Late. As in the Late Bloggin' Translator.

Good (after)noon, y’all!

One of our colleagues has got himself in big trouble. Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun seems to have gone AWOL in Lebanon – or so thinks our illustrious Secretary of State. She wants to bring him back to the U.S. and ask him a few questions about his buddies – which seems all right to me. The first thing you learn in translator school is “friends don’t let friends translate for terrorists”. I’d like that on a bumper sticker, I really would. If Cpl. Hassoun left his post because he was being asked to interpret for torturers, well, he did exactly the wrong thing. How’s about equipping each of our military colleagues with a great big WHISTLE to blow, when they’re asked to do thinks that go against U.S. law and basic ethics? Blow the whistle, guys, when there are problems. Like Sibel Edmonds did. Don’t go AWOL, it’s bad for your health.

A case in point is Dear Leader’s attempt to use an interpreter while playing politics with Italy. As is widely reported, Mr. Bush had a press conference after a meeting with Italian are-you-kidding-this-is-who-you-made-prime-minister Silvio Berlusconi and made a comment about the Dubai port-control deal – then asked his interpreter not to interpret it. Does he think this will endear him to the Italians (who oppose the deal) or keep the information away from his counterpart? No way, Mr. B. The faux pas hit every news story in the world. We all know what you said. If you want some privacy for a particular message, perhaps a news conference isn’t exactly the right place, mmm?

Interpreters were in short supply on Maui last week. A possibly-venomous snake was loose in Wahikuli village, and there was a witness – but he couldn’t talk to the snake geeks because – oops! – they had no common language. Phone interpreters, anyone? It’s easy, you dial one of the leading providers, state your language and Bob’s your uncle – you can find out if you’ve got a public hazard or a cute little snake. In our multilingual world, phone-interpretation should be accessible to all local authorities, just in case someone gets a snake in their garden, don’t y’all think?

The Big Apple has the right idea: the city is expanding translation and interpretation services to allow parents full participation in the education of their children. What’ll cost more, d’ya think? Keeping parents informed or jailing the drop-outs as they grow up? Dollar per dollar, every investment made in education will save us on prison costs, I’d bet. So unless you’ve invested your retirement in the private prison industry, give a cheer for the Apple and maybe write your city council about it, too, if you’re feeling political.

But maybe politics are a bit much for today. I’m tired (already!) after a long session interpreting between a very nice young woman and a gorilla. I’ll leave you with the East African, where Tabula Jingo, Kiwa, Kasule Moses, Ssali, "Prince" Joel Nakibinge and Shokhau have become celebrities by making translated remixes of cinema classics. Gosh-golly, that’s art of the people, by the people.

I’ll be back earlier tomorrow than today, promise; and maybe I’ll give you my impassioned speech about straw-man arguments, if you’re lucky.

Over and out!

Cool to be a translator? Oh yeah!

Good morning, translators and interpreters and language buffs!

My fabulous weekend ended up with a rrrrooooarrrr as Attila The Stockbroker and David Rovics rolled through our town, to perform at the local U.U. Fellowship. Which is kind of like a church, only it isn’t exactly a church. I’ve got an authorized bootleg recording on my nifty little digital recording device, so I’ll share the love – and love it was. Gosh-golly if Attila (whose real name is John, and who actually deserves a mention in this blog because he was trained as an interpreter) doesn’t have poetic license, or as he puts it, he uses language live raw and bleeding. Here’s a grand Shunra meow for the poet in Residence at Brighton and Hove Albion football club, and his lovely wife Robina – whose piano accompaniment of Attilla’s romantic song (yeah, there was a romantic one) would bring tears to your eyes. Will, actually, if you go to his website and download material. Poetry will never be – quite – the same again.

David takes more explaining. His material is all online, downloadable without cost and moving without end. His concerts are an experience in grace, which is a concept that doesn’t translate well into words. Go, check him out. Folksinging, protest, you name it, he’s doing it. Amy Goodman called him “the musical version of Democracy Now”. It’s the Good Stuff. Go, listen, you’ll hear what I mean. Song for Hugo Chavez is my current favorite, celebrating the feeling of democracy in action. But download them all, and catch him live if you can.

But what’s up on the translation front? Plenty, as usual.

There’s yet another company trying to harness speech recognition to automated translation, a crime for which the penalty should be forcing the inventors to use it for communication. What Ectaco does is sell electronic translators. Uh-huh. And a nice source of income that is for human translators, cleaning up the debris of texts given into the hands of electronic counterparts.

The profession is increasing its coolness index: a San Francisco alternative rock band calls itself Translator. It’s nice to be on the radar of popular culture, at last. When we start appearing in ads and sit-coms, that’s when we’ll know we have really arrived!

Pimping the coolness, translator Janos Sanu told students at a job fair on Kauai that he’s traveled to 61 countries around the world on clients’ dime. That’s Hiker Dude’s plan for geocaching, too: whenever he interprets, he mops up the local caches. Not enough of those, says Hiker Dude!
Our colleagues are even appearing as lead characters in novels, such as Richard Galli’s Of Rice and Men, which tells the story of Guy Lopaca, who leaves the Army Language School equipped with absolutely no ability to understand the local population, which makes it hard to act as interpreter for troops trying to build the peace in Vietnam. I haven’t read it (yet!) but hey, you’re right, translation is both cool and amusing.

Budgets for literary translations are found in odd places: Peter Green found someone who’d buy a new translation of Catullus, a very dead member of the dead poets’ society. Congrats, Peter!

Less perplexingly, first volume of 'Don Quixote' has been translated into Thai by Professor Swangwan Thaichareon-Wiwat . Yeah, that’s a good book in any language. Windmill tilting is probably my most active sport, personally. Way to go, Swangwan - here’s rootin’ for volume II!

Less cool, however, is translation for Australian translator Anna Rubin, who put down her dictionary, picked up a paint-brush, and left our profession. Gosh, Anna, those are some beautiful fish in the news release. Thanks for adding beauty to the world!

The Olympics are done, but the linguistic shambles that they made are still being reported: Bulgarian short-track speed-skater Evgenia Radanova was rendered as ineloquent as the Japanese skater I told you about last week; I somehow doubt that “Well, I'm happy I passed well. But especially I'm happy I passed" was a faithful translation of what she actually said. Issues were experienced for Czech goalie Dom- inik Hasek too. What is it with the Olympic organizers? If it’s not English, do they just not care?

It is an issue dear to the heart of Peace Palestine blogger, who has established an international cooperative venture to deal with the problem of linguistic imperialism and languages of limited diffusion. The Tlaxcala site attempts to solve for texts those very problems that the Olympic organizers ran into with athletes: little languages still hold big ideas. It’s an interesting venture, and a good place for people moving into the business to pick up worthwhile credits while providing a good service. Limited diffusion is not the same as limited value, guyz!

Here’s a Port Townsend cheer (like a Bronx cheer, but we’re spraying granola) for a group of Tuscon language bigots who heckled Mauricio Farah, national inspector for Mexico's National Human Rights Commission, at a University of Arizona event promoted only in Spanish. Hello, bigots? Take a look at the constitution. Freedom of speech is not qualified by the language spoke. It’s not Freedom As Long As You Speak English, and you’re in the wrong. Immigration issues are too important to leave to bigots!

Finally, a pet peeve: what’s this about all the people who “say things through a translator”? Isn’t there a stylebook somewhere which knows that if you’re talking at all, you’ve got an interpreter, while a translator would only be pulled in if there are written documents?

This is not an error my knitting-buddy, mom-buddy, and one of my favorite bloggers anywhere would make. A blue gal in a red state gave this blog a nod – thanks, Gal-pal! – and the counter’s HUMMING in response. Viral marketing, anyone?

I’ll be back with you tomorrow. There are deadlines on my desk today!

Routines and Responses

Gosh, y’guyz! It’s so much fun to get them from you!

I’ve gotten responses to this blog by email, phone, and through the comments facility, and

In particular, lower-case susan pointed me to the new URL for the Lantra gallery , where Daniel’s on-line, on-list proposal to me won us a well-deserved reputation as hopeless romantics. Susan’s own web-page is still pertinent to translators, not only ones working in her own Swedish-to-English specialty. And of course, I remember her own blog, Translators’ Site Du Jour, with great fondness. I don’t have to remember Susan herself with fondness because no memory’s involved – I get to experience fondness with no memory required, because she’s a regular part of my day thanks to IMing, which is probably worth blogging about some weekend.

And there’s always Alexander Mann, German/Hebrew/English translator and IM-buddy, who asked about the language I dream in. Well, there’s no question about that – I dream in English and always have. Hebrew only infiltrated my dreams once, when I woke up singing a song I had started to sing in the dream, with a choir of angels. The angels went away when I woke up, dang it!

Now, about those routines: when faced with a pile of paper requiring translation – and in my language combination, paper seems to be the order of the year in the U.S. (what ever happened to electronic documents, d’ya think?) – it is difficult, nearly impossible, to launch straight out of breakfast and into work.

Skipping breakfast doesn’t help.

There is something about translation that requires me, and probably all of my colleagues, to brace our minds, so to speak, and focus our thoughts, before being able to harness those minds to the task at hand, which is being a channel for someone else’s well-put words on a good day, or insurance forms and bank statements, on a bad one.

The process, my getting-into-translation-mode routine, is crucial for my work. If I skip it, my work is distracted, seems careless (although I do take care), and often needs a whole lot more editing and review. If I am faithful to it, my work looks like – well – what we all want my work to look like. A light review makes it shine.

So, what is this magic routine? What takes me from the realm of the not-quite-ok to that of professional-and-looks-like-it-too? I can only describe it as a process of disengaging my mind, like gears in a car going into neutral. Not just having a quiet mind, more like giving it something with no emotional content to worry about and leaving the translation to be done by some other layer of my mental organization. When this is accomplished (and yes, I’ll explain how I do it in a moment), the translation simply flows through me, like so much water through a pipe. The technical input (reading) and output (typing) channels are not bottlenecked by something inside.

Interestingly enough, “flow” is the word used for this state of enjoyable productivity. Its third component appears in the Wikipedia as “A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness”, which is what I was trying to get at in my description, above. I attach that feeling to translation, dishwashing (talk about instant gratification! Take a sink full o’ muck, plunge your hands into warm water, end up with sparkly-clean dishes!) and ironing, although I’ve rather given up that hobby since becoming a mother. (Aside: the younger of my children is now nearly eight, and I’ve gone out to buy some clothes that do not need to double as towels. Dressing up for work may mean I’ll take up ironing again.)

Here’s an article from Psychology Today by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the man who coined the term. He seems to draw his inspiration from the spiritual traditions of the world, which have been concerned with maximizing the efficacy of our all-too-short sojourn on this planet. It is heartening to see that this has become a piece of mainstream psychology. As M. Scott Peck, who wrote the marvelous The Road Less Traveled, pointed out: the closer we get to understanding ourselves, the closer we get to understanding the creative impulse in the universe.

So, what is it that I do to achieve this lofty goal? I start my day by checking email and clearing my desk. A clear(er) physical surface - or at least neater piles of paper – help anti-distract my distractable mind. I look at my low-tech tasks sheet (recorded on paper) and do the things I intend to do before translation, then prioritize my translation projects.

And then I disengage my ego by playing three or four rounds of sudoku. I used to play solitaire of various kinds, but it got to the point where it wasn’t engaging my mind anymore, so I stopped. Sudoku is still new enough to do so; when it ceases to be, I’ll probably get back to translating poetry, which has the same effect. (More on that another day).

And when that is accomplished, I can get into flow for translation or writing.

Over the years I’ve wondered why it is that solitaire is such a soothing game for me. I’ve gone way back into the past and remembered why I got involved with it in the first place: I was about eight, and winning in Vegas seemed to be the only way I would ever make enough money to move back home. But by the time I was working as a translator, in my twenties, I knew how to earn money in more effective ways. And by the time I did find my way home I was still into solitaire. So what’s the deal?

Playing sudoku has given me a clue about this: I think it has to do with my urge to struggle against entropy. Solitaire, like sudoku, takes a heap of messy items (cards, numbers) and puts them into a neat pattern. And once my world (board?) is in order, my mind can be free to translate.

If the Spirit moves you, do share what your routines are. I’m curious! Either email me or enter a comment; both methods hit my inbox, the latter also has the potential of opening a discussion thread. And discussions are some of the neatest things about blogs.

I’ll be back tomorrow with a translators-in-the-news roundup. Tot ziens!

It's all about the future. And the past. Children. And archeology.

Saturdays and Sundays aren’t for work – they’re for rest, rejuvenation, and the projects that are on hold all week. Some people think they’re for hiking, but we’ll overlook that for a while. The fact that I’ll be working on an urgent project that landed on my desk yesterday, around noon? We’ll overlook that, too.

Rest and rejuvenation includes my children, who are on an unending quest to drive me screaming to the edge of a bluff and watch me drop down below. We’ve declared our home a “put-down-free zone” to prevent teasing, and in response they’ve encoded their favorite digs at each other into single letters, and now can be heard saying things like “M and L” to each other, which leads to giggling and then shrieks. Kids, if you happen to read this, just don’t tell me what I’m missing. I’d rather set up automatic payment on the utility bills before we hit the cliff, okay?

I’ve been reading various books by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. She’s published three: Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years : Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times, The Mummies of Urumchi, and When They Severed Earth from Sky : How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, and each of these is a get-up-out-of-bed-and-read-bits-to-the-nearest-listener type of book. All too often, that’s meant I’ve ready pieces to the cats. Barber looks at the world through her dual fascinations: linguistics and textile history. She unravels knots in history by mapping the kinds of looms found around the world and the words used for weaving in the languages associated with those places. The effect on me was electric, propelling me to the ancient text I have best access to (the bible; reading Hebrew has that advantage) to seek the words used for weaving, wool, yarn, and other items important in the days before industrialization.

Her latest book, with husband Paul T. Barber, is all about myths set forth in the oral tradition, and it has the same propelling effect. Their thesis – in a nutshell – is that oral traditions meant lossy compression, with an intent to keep certain ideas (“stay away from the volcano” or “precession is real so take it into account while navigating”) intact, coated with whatever extraneous material would keep the story going. Compare the relative likelihood of repetition for an astronomical factoid and the goings on over with Harry and his latest girlfriend... ...that’s what they’re on about. In great, persuasive detail, with insights that will change your worldview.

The mummies get the short end of the stick, because they’re not much like Harry’s girlfriend. The fascinating, worldview-changing, get-on-the-phone-and-share-the-amazement story that it tells is a little more dust-coated. It has, however, permanently changed my feelings about Chinese and Celtic history. And plaids, yeah, those too... ...textile history is just the sort of thing a geeky mind can get waaaaay into. The linguistic aspects are more pertinent to this translators blog, though.

And the New Yorker gave me some food for thought, too. One of their January issues had a most disturbing article about a profoundly gifted teen: gifted, as measured by IQ tests. Now, IQ tests are fine and dandy and they really can help identifying issues that make life harder – or easier – for any particular kid. But giftedness-as-collapsed-into-a-number seems to be a horrible misstatement of a child, and that story depicted part of the ‘gifted industry’ which has sprung up in response to some odd need in American culture. And that industry? I distrust it. I do not think it’s there for the benefit of the children, and I do think that the parents who get sucked into it may be failing their children’s less glamorous but no less real needs due to the flashy, chorus-line style declamation of the gifted children’s strengths.

The gifted industry seems to be promulgating the notion that children with an IQ of 170 or so are so brilliant that they see normal people much as a normal person would see a mentally disabled person with an IQ of 30. Including, so state the websites, their parents and teachers. That is so arrogant, so hostile – and so wrong – as to be dangerous. Kids, even the most brilliant ones, need to operate in the world. Telling them “well, you don’t have to because the rest of the world is stupid” will hobble them as surely as blindfolding them would. People are what it’s about, in our world, and finding what to enjoy and appreciate about them is the smart thing to do. And with IQs like that, you’d expect them to do the smart thing, right?

What I want for my own children, other than that they stop teasing each other, is that they grow up to be well-grounded members of the society they are in, enriched as much by their contributions to the world as by the world’s to them. I want them to know that they can learn something from everyone, and to have the ability to listen to everyone, regardless of the number posted on their foreheads. A wealth of life and love concerns me – far more so than how long it will take them to buy a home. Would this be different if they had great big numbers tattooed on their forheads? I doubt it. Emotional peace and self-worth through contribution to a society that is meaningful is a true benefit for anyone.

Signing off with a cuppa, until tomorrow. Translation news resumes after the weekend... and do feel free to comment!

Fresh as snow - and a plug for phone interpreting.

Weather watch: it went so far as to snow here in Port Townsend. Waking up this morning, all the Shunras were astonished at the beauty of the vista before us. White on asphalt! White on roofs! White, in fact, on our own roof-in-progress (the roofers, having done some roofing in the rain, decided to skip the slipping in the snow and will be back on Monday to finish their shingling). Schools did not close, so we can continue to translate full-steam ahead, which is a very good thing. I think we had about a quarter of an inch, but a quarter-inch is enough for pretty!

Nice and fresh, which is a good way to start a season. And I can tell that the season has just started, because I got a request for a ketubah. Now, a ketubah is traditionally the document foisted upon a Jewish woman as part of the marriage ceremony, a deal signed by her father and husband (but not herself, because Jewish tradition considers women unfit to act as legal persons), describing the terms of the dissolution of their marriage. Kind of a prenup from a period when women were chattel. The document is traditionally illuminated and hung on the wall – perhaps by way of reminding the husband just how expensive it would be to rid himself of his wife. Modern Americans with a taste for Judaism like to order these for their marriage ceremonies; if I’m involved, it’s because the language was changed to reflect the fact that the deal is struck between husband and wife nowadays. The illuminated ketubahs are still beautiful pieces of art, with English vows in the form of poetry, and couples on the verge of marriage almost always need a Hebrew translation for the new language that they have wrought. This is a growth industry for Judaica artists, and we end up putting some of the poetic – and usually unrealistic – sentiments into modern Hebrew for a minimum rate. The first one came in the mail this week, just as the buds started poking out in our backyard orchard. Ah, young couples.

Fresh like spring, or like the sudden stunning understanding by the Torino Olympic Organizing Committee, who skimped on interpreters and ended up with a medallist rendered mute to all but Japanese-speaking audiences: Shizuka Arakawa was hobbled at her press conference by a volunteer interpreter-wannabe. Skating that fine shouldn’t be made to speak for itself now, should it? Keep this clip to petition your local Olympic Organizing Committee: professional interpreters are the life-blood of international events, no matter when and where.

Now, what is it about the court system? A young woman was killed in a traffic accident involving two men who cannot speak English - or not involving them, because everyone in the U.S. is innocent until proven guilty unless they’re charged under the PATRIOT Act. Does the court have interpreters on call? Nope. The facts of the case will be discovered only after the ATA find-an-interpreter page is found. Yo! Courts! Google is your friend!

Courts as well as hospitals were involved when 10 month old Ravindor Toor was unable to access care because he was a baby – and his dad, Naib, didn’t want to go to the hospital without an interpreter. Hello, hospital? There are services that offer telephone interpreting. I know that for a fact, I do it! There’s no excusing a father who doesn’t take a baby with a broken wrist to the hospital. What I hope for the father would burn a hole through your screen. But hospitals everywhere need to make it known that phone interpretation is available, just in case. Kids with language-disabled parents deserve good healthcare, too!

Oy. That left a bad taste in my brain. Weekend posts will be a little different – exactly how? Drop on by and see. My roundup of translators in the news will reappear on Monday, if the creek don’t rise...

Email and ethics and doing it exactly right (a hat's off in mid-post)

Ooh, what nice things I get in my inbox. First, a bunch of kind comments by some of you readers. Under the assumption that if you’d have wanted to comment publicly you would have, I’ll do my share and keep your names private. But hey, I loved that you read it, jointly and severally.

Also, yesterday was the day for Jost Zetzsche’s Tool Kit – the 56th. I’ve been reading them since #13 and lovin’ ‘em to bits. Their ain’t nothin’ technological going on that escapes Jost’s attention. I love that he covers not only the expensive solutions but also free and Open Source ones, since things like Ubuntu suggest a far happier model to me than the Other Kind. Since his newsletter’s free, although there are always some teasers for the for-pay content – and everyone seems to read them. If you don’t yet, sign up and try it out...

Last from the inbox, the ATA PR Committee is getting some traction in webcasts: look for a series of conversations with leading lights in translation on My Technology Lawyer. The specific show is right here, and you can listen to it on Real Player or Windows Media Player. (How’s about a podcast on translation, y’all? Who wants to be stuck at their desk while listening to a discussion when spring is so very near?)

Back to the trenches, or the Sudani equivalent, one of our colleagues induced a bit of a mess. A government interpreter (who’s referred to as “translator” in the story) neglected to interpret the important words “The rebels are even within the AU base and are taking their cars to go around the town at night.” It makes me wonder if the interpreter was overworked, multitasking, and in some state of mortal terror. Could it be? I know we don’t have enough interpreters to go around, but gosh-golly how’s about some training in gist-extraction before we send them out into the field?

Hopefully unrelated to the Sudan situation, the World Medical Association came out with nine guidelines for physicians concerning torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in relation to detention and imprisonment. Considering the role translators play in international disputes, including the blood-and-gore-intense variety, I think we ought to come up with a response, as well. Were there any translators implicated in the Abu Ghraib war crimes? (Oh, and don’t Google that combination of words; trust me on this ::she said, turning green::).

A code of ethics would help.

We can wash the horrible thoughts out of our minds with this happy story of an interpreter translator making a huge difference in the world. Gul Akbar is a policewoman in Sana, Pakistan, and her work was the make or break of the U.S. medical relief effort in her town. “Her role as a key to the success of military hospital.” – take a moment to appreciate that. Gul Akbar, you RULE!

A little levity before I sign off for the day: Slashdot reports a new Sony “translator”, into which you can shout words in your own language and play a translation into another. It’s designed to be hand-held and low-weight and generally evokes the image of tourists shouting into their devices instead of at locals. Picture that in a Middle Eastern souk...

And finally, eye-candy, courtesy of my hiker-dude: Ethan Welty isn’t even twenty yet, but his eye for composition is eternal.

Catch y’all tomorrow, I’ve got a deskful of paper to wade through.

Merging: plants and animals, Dutchies and 'Murcans, sports and interpreting

Translators are often lovingly (or otherwise) enveloped in cross-cultural marriages, which take even more straight-forward communication than the other variety to get to the point of smooth functionality. Case in point: I’ve been accused of improper pancaking. Try to get through the day with your breakfast marred by erroneous foods! Well, after years (about nine – how time flies! And where’s the Lantra Gallery, which documents his proposal and our love? Can’t link to what’s not up anymore!) , by the resident Dutchman. What I was making, apparently, was AMERICAN pancakes. Would my marriage, peace of mind, and breakfast-making skills survive the multi-culti conflict? Trust the Amsterdam board of tourism to come to the rescue. “Dutch pancakes are thinner and come with toppings”, it says so right there on their blog. Which implies that my pancakes are fine - and that what he actually wanted for breakfast was another food item by the same name. So now we know...

However, pause to appreciate the Amstedram blog tour. Being a brilliant – and budget-conscious – board of tourism, they sent a bunch of prominent bloggers to Amsterdam for most-expenses-paid (I *did* say budget conscious) trip. The result (links on the Bloggers In Amsterdam page) makes for a very good read. And *do* check out the blogs linked too. Especially Dooce, she’s priceless.

But she’s not a translator, and this is a blog for and about translators, so let’s get down to the daily news. Here’s a Bronx cheer to Natalia Smirnova, foreign rights manager, at Limbus Press , who is quoted in the St. Petersburg Times saying that “A middle-aged translator might not be able to put adequately the thoughts of a teenager, to translate young people’s slang, and the way they speak and act.”” Ageism is one of my pet peeves, and she’s stomped right on top of it in her great-big winter boots. No way, Natalia. It’s not the age. It’s the exposure. I hear more teen slang now (I’ll be forty sooooo soon) than I did in my twenties. This has to do with the presence of teen speech in your life. One of my favorite into-Hebrew translators of literary material, a Dr. Emmanuel Lottem, has a crown of silver hair that boasts far more decades than mere teens, but his work is pure poetry. Look for some more like him, not for cheap teenagers!

For us law-and-biz translators, it is heartening to see some government getting it right: Jurist reports that “ The Japanese government is planning to put English translations of its business-related laws on the internet in order to avoid their misinterpretation by foreign companies. All that, plus a definitive glossary! That’ll make work much easier for Japanese-into-English translators!

When it comes to pricing, have you ever wondered how much the market can bear? The highest paid interpreter in the world seems to work in California. Yeah, I could deal with wages like that. Have you any idea how much yarn you can buy for $50,000?

And I’ll sign out with some pictures worth a heck of a lot more than 1,000 words (target, payment 30 days net): a contest where slightly deranged folks in better control of their photo editors than their good taste merge plants with animals to great effect. Some of it is lovely, other pieces will come up in my nightmares.

‘Till tomorrow...

Economics and Intelligence

One John Yunker marvels about Dekadu, which is running a complicated venture to enable interlinguistic trade, or as he describes it “supports language pairs like Polish <-> Czech and German <-> French.” All those languages can make a guy dizzy! He contrasts the approach with “American companies tend to focus only on language pairs that involve English.” The brilliant insight, that “there are many more language pairs out there that don't involve English. Which is why Dekadu sees a nice business opportunity.”

So far so good, especially for the multi-language professionals among us. However, the monolingual point of view rears up and barks in his guess about the mechanics of this, when Yunker states that If you figure that most content on eBay, for example, are fairly predictable text strings, like "high quality" and "never been used," all you really need to do is translate most of these boilerplate strings and you'll have strings that can be re-used again and again.

And in that one sentence Yunker drops a bombshell, the quality requirements, and most of the world’s trading-partner audience because that’s not the way to do it, is it? Not when the platform is meant to support the sale of actual goods and maybe services.

‘Cause I may be preaching to the choir, here, but last time I checked the grammatical variations, prefixes, postfixes, infixes and just plain textual correctness means that just dumping a pile of strings on the screen with little or no human oversight will lead to the sort of howls of laughter that tend to accompany any widely disseminated exercise in machine translation. In a trade situation, where someone expects a full return for their seven-hundred and fifty rupee (which are about 16.60), automating multi-lingual translation can be seen as a delightful, if somewhat disingenuous, invitation for law-suits. Good luck Dekadu, and do hire lots of humans, beyond the setup stages. Hire translators. And hey, try the ATA first. Think global – shop local, y’guyz!

That’s exactly what the Chinese government seems to be doing. In fact, they're desperate for us! Of course, they’ve got their ideas of supply and demand a bit skewed: One would think that with the international interest in China and in the Chinese language, translators and interpreters would be begging for jobs.

Uh, no... ...the greater the need, the LESS interpreters will be begging for jobs. That’s how it works, see? Global commerce has made our profession into a hot one, that attracts talented people and perforce is becoming professionalized. Will Chinese translation clients get down on their knees and beg for help from their suppliers? Something tells me that a livable rate will do more than any politely phrased plea. Even in China.

The funniest title I saw today was about the plight of simultaneous interpreting clients in Indonesia. Apparently, demand is outstripping supply there, too. This is no surprise, nor is it particularly funny, but The Jakarta Post saw fit to tell us that simultaneous interpretation is harder than it seems. Making this point, Interpreter Edlina Hafmini Eddin gives the reporter some basic pointers on what interpreting actually means, how it differs from translation, and that it’s actually hard to do. That’s ten out of ten for client education, Edlina – we need more of that everywhere in the world!

Over on Cyprus, one of our colleagues (unnamed, to protect the inexcusable), was accused of being party to coercive interrogation. Or, in other words, aiding in torture. Now, this is a practice used by intelligence forces worldwide, but this wasn’t a global intelligence issue, it was a petty crime involving forty bottles of whiskey and some DVDs. Stealing isn’t ok, torture is worse, two wrongs don’t make a right, and we need a slogan, don’t we? Because y’know what? It’s up to us to stop the practice: translators don’t torture! Interpreters interrogate, not intimidate!

I think we need a better slogan... check this space tomorrow for what may come up.

Watching them watching us - let's do it

This morning’s coffee-substitute seemed like an excellent time to round up a bunch of news items, as part of my hobby of watching the media watch translators at work – and the spaces they should have been.

In that latter category, failure to include a translator in a delivery room team led to the unnecessary and tragic death of a baby only ten days old, as we’re told by the Saipan Tribune. Let me shout it out from the rooftops: “What’s your native language?” should be right on top of medical charts. Situations of pain and stress (childbirth leaps to mind and does somersaults for us) can lead to an inability to focus on skills acquired late in life. Heck, breathing is enough of a problem. Language should be a checkbox, not a problem, and no baby anywhere should die of this.

U.S.A. Today tells us of an important part of cultural sensitivity: soldiers in Iraq are learning what the gestures mean. Always a paragon of brilliant reporting, this esteemed publication informs us that the low-down on gesturing “has found its way into a video game and training program the Pentagon uses to give soldiers a crash course in how to speak and gesture like the people they run across.” I look forward to reading some research about how playing a video game will help U.S.ian soldiers get into the very different interpretation of personal space that prevails Arab society. My crystal ball (right up on the window, yeah) shows a bunch of misunderstandings with people toting guns. Prospects for Iraqis? Overcast (or is that a bomber in their skies?)

The Post & Courier, of Chesterton, South Carolina, gives Walterboro translator Isabel Nettles a bit of a serenade when it sings her praises in its Unsung Heroes space. You go, Isabel!

Also in North Carolina, Maria Guerrero - a translator who could be paid handsomely for corporate work - has taken time to do community interpreting for schools, as we’re told in the Kernersville Journal. Consider this to be a loud cheer for you, Maria, from here in Port Townsend. Education, investing in our future, is made or broken by people like you.


And finally, a sad and dismal letter to the editor of the Murfreesboro, TN, Daily News Journal, about how the school districts of Tennessee do not, in fact, value the educational efforts of its teachers. What does that have to do with translation? Yes, you might well ask.

The correspondent, one Dr. Darcy (not Mr. Darcy, although one might wish to see him in the news today) hailed his sister-in-law’s career as corporate translator, which she took up under financial duress in order to pay off her student loans. Yes, she took to translating as a way of digging gold. Are we to expect a new gold-rush, with the dupes being not 49ers with pick axes but 09ers with dictionaries and the occasional laptop connector dangling behind them? And if so, is SDLX the new Levi’s?

I’ll be right back at the blog tomorrow morning with a fresh bunch of news about where translators are – or should be – and perhaps a theory or two tucked in. Let’s make the world better for translators – and our clients – shall we?

Technical Whee

Aha!

After various attempts and subtempts and retempts and distempers, the blog is up and running.
Welcome, gentle readers. Careful of the kitties.