The U.S. Government Loses Credibility

According to a news story discussed on Slashdot, our government, in its wisdom, has put Iraqi documents on the Web, with the goal of speeding up translation.

Hello? Do you think that just-maybe-possibly this is the best opportunity yet for misinformation campaigns? Mistranslation or "nothing interesting here, move to the next document" statements could cover up real intelligence and gum up the works in a huge way.

Newsflash for my government: hire people. Pay them market rates. They'll do the work you want. But don't just rely on volunteer translators - would you rely on volunteer bridge-builders? Customs officers? Physicians? If not, don't trust MY security to "volunteer translators".

Harrumph!

Yaoza! And the occasional world leader who REALLY neads a kindergaden teacher

Look up! It’s a bird! It’s a plan! It’s Yao and his interpreter! Although this review considers him to be a translator, we all know the truth. The movie, The Year of the Yao tells the story of the first China-born athlete to make the NBA. And since he can’t speak English, guess who enjoys a star position? You’re right, a good ol’ fashioned interpreter, that’s who. The story of Colin Pine – and Yao Ming, of course – makes interpreting history, I believe. I hope my local library picks up a copy.

Looking for tips on how not to do your job? BBC’s Gavin Ensler has a clue. Faced with a world leader who wouldn’t stop talking, and an interpreter who filled in all the rest of the time, Ensler stumbled across the difficult issue of client education. Interpreters have to tell their clients the rules: first you talk, then I talk, then he talks, then I talk. Take turns. You’d think World Leaders would have learned that in kindergarten! I know for sure that Julie Ann taught my little Rose all about that before switching careers and going into real estate sales. Rose is now definitely ready to be a world leader. Maybe when she’s done selling, she’ll give a Manners for Monarchs course?

Over in the Dominican Republic, they seem to have an interpreter shortage and had to rely on the services of Dominican councilman in New York, Miguel Martinez, to make heads or tails of a donation service. Psst! Check out your local covered market for interpreters. No scabbing by politicians!

Whatever you do, don’t work with the creeps in translators clothing described in this tale of U.S. torture in Iraq. I don’t care how bad the person is, if we use torture, we’ve lost our own ethics, morals, integrity, and raison d’être. No, raison d'état does not fly here. We’re bigger than that.

That’s what I’d like to think, anyhow. Of course, I may be too literalist when I interpret the constitution and those amendments it’s got tacked onto it. But then, I come from a long line of literalist interpreters...

Catch y’all tomorrow. Be good!

Illegal Translating, Interpreting to Death, and Enough being Enough - Monday Grab-bag

Gosh, I love the blogosphere! Remember Of Rice and Men, comedic treatment of a not-quite-prepared-enough interpreter in Vietnam? I blogged about it last week. Well, author Richard Galli, already picked up on it and shared a few passages from the book (go see, it’s right here).

Another reason to love the this-here-sphere: lower-case susan is right back in it. I’ve been reading her (and writing to her) since the mid-nineties, mostly on Lantra (and profuse instant messaging conversations into the night). Now the rest of the world can enjoy. Go give her a hug from me, willya?

And yet another: it makes daydreams come true! Last week I was kidding around about waving a pen translator at signs to find the rest rooms in a foreign country. Alex Waibel to the rescue! 3,000 Chinese characters are stored in a device that integrates a camera and some translation memory. Idioms will still pose hurdles, though...

In a more ambitious project, the U.S. military has put DARPA on the tail of truly automatic translation. Allow me some skepticism – is that mountain pictured in the report the tower of Babel? Or Sisyphus’ office space?

Over in Iran, we hear a blow for the first amendment: poetry by Parvin Etesami will be translated from Farsi into English by Iranian poet Mehdi Afshar . What with this activity being illegal in the U.S., Mehdi’s work is doubly welcome. It is a sad day in the U.S. when translating poetry is considered seditious. That’s not the saddest thing around (that would involve all the children killed directly by U.S. policies) or even the second saddest, but it’s a good thing to pay attention to before other activities go illegal on us.

At least in the U.S. the wages of our work couldn’t get much worse than a half-million dollar fine and ten years in prison. Our colleagues in Iraq are being routinely shot dead. Interpreting for the American forces, NGOs, and journalists would seem to be a very bad career move for those of us who want to make it to our next birthdays.

But it’s not just shooting that gets at us. Much of what Kurt Williams points out about developers in start-ups is true for self-employed translators. We tend to borrow from Peter’s hours to give Paul’s project some extra minutes, and the person who’s short-changed is the one at the keyboard. My solution for this involves long walks, a bit of yoga (I should really do more) and forcing myself to avoid night work despite the temptation. This has turned out to be a healthy practice both for my body and my business, as it has led to the realization of what is, in fact, enough work – and what is way too much.
Now’s a good time to work, though. Over and out (until I’m paged for a walk with HikerDude!)

First I laugh, then I cry: websurfing for catharsis

Ow! Ow! My sides hurt! Someone (which is not, HikerDude wishes me to clarify, the same person as HikerDude. Someone is someone else and not the person you may think it is; in fact, Someone specifically forbids us all to think of themselves.) has been roaming the blogosphere and finding yummy tidbits. Such as this delightful array of culinary possibilities found on the menu of an Asian restaurant could not be the result of a machine translation. Machine translations may be idiom-blind, but they are at least consistent.

Oh, the verbs on this menu; oh, the mountains of food offered. Literally: “Good to eat mountain, 18 yuan”. Jon Rahoi may not have been quite that hungry, but I’ve got a teen with a hollow leg to feed. I wonder if they produce a cookbook... ...perhaps all the extra Internet publicity will let this fine establishment hire a translator, instead of playing with the Verbs And Ingredients refrigerator magnet set they seem to have used along with a twelve-sided and chisel to create their piece of art.

Menus like this – or not quite exactly like this, because this one is rather extreme, but you know, menus aspiring to this - are a very good reason to keep translators’ meet-ups confined to homes and parks. If there’s anything a group of translators can proofread, they’ll do THAT before ordering, and if you’ve planned on eating at the meet-up, you’ll end up hungry.

But if only one (or two) translators meet at a restaurant like that, it’s not just a great time to use their phonecam; it’s a business opportunity. “I’ll trade you an actual translation for a meal” is an acceptable proposition. And menus change all the time. It is such a pity that I can’t pull that off in my home town.

I’m not sure that the same strategy could be applied to Jon Rahoi’s latest post, where he remarks that This stuff reads like they're inventing English, not learning it. We need a massive airlift of retrofitted Speak N Spells dropped over Asia. How about starting with a massive reeducation on the value of professional translation? And editing?

Translation is not required for the Japanese TV spots on housekeeping you’ll find behind the link. In it, you can learn how to stop a baby from crying by blowing Japanese text at it, how to peel a potato, and how to fry onions into a golden paste. Oh, yeah, and a slower version of that shirt-folding video. Someone and I have perfected our technique by now.

Last but not least, under the general category of “job openings that seem least likely to generate good feelings for interpreters”, Australia tells Moslems to preach in English or hire translators. I find this offensive in a bunch of ways, not least of which being professional outrage: so, the Australian government wants to allocate language resources for religious applications, and urges residents of that country to “be more Australian”, with their religious worship first? Gosh, y’guyz! Haven’t any books about the consequences of religious persecution hit the down under?

That’s all for today. I’ll go stomp around the block and maybe the bad taste (pun intended) from Oz will go away.

Sacagawea, Wyoming, and Rye

90% of blogging is showing up on the page, right? Well, let’s mark this weekend as a complete blog-failure and start the week with a nice round-up of news. But happily, translators and interpreters have been making headlines even while I couldn’t make it to my desk, so we’ve got a pile of things to think about.

For instance, France. We all like thinking about France, don’t we? HikerDude and Susan each pointed me at the fact that a Versailles court imposed a large fine on GE Medical Systems under the Toubon law. The company has three month to translate all past documents, and other multinationals are expected to scramble for translators. Happily, English into French is a fairly common combination. I’d hate to think of the impact of that sort of ruling on a rarer language!

The Daily India engages in some client education and discusses the multilingual environment in that great country. I love the first question they set: “Is the translator capable?” – that’s an important issue, because anyone can hang out their shingle as translators. And some of us are rather more professional and – well, capable – than others, as any project manager will tell you.

Hospital interpreting is making news in Wyoming, where a combination of trained community interpreters, such as Louisa Garcia, and a phone interpreting service offered by AT&T make it possible to communicate with patients for whom English is not a comfortable medium. I’m a bit miffed at the phrasing of the article, though. The reporter said that “The phone is an important tool for the hospital, but whenever possible, real people are brought in.” – Do they think the phone interpreters aren’t real? – but other than that small quibble, I’m delighted to see that at least in that Wyoming, a lack language skills won’t be a death sentence.

The phone interpreting solution has also made it to Kansas City, where the police tip line (a.k.a. TIPS) now accepts leads in all languages. Go, Kansas City!

In Rye, New York, one stop away from my most-visited-in-the-U.S. train station, there is an interesting need for interpreters who speak Romanian and Georgian (not the Southern Dialect characterized by a hospitable attitude and very sweet tea, the one from the Republic of Georgia). There are two sixth graders who’ll be needing help on a math test. I’m glad they’re not using the parents, and indeed, hiring interpreters is better than forcing the parents into the classroom. I wonder how this ad hit the papers, though. I didn’t see any district-hired Spanish interpreters helping out my daughter’s classmate last year... ...let’s just file it under things that make me go hmmm.

Last for today, a colleague of ours is honored as part of the Women’s History Month. Mentioning Sacagawea always makes me wonder about just how consensual her interpretation gig with Lewis and Clark was. The importance of her role is in no doubt, though, and women have been making do with whatever situations we are dealt since, well, since forever. Sacagawea, at least, gets honor and acclaim for it, and that’s a good thing in herstory.

Having alienated half of the human race with the last word in the previous sentence, I’ll sign off for today. Be good; consult your dictionaries; and stop by here for another entry tomorrow...

Edited to add: Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Someone sent me this link to a short but sweet video of how to fold a shirt. Later, Someone and I spent several minutes trying to do so. I think we need a translation!

Wordwidgets and the things translators do beyond the call of duty

There is a logical fallacy which I’ve noticed in my thinking. Namely, “people like us don’t do that kind of stupid thing”. I’ve engaged in it in many parts of my life: people in my family don’t do stupid things (wrong!), people in my language-group don’t do stupid things (I speak English. Wanna talk empires and oppression, anyone? English is not, in general, the language of saints and the morally superior...), and finally, the astounding error of thought which I had sort of left in the unarticulated notion “language professionals don’t do that kind of stupid thing”.

Page Plato, we’ve got a new philosophical realization here. Yes, indeedy, language professionals can and do incredibly stupid things. Sometimes to the point of being Darwin Award-worthy, but on a more frequent, daily basis, I’m talking about smaller things. Like the idiots who specifically and vociferously demand literal “word for word, do you understand?” translation of copywriting and then complain about its sounding horrible in the target language (an issue that came up not once but twice yesterday). Makes you want to shake the culprit and maybe dislodge the stupid ideas from their brain – copywriting cannot be translated literally. It just. Does. Not. Work. How come language professionals – project managers, for example – fail to know this?

But this morning’s grumble-grumble-grumble belies my big happy smile. A chronic condition has been cleared up, around here. To wit: some people have lice; some people have leprosy. For a very long time, we had contractors. Now we have a nice, new, functional bathroom, at twice the price and six times the estimated length of the project.

All phases of this project reminded me of translation projects. The bid, the way things got more complicated once they tore out the floor (gosh-golly, guyz, that’s pretty much the reason I like being a translator rather than a contractor. I’d hate to have to spend most of my time in places with no floor). But I wonder, how long would I stay in the market if I were charging double the original quote and taking six times as long to deliver? And why did I put up with it?

I’m trying to figure the answers out myself.

Meanwhile, other people are putting their time and experience to better use: Norah Bagarinka, Rwanda massacre survivor, did what we all do and went above and beyond the call of her duty as official translator for the movie God Sleeps in Rwanda, an Academy Award nominee for best documentary short. But she didn’t just translate –co-director Kimberlee Acquaro explained that her role grew far beyond her original brief to being a major part of the in-country production team. That keeps happening, of course. Translators are people who need to know a lot about a lot of things, and our talents are often recruited for all those various extras.

What seems to be a daily offering – the wordwidget du jour is a pen scanner with translation capabilities has made it to the market. You point the pen to the word, run it along it, side to side and presto, there’s your translation, right on the LED. This may be a bit harder when trying to read signs in foreign countries, and outright dangerous for translations where context is key like pharmaceutical inserts and such. But hey, nice widget and I wouldn’t mind getting one for Christmas. In fact, any pens are welcome - the half-life of a pen-purchase is numbered in days, here, so I'm giving the twenty-four new ones we bought this morning about a week and a half. Then I'll go raid you-know-who's office.

Over in the U.K., the Independent foreign fiction prize honors superior literary efforts that need the help of literary translators to make to the English press. To emphasize the fact that this help is a need, the prize money – £10,000 – is shared equally between writer and translator. In the running this year – mainly works from Eastern Europe. The prize will be awarded in May - I’ll be on the lookout for it and when I find out, I’ll share. Meanwhile, pick up the short list here - maybe your local library has ‘em?

Dismal times for the linguistically disadvantaged of New York: the medical situation is bad enough, but how come you’re using a waiter as your interpreter, docs? Read it and weep. As HikerDude commented the other day, our medical issues may be irritating, but at least we can get the information. Petition your local hospitals to use interpreters, and phone interpretation services. Really, do. Slamming against a language barrier should never kill anyone.

It’s back to the salt mines for me – work is piling up, as are administratrivialities. I’ll be back at the blog tomorrow with an essay on Islam, on Sunday with some other musings relating to – oh, I dunno – and on Monday with the news roundups: the world through, with, by, and for translators.

Our General Store Has A Little Of Everything

HikerDude pointed out yesterday about how it is that translators always get the blame, even in situation such as a mixed up sign in a monolingual environment, which has absolutely, truly, wholly not one single thing to do with translation. That convenient catch phrase, "lost in translation", taints our profession with a continuous mental link with loss. This calls for a button, and some copywriting. Something like “gained in translation”, but with more spin and twist. Ideas, anyone? Mail ‘em direct or leave a comment. I’ll post a round-up once we’ve got a few.

Community interpreting with red suspenders: how come Del Rio Texas is relying on firefighters as interpreters? Are they trained for that? Do they know the rules? In a bilingual environment such as Texas, they’ve got to fund another way – or pay the penalty of unclear information.

Here’s a good one from Bangladesh, a caution to our colleagues: “Friends don’t let friends aid terrorists”, is that clear? Apparently, Shaikh Abdur Rahman didn’t have friends who knew that. After returning from travels around the Moslem world, “Rahman took up a job as a translator of Arabic travel documents for Bangladeshi workers going to the Middle East, but intelligence sources said the occupation was a cover”. But take that with a grain of salt, folks, because ANYONE who can speak the language of those other folks (whoever they may be; it used to be Germans and Japanese, but the fashion’s changed now) is a potential suspect. Even people arrested in Bangaldesh are considered innocent until proven guilty.

Moving right along, I foresee loads of work coming at us when people who built their sites with Apollo Hosting realize that automatic machine translation, without the blessing of a human who actually speaks the language, may end up with them trying to say “out of sight, out of mind” and ending up with “invisible idiot”. There’s a marketing niche there, somewhere – offering a bundled website translation to hosting companies. It’s not something I’d want to do, but hey, go for it. Just tell ‘em you heard it from Shunra.

Following up on yesterday’s healthcare message, I thought it was important to not that no, it is not surgery required because of violence I inflicted on pen-stealers. Thanks for asking and I’m glad I could make this public clarification. I caught the infamous team at it again in the evening, though. I think I’ll go down to Swain’s General Store and pick up a box or two of new ones. Wouldn’t it just be easier to write it on the shopping list, guyz?

Finally, a pet software peeve – am I the only translator who gets the violent shakes when waiting for Adobe Acrobat Reader to get all its ducks in a row and open already?

I’ll be back tomorrow with a brand new round-up and I won’t even mention politics a teeny little bit. Or at least, I’ll try. Till then!

The healthcare debate, pen thieves, and a little translator round-up

The things a translator has to do to get her day started.

Any readers outside of the U.S. would have a hard time believing this, but my morning was spent trying to figure out health insurance. Any readers inside the U.S. would find it difficult to believe that I got my answers so fast – but I did, indeed, get them all within a phone call. And the answers are not pretty. Yeah, a member of my family can have needed surgery – but the (outrageous) costs will be 20% out of pocket AFTER we hit the (quite high) annual deductible.

And we’re the lucky ones: we’re insured. Forty-five million Americans are not; they’d have to pay 100% of the cost, or more likely, go without.

What does that have to do with translation? Did I use “French” that needed to be excused to the nice lady at the insurer’s office? No, I’m a mild mannered sort of person. This has to do with translation because many if not most of language professionals (translators, interpreters, writers, editors) in the U.S. are self-employed, which means that they’re in the same boat as we are. Self-employed? Stay healthy, or you can join in the bankruptcy fun – health-care expenses are, in fact the leading cost of bankruptcy in the U.S. Malcolm Gladwell discusses this in some detail in an excellent article in the New Yorker. Interestingly, he reverses a position he held on the subject several years ago. Read about it, pass it on, VOTE ON IT, guyz. ‘Cause the human body comes without a warranty.

We can tie that in to translation using the Olympics, which will soon – I hope! – fade out of the headlines. But it’s still there, this time with the story of one Dr. Frank Nisenfeld, an orthopedic surgeon in Frederick, spent two weeks at the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, working at a clinic in the Olympic Village. But was the medical work the most rewarding? Not at all. Apparently, “serving as a translator was one of the most helpful things he did. "I felt more useful as a translator than as an orthopedic surgeon." Does this surprise your news trawler? Not at all. If you can’t find out “What hurts? How bad is it? Was it ever broken before? How many fingers?” – how are you going to practice medicine? Like most human ventures, medicine is about communication. And this means that in multilingual environments, interpreting is as healing as doctoring. Thanks for noticing, Dr. Nisenfeld (and glad you liked the Olympics)!

In terms of things that make you go “hmmmm...” file the story of one of Yale’s newest freshment. Admissions must be pretty desperate, wouldn’t you say, if they accept a former Taliban leader, who had risen to power from his position as translator (which is how I happened to notice this story in the first place)? Didn’t this guy have to check the box that says “have you ever been a terrorist” when landing in the U.S.? Or maybe the Taliban were not, in fact, terrorists? I guess a terrorist is what our Department of Homeland Security (gosh, what a name) think a terrorist is, and that’s all there is to it.

Speaking of all there is to it, I’d like to take an informal poll: anyone around here have strong opinions about their spouse coming into their office and stealing pens from their desk? How about the spouses who know that such behavior is unacceptable and bribe your children to do it for them? Not that such a thing could happen in Port Townsend, no way. We’re all waaaaAaaay too civilized to do that here in hippieville.

Or that’s what I’d have thought until I caught them red-handed (and, I might add, pink-inked).

I’ll go translate something that doesn’t need pink ink. Catch you tomorrow about this time with a new round-up of things linguistic.