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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.
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Language professionals especially those who are in the job for the love of it, are generally eager to know not only about those languages in which they are experts but also others. They are interested in knowing about the entire life-cycles of various languages including their birth, evolution and death. Most languages develop naturally as they are used by their speakers over a period of years and centuries. But there are also those languages that are developed artificially by linguists.
There can be many reasons behind that some linguists want to develop a universal language which is easy to learn and master and thus adopt. Esperanto is an example of such a language. A very interesting reason for developing languages is for literature and art. Take a book like The Lord of the Rings which had its author J.R.R. Tolkien develop an entirely new language called Elvish complete with a couple of dialects, for its characters. In more recent times, new languages have also been developed for movies/television series like Star Trek (Klingon). The latest among such initiatives is Na’vi a language developed for Avatar, one of the most widely anticipated movies in recent times.
While Klingon was taken up by fans of Star Trek and popularized to such an extent that there are now many Star Trek fans worldwide who are fluent in it. Na’vi, on the other hand has been developed by a linguistics expert, Professor Paul Frommer of the University of Southern California. The language was developed to be spoken by characters inhabiting a fictional moon called Pandora. It has got a vocabulary of around 1,000 words and only time will tell how Avatar is received by its fans and till what extent they go on to use and promote Na’vi. Rest assured the folks at Tomedes will be monitoring it closely and just in case it becomes popular and important enough to require language translation services, we’ll surely be there to provide it.
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Foreign Translations, Inc. is a global language translation services provider that specializes in foreign language translation, website translation and interpreting. It has recently been a part of an interesting experiment in which it provided useful content for free on its website which lead to an increase in its overall profits.
There are a lot of valuable insights to be gained from this experiment and its results. For one thing, today’s internet savvy consumers prefer to take decisions after conducting personal research. Information has become the great leveler, it is available to everybody connected to the Internet, and one only needs to spend time googling around to find satisfactory information on most topics. In a way this has turned the consumer into an expert. So for companies irrespective of whether they are dealing with language translation or not, one of the most effective ways of becoming a force to reckon with is to offer information that a potential customer might be looking for. This move would help the customer become an expert thus making the company, or the web site which offers such information, a reliable and trusted source.
Such a move will specially benefit companies that rely on their websites to connect with customers. High quality instructional articles that directly serve the requirements of a company’s existing or potential customers when offered free help a company gain the reputation of an expert. This would, in a natural progression lead to customers spending more time on its web site and recommending it to others with similar interests. The resulting increase in user base would lead to increasing number of converted customers and improved profits like it happened in the case of Foreign Translation Inc.
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There was a time when looking for information involved a lot of work and could be quite painstaking depending upon the subject of enquiry. The development of the Internet changed all that, and now a whole world of information can be accessed by anyone, anywhere in the world, with a personal computer and internet connection.
Initially information available on the Internet was largely in English. This created challenges for people who did not know the language. Fortunately, the rapid spread of the World Wide Web has been able to fill this gap and now we have a growing number of websites in other major and minor languages.
Though it’s a positive development, it has come with a cost. Earlier, people across the world accessing the Internet were united by a common language, English. This created opportunities for people coming from different languages and cultures to interact with each other. This will be diminished now as more sites come up in various other languages. Think about it, you are in a forum which supports multiple languages; you will most probably gravitate towards members who speak your own language. Say you are an American and the site also has Russian members. Most likely, the Russian and American groups would keep to their own groups thus losing out on a wealth of information they could gain from each other.
I do not in any way support the omnipotence of any single language. What I am saying is what if all the hundreds and thousands of languages used to communicate in the Internet could be translated into other languages. Say if you understand only English and you are in a virtual space where there are people speaking other languages as well, you could have the option of communicating with them in their language and vice versa, through instant translation.
We already have thousands of talented software professionals creating amazing open source software for use by everyone around the world. Why not have something on the same lines for language translation as well. There are probably millions of people, many more than software professionals, who are fluent in more than one language. Can a system be developed where people can produce translations for languages they know, and over the years we could develop a self-sustaining system which would unite people coming from different languages and cultures in the Internet. I am not taking machine translation into account because although it has come a long way, it still has to go far. Machine translation cannot match the accuracy and authenticity of human translation especially in the context of colloquial and informal language, and it just doesn’t work for certain language pairs like English-Hindi.
So let’s keep dreaming, and working, and praying for a World Wide Web united through translation.
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Professional language translation providers frequently land up with inferior quality source document, most translators I know have had such experiences. By inferior quality source document I refer to original documents that are filled with typos, factual errors, ambiguities and poor writing among others.
This is a Catch-22 situation, what does a translator do? Should he or she correct the errors and improve upon the existing quality, keeping in mind that some errors and ambiguities might be on purpose. There is no sure shot solution to this problem. What I personally do is follow some strategies which might work for some and might not for others.
The first thing to do is to get in touch with the author of the source document. You can then discuss the questionable areas of the text. However this might not be always possible, for example in cases where you got the source document from someone other than the original author whose whereabouts are not known. You can try discussing it with the client but then he/she might be equally clueless about the matter if not more.
In my case I get in touch with my client and try to follow his/her instructions. In situations, where I am left entirely to myself, I try to take the safest path. Firstly I try to avoid going ahead with such translations. If that can’t be done, I generally leave the ambiguities as they are, and only change the most obvious or glaring factual errors, otherwise more or less I stay true to the text. However the solutions to this problem can vary according to varying language translation requirements and situation, do care to chip in with you thoughts.
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Did you hear about Bing. It’s the latest in search engine technology from Microsoft and this time the company means serious business. All you “snug with Google” users, do give it a try as it has some really cool and helpful new features.
For starters Microsoft has been promoting Bing as a “Decision Engine” that is Bing will go beyond your regular search engines lead by Google, and provide users with tools that would help them make informed decisions. Bing has been tailored to help you make decisions like those involving purchases, locating specific local businesses, planning a trip, and even researching for a health condition among others.
I can see many of you rolling up their eyes, but folks do give it a try. These are early days and it might take some time to come on its own, but unless you spend a reasonable amount of time learning to get the best out of Bing, it would be unfair to dismiss it. On my end I am playing around with various keywords related to language translation and getting some very interesting results. For one, I get to see snippets and meta data of search results as I hover my cursor over individual links, that saves a lot of time as I don’t have to leave the search page every time I need to check out a particular link.
From the perspective of the language translation services industry Bing might very well develop into a tool which would help translation buyers in selecting the perfect translation services provider for their project. In the case of professional translation providers, there might be a number of ways in which Bing could help – it could make research easier among other things. I have just started using Bing, and am still exploring its utilities… do give it a try and share your experiences and ideas with me.
Hot deal welcomes 2010 - 10% Discount on any translation order.
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I had other terms in mind before I settled down for the final title of this post. I considered “firing translation clients” or “getting rid of translation clients”. But I rejected them as they did not go with the spirit of my thoughts. They are too negative for my liking. Face it guys if you are a professional freelance translation provider, you wouldn’t like to see a post with a title on the lines of firing or getting rid of your translator. Rude is not Good.
So getting to our main purpose, professional translation services providers frequently face situations where they feel that they cannot continue with a current client for some reason. A few such reasons might be –
- The client is troublesome - a pain to work with
- The client cannot pay your standard rates
- The client is always late with payments
The above reasons can also make for broad categories, under which you can list several other ‘sub-issues’.
Whatever be the kind of client you are dealing with, you should always maintain a high level of conduct or professionalism when you are dealing with him or her. Even for clients who have bugged you to developing suicidal tendencies 
Just write a note to such clients, which refers to a mismatch in working styles that has led you to decide on ending the relationship, and request the client to remove you from their list of available translation providers. You can use the same strategy for clients who are bad with payments.
The most difficult translation client to part with is a good client whom you have liked working with, but who is unable to pay your increased charges. But sticking with the client would mean continuing financial loss for you. You should, for obvious reasons, treat such clients gently. While communicating with them let them know that you have increased you rates, which might be more than what they can pay. Furthermore, tell them that you would definitely like to work with them provided they can pay you according to your new rates.
This was just a brief overview of my thoughts on the issue of parting ways with a translation client. Hope it helps you. I would end by reminding you again the necessity of avoiding nastiness and mudslinging, and being as professional as possible.
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Machine translation is treated as a nemesis by a majority of professional translation service providers. But is it really so? I think most translators dismiss machine translation because of two reasons, one is of course valid, machine translation can be awkward to read and more critically, it can contain mild to severe errors. The second reason for many professional translators’ aversion to machine translation is the niggling, maybe unconscious thought that it can hurt their job prospects. This is where I beg to differ.
I strongly believe that artificial intelligence can never replicate the capability of human intelligence. When it comes to machine translations, I believe that translation buyers would always need the services of professional human translators especially when they require important documents to be translated.
Anyway let’s look at the bright side of machine translation, in my experience I have got a number of new clients who have been disappointed with machine translation and have approached me with a reinforced respect for my translation skills. And then there are times when a client is not willing to pay my standard rates on a translation job, since the document itself is not very important. I readily refer them to a free online translation service or software which I believe can do the job well. This makes my client happy and I don’t have to say no a job because it is not paying well enough.
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The difference in date formats across various countries of the world can sometimes cause great blunders. As an example, let’s take date formats used in two different countries. Suppose country ‘A’ uses dd-mm-yy and country ‘B’ uses mm-dd-yy then if you have to refer to the 4th day of May in the year 2009, you might write it as 04-05-09 but if the translation is read by someone in country ‘B’ then that person would mistakenly understand it as referring to the 5th day of April in 2009.
People residing in various countries have a tendency to stick to the format that they have always used, many of them are not aware that there is already an International Standard for date format in existence. It has been defined by the ISO under the classification ISO 8601.
The ISO 8601 prescribes an order in which the larger value (i.e. year) is followed by the smaller value (i.e. month, day, hour, seconds). The standard for date is ISO 8601:2004(E). It suggests numeric representations for date and time. This is in order to eliminate the possibility of confusion or misunderstanding. Accordingly the standard notation of the date mentioned in the beginning of this post would be 2009-05-04. If you have to mention hour, minutes, seconds as well, then you would have to write them down in a descending order, as in hour followed by minutes, followed by seconds.
As professional translation services providers we should all do our bit to promote this standard date format which would greatly reduce errors of various degrees in language translations.
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Languages are dynamic entities, they keep evolving, branching out and mutating. This keeps professional translation services providers on their toes. We are specially challenged in projects where the target language is a specific dialect of the language of our expertise. Now it is not necessary that a translator would be aware of every dialect of the language he/she specializes in. That may not be possible in languages whose dialects bear significant differences from each other.
I have frequently faced the above situation in my working life which is why I was delighted to find out about the Plain English Campaign. It is based in UK and was founded in 1979. However, it is only in the recent years that it has started attracting popularity.
The mission of the Plain English Campaign has been to popularize the use of simple English language in simple form devoid of jargons and any other form of complication so that its understood by all English speakers in the world. Though the Plain English Campaign has focused on official organizations like those of the government, its message should also be applied by commercial organizations that have a presence in multiple countries. And we should not stop at that; every person writing a document that is utilized in common day to day work should try to utilize Plain English as much as possible. This would surely everyone’s lives easier.
