: the fuel for machine translation. Another layer that organizes and prepares the data for use. The ‘pipes’ that channel data to and from tools and devices. A sea of people needed to keep such an infrastructure running.

In this context TAUS Data is just a first generation incarnation of such an industry utility. In a meeting taking place later this week, on March 1, in San Jose (CA, USA) forty bright minds from the TAUS community and beyond are meeting to brainstorm ‘TAUS Data Vision 2020’ More.

See: TAUS

More than 3 000 teenagers from 720 secondary schools across Europe took part in the EU Young Translator (‘Juvenes Translatores’) contest this morning. The 17-year old pupils put their command of foreign languages to the test while trying their hand at being a professional translator.

Malta and Gozo had six schools taking part:

De La Salle College, Birgu

G.F. Abela Junior College, Msida

Sir Michelangelo Refalo Centre for Further Studies, Kercem

Skola Sekondarja Oghla Giovanni Curmi, Naxxar

St Martin’s College Sixth Form, Swatar

St. Aloysius’ College Sixth Form, B’Kara

“The Juvenes Translatores contest is an excellent way for us to promote language learning and translation as a fulfilling career for young people, ” said Androulla Vassiliou, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth. “Since most of those taking part are translating into their native language, the contest also underlines our commitment to linguistic diversity, one of Europe’s biggest assets.”

The pupils translated a one-page text based on their choice of any of the 506 language combinations possible among the EU’s 23 official languages. This year the theme of the texts was volunteering, to mark the European Year of Volunteering.

European Commission translators will mark the texts and select one winner per country. In March 2012 the winners will be invited to Brussels to receive their prize from Commissioner Vassiliou.

The contest, now in its fifth year, was for the first time extended to schools located on islands which are part of EU Member States: New Caledonia, the Canary Islands, Madeira, Guadeloupe and Martinique.

See: Gozo News

Called ‘Patent Language Translations Online’ (PLuTO), the system has been developed by researchers at the Centre for Next Generation Localisation at Dublin City University, which is leading the consortium running the project.

Funded by the European Commission, PLuTO aims to improve access to multilingual digital patent libraries, thus reducing the time and cost associated with patent information access and filing.

The translation burden when seeking patent validation can prove expensive and time consuming for companies. These translations can cost up to €680 per EU patent, and are often prohibitive to individual inventors and SMEs.

Additionally, the increase in IP activity globally over the last number of years, particularly in Asia, means that greater amounts of patent data now exist in languages foreign to patent searchers and examiners, thus creating additional translation needs.

“PLuTO makes use of existing web content and the latest machine translation tools developed by DCU researchers,” explains project leader Dr Páraic Sheridan. Read more.

See: Silicon Republic