Monthly Archives: September 2009

Workshop for translators

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on September 16, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Translation Workshops

The Northern California Translators’ Association will be a conducting a workshop titled “Getting started in translation and interpretation”. As the title itself suggests, the workshop would provide participants with practical information on how to prepare oneself for a successful career in language translation and interpretation.

Those who are beginning in the field of language translation would be specially benefited as a large variety of useful topics would be covered. The presenters would discuss concrete tips and useful resources on education like Translation & Interpretation Schools, continuing-education opportunities, certification exams, professional seminars, self-study, office equipment and organization.

The workshop would also cover the business end of the profession like-

  • Marketing of services to direct clients and agencies
  • Resources that provide information on reputation of various agencies and payment practices
  • Process of evaluating, meeting and exceeding customer’s expectations
  • Negotiation and drafting of contracts
  • Quality assurance
  • Compensation
  • Professional ethics
  • Research methodologies
  • Computers and CAT programs
  • Creating and updating glossaries
  • Glossary creation and maintenance
  • Reading for self-improvement
  • Bookkeeping issues and
  • Translation & Interpretation associations and conferences

This workshop is being presented by highly qualified translation and interpretation experts who have amassed considerable experience working in a variety of projects, including high profile ones, across the world.

For further information check out this link - http://www.ncta.org/cde.cfm?event=248512

Web site translation – Avoid these pitfalls

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on September 15, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Blog Translation, Language Translation Advice, Web site Translation

A large number of multi-lingual web sites are created with the attitude, that just by their existence they will attract customers. Consequently much thinking does not go into the web site translation. This is among the primary reasons for the less-than-desirable performance of such web sites.

Speaking to potential customers in their own language is not enough, one needs to understand their culture, traditions, their expectations, likes and dislikes in order to get through. At present a lot of web sites are made with short-cut strategies like, which just ensure that a web site is very simple and predictable so that the user can easily find his/her way through it. But then this a major reason that they don’t stand out in the users’ memories.

Some tips that would help –

Revise the tone of the language of your web site, especially if it’s informal. North Americans go about their business in a pretty informal manner. But the Japanese are quite the opposite. So web sites in the US can refer to their users by their first names but not those that are targeted to the Japanese.

Make sure that your web site complies with the local laws of the country of your target users.

Revise elements like date and time format, systems of measurements and the like to confirm with the local standard.

Provide the required foreign language support to ensure that foreign language mails are not garbled after entering the company’s servers and various foreign symbols don’t go missing/get altered due to incorrect character encoding.

Make it easy for your targeted users to find your web site in their language. It’s quite surprising that many companies spend a considerable amount of money on building multilingual websites in which access to foreign language versions is hidden in some corner or through flags which might not stand for the language known by specific users.

Color and design sensibilities vary across different cultures, similarly various icons and symbols used by web sites may mean different things to different people. So use them after a proper study of how they are perceived by the target population.

High resolution graphics are great to look at but not all parts of the world have access to high speed Internet connections, and a slow site is never a good experience. Design your international web site with care.

Translate your Wordpress blog instantly

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on September 14, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Translation Tools

There’s a new plugin for Wordpress for those who would like to translate their blogs in a jiffy and for free. It’s called Transposh and is very simple to use. After you have installed Transposh you will find several small flags belonging to different countries (you can select them on your own) below the RSS subscription logo. Towards the upper left will be you default language flag. Now all you have to do to translate your blog is to click the flag of a country and presto you’ll have the translation in front of you!

Now for the not so desirable part, since Transposh is an automatic translation tool, the quality of translation would not be very good. It would be awkward to read and may sometimes be erroneous as well. So if you chose to use Transposh, do take stock of the pros and cons which could affect the standing of your blog.

Chinese publishers test global waters

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on September 11, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Translation News

Chinese publishing houses are now gearing themselves to take Chinese books worldwide. This could be readily ascertained at the Beijing International Book Fair where Chinese publishers were eagerly discussing strategies to take the industry ahead with their foreign counterparts. Among the main topics around which these discussions revolved were translating Chinese books into foreign languages especially English.

The publishers discussed various challenges that they might have to face in their endeavor. The primary hurdle was that very few western publishers were able to read Mandarin which made it impossible for them to accurately evaluate various Chinese books and their potential for success among western readers. Furthermore there is a lack of awareness about Chinese writers. These writers might be writing best sellers in China but remain unknown in the west. Thus a publishing house would require considerable marketing muscle to promote awareness about such authors and build them as identifiable and reliable brands for western readers. Another problem lies in the fact that Chinese culture and philosophy is markedly different form the west; this limits such books from getting absorbed in western market.

Industry insiders feel that Chinese books have a long way to go before they can be successful in the western. Recommended strategies include co-authoring books with western writers or even working with western editors who have substantial idea about the target readers. Chinese publishers are also working on books that have international appeal and can cut across different cultures.

A new online dictionary that means business!

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on September 10, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Translation Tools

Are you one of those people who are frequently looking up online dictionary sites like dictionary.com? Maybe your work requires you to do that or you simply like finding out the meanings of words you didn’t know about or new meanings of various known words. As far as I am concerned, I consider myself a word junkie, I can spends several hours at a go simply looking for meanings of various words, their roots and their histories. If you find that weird, I’ll suggest that you try it out sometime. Or maybe you could start right away with Wordnik.

Wordnik is a cool new dictionary that has the potential to give existing heavyweight online dictionary sites a run for their money. Wordnik goes much beyond being a simple dictionary by providing users with a lot more than various examples of a given word. Along with regular features that can be found in standard dictionaries like word definition and pronunciation, Wordnik also provides synonyms and antonyms, etymology of the given word and even statistics related to the word’s usage. Users registered with Wordnik can even add their own lists of related words and synonyms.

One of the best features of Wordnik is that it displays the queried word in the context one is looking for; it combs through a vast database of web sites, archives of news papers and magazines, blog posts and even books that are out-of-copyright (from Project Gutenberg) and recent Twitter messages where the word has been used!

At present the Wordnik’s database covers nearly 1.7 million words, the company is now working building apps for smartphones.

Biblica releases a new Kiswahili Bible

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on September 9, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Translation News

Millions of Kiswahili speakers now have a brand new translation of Bible. This latest translation is the result of the efforts of International Bible Society/Send the Light which is now known as Biblica.

Although Kiswahili speakers already have a Bible in their language, it’s a very difficult read quite like the King James Bible is for English speakers. It’s very old and hence written in an older form of Kiswahili which is not used any longer, and contemporary readers have a hard time deciphering it. The newly translated version is quite like the NIV Bible in the sense that it’s written in simple contemporary language which makes it easy to read and understand.

According to Biblica’s vice president the new Kiswahili Bible’s importance goes beyond the Kenyan market because the language is not only widely used in eastern and central Africa but is spoken in eight countries by a total population of over 60 million people. It will significantly help in evangelical efforts and discipleship across urban, as well as rural population.

Tops banks in the United States zero in on Spanish speaking customers

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on September 8, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Translation News

The recent few years has seen an explosion in the population of Spanish immigrant population in the United States. Not only has the Spanish speaking population grown substantially in size (number of Hispanic Americans living in the United States is 45 million and counting) but also in affluence. This has led the nation’s top banks to recognize the need for providing their services in Spanish language.

This does not however mean that these services are solely available in English at present. In the last few years over 70% of traditional US banks have gradually translated parts of their web sites - mostly related to product information and services, into the native languages of specific sections of customers.  Now the banks are planning to go ahead and expand the area served by foreign language content, specifically for the Spanish population, which means that services like bank statements and customer support services among others would soon be available in Spanish.

Corporate Insights recently conducted a study on Foreign Language Services and concluded that some banks had been quite proactive at serving Spanish speaking customers and  already have advanced web-based options in Spanish language in place. Leading with top grades in this area are Bank of America and Citibank which are the only two banks at present that offer their clients a fully functional private site in Spanish. Then there are Wells Fargo and Fifth Third that operate Spanish Help Centers which help the customers by answering online banking queries and assisting them in navigating through the site. At Wells Fargo and Wachovia, Spanish speaking customers can open bank accounts online, they do not have to fill up any forms in English language.

America’s Best Selling Bible to be revised

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on September 7, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Translation News

The New International Version Bible which has been America’s best selling Bible will be revised. This proposed revision comes after 25 years and is intended to modernize the language to make it friendlier for present users as well as include information gained from progress made by Biblical scholarship.

Though the publication of this version is still several months away (sometime in 2011), as it could have been expected, the proposal has already sparked a furious debate about tampering with God’s words. In fact the New International Version Bible has been in such controversies before when similar attempts in the past were weighed down by many controversies, a lot of them related with the replacement of gender-specific terms and changes which smacked of political correctness.

This time around The Committee on Bible Translation which would oversee the project have assured that the Bible translation process will be made as transparent as possible and would take into account the suggestions of scholars and readers.

Lack of professional translators continues to dog US war on terror

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on September 6, 2009 – 6:00 pm
Filed under Translation News

A few weeks back I had written about language challenges being faced by US National Security Agency (NSA) in Afghanistan. The problem continues to exist with the ongoing critical shortage of language translators.

The terrorists hunted by US security agencies communicate with each other in obscure dialects through emails, text messages and phone calls. So when any such communication is intercepted, the NSA is supposed to relay it to authorized translation centers where the message is translated into English in the shortest possible time, and then distributed as reports and even raw transcripts to the policymakers and commanders. However, the reality is that in many instances, the US military is unable to take prompt action because of the unavailability of professional translators who could readily translate the information into English.

Intelligence officers have offered considerable amounts of money to suitable language translators but the demand continues to be much higher than supply. A recurring problem is that many translators fail the require security clearance - a number of them being too old or not fit enough to face the hardships that come with working in the tough terrain of Afghanistan.

Prepare to shell out money for PayPal (even for free accounts)

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on September 6, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Translation News

This is for professional translators and anyone using PayPal – the company has added some new fees to its services without notifying the users. It came as an unpleasant surprise to many PayPal users with personal and supposedly free accounts when they found out that they had been charged by PayPal for some of the services.

It appears that PayPal is charging for all payments which have been categorized as services or goods. These were earlier free, but now users have to shell out about 2.9%, and an additional 30 cents for all such transactions.

So professional translators who have been using PayPal for payments should have a detailed look through their accounts, this is specially required in the case of international business transactions and banking deals, as the fees can be very high.