Rage Against the Machine Photo: static.sched.org

Just what IS machine translation and how did it start interfering with an all-human process?  Machine translation is the translation of words and documents by computers.  There are websites out there that can translate words from one language to another in real time.  All it takes is typing in the word and then the click of a button.  Such simplicity may be very helpful when communicating by email with a foreign pen pal or getting the main idea of a foreign website without hiring your own private translator to surf the net with you.

However, real communication requires that the original thoughts and ideas of the sender to bepresented in such a way that the receiver can understand not just the words but also the context behind them.  Try typing paragraphs of English to be translated into German, French or Spanish, into a machine translator.  The translation engine will spit the words back out in the language you requested, but alas, if they were to be received and read by a native speaker, would he or she comprehend the depth, meaning and intent of the original English words?  Doubtful.  Why not?  Because a computer just analyzes the text word for word without any thought or consideration for the context in which the words were meant to be used.  A word in one language can have many definitions.  How could the machine translation engine possibly know which definition you intended?  It doesn’t.

So, while machine translation and software make helpful tools and get a general idea of what is being expressed, for an accurate translation with the true meaning clarified, a professional translator will deliver the best results for clients and language translation agencies alike.  A website translated into several languages, each true to the original author, presents a professional image and develops trust.  A translation that imparts the true message of what the original words were intended to convey can save patients’ lives, win that big bid, or persuade a shopper to purchase from you.

Have you run into any bad machine translations that left either you or your clients out in the cold?  Do you think that machine translation will ever trump human imagination and creativity?

Christine Prantil

Links:

• About machine translation.

A painting about The Mabinogion Courtesy: www.sacred-texts.com

A monumental addition to the world’s cultural treasure chest came in the form of an English translation at the hands of a man named Gwyn Thomas.  (The original translation was done by Lady Charlotte Guest in 1877, which is when the title The Mabinogion also became popular.)  Thomas, who is a Welsh writer and a professor, has published 16 volumes of poetry, and several volumes of work as a literary and cultural critic.  But perhaps his greatest contribution, his grand opus, was his translation of The Mabinogion into English. For those of you who are unfamiliar, The Mabinogion is a collection of stories taken from medieval Welsh manuscripts.

This group of 11 stories focuses on historical events in both the medieval and Iron Age.  Several of the stories are important to note as they provide valuable evidence for the development of the Arthurian legend.  The stories of The Mabinogion appear in the earlier White Book of Rhydderch and The Red Book of Hergest.  They are divided into The Four Branches of the Mabinogi, four native tales, and three romances.  This collection consists of the preponderance of prose found in medieval Welsh manuscripts that had not been translated from other languages.

Throughout the manuscript, there are echoes of the primordial Celtic mythology and folklore, including the pantheon of ancient gods and goddesses.  Their importance as records of early myth, legend, folklore, culture, and language of Wales is immense.

This latest translation of The Mabinogion, once again and more thoroughly into English, is quite possibly the “finest English language version of one of the ancient jewels of European literature.”  This just goes to show how absolutely essential foreign language translation is as a tool to connect one to peoples from different cultures…as well as to our collective past.  Such shared knowledge inspires dialogue and cooperation between cultures around the world.

It is imperative to really understand the culture and country and people with whom you wish to do business.  This is why internationalization and globalization are so vital when designing your website or your software application.  The most gentle of cultural nuances can coax a customer towards your business and your product.

Can you recall a conversation on a cultural point or shared experience that opened the doors of communication between you and your potential clients?  How important do you think it is to be informed as to your customers’ cultural background?

Christine Prantil

Links:

• More about language translation.
• More about The Mabinogion.

Brain mapping Photo: wikipedia.org

Have you wondered why others can pick up foreign languages so easily and you have such difficulty with the same task?  A group of neuroscientists from University College London has uncovered a clue: fast language learners have developed different brain structures at different rates than slow language learners.  Their findings, entitled “Brain structure predicts the learning of foreign speech,” determined that the capacity to differentiate sounds in a foreign language is linked to cerebral white matter.  In accordance with their results, quick learners have more white matter and a less symmetrical brain than those who labor with foreign tongues.

Translation agencies haven’t gone quite the distance of having their translators’ brains examined, but their translators and interpreters should be qualified professionals, selected for projects on the basis of their native language and their education and training in the field of the material to be translated.

Do you find it difficult to learn new languages?  I know I do.  My biggest trouble is the differentiation of sounds.  Everything seems like it just flows together in one long word to me.  But my sister is a whiz, so obviously the problem doesn’t run in families.  What language do you think is the hardest for English speakers to learn?

Christine Prantil

Links:

• Brain structure predicts the learning of foreign speech.

Latin American Spanish Photo: www.izea.net/world/southamerica.htm

The Spanish language was born in Spain out of the prolific womb of Vulgar Latin.  When Spain decided to conquer Latin America, they brought their language with them and introduced it to the indigenous peoples.

However, just as the United States of America is geographically cut off from England, producing different intonations, language patterns and phrases, the huge mountain ranges and impenetrable jungle landscapes of Latin America have isolated pockets of Spanish being spoken throughout the region.  There is also the same Atlantic Ocean that still separates them all from Mother Spain herself.  These geographic barriers produced several dialects of Spanish that sound distinctly different than the Spanish mother tongue.  As all languages evolve with time, almost every region of Latin America has a form of Spanish uniquely their own, with some distinctive nouns and phraseology.  Other areas that are so cut off from the outer world by nearly insurmountable geographic forces have kept a form of Spanish almost as pure as their Castilian predecessors.

Translations are often requested to be done in Latin American Spanish or “Neutral” Spanish.  But “Neutral” Spanish doesn’t really exist.  However, in an attempt to produce a neutral Spanish, a professional translator who understands the different dialects between the differing regions will choose the words that are most recognizable to the greatest number of Spanish readers living in the area.  Obviously, when dealing with a specific country, it is always best to employ a native speaker to concentrate on your target readership.

Have you encountered any difficulty dealing with different Latin American dialects?  What are the words and phrases you find the most commonly understood?

Christine Prantil

Links:

• More about Spanish translation

The Linquistics Encyclopedia photo: lit-download.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html

In the early 20^th century, language scholars decided they needed a theory of linguistic structure and a strategy for analyzing those structures.  And so was born the field of structural linguistics.  Some of the first pioneers included the anthropologists Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloomfield. When historical comparative linguistics bumped up against unfamiliar languages, the linguist’s first job was to thoroughly dissect and delineate the language for closer study.

In Europe there was a parallel development of structural linguistics most strongly inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss student of Indo-European and general linguistics.  His lectures on general linguistics, published posthumously by his students, set the tone and direction of European linguistic analysis from the 1920s forward.  His approach has been widely embraced in other fields under the umbrella of the term “Structuralism.”

For most of the Second World War, Leonard Bloomfield and several of his protégées and colleagues improved and refined teaching materials for a variety of languages whose expertise was needed for the war effort. This work led to an escalating eminence in the field of linguistics, which became a recognized discipline in most American universities only after the war. Starting in 1980, pragmatic, functional, and cognitive approaches have steadily gained ground in both the U.S. and Europe.” ¹

Which approach do you find most effective in the study of linguistics?  Or do you find a combination of the three necessary for a true understanding of the material?

¹ From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_linguistics

Christine Prantil

Adam and Eve Photo: www.answersfrommen.com

Scholars across the globe once believed that all human languages were handed down from the language of Adam and Eve, a language referred to as Adamic.

“In the Sanskrit Language (1786), Sir William Jones proposed that Sanskrit and Persian had resemblances to classical Greek, Latin, Gothic and Celtic languages. From this idea sprang the field of comparative historical linguistics. Through the 19th century, European linguistics centered on the comparative history of the Indo-European languages, with a concern for finding their common roots and tracing their development.”

Operating from a biblical vantage point, some intellectuals accepted as truth that all human languages were the progeny of the language of Adam and Eve’s Adamic Language.  Many of these learned men believed that the Hebrew Language was, in fact, the same as the Adamic Language.  In the early 19^th century, Wilhelm von Humboldt theorized that human language was a rule-governed system, adopting a hypothesis that was to be the locus of all formal studies on the syntax and semantics of language in the 20^th century.  Of this proposition, he said that it allowed language to make infinite use of finite means (Uber den Dualis 1827).

Toward the end of the 19th century, scholars in the United States undertook the recording of hundreds of native languages once found in North America.  The interest in describing languages spread across the globe, resulting in thousands of international languages having now been analyzed to varying degrees.  As this work evolved during the early 20^th century primarily in America, linguists came up against languages whose structures varied greatly from those of traditional European languages.

Language scholars concluded that they needed a theory of linguistic structure and methods of analysis.

What language do you think is the most structurally different from English?  Basque?  Arabic?  Chinese?  What about their structure makes them so different from our own?

Christine Prantil

Links:

• More about language translation
• More about Wilhelm von Humbold

George Washington at the Signing of the Constitution by John Howard Christy from Wikipedia.org

After enduring radical changes from its homeland and home language, the use of English in the colonies still remained close to that of the motherland, at least up to the bloody conflict of the American Revolution. Following that horrific chapter in American History, American English found itself no longer a colonial variety of British English.  American English burst into its own national period.  Political freedom and independence was soon followed by a flood of cultural freedom and independence.  A notable Founding Father of this Cultural Revolution was Noah Webster.  With his history as a school teacher, he perceived the need for this new nation to establish its own linguistic identity.

“Accordingly he set out to provide dictionaries and textbooks for recording and teaching American English with American models. The need Webster sought to fill was twofold: to help Americans realize they should no longer look to England for a standard of usage, and to foster a reasonable degree of uniformity in American English. To those ends, Webster’s dictionary, reader, grammar, and blue-backed speller were major forces for institutionalizing what he called Federal English.”¹

There are very few of us who have been educated here in the United States without the use of Webster’s dictionary in our studies.  I have found that my favorite discovery in that impressive tome is the word “murmuration,” which means a flock of starlings…and their magical flight patterns.  Do you have any favorite American English words with either exciting or enlightening definitions?

Extract from The History Channel site by John Algeo¹

Christine Prantil

Link:

• More about John Algeo.

First Thanksgiving Photo: www.victorialodging.com

American English settled its roots in three different time periods: the colonial (1607 – 1776), the national (1776 – 1898) and the international (1898 – present) periods.  After four centuries, the United States has borne witness to small changes in syntax and pronunciation, but we have seen much more expansive and exciting changes in both vocabulary and the demeanor of its speakers.

Throughout the 17^th century, British colonies up and down the Atlantic Coast set the stage for English to become a permanent language in the Americas.  But the colonists found themselves set apart from their homeland.  With a geographical hurdle the size of the Atlantic Ocean, huge distances left little opportunity to socialize or communicate orally.  Therefore, language patterns begin to evolve separately and people on either side of this physical and social chasm begin to speak differently.  The broad expanse of the Atlantic Ocean between the colonists and those they had left behind in England ensured that their languages would continue to deviate from their common lineage.

Americans also coexisted and worked alongside “Amerindians” of several linguistic dialects, as well as French and Dutch colonists.  New communication strategies became vital to successful relations with their neighbors.  Even the settlers themselves were from widely diverse districts and social groups in England, with even more wildly diverse patterns of speech and colloquialisms, so there was a homogenizing effect: those who shared this new world as brothers in arms began to talk more like one another and less like any particular locality in England. All these influences fused together to create the distinct variation we now know as American English.

There are interesting vocabulary changes that we still use today.  In England, “corn” referred to any grain intended for human consumption, especially wheat, hence the divisive “Corn Laws.”  The colonists transferred this term to use in regards to  “Indian corn”…which the Indians called maize.  Eventually the “Indian” was dropped and it was simply called corn, while other grains were referred to as “breadstuffs.”

I know that it is close to impossible for my British ex-mother-in-law to communicate with my teenage American daughter.  Do you know of any words that have been “lost in translation” between the English language and the newer American English?

Christine Prantil

Link:

• More about John Algeo

Internationalization photo: www.tbmagazine.net

The Internationalization of your software and/or website is the first critical step towards Localization.  But let’s start with a quick overview of exactly what Internationalization is. LISA, the now defunct Localization Industry Standards Association, defined it as follows:

Internationalization is the process of generalizing a product so that it can handle multiple languages and cultural conventions without the need for re-design. Internationalization takes place at the level of program design and document development.

Basically, prior to sending the source material to the localization vendor, the product must be made ready for international markets.  This process entails the removal of text to be translated from the software source code.  “String files, or if you prefer, “resource files,” are created to house the translated text.  Next, the translators have access ONLY to these translatable text files in order to prevent any inadvertent changes to the program code.  This is also extremely helpful during the revision process by  eliminating the need for editors to search through hundreds of lines of code to find the translated text.  The translated information is all right there at their fingertips in the separate string/resource files.  This facilitates finding any potential errors more easily and much more quickly.

Internationalization can also include the procedures necessary for the development of documentation, help screens and web sites.

The most important reasons for Internationalizing software are:

1. To insure that software is functional for international markets
2. To insure that a software is able to be localized

Well thought out and pre-planned internationalization of a product will reduce localization costs down the line and ensure a smooth localization process.

Has anyone ever tried localizing without  first internationalizing?  What problems do you think are most common in the internationalization process?  Let’s get a forum going to help ease the way for all of us!

Christine Prantil

Links:

• Internationalization:  Step one for localization
• More about translation

Three sets of eyes photo: courtesy pbase.com

When searching for translation services, it is vital to remember that just because someone speaks two languages does NOT mean that this person is qualified to translate between these two languages. The fact is that most bilingual speakers do not receive the sort of education or expertise required for a quality professional translation in either language or in the field of expertise for which the translation is intended.  Often an employer will ask one of their Spanish-speaking team members to translate a letter or some short document from English into Spanish. It happens all the time. It never occurs to the team leader that the employee may not be equally well-educated in both languages–especially not for a translation of a technical or medical document.  Without really thinking about it, the assumption is made that they are equally well educated in both languages but this may not be the case.   Commonly in these office scenarios, the employee believes that they speak proper Spanish because they learned the language from their parents.  Often, however, their parents may have been undereducated and use a more colloquial Spanish with improper grammar usage often mixed with Anglicized words that even dictionaries won’t recognize.

What kind of impression does this leave with a client when they review the final draft of the letter or document? You and your company will be judged by the quality, accuracy and proper word usage of your product. When used improperly, some words can even be insulting when read by a person from a different region or dialect.

Equipped with a true understanding of the real-world benefits of accuracy in your business translation, you may decide to hire a freelance translator.  Just keep in mind that there is no official licensing process out there that anyone of them are required to complete.  So how do you know if you have found a good one?  Even using referrals from your friends and colleagues to locate a good translator, you will still need to have someone in your business coordinate the workflow.  Additionally, extra costs will begin to crop up when you need to locate and hire other translators for editing and proofreading.

A professional Translation Agency will remove all of the risk and stress from this process. They work with hundreds of qualified translators and editors so you can be assured that the translated documents will be accurate.  In addition, any such agency will perform the supervising project management and quality control for the entire task…from inception to completion.

Have you found it easier to work directly with a professional translation agency?  Have you experienced the extra effort and time involved with using a freelance translator?  We would love to hear your input on either side of the argument.

Christine Prantil

Links:

• More about language translation

Using a three-step process ensures an accurate and complete translation that conveys every nuance in the target document.

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