Globalese?

Or is John Dixon from Applied Languages writing his career as a translation project manager off?

Apparently, after Elvish, Esperanto, Na'avi, Spanglish, Chinglish and G-d alone knows what else, John is suggesting governments pay a bit more attention to imposing a common world language, tentatively called Globalese.

"Think how much money companies would save in the long run. In the US alone the translation business is estimated to be approximately $10billion per annum and growing."

Think how much less you would be making, John!

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Moroccan Judeoarab Dictionary the first of its kind..

Reported by Arutz Sheva:

(Apologies for the weird English)

Mordechai Hanoun has published the first dictionary of the Jewish Moroccan language. The two-year effort contains about 10,000 words, idioms, phrases and sayings from the Jewish Arabic of Morocco and their Hebrew translations. Hanoun told Arutz Sheva's Hebrew journal that words and phrases from English, French, Hebrew and Italian were mixed into this unique language, along with ancient Akkadian and Ugaritic. He also used the Hebrew word Me'arah, as in Ma'arat Hamachpelah, the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hevron, as an example of a word whose meaning (in this case that of "tomb") was preserved through the Jewish Moroccan language.

Hanoun said, "An injustice has been done to this language, which has been related to as vulgar and not as poetic as it is." He added that the time has come for people to get to know this language, which was created by the people. He thinks the general public, as opposed to academia, will take an interest in the language and the ancient heritage filled with stories and roots.


For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Stay Proficient or Rank Down, says CIA

Oh, la la!

Under a new policy announced recently by CIA director Leon Panetta, an intelligence officer can’t be promoted to the agency’s highest rank — the Senior Intelligence Service — without a demonstrated proficiency in a foreign language. From a CIA release:

While many senior Agency officers have tested proficient in a foreign language over the course of their careers, some have not kept their skills current. Under the new policy, promotions to SIS for most analysts and operations officers will be contingent on demonstrating foreign language competency. If an officer is promoted to SIS and does not meet the foreign language requirement within one year, he or she will return to their previous, lower grade. This is a powerful incentive to maintain and improve skills critical to the Agency’s global mission. Languages play a key role in the CIA’s work at all career levels.

“The stricter requirement for SIS promotion,” said Panetta, “is meant to ensure that leadership on this vital initiative comes from the executive level. With an unwavering commitment from SIS officers—to both lead by example and to support language proficiency at all levels—we will reach not only our language goals, but our ultimate objective: an Agency that is better positioned to protect our nation in the years ahead.”

Let me guess.. it takes the Yanks 9 years to see the error of their ways, and then they arrest a student at an airport for holding flash-cards in Arabic? The mind boggles!

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Even more reasons to have a multilingual website

This from the Marketing Blog

(1) English is not a predominant language in the Internet any more. As the Internet grows, so does the variety of languages. Having a multilingual website means you will be able to sell much more to those new customers. Fundamental, my dear Watson!

(2) If your website is translated to many languages, it receives not just many new orders, but it enjoys a bigger flow of traffic. Your website will receive more visitors. So you can use gadgets such as AdSense ads more efficiently and will receive more CTR and will increase overall dollar amount per day.

(3) Multilingual website brings credibility to a company. Not a cheap free machine translation, for sure. Errors may hurt reputation of a company. Poorly done, machine translation may erode a company’s reputation completely. We are talking a real professional human approach to translation. Professionally done translation adds credibility to your website. Fundamental, too, but you would be amazed at how many CEO's don't get it. Just think Pajero.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Arabic still among the first 10 languages online

There we are, No. 8, with 50,422,300 users online. Enough stuff to translate..



Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Language Attrition Reversed?

Aaron's posting on language attrition suffered by native speakers who live overseas is something I can personally identify with. The sole difference here being the fact that I am a linguist by trade, and so I am even more aware of it.

I have to admit, however, that I was taken aback when a colleague made the comment that my Arabic was "weird". On further investigation, it turned out that it wasn't as much attrition as it was acquisition. Arabic is a rich language spoken with over 20 different dialects all the way from Western Sahara and Mali in Africa to the eastern board of the Arab Gulf. These dialects are often mutually incomprehensible.

What happened in my case is that I had a solid knowledge of Sudanese and Egyptian dialects, but that in Australia, most of my friends were Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian and Iraqi. Over the last 15 years, I had therefore acquired a substantial vocabulary of various Levantine dialects, often pronounced with a Cairene accent. The result, to say the least, would surely be weird to any ears other than mine!

The solution to that was, of course, to revert to my strongest dialects when speaking and risk not being understood anyway by people from other dialects. Which can be fun, because they in turn learn from you, too..

Aaron is facing the dilemma of speaking proper English, or speaking English Azerbaijani way. These days, with a team of five translators each from a different Arab country, we solved it by simply talking to each other in English.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Translators Boon to Economy

Add three things together:

Economic Migration (outsourcing/multinationals/professional) + the Internet population + social media marketing that reaches incredibly wide audiences.

The result is that you have a highly multilingual market that you need to address IN THEIR LANGUAGE, because even people who speak English well prefer to buy in their own language.

The solution?

Translation.

The fact that language service provider are a boon to the global economy are perhaps not immediately apparent. But if a company, whether large or small, is to get involved with it’s public in a meaningful way it needs to approach them in a manner that their clients understand and like. It needs to buzz in tongues, so to speak.

Companies express their cultural sensitivity by providing their diverse customers with materials in their own languages. For a company not to offer this kind of information would be short-sighted and would not make good business sense.

The role of the translator in the global economy is almost indispensable. The need for businesses to communicate with their clients base that there will always be a requirement for a translator. Not an Internet based software, mind you. Nothing offends more than a garbled information text on a reputable website - it simply renders the owner of the site untrustworthy (if they stuffed my language, they probably stuff lots of other things, too). Putting information out in a foreign language is meant to make things clearer, not more confusing.

Simply translating material is not sufficient; a qualified, professional and experienced translator would need to know what kind of message the company wants to convey to their new client base, and set the tone for the promotion or corporate identity. Certain symbols or ideas that are common coinage in one country may be highly offensive in another. Cultural sensitivity is extremely important.

The role of a translation services provider is not simply to transpose a set of texts or materials from one language to the next, but also to engage with the culture of the target language.

So use a human being. A qualified one. Because that is an investment in your business, not a cost to cut down.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Getting Started with Translation Style Guides

Whenever a translator or a translation editor makes a choice that affects consistency, that choice should be recorded in a glossary or style guide. A simple rule to get started is that translation style guides should contain every choice that can not be recorded in a translation glossary or a translation memory.

Instructions and choices that should be included in translation style guides are listed in Annex D of European Standard 15038 for translation services (see page 15). The elements detailed in the PDF include the following:

• Punctuation
• Spelling
• Formatting
• Adaptations
• Language-specific and client preferences
• Common errors to be avoided
• Other miscellaneous elements

Effective translation style guides can vary in length and detail, as exemplified by the following downloadable style guides from the technology industry:

Google's Translation Style Guide: a single guide for all languages that is simple and concise.

Oracle and Sun's Language Style Guides: guides in 8 languages, each of at least moderate length, French, Spanish, German, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Swedish

Microsoft's Language Style Guides: guides for 90+ languages, each of varying length
Other international organizations and governments with respectable translation teams have also made their translation style guides available online for download:

The World Bank Translation Style Guide: English, French, Arabic, Spanish
The European Commission Translation Style Guides: English, Danish, Finnish, Portuguese, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, and other languages.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Explosive Translation

Oh, boy!



For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Not as "Arabic" as it is claimed

An interesting article on loan words in Arabic was prompted by the recent debacle on whether the term "Allah" is purely the property of Malaysian Muslims..

Note please, they don't speak Arabic. Note again, Islam came to an Arabic-speaking Arabia that was full of Christian, Jews and other religions, and where Arabic jostled side by side with Aramaic, Syriac and Hebrew.

But that is the province of historical linguistics in "democratic" countries, not of political war-mongering and nationalistic hip-hop to the tune of religion.

It is evident that there is no such thing as a pure language which would presuppose a self-contained and self-sufficient linguistic community, hermetically sealed from interactions with neighboring linguistic communities – a historical impossibility by any account. Loan words in the Koran point to this over and over again..

"From the earliest period of Islam down to the present day, attentive readers have observed that there are words in the Koran which appear to be of non-Arabic origin. Such observations, motivated by varying factors, have been the source of controversy, discussions and extensive study in traditional Muslim and Euro-American scholarship," says Andrew Rippin his article on “Foreign Vocabulary” in Encyclopedia of the Quran vol 2 E- I ed., Jane Dammen McAullife (Brill 2002) pp. 226- 237).

And the hip-hop response to this is that (a) God sent the Koran down in the a form which the Arabs will easily understand. i.e. Arabic; (b) Arabic is the widest and richest of the languages, it should not be surprising that they exists similar words between Koranic Arabic and other languages (DUH? It is only the 8th language of the world, with English being by now the first, followed by Chinese); (c) words of foreign origin are to be found in the Koran but they had been incorporated into Arabic well before the revelation of the Koran and are thus to be considered Arabic, and the nature of the Arabic usage of such words is superior to their usage as found in other languages (is that why almost all technical terms nowadays are being transliterated from English?).

In his 1938 book, The Foreign Vocabulary of the Koran (now almost an obsolete academic curiosity, considering the Arab Middle East can't speak proper Arabic anyway), Arthur Jeffrey wrote, “Closer examination of the question [foreign words in the Koran] reveals even further and more detailed correspondences than these which appear on the surface, and forces on one the conviction that not only the greater part of the religious vocabulary, but also most of the cultural vocabulary of the Koran is of non-Arabic origin".

A few examples will suffice here:

Why, for example, does khalîfa end with an “a” which should denote it as a feminine? There is no answer from Arabic, but in Aramaic it is the article which usually in that language comes as an “a” (alif in Aramaic/Syriad spelling, ta’ marbuta in Arabic) at the end of the word, e.g. meshîha, the Messiah. These scholars would have been able to account for the “feminine” gender of khalîfa if they admit to its origin in the cognate Semitic languages.

Consider the words ‘salat’, or ‘zakat’ - why is it that in Koranic Arabic they are spelled with a “w” in the middle, and not, as outside of the Koran, with ‘alif’ to make it sound a long “a” (salât), while the Koranic spelling makes it sound like ‘salôt’,or ‘zakôt’? There is no answer from Arabic grammar for this observation, but the phenomenon is easy to explain if we take them to be loan words from Aramaic/Syriac, which uses a long ‘o’ where the Arabic uses a long ‘a’. The same explanation applies to the word, ‘salâm’ and ‘shalôm’.

The hip-hop continues, and will eventually become a civil war over a loan word.. Nevermind who is loaning from whom.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Proposal to Make Arabic Official at WTO Expensive

But if it goes ahead we may have some more work to do :-)

Reuters reported on 26/01/10 that Arab members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are pushing for Arabic to be made a fourth official language of the global trade body. But the heavy cost of translation, interpreting and extra printing involved in adding Arabic to the three current official languages -- English, French and Spanish -- means the proposal is running up against resistance (...) Any move to add Arabic as an official language would probably prompt a request for Chinese, and maybe even Russian -- aligning WTO language policy with the United Nations (...) Adding three languages would cost about 45 million Swiss francs ($43 million) a year, the ambassador said -- no small amount given a total WTO budget in 2009 of 189 million francs. As a result the Arab group will need to lobby hard to convince other members of the virtues of the proposal

The WTO's 153 members include a dozen Arab countries, and another six are applying to join, including Iraq, Algeria and Libya.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Writing in multiple identities

Sami Michael is an Iraqi-born, Israeli author. His interview on MedArabNews by Claudia De Martino tells the story of a writer with multiple identities and languages, as well as some strong political opinions..

"I was born in Iraq and immigrated to Israel at 21. Back in Iraq, I was writing in Arabic and it took me 15 years to switch from Arabic to Hebrew writing. In those 15 years, I never published novels in Arabic, but many short and long stories. I also wrote for a newspaper for 5 years; I was on the editorial board of Arabic language newspapers. But the reason why I never published a single novel in Arabic is that authors in exile have to write in the language of the country in which they live, otherwise they do not find readers and most of them became frustrated."

I can identify with that, as well as with his sentiments that "in many Arab countries in the Middle East there is hardly any freedom of speech. If an author writes something “critical” of the regimes in place, he/she may be taking an extreme risk, be jailed or persecuted for it" while in Israel the "persecution" is more subtle - no promotion, no financial assistance. It is the same in any democratic country. Democracy only works if you have access to the media, and main-stream media are seldom democractic anywhere. Thank God for the Internet.

I do write in Arabic, although much less than in English. I have another blog, under a pseudonym, where the Internet has allowed me to talk to people in the language they understand without being jailed or shot for it.

I also liked his comment that "my mother tongue is Arabic and my nationality Israeli, and my identity Jewish. I have always thought of myself as an “Arab Jew” without distinguishing at all which one of my identities was the dominant one. don’t feel I need to define myself for anyone, as an Englishman doesn’t get up in the morning and ask himself: who am I?" Many decades ago I opted for a line from Bernard Shaw's Man and Arms - I am a citizen of the world.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.