A very interesting and admirable effort is taking place within the boundaries of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for there lies the Academy of the Hebrew Language which is dedicated towards preserving Hebrew and promoting its use among the masses by updating it with the changing times. The academy develops nearly 2,000 new Hebrew words annually for modern terms and concepts like blog, sustainable development, hacker and jetlag. The academy tries to find original Hebrew words that would convey the meaning of modern terms rather than just translating a new English word into Hebrew. For example, it came up with the term “ayefat” for jetlag. This Hebrew word was created using the root word for “tired”, similarly the academy recommends “misron” for SMS.
Hebrew, which is among the oldest languages of the world had not been used as a spoken language for more than 1,700 years. During this period it was solely used in biblical and religious texts. It was only 150 years ago that efforts were made to revive it as a spoken language and the man who played an instrumental role in reintroducing Hebrew as a spoken language is Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. This year Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet marked Ben-Yehuda’s 152nd birthday on January 7th with a special session in which it was decided that the day would be henceforth celebrated as National Hebrew Day.
Diplomats and officials revealed early this week that the Arab members of World Trade Organization are making efforts to get Arabic recognized as the organization’s fourth official language. Keith Rockwell, the spokesman for WTO said that Kuwait had made a formal request and members of the body were discussing the matter. The WTO has 153 members at present among which there are around a dozen Arab countries, six more including Iraq, Libya and Algeria are in the process of joining. But all said and done there are significant hurdles that might thwart this effort.
WTO’s existing official languages include English, French and Spanish. Adding a new official language means that there will be requirement for interpretation, translation and printing. This would involve heavy expenditure. But that is not all, adding Arabic as an official language would lead other nations like China and Russia to step up efforts for including their languages among the official languages of WTO. Moscow has already been making on-and-off efforts in that direction for some years now and the addition of Arabic may just renew its zeal and increase pressure on WTO. According to official sources, the addition of 3 languages would lead to an annual cost of around $43 million or 45 million Swiss Francs. Consider this amount by comparing it with the total budget of WTO for 2009 – 189 million Swiss Francs.
The rapidly increasing Hispanic population in the US and many other parts of the world has led to an increase in demand for Spanish translation services. Many global businesses are trying hard to expand into the Hispanic market and are taking assistance of professional language translation services to communicate with potential customers in their language. But many of these companies make the mistake of relying upon automatic or free translation services or hiring inferior human translators. This quite often results in embarrassing errors which deal a deadly blow to the interests of the company that is trying to make inroads into the Spanish market. Following are some examples of Spanish translation errors that some companies have had to deal with.
A reputed American milk distribution company with a famous campaign “Got Milk?” tried to market its products in Mexico. It tried to repeat the success of its existing campaign, but the Spanish translation of the campaign that it ended up promoting read “Are you lactating?”
A T-shirt manufacturer based in Miami wanted to target the Spanish population. It produced T-Shirts that were intended to have the phrase “I saw the Pope” which should have been “el Papa” but unfortunately the translated version in Spanish read “la Papa” which meant “saw the potato”.
A beer company in the US with the successful slogan “Turn it Loose” tried to translate the same into Spanish but the translated version came out as “Get Diarrhea”.
A US airline tried to market its new leather seats with the slogan “Fly in leather”, but the translated version in Spanish read “Fly Naked”.
Going over the above instances you can imagine the immense embarrassment that the companies in question had to suffer along with business losses. However such situations can be easily avoided by availing Spanish translation services from professional providers. They would not only provide you high quality translation services but also give you with best suggestions/alternative for complicated translation problems.
The World Wide Web has created many new channels of communication which are available to all types of businesses. Any business can now connect to its target customers in highly innovative and effective ways. However communication relies on language and those businesses that operate on a global level need to communicate in the varied languages of their customers. Common Sense Advisory has found out through extensive research that over 50% of Internet users who made online purchases preferred to buy from web sites that presented information in the language they understood. Global businesses have largely realized this fact and have started translating their content for the benefit of their customers as well as employees. However in order to use language translation services optimally one needs to take the following steps.
The nature of content that is being translated
An organization has many different types of documents. They can include product documentation, knowledge bases, training material, company policies, blogs, emails and user forums among many others. Each of these type of content needs specific treatment. For example creative content like advertising material needs to be translated with a lot of care by professional human translator that are specialized in the field. Matters like product name and tag line need to discussed and altered suitably when required to suit the target market. On the other hand there are certain types of content which are not very critical and can be translated using high quality language translation software. But one should have a language expert review such a translation before sending it out.
Making you translated content searchable on the Internet
Information present on the Internet is found by users with help of search engines. You will need to ensure that your translated content has been optimized with suitable keywords. You cannot depend upon free translation services for translating such content as that might not provide the right keywords and your content wouldn’t appear high enough in relevant searches.
Protecting your content from automatic translation
Nowadays free translation plugins are available with most web browsers and users can get content translated from almost any language to any other language instantaneously. However this can be detrimental for certain types of content that do not translate well through automatic translation. In such cases you can make use of a “NOTRANSLATE” tag which will instruct Google’s crawler that the page is not supposed to be translated automatically. This ensures that Google does not provide its automatic translation option for such pages.
The state of Oregon has added automatic language translation options to its website. This news was announced by The Oregon Department of Administrative Services last week. The state’s official website is now supported by Google Translate which provides visitors with the ability to translate the content of the site into 25 languages apart from English. The languages are Italian, French, German, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Greek, Hindi, Norwegian, Malay, Persian, Korean, Portuguese, Swahili, Swedish, Vietnamese, Thai and Ukrainian.
Those who visit Oregon.gov will find a “drop-down” box labeled “Select Language” at the upper right corner in all pages. A user who is unable to read the default language which is English can choose from the 25 languages provided in the drop down box. Selecting the desired language will instantly produce the translated version of the page.
Oregon’s e-government manager Wally Rogers said on the occasion of the announcement that this feature had been added taking into account the fact that the State had a substantial population of non-English speakers who could not use the online resources available on the website because of language differences. The automatic translation option would not only allow such residents to understand and take advantage of the information presented on the website but it would also allow the government to reach out to more people. Moreover, with the help of Google Translate the state government was able to translate more than 40,000 pages without spending any money.
Language translation is not only about translating words in a given language into another. It goes beyond that, if one thinks about it carefully and mulls over the role language translation has played over the history of mankind one will realize that language translators have been instrumental in making alien cultures intelligible. If one takes into account the influence of the King James Bible on the English speaking world then one can safely conclude that the translators who worked on translating the Bible from Hebrew and Greek to English have also been responsible for shaping up their culture and history.
However it’s hugely ironical that a great-to-good translation usually goes unnoticed simply because the translator has captured the spirit and language of the original so well that the translated version seems to have been the original work. In fact there are many translated works that are revered as great works of literature on their own right. Apart from the King James Bible they are The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Arabian Nights, C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s English translations of Proust and August Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck’s German translations of Shakespeare.
Considering all this it is quite heartening to see translators being honored through events like the Times Literary Supplement’s Translation prize. Some of the works honored this year include The Accordionist’s Son by Bernardo Atxaga which was translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and Burning Secret, a novella written by Stefan Zweig and translated from German by Anthea Bell.
Desertec is a highly innovative and timely concept which involves using solar and wind energy from the deserts of Middle East and North Africa to generate power. It uses as its basis the fact that more energy falls in a mere six hours on the deserts across the world than is consumed worldwide in a year. The concept has been proposed by the Desertec Foundation and developed by a consortium of Algerian and European companies called DII GmbH, Desertec Industrial Initiative. If this concept is successfully implemented in reality then a significant percentage of African and European power requirements can be met through solar and wind energy.
The proposal states that the idea of creating concentrating solar power systems, wind parks and PV systems spread out over 17,000 square kilometers in the Sahara Desert. The electricity that would be produced by this setup would then be transmitted to African and European countries through a super grid made up of high-voltage direct current cables. The year 2012 has been set as a deadline for the company to design the complete plan which would include the financial and technical requirements of the project. Since several European and African countries are involved in the project, the difference in languages could become a barrier in allowing clear communication. Thus language translation services have a very important role to play in the Desertec project.
Since the Desertec project is huge and documentation related to it would span over technical, as well as financial domains, it’s necessary to get the required language translation services from specialized professional translation providers. Tomedes has already been working on translating a number of critical projects for a few Desertec companies. We have got a grip on the unique requirements of the project and are in a position to turnout high volume and quality translations across all required languages. Moreover we guarantee the best translation rates across the market. So if you require Desertec translation services look no further than Tomedes!
Instant voice translation has long been the stuff of science fiction and a much desired ability in the real world. People who frequently travel to foreign countries where they do not understand the local language would be delighted by a gadget that could instantly translate what they say in their native language into the local language of the foreign country to which they are traveling.
Many individual inventors and companies have been working on developing such a software. We’ve already got a few which are available for desktop computers. Although these devices work on a simple level that is, for basic phrases, they do indicate that we are closer to developing a full-fledged instant voice translation software now than ever before. There are a few companies that have been working on developing voice translation software for mobile devices which makes sense, since such a device would provide maximum utility in its mobile form.
Toshiba for one has already developed such a software which in its present version can allow the user to translate between English, Japanese and Chinese, and has a database of 30,000 words for every one of these languages. The company will be introducing this software on their smartphone - TG01 and is aiming to sell to tourists who travel to foreign countries. The company claims that the software is extremely user-friendly and all it requires from its users is that they speak into phone in any of the aforementioned languages following which the handset would process it and translate it into the desired language. The company intends to release the software in the present year itself.
Yet another year has gone by, welcome to 2010 dear reader, my best wishes to you for a happy and prosperous New Year. Overall 2009 was good for the language translation industry as in spite of the recession we managed to notch up better results than many other major industries which went reeling from the shock of recession and are still recovering.
The New Year comes with fresh challenges; moreover as the economy recovers there will be more opportunities for the language translation industry. 2009 saw a buildup in awareness about the importance of language translation among people from different industries. They started taking interest in the business opportunities that would open up for them if they used language translation services and expanded their business into prospective overseas markets. This awareness will now likely lead to positive action as various business organizations roll-out their expansion plans in which language translation services would play an integral role.
Niche translation is also likely to see more development in 2010. Over the past year more people came to know about the importance of specialization in translation. Now niche translators or translation professionals working within a specified knowledge area or with less popular languages are coming into their own. We can now frequently find specialized translation services like game translation, medical documents translation and legal translation along with translation to and from languages like Tagalog, Catalan and Pashto which are spoken by small groups of people and mostly restricted within small geographical boundaries. It’s just the beginning of the year and at Tomedes we have already bounced back from the holiday mood and geared up to take our language translation services to new heights. Keep watching this space for more.
Spanish translation services have grown from strength to strength especially in the US where the Hispanics make for the largest group whose native language is not English. Moreover, according to the Conference Board Hispanic families are poised to increase at a much faster rate than other groups in the United States. Consider some figures - in 2008 there were 44 million Spanish speaking families whose combined purchasing power was $870 billion. This is projected to grow to $1.3 trillion by the year 2015.
Professional translators and those aspiring to make a career in language translation cannot afford to ignore these figures. Specializing in providing Spanish translation services could just turn out to be the key to your success in 2010. If you are already working as a Spanish translator you should look into ways in which you could improve or enhance your services. For example, you could specialize in specific domains and dialects – although majority of the Spanish speakers living in the US come from Mexico, taking into account the fact that Spanish speakers are found in many different parts of the world would help you appreciate the importance of different dialects in which Spanish is spoken around the world.
Fortunately, learning Spanish is relatively easy, the language is fairly easy to understand and learn, and there are many learning options available, you could learn it in a class, through private tuition, and even online. You could also learn Spanish in Spain where some well designed programs are available that will help you gain mastery over the language and at least a few of its important dialects.
