Musings of the Mad Wordsmith (and other things)

WEBINAR: What makes a successful freelancer?

2011-04-07T11:27:00.002+10:00

Date: 28 April, Tuesday Time: 7:30 PM in QLD, ACT, NSW, TAS, VIC (GMT+10) Place: at your computer Price: $ 35 (AUSIT members), $ 50 (general)

Most of us are freelancers. When we sign contracts with agencies, we do this as freelancers. Usually we operate using mere scraps of knowledge in bookkeeping, marketing, social media and networking, whilst we all agree that ideally anyone attempting to run a business - whether a boutique T/I agency or a one-person show- would have some sort of formal business education.
Not all is lost, however. Skills can be acquired on the path to success. Skills become more permanent the more practical experience one gets. In this webinar, our own much-admired Sam Berner will share with us her knowledge and experience (often learned from mistakes), on how to succeed on the path to professionalism.

During the webinar you will be able to ask questions, you will receive a printout after the session, and you can access a recording of the webinar for another 60 days.
Register early to avoid disappointment: attendance is limited!
Registrations close on 21 April!

Click here to register!

The presenter:

Sam Berner has been at one time or another a writer, publisher, teacher, business woman, mentor, translator and motivational speaker who arrived in Australia 16 years ago. She is currently the manager of Arabic Communications Experts . In Australia, she mentors and motivates many aspiring small business owners, most of whom are home based, to expand their vision globally. Prior to coming to Australia she lived for over twenty years in the Middle East and North Africa, teaching, publishing and translating. During those years Sam worked for a number of regional and international publishing houses, as well as the UNICEF. She was a founding member of the WATA (World Arabic Translators' Association), a National President of AUSIT, and currently serves on the Management Committee of the Queensland branch of the Institute. In addition to her translation work, she also writes regularly for a number of professional and community publications. Some of her writings are accessible online. Sam conducts workshops for small businesses about knowledge management, cross-cultural training, effective use of IT for growth, time management, and business intelligence. She also gives talks on work/lifestyle choices, going solo, and creativity in work, and seminars on business ethics and professionalism.

Japan post-earthquake: Glimpses of Stoicism, Humanness and Strength

2011-03-21T10:58:00.003+10:00

This is from a friend of mine, a Japanese translator and interpreter, Yoko.

Compilation of personal episodes, comments, and tweets from earthquake-affected people translated (by me) from Japanese:

1. Tokyo Disneyland started distributing sweets and treats from the Disney shop. I saw conspicuously dressed up high-school girls demanding more than they should need for themselves, and felt dismayed. Later I saw the same girls distributing the treats to little kids in the Earthquake shelter. Mothers with small kids could not stand in the line to receive the treats, so the high-school girls' action was very much appreciated.

2. In a supermarket where all the merchandise were still on the floor after the earthquake, shoppers picked up the merchandise and put them neatly back on the shelves as they shopped, calmly waited in line for their turn to check out, and paid for their purchase as usual. In the packed train, an elderly gave his seat to a pregnant woman. Many foreigners were speechless to see such acts. Japan is extraordinary.

3. When the lights turned green, typically only one vehicle could get across the intersection before the lights turned red. But all the drivers were calm. The traffic would come to a standstill at a more complicated intersection, but during the ten hours of traffic jam, I never heard any honk other than to thank other drivers. Despite the fears that had engulfed me, I came to love Japan even more.

4. When I was walking home from my university late last night, a baker-woman was distributing bread to people who were walking home. The bakery is normally closed at that hour. In this time of confusion, she had discovered what she could do to help. I was warm inside. Tokyo is not a bad place to be in right now.

5. I received an email from my Korean friend: "The only country that has ever received atomic bombing. A country that lost the WWII. A country that receives typhoons every year. And earthquakes. And a tsunami...A small island nation, and yet, it always knows how to stand up after it fell. That's Japan. Keep it up." I'm crying right now.

6. When I was getting really fed up waiting for a train on the platform, a homeless man gave me a cardboard box and told me to sit on it to keep myself warm. We always ignore the homeless people. Now their warmth has hit me.

7. I walked for four hours to get home. I saw a woman who was standing in front of her house and showing a large sketchbook to the many passers-by. She had written on the sketchbook, "Please use our toilet if you need." Perhaps Japan is one of the most hospitable counties in the world. When I saw her, it was hard not to cry.

8. I had to walk four hours to get home and the streets were packed with people walking home. But it was not chaotic as people marched in a very orderly manner. Convenience stores and other shops were operating as if nothing had happened. Network infrastructure withstood the huge quake. Many shelters for stranded people were instantly set up in many locations. The train services came back on the same day and the trains run throughout the night to carry people home. It is a great country. This is something you wouldn't know from a simple GDP ranking.

9. A friend in Chiba told me this. An old man in a shelter murmured, "I don't know what's going to happen now." A teen-age boy started stroking the man's back and said, "Don't worry. When I grow up, I will bring everything back to normal." We will be all right. Our future is bright.

10. The man had been rescued after 42 hours of being trapped in a destroyed house. When he came out, he smiled at the TV camera and said, "I was there when the tsunami from the Chilean earthquake hit us. It's all right. All we need to do is rebuild." What is important is what we do from now.

11. "Operation Tomodachi" [meaning, "Operation Friends"] is the name of the U.S. military's rescue operation this time.

12. It's so dark with the power down, so the stars are shining the brightest ever. My fellow earthquake refugees in Sendai, let's look up.

13. M9.0. One of the greatest earthquakes in the human history. Well then, let's make the passion to rebuild and love for each other one of the greatest in the human history.

Japanese migrants' communities across the State are preparing for fundraising activities. The activities will typically involve paper-craft cranes and in some cases music or dance performance. If you see one like that in your suburb, please make generous donations, but make sure the fundraising activity is legitimate. (Normally the organisation that receives the funds, such as Red Cross, issues an official letter of authority. If you are not sure, you can always ask the fundraiser to show you such a letter before making donations.)

Thank you very much for your support for the earthquake victims in Japan.

Yoko

Slowly Catching Up to the Reading Nations

2011-03-15T15:37:00.004+10:00

Rufoof...

Shelves...

Called a "flagship project" - more like flagging-stone. Or is it flogging?

What am I raving about, you ask? Well, a UAE-based software company has "unveiled" a new mobile book-reading application. They called it Rufoof. In the words of its developer:

- it is one of the prominent Arabic apps on the app store, is an amazing reading experience for Arabic Content (I read Arabic on Kindle, what's so amazing?)

- Users of Rufoof can view a wide range of book titles in different categories and download a sample to have the content available even when the device is offline. Another feature of the application is reading through bookmarked pages, search and change the font size as well as colour of the shelves. This represents a big advancement in the world of reading from an iPhone, Ipad or other smart phone devices. (DUH? Ditto Kindle, Sony, iPad, etc. etc..)

- is a revolutionary bookstore application that targets the Arab audience with more than 4,500 books covering various sectors (OMG. I have this much and more ebooks alone. Must be a drought in publishing).

Something is telling me that they will be selling it oveseas to the diaspora. Only a few days ago, a blogger I respect posted a Yahoo Maktoob research on reading in the Arab World. She says that "the survey polled 3,503 online folks, which means that it should definitely be taken with several grains of salt. Internet penetration in the Arab world does not go beyond 35%, and the fact that the poll takers are online already says a lot about them." And what were the results? A quarter of people polled hardly ever or never read books for personal enjoyment. Roba (the blogger from Jordan) blames lack of pulp fiction as a reason for turning off young readers. Would I rather they didn't have intellectual junk food? Of course, yes.

So will reading off the electronic shelf be any more enticing? Is Edward Said or Nawal Saadawi more palatable in e-ink than on paper? You never know. Research is beginning to show that reading online makes one more shallow and destroys the ability to think deeply. What it does to heads that were empty in the first place, is something we need to wait and see.

Suitably empty!

*******

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

Writing in a Language Other Than Your Own

2011-03-15T15:06:00.002+10:00

It is interesting to see how, at the time Arabic-speaking Gulf countries complain about the morbidity of their own language, an American university in Qatar is celebrating "the creative possibilities for expressing oneself and one's experiences through writing - in a language other than his native tongue."

"The Writer's Craft: Teaching Creative Writing in Qatar", edited by Amal Al Malki, Ph.D., assistant teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, is a book based on a collection of essays written by students of Al Malki's creative writing course - in English.

Al Malki says that her students "were encouraged to acquire both comfort and competence in a variety of English genres - but, not really to mimic the English of a native speaker."

Even more fascinating is how Al Malki explains the difference between writing in Arabic versus writing in English: "Many students in Education City had grandparents who were illiterate, and have parents who are literate primarily in Arabic. The students find themselves the first generation cultivating two languages, and two identities. They see the Arabic language as the language of family and religion, and English as their global self - the language in which they can relate their pride in their Arabic heritage to the world."

I have seen and experienced very similar sentiments among first and second generation migrants in Australia - but it didn't relate to "pride in one's heritage" as much as to the innate ability of English to express the inexpressible in Arabic - alternative identities, erotica, technology, theories of science that have not yet caught in Arabic, for which there are no terminologies in that language.

Arabs face huge obstacles in gaining access to western knowledge, the most significant hurdle being the language barrier between them and the industrialised
nations to the north that generate the majority of technical/social/philosophical innovations.

This situation is further complicated by the lack of clarity regarding the correct Arabic equivalent for numerous technical/scientific terms. The region speaks various dialects, and there is often no distinct or standard term for technological innovations. Often, Arabs from different countries in the region are forced to use a third language (mostly English) in order to communicate that sort of knowledge.

I am not a proponent of conspiracy theories, but when much of the teaching material at science courses in Middle Eastern universities is only available in either English or French as there are no Arabic translations, while students are often given texts in English or French while receiving instruction in Arabic during class time, it makes one wonder how Arabic could ever evolve and catch up?

This is a proverbial shooting yourself in the foot.

It is also a great time for lexicographers of all colours to start producing real dictionaries for a real, 21st century, Arab world. Enough esoterica. Sufis need technology, too :-)

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

Equal Rights, Unequal Pay

2010-11-20T10:04:00.002+10:00

I read with interest the address by Joris de Bres, Race Relations Commissioner, at the Annual General Meeting of Interpreting New Zealand, Multicultural Services Centre, held in Wellington on the 17th of this month.

The right to an interpreter is enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: “to have the free assistance of an interpreter if they cannot understand or speak the language used in court (Article 14.3(f)). So is the right to legal representation. Otherwise, it amounts to the miscarriage of justice, which is a grave offence.

A lawyer in Australia charges over $200.00 just to look at you for an hour. An accredited, qualified court interpreter in Australia, after all things get factored in (travel time, delays, etc), is paid a paltry $16.00 per hour before tax. Both are professionals, both have qualifications. The diffrence? One is employed by himself (or a large law firm), while the other is employed by Australia's only employer - the Government - via a host of decent and not so decent agencies.

Talk about monopolisation!

Plus, there is no union to represent community-sector interpreters. So no access to legal redress for all sorts of other abuses that come bundled with low pay: no debriefing, harassment and intimidation of interpreters, no parking dues, often no travel fee, and no paid CPD opportunities. And then the one and only employer has the temerity to pay thousands of dollars to pack agency owners and so-called "end users" (still Government) for a whole day of fruitless discussions about the lack of retention of interpreters (or good ones at least).

Is it so hard to fathom, or is our public service slightly intellectually disabled?

Palinese?

2010-07-30T22:39:00.002+10:00

First we had Dubya.. Now we have Wasilla.

"Now, some of you may think Sarah introduced “refudiate” to our common language last Sunday, when she tweeted Manhattan’s Muslims, begging them to “Pls refudiate” plans to build a mosque two blocks north of the Ground Zero.

You would be wrong.

Mama Grizzly actually gave the “word” its out-loud debut about a week before, when she bounced it off her fellow Fox News heavyweight and conservative stud muffin, Sean Hannity.

Sarah was opinionating, via live-feed from her kitchen overlooking Russia, calling on the Obamas to “refudiate” the NAACP’s charge of racism in the leadership of the Tea Party movement."

Peter Gelzinis from Boston Herald

Refudiate the fact, please, that something is very wrong with education in the USA if someone like Palin can become a politician. PLEASE??

Left or Right, East or West?

2010-07-30T20:43:00.002+10:00

Prof. Lera Boroditsky on how language shapes thinking (or is it the other way round?). Absolutely must read! Read the comments, they are as good as the article, if not better.

Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.
Some indigenous tribes say north, south, east and west, rather than left and right, and as a consequence have great spatial orientation.
The Piraha, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.
In one study, Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn't remember the agents of accidental events as adeptly as English speakers could. Why? In Spanish and Japanese, the agent of causality is dropped: "The vase broke itself," rather than "John broke the vase."

What happens in interpreting, then, when we need to bridge the east with left, or the few with five?

Cultural Translation - Not an Easy Bid

2010-07-30T15:02:00.004+10:00

In Australia's professional LSP sector, the standard (and of course lazily comfortable) response to the question "Can translators be cultural advisers?" is "No". Too much responsibility is attached to trying to explain cultural issues A to a member of culture B, especially if B is a much more powerful and sort of mainstream culture, and A is a minority, often refugee (economic or otherwise) sub-culture. It is so much easier just interpreting words, usually making the discourse of the dominant language into something utterly alien and alienating in the receiving language.

I don't agree with this stance. A language is a vital vehicle of culture, it does not exist in a vacuum. Whether interpreting or translating, some things need to be "footnoted", explanations need to be added. It enriches both parties. But I agree it is hard.

I have been following this guy for a while now, and I am full of admiration for what he does. And today I came across another bunch of "lingovists" (language activists) from India - Video Volunteers. Their main issue, of course, is that India is a subcontinent of many cultures and many languages. And it is a subcontinent of many voiceless people.

How do you give a voiceless community a voice? You interpret and translate what they say into the language of the dominant discourse! Bravo..

Are we creating our own 'voiceless' communities by refusing to be cultural brokers?? Listen to Ted talking about what translation is REALLY for:

More on the GIGO Syndrome

2010-07-30T13:21:00.002+10:00

I love Barbara Jungwirth posting on writing source text in "grammatically correct, clear structures free of spelling and punctuation errors" so as to facilitate the translation process, instead of getting the "Garbage In, Garbage Out" syndrome.

Barbara writes: "I was initially surprised at how frequently source text -- even fairly lengthy white papers and similar types of text -- appears not to have been proofread, let alone copy-edited. After reading a couple of books on technical and business matters recently, I am no longer surprised. Even books being printed and sold in bookstores don't seem to undergo much of a quality-assurance process any more. A case in point is Tamar Weinberg's "The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web", which I am in the process of reviewing for an upcoming issue of the Society for Technical Communication's magazine Intercom, which contains quite a few instances where sentences seem to have been hurriedly revised and fragments of the sentence's previous incarnation left behind or too much taken out. So if books aren't proofread any more, what can we expect from internal industry papers or instructions?"

Surprised, eh? I have a few books on translation studies that were published by very respectable institutions, and which contain errors. It is human to err. It is unprofessional to write slovenly, however. However, since the generation currently coming into force as editors and writers grew up on cut-and-paste, SMS and the Microsoft spell-checker, and without the benefit of being taught any serious usage of English at school, we can only expect to see more of this.

It is the translator's job to "leave source text errors in the source text" and provide a clean translation. Provided, of course, the translator knows an error when they see one. SMS your professional body for advice, maybe?

Barbara states, correctly: "However, such poorly written source text not only hampers the flow of reading, it often also adds ambiguity to the text. After all, if there are two conjunctions when only one should be present, which of the two did the author intend to use?"

I just smiled.

Ambiguity is now called "creativity" and "innovation" in language. Rules are BAD. And for someone to understand what one conjunction versus two mean in a text, they must be my age :-)

******

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/

The US Government Still "doesn't get it"

2010-07-30T12:58:00.002+10:00

The Government Accountability Office reported on Thursday that Federal agencies must do more to improve employees' foreign language proficiencies.

David Maurer, director of GAO's homeland security and justice team said that DHS, in particular, has failed to take a comprehensive approach to assessing the foreign language capabilities of its employees and addressing any shortfalls despite several critical GAO reports. Jeff Neal, chief human capital officer at DHS, acknowledged the department does not have an overarching plan or program for foreign language skills.

"An effective program must be dynamic and responsive to changing situations," Neal said.

(Source: Government Executive.com)

Couldn't the same be said of any English-speaking business trying to enter foreign markets? All this money spent on copywriting, advertising and business meetings is going to waste if the produced materials do not actually address the target audience - that is, their potential clients and business partners.

And yet, when it comes to budgeting, the beneficial, intelligent use of language services comes as a not-so-high priority. Instead, business tend to depend on locals to tell them what to do. A bit like going to the barber to have your tooth extracted, if you ask me.

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

Predicting the Nakba in an Israeli Novel

2010-04-04T20:33:00.003+10:00

A book I would love to translate (are you listening, Alon?) into Arabic. A book that MUST be translated into Arabic, and translated well.

House of Rajani (Harvill Secker - Random House UK), takes place in 1895 Jaffa. It records the diaries of Salah Rajani, a 12-year old Moslem child cursed with prophetical powers who foresees the rising of the Jewish state; and of a 27 year old Jewish colonist, new to the city of Jaffa, who takes both Salah's mother and their house.

Arab Israelis – among them Radio Cairo correspondent Khamis Abulafia and politician Ahmed Tibi – have called the book "riveting" and claim to find an echo of the Palestinian narrative embedded within.

The House of Rajani was awarded the Sapir prize in 2009, but two weeks after the public announcement on Television, the award was withdrawn due to allegations of a conflict of interest.

Alon says that the main catalyst to write the book came from a deja vu feeling: "The initial catalyst for writing it came from a scene I envisioned one day as I sat in a Tel Aviv café: all at once I stripped the present reality of its clothes – the Bauhaus buildings, the uniquely Israeli window blinds, the ugly air-conditioning units, the ficus trees, the asphalt sidewalks, the low stone walls – and I could picture the orchards and groves and prickly pear cactuses of the Palestinians who had lived there in the past. I shuddered, and at that moment I decided to try to pass that feeling along to my readers in a historical novel about Tel Aviv's Palestinian past and about the first wave of Jewish immigration."

An expert from the novel can be read here.

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/

Being Fast

2010-04-04T20:19:00.002+10:00

Ken of the 1-800 Translate company is blogging about Speed.. not the kind that makes you unwell, but the kind that makes you productive.

"You’ve got to do it right, but you’ve got to do it fast too. How fast? It all depends. Most translators in most languages can do somewhere between 2500 and 3000 words per day. That works out to about 300 words per hour. That’s unique words, now, so if the materials to be translated have a lot of repetition (say 50%), then the translator is effectively translating 5000 words instead of 2500 (...) Terminology management, machine pre-translation, and lots of other stuff can push those numbers much higher (...) Edit and proof take more time, say around 1000 words per hour, each, depending on the quality of the original and the talents and diligence of the editors. Traffic becomes a concern, too, in that the document has to be scheduled and assigned to the appropriate linguist by the appropriate project manager or language manager. So all the expectations we have for words per hour get tossed out the window if the one-and-only language manager is backed up or simply having a bad day. "

When all else fails, Ken throws in more translators, but complains that we are like cats, that is, there is more than one way to skin us. Thanks, Ken. I agree that as a bunch of professionals, we find it difficult to agree on anything, starting from translation theory and ending with which style manual is best to use. Don't worry, though - if the automation market keeps growing at the speed it does currently, our own productivity will kill all cats in the linguistic neighbourhood. That achieved, your only worry will be software crashes.

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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/

Weaving Trust

2010-04-04T19:27:00.002+10:00

Here is an excerpt from a recent interview with Mark Tappling, the CEO of Language Weaver, a venture-backed firm which develops language translation software:

"What we've discovered on the commercial business side, is that there is a massive need for translation of digital content on the Internet. But, because of the large volume of digital content out there, most of it simply is not being considered for translation, because there's just not enough money, people, or time. That said, we made an entry into the commercial market in the digital content space. In order for that to be credible, we found that there was a lack of trust--most people do not think translation software works well enough to be commercially viable. Our strategy was twofold--one, was to go out and get brand name customers, and to translate their content to such a high quality, with no human oversight, that they'd be willing to post that on the internet. We've been able to achieve that (...) The second thing we needed to do, was to engage our users trust. In order to do that, they needed to know when a translation was good or bad. So, we established a patented algorithm--a trust score--which automatically ranks a translation from 1 to 5, five being great, one being poor, so that a customer can determine the trust of that. We calibrated that to our customers own, native speakers, who scored them, so that everyone has trust in the score. That has taken the risk out of the conversation, because we only ask customers to pay when the translations are good."

Is that bit about "no human oversight" giving anyone a chill? If their MT is such high quality, how come Google is struggling? Something is telling me that their average score is around 3/5 and that they sort of provide a tiered system: if it is mediocre, we will get it reviewed by humans, unless of course you are happy with being mediocre in language X (which most of their clients would be, since any language other than English is an enigma and for a pragmatic English-speakers, enigmas are best left at mediocre levels). So close enough is good enough, and if their algorithm produced "3" is 30% better than the "5"s of other MTs, they aren't doing bad.

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/

Marian Schwartz Interview

2010-04-04T19:00:00.003+10:00

Boston Globe interviewed Marian Schwartz, the Austin-based acclaimed translator of Russian fiction, history, biography, and criticism. Her most recent translations include Ivan Goncharov’s 19th-century novel “Oblomov” and Olga Slavnikova’s futuristic novel “2017.” Schwartz is also the principal English translator of the works of Nina Berberova.

Schwartz started by defining a "good" translation as one which "readers like". With my due respect to all readers of various temperaments, IQs and levels of intelligence - the fact that I love fries does not make the fries a health food item. I read Bulgakov's books both in Polish (which is a close relative of Russian) and Arabic, so I knew a bit about the hazards of translations before I landed the Glenny English version - and so I can say that the English boo in question shares a title with Bulgakov, and that's where the story ends.

Schwartz also states that in her opinion a translation cannot be bad when it gives people access to works that they would never otherwise have read. But are they actually reading the book they would have read if they could, say, read French, or Spanish, or Arabic? Or is it a book written by the translator and passed under the pseudonym of some foreign dude with a literary reputation? If I say "I am hungry" and Ms Schwartz translates it as "Sam is experiencing stomach pain and would like a steak" - is that representing faithfully what I said? I know she wouldn't - she is too brilliant a translator for that. It is just a rhetorical question, and I hope Marian was not watering down her IQ because this was a newspaper interview!

***********

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/

When a PC Validates Your Language...

2010-04-04T18:36:00.004+10:00

Back to Dr. David Harrison and endangered languages - Harrison believes language revitalization will be one of the most important trends in linguistics over the next couple of decades, and he believes companies need to get on board.

He is calling on technology companies, such as Microsoft, to help kids engender language. "The Microsoft Local Language Program can empower indigenous communities from the very moment when children in those communities first encounter a technology. It is a powerful thing for children to see their native language on a computer or on cell phone in a high tech medium. It validates the language and encourages them not to abandon the language. It shows them that their language is neither backwards nor obsolete and that it has use in the modern world and has value.”

It used to be different.

When I was growing up, the value of my language and its prestige came automatically as the result of the culture enshrined in it. I had Polish, Yiddish, English and Arabic spoken at home, then picked up a bit of Russian at school. None of the speakers of these languages needed the worth of their language validated by some PC.

It worries me immensely that kids now need to see their lingo on a hand-held phone screen to believe that it is OK to learn it. Amidst the many extinctions I am surrounded with - species of plants and animals, human languages, humanities subject at undergraduate level, common sense and politeness - here comes the extinction of the human wetware.

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/

Open Source Corpora from Meedan

2010-04-04T16:59:00.003+10:00

I wrote about the Meedan Project just a few weeks ago. The site has been launched, and although the translations are not brilliant, they are readable and make sense.

Meedan had originally planned to use the Worldwide Lexicon (WWL) project's open source system, but right now we're using IBM's Machine Translation engine and the IBM Transbrowser" -- a browser-based tool for creating a translation layer on the web.

Meedan's data -- its 'translation memory' of over 3m words -- is available to other translators. George Weyman, Meedan's content and community manager, says: "the translations that are done with the Transbrowser are part of our agreement with IBM that makes sure all those translations are open source."

The 'translation memory' is important because having a corpus of texts in two languages allows you to apply statistical techniques to improve a translation engine. The whole translation memory is downloadable from http://github.com/anastaw/Meedan-Memory.

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 Kaput in the Gulf?

2010-04-04T16:45:00.003+10:00

Hard to believe, but it seems that it could be true. In United Arab Emirates, 80% of the population are expats, and Arabic is trailing behind English and Hindi in the fields of business, finance and education.

Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait are all in the same boat, with governments bewailing poor Arabic language skills on one hand, and funding higher education in English on the other. Is that a smart move?

Blame is also placed on the primary and secondary education, with students arriving in uni incapable of writing in any language whatsoever.

To read more, visit the Global Post.

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/

Revisiting Sacred Texts

2010-04-04T15:28:00.002+10:00

The British Guardian asks if the spirit of the original religious text can be adequately conveyed in a different language.

Alexander Goldberg compares this seeking for the original to translate to interpreting art. And since "G-d is good at Hebrew", the knowledge of the original Torah is of paramount importance to Jews - except that Biblical Hebrew is sort of dead, and Aramaic is best spoken by the Iraqi Christians - not the best candidates for translating the Torah into English! The question then becomes who has the sufficient knowledge or who has the power to interpret.

Dr Usama Hasan, a senior lecturer at Middlesex University, tells a story of misrepresentation that made me smile: "When I first participated in electronic discussions about religion as an undergraduate about 20 years ago, I began all my posts with, "In the name of God." This was the standard translation of bismillah, a phrase that prefixes all 114 chapters of the Qur'an bar one, and by which Muslims start all kinds of daily activities (...) One of the other students responded with, "In the name of myself, since I can't speak for God … " Whilst other colleagues asked him to apologise, fearing that another humourless Muslim would be offended and disengage, I was creased with laughter. But I took his point, and ever since that exchange I have tended to use the prayer-like "With the name of God" for my own correspondence, reserving "In the name of God" for translations of the Qur'an. This illustrates the difficulty of dealing with nuanced religious texts."

Language is a vehicle of meanings, and one of the arguments cited to support the disputed existence of mentalese, in which we allegedly think, is precisely the possibility of translation between languages. For Dr. Hasan, "the best translation of the Qur'an is in the language of action."

Heather McDougall, a music teacher with interest in comparative religions, maintains that in the beginning was Logos, and then it got translated into English..as "word", "reason" or "intellect". Logos is a difficult concept to translate, a bit like the Na'avi "I see you". She then talks about mistranslations of the Revelation of St. John by certain door-knocking groups. But any translation is an interpretation, and any interpretation is by default subjective. Some see the Lamb. Some see the FBI. Some see Bin Laden.

I tend to see Bedlam. That, too, is subjective.

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/

Translating Surveys

2010-04-04T15:11:00.003+10:00

Jeffrey Henning of VoVici has a series of excellent articles about preparing multilingual surveys and questionnaires. He does not start at the translation process, but goes further back and concentrates on designing. His advice:

(1)The biggest mistake you can make is to assume that you simply have to translate the English questionnaire into other languages.

(2) When you think about the problem as one of localization, you realize that you need different editions of the questionnaire for different markets.

(3) Write the master questionnaire with translation in mind.

(4) Design the questionnaire up front to minimize open-ended questions.

(5) A survey translation is not just a translation of the survey itself.

(6) Don't submit the master questionnaire for translation until it is "final final".

(7) Back translate the survey into the native language of the survey author.

And the DON'Ts?

(1) Do not use free translation software.

(2) Don't give it to someone who is not a professional translator.

(3) Don't be in a hurry. Give it plenty of time.

(4) Don't be stingy on back-translating.

(5) Don't under-budget. It costs.

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/

The importance of Multilingualism

2010-04-04T15:01:00.004+10:00

"Multilingualism, which can be defined as the harmonious accommodation of different languages spoken within a common space, therefore becomes an essential component of educational and cultural policies, to which attention must increasingly be paid," said Irina Bokova, director-general of UNESCO, in a statement on the occasion of International Mother Day Language 2010.

"At the same time, the learning of foreign languages and, as a result, the individual ability to use several languages encourages openness towards diversity and understanding of other cultures. As such, it must be promoted as a constructive and structural element of modern education."

Because of the increased pace of communication in our globalized world, translation is enjoying a level of growth unprecedented in the history of humanity, Bokova said. "For it to become a genuine tool for reciprocal dialogue and knowledge, we must promote a more diversified and even more balanced context of cultural and scientific exchange.

"Multilingualism, the learning of foreign languages and translation are three strategic axes for the language policies of tomorrow. On the occasion of this 11th International Mother Language Day, I am appealing to the international community to give the mother language, in each of these three axes, its rightful, fundamental place, in a spirit of respect and tolerance which paves the way for peace," Bokova said.

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/

An Introduction to Literature in Arabic

2010-04-04T11:42:00.003+10:00

L.D. Mitchell (book collector, professional librarian, author, photographer) did everyone a great favour by posting a ten part introduction about the literature in Arabic that any serious reader should have on their shelves.

Given the enormous debt that Western Europe owes to Arab scholarship, it is puzzling why the Arab world's own native literary traditions remain so poorly known and understood in the West.

I have written often about contemporary Arab writers whose works are being translated into English (Humphrey Does It Again, Darwish Celebrated in Film, Arab Literature Breaks Taboos - in Translation, On Translating Arabic Literature, Taha and Adina - Translating the Other, From "Religion Dispatches" - Translating Rumi], but Mitchell takes us on a journey from 1001 Nights to Naguib Mahfouz, touching on folklore, religious texts and science, then stopping long at poetry, moving on to compilations of Jahiz, Maqdisi and the globe-trotter Ibn Battuta, biographies of the Prophet and other greats, Ibn Khaldun's seminal work on sociology and the histories of Tabari.

Mitchell says that his mini-introduction would not improve the general ignorance of the subject much, partly because of the frustrating lack of English translations. rest assured, my dear librarian, that there is a similar frustration among the Arabic-speaking generation Y and Z who no longer use classical Arabic and cannot comfortably link to Tabari, Ibn Battuta or Jahiz. Modern translations from 7th-12th century Arabic to Modern Standard are either non-existent, or very few and far between. Add to that high levels of illiteracy, censorship, and rote-learning. I read my first 1001 Nights in Burton's translation, not in the original Arabic, although the whole set was adorning our bookshelves when I was growing up.

What books in Arabic get to see the light of the English presses also depends on which political buttons are pushed, as Youssef Rakha writes in his article "A literary prize fight: politics and the International Prize for Arabic Fiction".

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/

Google Translates Pictures into Information

2010-04-04T11:15:00.003+10:00

To learn more about the newest gadgeting Google is doing, read their blog!

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/

Measures to Protect Arabic in ME Media - and what it means

2010-04-04T10:40:00.003+10:00

(MENAFN - Kuwait News Agency (KUNA)) Media figures and field experts called Wednesday for protecting the elements of the Arabic language, as a basis for the region's identity and culture.

Participants in the seminar on 'The Role of Media in Serving the Arabic Language', held by the Arab Center for Educational Research for the Gulf States, said in their recommendations at the conclusion of the three-day event that classical Arabic should be used in official letters and communication between government bodies.

Moreover, they called for making the Arabic language a primary subject taught at all school levels, and to make it compulsory in all mass media colleges, whether in public or private universities.

It also called for selecting editors based on their competence in the language, and for media institutions to coordinate efforts to create programs that focused on the Arabic language.

It also encouraged making children's programs in classical but simple Arabic.

The event saw the participation of media figures, as well as language experts and representatives of education ministries from around the Arab world.

What this means is that if you have been dealing with the Arab Gulf countries, or you are planning to, you will meet with more stringent demands on having your transactions (legal, business, financial) done bilingually, if not fully in Arabic. And because the mood in the Gulf has been very "linguistically and culturally sensitive" over the past few months, cutting corners in the quality of your paperwork by using online translation tools or bilingual non-specialist might just land you in more trouble.

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/

One more language goes the way of the dodo..

2010-04-04T10:03:00.004+10:00

Very sad indeed.

CNN reported on February 5th the death of Boa Sr, 85, the last speaker of Bo. the language which she grew up with, which is said to have evolved over 65,000 years on Andaman islands is officially extinct.

Stephen Corry, the Director of Survival International - a London-based group, which works to protect indigenous peoples - said Boa's loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman islands.

According to UNESCO, at least 240 languages have died since 1950. That's a cultural extinction rate of one language every three months over the last 60 years. Worse news is that the language mortality rate may be accelerating dramatically: worst-case scenario is an extinction rate of a language death every ten days between now and the year 2100.

Greg Rosner writes about this and the similarity between human DNA and languages. There are 6700 languages spoken today, he says, half of which will become extinct in about 25 years. While all humans have 99.9% the exact same DNA, that point one percent carries billions of variations which make up all our different physical (and possibly other) traits as humans. Those differences have been mutating and diverging in modern humans for only about 150,000 years. Which means that the Bo language evolved prior to modern humanity. Fossil record and DNA evidence seems to indicate that all hominids died out 60,000 years ago, with the exception of a small population of humans living in eastern Africa, some 65,000 years ago!!

Language and DNA both evolve, mutate and in many cases, die out. When populations of people live in isolation for long periods of time, (say, a thousand years) their language changes and so does their DNA.While languages and DNA change with different rates of time, it has been natural for both to evolve and adapt into amazing differences. Grammar, syntax, style, spelling. Dialects evolve.

Every time we lose a language we lose human experience, creativity, and a unique perspective of ourselves and the world. We are all weaker every time it happens.
There is something we can do about it--and it's not only a matter of protecting and promoting our own mother tongue. Language and cultural experts tell us that the best way to protect human cultural diversity is to celebrate and share it. Celebrate our own language, yes, but also learn and respect the languages of others.

There is a website where you could learn more about endangered languages.

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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/

Kill the Russians??

2010-04-04T09:55:00.004+10:00

From the Globalisation Group - a hooter as usual:

A few months ago, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released and began setting numerous world records for video game sales. Unfortunately, the game also received negative publicity for including some frustrating mistranslations.

At the center of the issues is the "No Russian" scene, in which [the character] Vladimir Makarov is supposed to tell the player "Remember, no Russian." In the story, this is a straight-forward message: as a Russian nationalist, he doesn't want his men speaking Russian as they kill civilians. But in Japanese, it was apparently translated to, "Kill them; they are Russians."
The result was that Japanese players were shooting the wrong characters in the game, causing the players to prematurely see "game over" flash on the screen. Note translator: be a little extra cautious whenever translating an order to kill or "game over" may not be the worst consequence of your actions. Fortunately, Modern Warfare 2 has been very highly anticipated, so all the publicity enabled confused Japanese players to quickly identify the problem and adjust accordingly. If only everyone could recover so quickly from such translation errors...

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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/

Proz responds to ridiculous translation offers from agencies

2010-04-04T09:11:00.005+10:00

Changes to be made to the ProZ.com job posting system

"Huge movement, the biggest yet seen in this profession.. thousands of people supporting the petition.."

A petition concerning the ProZ.com job posting system ("A Translators' Petition Concerning ProZ.com's Job Policies" was hosted online at iPetitions.com) in February 2010. The stated purpose of the petition was to urge ProZ.com to revise its job-posting policies. In the space of less than four days, 844 translators and interpreters signed the petition.

In response to the petition, ProZ.com staff announced that changes would be made to the job posting system:

"1. The pricing field will be removed from the job posting form.
This change is consistent with the fact that the individual translator is in the best position to determine what he or she needs to charge to deliver the quality required on a particular job.

2. When consistent with member preference, posters will be given an opportunity to specify a budget range (after having posted).
An option to enter budget information will appear, with a suitable explanation, when among those who meet the specified criteria there are one or more members who prefer to take budget information into consideration when deciding whether or not to quote.

3. Even when a client budget range has been specified, it will not be published by default.
Client budget ranges will be accessible only to members who (1) have expressed a preference to consider client budgets, and (2) meet the specified job criteria. (This eliminates the possibility for the job posting system to be used to "popularize" low rates.)

4. More information -- supplied by the community -- will be made available concerning the price of professional translation.
In the void left by the decreased publication of poster positions on rates, guides entitled "Determining what service you need and what it will cost" and "Determining your rates and fees as a translator", will be introduced. These guides, linked to from the job posting and job quoting forms, are already being built by the ProZ.com community in the ProZ.com wiki. (Please consider contributing.)
Together with the guides, real-time data on rates charged by ProZ.com members will be made available for reference by job posters and those quoting. (This will be the topic of further notices in this site area.)

5. A means will be provided, and job posters will be encouraged, to enter more detailed information in job postings.
To quote accurately, jobs have to be posted in sufficient detail. Encouraging job posters to enter as much detail as possible becomes more important with these changes.

6. A means will be provided to enter more detailed rates information in profiles.
Profile owners will be given a means of entering more detailed rates information, such as premiums for rush jobs, etc.

7. The prominence of the job posting system will be reduced overall, with higher priority given to the directory.
The directory has proven to be a much better source of new clients for professional translators.

8. An addition will be made to the ProZ.com professional guidelines on the topic of rates.
Proposed addition: "Professionals: ... set their rates at levels that allow them to deliver, on an ongoing basis, the quality levels that their clients require"

9. Efforts will be made to stimulate industry-wide cooperation to support the livelihood of professional translators.
Several ideas for how to approach this have been considered, but at a minimum, links to groups that are active in this area will be maintained. Please share information related to any groups or individuals that you know that are active in this area.
Of particular interest would be those active in the following areas:

differentiation on the basis of quality
establishing a more direct correlation between quality and price
techniques for boosting productivity
marketing / negotiation / business skills for translators

Note that although these have been areas of focus in ProZ.com events and trainings for some time, there is ongoing demand for training on these topics in various areas and languages. If you have developed programs in these areas, and would like to deliver trainings or sessions on these topics, please make a proposal via support ticket.

10. A host of other steps, both technical and social, will be undertaken. Updates will be posted here.

Note: The above changes will be implemented as soon as development can be carried out. More detail on each of these points, and notice of additional measures, will be posted on an ongoing basis. To be notified when changes are made to this page, subscribe below.

The Proz Founder and CEO, Henry Dotterer, has responded to the petition. You can watch the response here.

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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/

Reading List for the rest of 2010

2010-03-16T12:08:00.003+10:00

The 2010 Best Translated Books:

Ghosts, by César Aira (Argentina)
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

The Twin, by Gerbrand Bakker (Netherlands)
Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer

Anonymous Celebrity, by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (Brazil)
Translated from the Portuguese by Nelson Vieira

Wonder, by Hugo Claus (Belgium)
Translated from the Dutch by Michael Henry Heim

The Weather Fifteen Years Ago, by Wolf Haas (Austria)
Translated from the German by Stephanie Gilardi and Thomas S. Hansen

The Confessions of Noa Weber, by Gail Hareven (Israel)
Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu

The Discoverer, by Jan Kjærstad (Norway)
Translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland

Memories of the Future, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (Russia)
Translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull

Rex, by José Manuel Prieto (Cuba)
Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen

The Tanners, by Robert Walser (Switzerland)
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky

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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/

The EU is taking the first step towards setting the right to an interpreter directive

2010-03-16T11:59:00.003+10:00

THE EUROPEAN Commission has proposed minimum standards for interpretation and translation for suspects standing trial in a country where the language is not their own. The proposed legislation is designed to help people to get a fair trial anywhere in the EU, even when they cannot understand the language of the case.

The need for standardised procedural rights and the barriers which can lead to unfair convictions during judicial proceedings in other EU countries have been highlighted by a number of real-life cases. These include an Italian tourist involved in a traffic accident in Sweden who was not allowed to talk to an Italian-speaking lawyer during trial, and a Polish suspect who could not see written translations of evidence used against him in a French court.

The proposed new Directive replaces a Framework Decision on interpretation and translation rights in July 2009, which became void upon the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty on December 1st, 2009.

On November 30th, 2009, EU governments asked the commission to put forward proposals on a “step-by-step” basis to establish EU-wide standards for a series of procedural rights. The commission is thus turning the proposed Framework Decision into a Directive.

This proposal is the first step in a series of measures to set common EU standards in criminal cases. The Lisbon Treaty enables the EU to adopt measures to strengthen the rights of EU citizens, in line with the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

The proposal strengthens citizens’ rights to interpretation and translation in three ways: interpretation would have to be provided for communication with lawyers as well as during investigations – such as police questioning – and at trial; the proposal covers written translation of all essential documents such as the detention order, the charge sheet or indictment, or vital pieces of evidence; citizens must have the right to legal advice before waiving the right to interpretation and translation; translation and interpretation costs will have to be met by the member state, not by the suspect – irrespective of the final decision.

“We are taking a first important step towards a Europe where justice knows no borders. Nobody in the EU should ever feel that their rights and their protections are weakened simply because they are not in their home countries,” said vice-president Viviane Reding, the EU’s commissioner for justice, fundamental rights and citizenship.

The Directive on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings, proposed by the commission, will be the first Directive to strengthen criminal justice since the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty.

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 .

On translation and belonging

2010-03-16T11:31:00.005+10:00

I remember a discussion a few years ago with one of my colleagues from Cairo, a high caliber Arabic<>English translator, about the English version of Naguib Mahfouz trilogy.

I happen to know the translator of that work. I also happen to have read Naguib in Arabic, and then in English.

My friend said one thing that I could not disagree with: although technically very good, there was no Cairo in the English translation. At least not the Cairo both her and me spent such a long time in.

The Cuban-American writer, Gustavo Perez Firmat, says in one of his poems:

The fact that I

am writing to you

in English

already falsifies what I

wanted to tell you.

My subject:

how to explain to you that I

don’t belong to English

though I belong nowhere else.

Translating culture is a very hard task, and the more the source and target cultures differ, the harder it becomes to bridge the gap. Naguib in Turkish, or Farsi, would probably be more Cairene than Naguib in English or Swedish.

The way around it would be to limit literary and cultural translations to bilingual people who either spent their childhood in the source country, or come from bi-cultural families. Then again, being bilingual, or even bi-cultural, does not make you a brilliant translator. So maybe we could employ them as some sort of consultants to the translator?

Just dreaming aloud..

(Thanks to Patty Ball and The Quad)

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.

Learning Japanese on the Field

2010-03-16T10:43:00.003+10:00

I am not into sport at all, but the following article is about what motivates people to learn another language.

Tommy Manzella is a US baseball player, a shortstop for the Astros. The shortstop is often considered the most dynamic defensive position in baseball because more balls go to the shortstop than any other position.

But he still has time for his index cards. On his team is Matsui, the veteran Japanese second baseman who's in his third year with the Astros. Matsui can speak some beginner English, but Manzella wants to learn to speak to him in his own language. So he is working with Matsui's interpreter and jots down a few words every now and again. He is not aiming at being fluent - he just wants to be able to communicate.

I give him Kudos for that. Most of the words he has learned are at least baseball-related and concern defensive positioning on the infield or the best way to feed balls to Matsui while covering second base. He's also learned some numbers and question words.

What got him into it? A former team manager who worked in Japan told him "it goes a long way as far as your relationship if they see you, not only them trying to make an effort to learn your language, but you making an effort to learn their language. That's the kind of people they are. They show that as a sign of respect. "I was thinking that might be a good idea [to learn a couple words a day]. I think it's good to try to learn a new language because you never know when you're going to need it. I've got a situation here where I have someone I can go to every single day and say, 'Hey, is this right?' and he can help me out. If you wanted to do that normally, you'd have to pay a lot of money to have that kind of a system."

Sign of respect. You never know when you might need it. And it doesn't just apply to the Japanese. It applies to everyone. So if you are doing business (or just playing golf) with someone who is not from an English-speaking background, it pays to know the lingo.

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/.

Bravo, Grossman!

2010-03-16T10:18:00.006+10:00

The typical translator's status can be likened to a ghost writer's — an appendage obscure and underpaid. Like ghost writers, they often receive flat fees and no royalties. Reviewers often overlook them or faintly praise them — and this drives Grossman crazy — for "ably" translating the original text.

"`Ably translated,' compared to what?" asks Grossman, whose "Why Translation Matters," a brief, forceful defense of her profession, is being released by Yale University Press. "The reviewer clearly doesn't read Spanish. How would they know if it is ably translated? They quote long passages to indicate the style of the writer and never credit the translator."

BRAVO, BRAVO!

Grossman would know: she has translated such works as Miguel de Cervantes' 'Don Quixote' and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' 'Love in the Time of Cholera'.

In "Why Translation Matters," Grossman writes of taking on the opening phrase of the first chapter of "Don Quixote," among the most famous words in Spanish literature: "En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme," which in an earlier English-language edition was translated into, "In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind."

Grossman worked on the phrase by reciting the Spanish to herself, "mantralike." She reached for the right mood and rhythm, to recapture how it struck those who read "Quixote" centuries ago. She pondered the word "lugar," which can mean either village or place. The words came to her, like lyrics to a song: "Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember."

Grossman, who turns 74 in March, is curly haired and plainspoken, her voice still flavored by her childhood in a Yiddish-speaking neighborhood in Philadelphia. She had an early interest in languages — although she hardly remembers a word of Yiddish — and by high school was thinking about becoming an interpreter, "which suggested travel, exotic places, important events, world-shaking conferences at the United Nations," she writes in "Why Translation Matters."

Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator’s role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, “My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented.”

For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: “Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable.”

Throughout the four chapters of this bracing volume, Grossman’s belief in the crucial significance of the translator’s work, as well as her rare ability to explain the intellectual sphere that she inhabits as interpreter of the original text, inspires and provokes the reader to engage with translation in an entirely new way.

The full interview with Grossman can be read online. The book can be purchased directly from the publisher's website.

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/

Get a Piece of That Cake, Quickly

2010-03-16T09:32:00.002+10:00

Is your company doing business with the Arab world?

The Google CEO, on a visit to Riyadh, predicted that the Kingdom would have a bright future because of its large young population. He said the Arabic content on the Worldwide Web was expanding by the day. "The Internet Arabic content will increase further due to the presence of a large Arab population estimated at 300 million," he said, adding that Saudi Arabia would have a big role to play in expanding Arabic content on the Internet. According to statistics published in 2009, 48 million Arabs use the Internet.

Google International has two offices in Egypt and Dubai but no presence in any other Arab country. It has introduced Arabic language in its search engine and provides translation services from different languages to Arabic. But be careful - Arabs are very touchy about their language. After all, the language is sacred because the Koran came down in it. So Google-type mess of machine translation is a very sure way of making unhappy and offended clients.

If you are doing business with the Arabic-speaking world, it is time to localise at least the most important parts of your website NOW. 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 www.arabic.com.au .

Tell Tells All About Neosales

2010-03-16T08:48:00.003+10:00

Are you still thinking of lunches and coffees (or maybe something stronger) to clinch that sale with your new direct client? Think no more.

According to Roy Tell from Applied Languages, your website and the technology it uses will now take place of the preliminary chitchat and the martini, because business people do not have the time to engage in business lunches. I don't concur, but I live in Australia, and we are mad about lunches (we don't have martinis). However, lots of what Roy says is true:

1. Globalization: “Information will find you [and] will connect everyone in business, customers—everywhere, and all the time…Entirely new business models, supply chains, customer care networks, markets and industries will be born from this always-on global connectivity. —Get ready now for this shift.” Institute for Global Futures, Global Trends Report 2009

2. Translation technology is changing the localization industry: “Google leaps language barrier with translator phone and [Google] has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents.” (Times Online-UK, February 7, 2010)

3. Traditional sales techniques no longer work: “Consumers frequently consult search engines and websites before heading for the store. This trend will accelerate.” Why Traditional Sales Techniques No Longer Work Well, Marketing Turnkey Systems, August 18, 2009

Which means, in short, that if you don't have a website that is localised, informative and easy to use, you are lagging behind in marketing. More importantly, you may never get the chance to actually talk to the client if they are not "turned-on" by your website.

So Roy is predicting a "translation Apocalypse" end of this year (I want to see that), because "from how we can now access information, to how we evaluate what we read, technology is facilitating the translation of this information and helping us reach that Tower of Babel stage where we once again all speak one “virtual” language. The entire Translation Industry is going to see dramatic changes, and only the companies that are prepared to integrate technology are the ones who will survive (...) Selling in this changing landscape, whether it is translations or anything else, will require a fundamental paradigm shift. Traditional sales approaches will be thrown out, old methodologies scrapped, and a Gestalt-type sales approach is embraced."

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 www.arabic.com.au .

Each language is a unique world of thought

2010-03-16T08:04:00.004+10:00

Languages are not only tools of communication, they also reflect a view of the world. Languages are vehicles of value systems and cultural expressions and are an essential component of the living heritage of humanity. Yet, many of them are in danger of disappearing.

UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger tries to raise awareness on language endangerment.

The editor in chief is the Australian linguist Christopher Moseley. According to him, we have to care about language preservation "because each language is a uniquely structured world of thought, with its own associations, metaphors, ways of thinking, vocabulary, sound system and grammar – all working together in a marvellous architectural structure, which is so fragile that it could easily be lost forever."

In Australia, for instance, there are active and successful campaigns to revive the use of languages that were regarded as dead for generations, but turned out to be only ‘sleeping’. In New Zealand, the Maori language has been rescued from near oblivion through the scheme of ‘language nests’ – nurseries where the language is passed on to young children.

This third edition of the Atlas is new in at least three important ways. Firstly and most obviously, it is being published in two different formats: an on-line version as well as a printed version. The on-line version is an important new development, and is based on Google Earth maps, with the location of each endangered language, no matter how small, pinpointed as exactly as possible on the maps, which can be filtered to any desired scale and level of detail.

Secondly, for the first time the Atlas is giving a comprehensive coverage of the whole world. The previous two editions gave only a sample from some continents of the state of threatened languages, but this time we have been careful to cover every language, and, as before, to show the level of endangerment, from “Unsafe” down to “Moribund” with a system of colour coding. The UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, freely available, aims to provide speaker communities, policy-makers and the general public with state-of-the-art knowledge, continually updated by a growing network of experts and community members. The online edition of the Atlas includes all of the information in the print edition and much more.

And thirdly, the Atlas is available in three languages: English, French and Spanish, with possibly more translations to come later.

Below is the Table of Contents:

Preface, p. 4
Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO

Introduction, p. 8
Christopher Moseley

Cartographic representation of the world’s endangered languages, p. 14
Christopher Moseley

Sub-Saharan Africa, p. 20
Matthias Brenzinger and Herman Batibo

North Africa and the Middle East, p. 26
Salem Mezhoud and Yamina El Kirat El Allame

Europe and the Caucasus, p. 32
Tapani Salminen

Western and Central Asia, p. 43
Hakim Elnazarov

North-east Asia, p. 48
Juha Janhunen

India and the Himalayan chain, p. 59
Stuart Blackburn and Jean Robert Opgenort

South-East Asia, southern China and Taiwan (China), p. 64
David Bradley

Greater Pacific area, p. 74
Darrell T. Tryon

Australia, p. 79
Michael Walsh

South America, p. 86
Willem Adelaar

South America: Andean region, p. 95
Marleen Haboud

Mexico and Central America, p. 103
Yolanda Lastra

United States of America, p. 108
Chris Rogers, Naomi Palosaari and Lyle Campbell

Canada and Greenland, p. 113
Mary Jane Norris

Contributors, p. 122

Bibliography, p. 125

Index, p. 137

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 www.arabic.com.au.

Literature, translation, globalisation

2010-03-15T23:30:00.002+10:00

"The Dull New Global Novel" essay by Parks in the NY Review of Books poses the hypothesis of "boredom" and "dullness".

The new "global" novel, written by someone in country X but intended for audiences from all over the world, will be boring by default because, as Parks says, "From the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension. Writing in the 1960’s, intensely engaged with his own culture and its complex politics, Hugo Claus apparently did not care that his novels would require a special effort on the reader’s and above all the translator’s part if they were to be understood outside his native Belgium. In sharp contrast, contemporary authors like the Norwegian Per Petterson, the Dutch Gerbrand Bakker, or the Italian Alessandro Baricco, offer us works that require no such knowledge or effort, nor offer the rewards that such effort will bring. More importantly the language is kept simple. Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader."

Mr Parks is making assumptions not born out by facts: that the "international" readership is dumb, and that translators can't translate literature.

The fact that there is a global market for any novel (witness Dan Brown and Rowlings) is in itself fully dependent on the existence and high skills of literary translators. Parks is saying that if it can be translated it isn’t literary — or the truly literary parts of literature are those parts that can’t be translated.

Except that we cannot ever agree on what is and what is not "truly literary". The way things are going, I am finding lots of post-modern novels in general incomprehensible in my native English, and I don't envy any translator the task of having to convey the already opeque language into another. Meaningless mambo-jumbo in English is not truly literary - it is literary mambo-jumbo. I could give a long list of examples, but I would run out of space, and court defamation lawyers.

That which can be translated is the essence of literature. Every translation is a witness to the unidentifiable beauty of Language.

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 www.arabic.com.au.

Bartleman, proudly anglo-Québecoise

2010-03-15T23:10:00.001+10:00

I am trilingual. So Bartleman's story made me smile, appreciate and bond...

Currently living in Squamish BC, Bartleman is a proud Canadian athlete who has come to understand the importance of French/English bilingualism. “I am a big supporter and enthusiastic proponent of Canadian bilingualism, a subject that is often treated with a lot of contempt and mockery out here in Western Canada,” she writes in her blog.

Originally from Montreal, Bartleman grew up in an English-speaking home and is the oldest of four children. In her early years, her family moved to Alberta where she attended a French immersion elementary school. Growing up, she didn’t understand the full scope of her parents’ insistence on bilingualism and like most children, didn’t care for French in school.

Around age 11, she and her family moved back to Montreal where she attended an English high school. “It’s different when you’re in Montreal once you get to high school. You go to French class in high school in Montreal and sure you might hate it, but then you go out with your friends who are French or who speak French and it translates right . . . no pun intended.”

While Bartleman went on to pursue her life’s passions, she began to understand her father’s insistence on her learning Canada’s other official language. As she travelled across the country, she noticed that a whole lot of people speak French in Canada. “I go other places in Canada and meet all these francophones and I think it’s really cool.”

As she started participating in international competition, Michelle understood the importance of her second official language even more, meeting other athletes from around the world, making friends and picking up other languages in the process!

“I recently had this enlightenment, after speaking at the Jour de la francophonie where there were all these BC francophones,” she says. “I had the realization that I’m their counterpart. I’m an anglophone Quebecer, an anglo-Québecoise.”

As guest speaker, Bartleman delivered her speech in French. Some other speakers were unable to deliver their speeches in Canada’s other official language. She describes this in her blog: “I couldn't understand why the francophones, on their day, were still pandering to the anglos. And then it struck me. The BC francophones at this event get it. They understand the give and take needed to perpetuate understanding and appreciation between different cultures. They realize that, even on their day, they need to respect and accommodate anglophones in they same way that they as francophones hope to be accommodated and respected every other day of the year.”

Hard Marketing Blooper

2010-03-15T10:21:00.003+10:00

One would have thought that writing a press release for your translation business is precisely the activity that will showcase these linguistic skills. As such, I find it difficult to consider the snippet below as anything else but a blooper (machine translated??)

Are you looking for someone who would translate your business letters for English and Spanish translations?? Finding a language expert is not an easy task. One has to really work harder to get a good translator as learning and translating a language is a difficult task and there are only few experts available in the market. Don’t worry we don’t want to scare you but this is ground reality. Just chillax!! we have some exciting offers which would leave your mouth open. We at Golocalise.com now introduce best translation services especially for English translation and Spanish translation.

"Translate for translations?" Sound like a book title - maybe there is also "translate for car mechanics", "7 Days to Translate for New Mums" and so on? And how "harder" do you need to work to find an expert (in Spanish, there are a few score thousand good translators). The term "harder" bring weird connotations - what are these guys into? "Harder" and "Chillax" go together well.. first you go harder then you chill an ax? Exciting comes at the wrong sequence, though - one usually gets excited, harder, mouth open then chills.. Especially with the photo that this ad carries.

The ad further requests that the reader "just close (..) eyes and give us once chance to deliver". Oh, boy! I would have to close my eyes to have the guts to hand them my work.. once!

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 www.arabic.com.au.

"In Fact"

2010-03-10T12:35:00.002+10:00

Another freelancer not to be added to my list of potential contractors:

Dear sir:
In fact I am a freelance translator from Yemen (Arabic native speaker)who has a university degree in translation and English literature. I can translate from English to Arabic. I have three years of experience. And I am doing my master degree in Transaltion . In fact I am wondering if I can join your team as afreelance from- home transaltor; I won't take much ( 25$ per 1000 word). Being ready to take such fees doesnot mean that I am not a good translator, for you can test this yourself. Iwill send you My C.V and a sample of my translation once I get a reply.
wish you contaced me.
Faithfully,
MM

(a) I am no Sir - he didn't do his research
(b) 25 bucks per 1K words does not inspire confidence, neither do his typos. Maybe he types 1K words per 25 seconds?
(c) Since he wished I contacted him, he obviously was aware it was a mere wish - in fact, he only stayed in my inbox long enough to be blogged here.

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/.

The Dam

2010-03-10T12:34:00.001+10:00

This is apparently an actual letter sent to a man named Ryan DeVries regarding a pond on his property. It was sent by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Quality, State of Pennsylvania . This guy's response is hilarious, but read the State's letter before you get to the response letter.

SUBJECT: DEQ File No.97-59-0023; T11N; R10W, Sec. 20; Lycoming County

Dear Mr. DeVries:

It has come to the attention of the Department of Environmental Quality that there has been recent unauthorized activity on the above referenced parcel of property. You have been certified as the legal landowner and/or contractor who did the following unauthorized activity:

Construction and maintenance of two wood debris dams across the outlet stream of Spring Pond.

A permit must be issued prior to the start of this type of activity. A review of the Department's files shows that no permits have been issued. Therefore, the Department has determined that this activity is in violation of Part 301, Inland Lakes and Streams, of the Natural Resource and Environmental Protection Act, Act 451 of the Public Acts of 1994, being sections 324.30101 to 324.30113 of the Pennsylvania Compiled Laws, annotated.

The Department has been informed that one or both of the dams partially failed during a recent rain event, causing debris and flooding at downstream locations. We find that dams of this nature are inherently hazardous and cannot be permitted. The Department therefore orders you to cease and desist all activities at this location, and to restore the stream to a free-flow condition by removing all wood and brush forming the dams from the stream channel. All restoration work shall be completed no later than January 31, 2009.

Please notify this office when the restoration has been completed so that a follow-up site inspection may be scheduled by our staff. Failure to comply with this request or any further unauthorized activity on the site may result in this case being referred for elevated enforcement action. We anticipate and would appreciate your full cooperation in this matter. Please feel free to contact me at this office if you have any questions.

Sincerely,
David L. Price
District Representative and Water Management Division.

Here is the actual response sent back by Mr. DeVries:

Re: DEQ File No. 97-59-0023; T11N; R10W, Sec. 20; Lycoming County

Dear Mr. Price,

Your certified letter dated 12/17/07 has been handed to me to respond to. I am the legal landowner but not the Contractor at 2088 Dagget Lane , Trout Run, Pennsylvania .

A couple of beavers are in the (State unauthorized) process of constructing and maintaining two wood 'debris' dams across the outlet stream of my Spring Pond. While I did not pay for, authorize, nor supervise their dam project, I think they would be highly offended that you call their skillful use of natures building materials 'debris.'

I would like to challenge your department to attempt to emulate their dam project any time and/or any place you choose. I believe I can safely state there is no way you could ever match their dam skills, their dam resourcefulness, their dam ingenuity, their dam persistence, their dam determination and/or their dam work ethic.

These are the beavers/contractors you are seeking. As to your request, I do not think the beavers are aware that they must first fill out a dam permit prior to the start of this type of dam activity.

My first dam question to you is:

(1) Are you trying to discriminate against my Spring Pond Beavers, or

(2) Do you require all beavers throughout this State to conform to said dam request?

If you are not discriminating against these particular beavers, through the Freedom of Information Act, I request completed copies of all those other applicable beaver dam permits that have been issued.

(Perhaps we will see if there really is a dam violation of Part 301, Inland Lakes and Streams, of the Natural Resource and Environmental Protection Act, Act 451 of the Public Acts of 1994, being sections 324.30101 to 324.30113 of the Pennsylvania Compiled Laws, annotated.)

I have several concerns. My first concern is, aren't the beavers entitled to legal representation? The Spring Pond Beavers are financially destitute and are unable to pay for said representation -- so the State will have to provide them with a dam lawyer. The Department's dam concern that either one or both of the dams failed during a recent rain event, causing flooding, is proof that this is a natural occurrence, which the Department is required to protect. In other words, we should leave the Spring Pond Beavers alone rather than harassing them and calling them dam names.

If you want the stream 'restored' to a dam free-flow condition please contact the beavers -- but if you are going to arrest them, they obviously did not pay any attention to your dam letter, they being unable to read English.

In my humble opinion, the Spring Pond Beavers have a right to build their unauthorized dams as long as the sky is blue, the grass is green and water flows downstream. They have more dam rights than I do to live and enjoy Spring Pond. If the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection lives up to its name, it should protect the natural resources (Beavers) and the environment (Beavers' Dams).

So, as far as the beavers and I are concerned, this dam case can be referred for more elevated enforcement action right now. Why wait until 1/31/2009? The Spring Pond Beavers may be under the dam ice then and there will be no way for you or your dam staff to contact/harass them.

In conclusion, I would like to bring to your attention to a real environmental quality, health, problem in the area. It is the bears! Bears are actually defecating in our woods. I definitely believe you should be persecuting the defecating bears and leave the beavers alone. If you are going to investigate the beaver dam, watch your step! The bears are not careful where they dump!

Being unable to comply with your dam request, and being unable to contact you on your dam answering machine, I am sending this response to your dam office.

THANK YOU,

RYAN DEVRIES
& THE DAM BEAVERS

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/.

A Linguistic Joke for the Sophisticated

2010-03-10T12:13:00.000+10:00

Prince Charles is visiting an Edinburgh hospital. He enters a ward full of patients with no obvious sign of injury or illness and greets one.

The patient replies:

"Fair fa your honest sonsie face,
Great chieftain o the puddin race,
Aboon them a ye take yer place,
Painch, tripe or thairm,
As langs my airm."

Charles is confused, so he just grins and moves on to the next patient. The patient responds:

"Some hae meat an canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat an we can eat,
So let the Lord be thankit."

Even more confused, and his grin now rictus-like, the Prince moves on to the next patient, who immediately begins to chant:

"Wee sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
Wha' sich a panic in thy breastie,
Thou needna start awa sae hastie,
Wi bickering brattle."

Now seriously troubled, Charles turns to the accompanying doctor and asks "Is this a psychiatric ward?"

"No," replies the doctor, "this is the serious Burns unit."

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/.

How Do You Want to Look in Translation?

2010-03-10T07:49:00.004+10:00

If you’re seeking to translate any kind of business documents, marketing materials or web pages, it is important that you obtain an accurate English to Arabic translation from the beginning. Using automatic text translators or a button on your toolbar that instantly translates a web page into Arabic might be very tempting, especially from the cost point of view, but these translations are not fit for public view, because although some of the words may be translated accurately, the meaning of your message most probably won’t.

Your document or website represents your business and reflects it to the international client base. Any mistake made or left behind by an automatic translating software or an inexperienced human translator can cost you lots of future business.

This is why it’s important to choose the translator you are giving your business image to very carefully.

Here is how:

* Always ensure that the professional translator of your choice is native in the language you want to have your documents translated into, except in the rare situations where that person is fully fluent in both the written and spoken forms of both the source and the target languages.

* If you’re looking at promoting your service or product to Arabic speaking North Africans, you shouldn't use the same vocabulary used in, say, the Arab Gulf. Although written Arabic is pretty standard, cultural differences do exist and you will not come across as someone who has done a thorough research of your proposed market place overseas.

* Do you really need the whole of your documents translated? Most translators charge by the word or page, so it does make sense to utilise images - a picture is worth 1000 words. Instructions, for example, could be pictured, and you may consider using the services of a graphic designer who can provide accurate pictures, and thus reduce your translation costs. Just ensure that your graphics are not considered offensive by your target clients.

* Compare the subject matter and technical content of your documents to the proposed translator’s qualifications. Translators specialise and not everyone can translate legal or medical documents. Terminology associated with these fields is very precise and mistakes in translations could result in serious consequences.

* Quality is not cheap. Reading and translating your documents takes time. A translator can only do so many words per day, so be wary of claims to be able to translate 50,000 words per day. Such work will for sure lack quality and won’t be worth the money you spend.

* Don't give your translators documents that are unedited and unfinalised, because any last minute changes to the initial document will result in additional proofreading to ensure that their incorporation in the final translation, the consistency of terminology, etc.

* A good translator doesn't shrink from approaching you with questions and suggestions about possible improvements to your original text in terms of spelling, grammar and sentence structure, or meaning of certain terms. A know-all is a sure fire way to disaster.

Investing money and time in ensuring a properly done translation will save you grief and cash later in the business interaction with your target market. The translated documents will work FOR YOU instead of AGAINST YOU. Remember, this is YOU in translation - what do you want to convey?

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/.

Google Chrome Translation Software

2010-03-04T00:05:00.003+10:00

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/.

KIT, lip-reading, and a multilingual mobile phone

2010-03-03T23:58:00.003+10:00

From AFP 02/03/10

It has happened to almost everyone. You are sitting on a train or a bus and someone right next to you is annoyingly shouting into his or her mobile phone.

Researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed a method for mobile phones to convert silent mouth movements into speech. The technology is based on the principle of electromyography, that is the acquisition and recording of electrical potentials generated by muscle activity. This muscle activity is measured in the face and converted into speech.

The user can speak into the phone soundlessly, but is still understood by the conversation partner on the other end of the line. As a result, it is possible to communicate in silent environments, at the cinema or theater, without disturbing others. Another field of use is the transmission of confidential information.

"We currently use electrodes which are glued to the skin. In the future, such electrodes might for example by incorporated into cellphones," said Michael Wand, from the KIT.

The technology opens up a host of applications, from helping people who have lost their voice due to illness or accident to telling a trusted friend your PIN number over the phone without anyone eavesdropping -- assuming no lip-readers are around.

The technology can also turn you into an instant polyglot. Because the electrical pulses are universal, they can be immediately transformed into the language of the user's choice.

"Native speakers can silently utter a sentence in their language, and the receivers hear the translated sentence in their language. It appears as if the native speaker produced speech in a foreign language," said Wand.

The translation technology works for languages like English, French and Gernan, but for languages like Chinese, where different tones can hold many different meanings, poses a problem, he added.

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/.

Meedan Bridges Language, Culture

2010-03-03T23:51:00.005+10:00

From Robert Lukes, Dakota

A new website was launched last month with the intention of providing a means of communication between the Arabic- and English-speaking worlds. Meedan, the Arabic word for "gathering place" or "town square," is meant to symbolize the old town squares where people would gather together and discuss community issues.

Arabic-language websites have been fairly unrepresented in the internet, but this is set to change in the near future. Vinton Cerf, a vice president at Google, estimated that the number of Arabic-speaking internet users in the Middle East will increase by 46.4 percent in the next three years, creating a great opportunity for increased communication between people across the planet.

The method for this breakthrough is a computer translation program that translates articles, blogs, and comments into the language of the reader. This automated translation is augmented by a team of experts and reader contributions-not unlike Wikipedia-to fix any inaccuracies in the computer translation.

In this way, Meedan intends to break through the familiar narrative of conflict between peoples. Through creating an online community, the people behind Meedan hope to bring the people into direct communication with each other. Much has been said about the gap in understanding between the English-speaking world and the so-called 'Arab street.'

More information, can be found at news.meedan.net.

I just hope they don't start some war by using translation software for this praiseworthy project.

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/.

Translation isn't enough

2010-03-03T23:33:00.005+10:00

Chanin Balance, President & CEO of viaLanguage, on international marketing:

- By the end of 2010 over 1 billion people will have access to the Web.

- Non-English speaking consumers drive nearly 70% of the world's economy.

- Companies are leveraging the power of the Web to present themselves and their products [to new consumers].

- Language tools are great but they can't account for cultural differences and language nuances.

- The use of social platforms, video clips, tweets and other tools, companies must adapt not only to the language differences but to cultural differences.

- In the short-term, campaigns should be created country-by-country, with both language and cultural differences taken into account.

- There are smart things businesses can do to be reusable such as internationalizing their copy. Once the labor-intensive translation and localization is done and proofed, one should take that content and design all their documents, campaigns and products to easily adapt to the various languages and regional markets without the need for major engineering on their Web sites.

- Communication challenges frequently occur when businesses begin to market across cultures. One key step that is often overlooked or short-cutted, is localization. No matter what vehicle you use, multicultural marketing is more than just translating an advertisement, website or even a blog or twitter posting. Businesses need to actually embrace the nuance of a culture and culturally adapt their messages and brand.

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/.

Humphrey Does It Again

2010-03-03T23:22:00.003+10:00

From the Egyptian Al Ahram, no. 985, 11 - 17 February 2010

Injy El-Kashef

"Piles of publications by the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press were displayed outside the Oriental Hall on Monday 8 February, proudly bearing the name of Banipal Award winner Humphrey Davies, whose translations include Naguib Mahfouz' Thebes at War, Alaa El-Aswani's The Yacoubian Building, Ahmed El-Aidi's Being Abbas El-Abd, Mohamed Mustagab's Tales From Dayrut, Gamal Al-Ghitany's Pyramid Texts, Khaled Al-Berry's Life Is More Beautiful Than Paradise, Ahlam Mosteghanemi's Chaos of the Senses and Hamdy El-Gazzar's Black Magic. Inaugurating the second in AUC's In Translation series of lectures, professor of Arabic Studies and director of the Centre for Translation Studies, Samia Mehrez explained that the Centre's ambition is to go past "inter-lingual" into "inter-semiotic" translation in order to generate the greatest possible exchange for the benefit of an ever-growing community of intercultural readers.

The second distinguished guest at the series, Humphrey Davies was introduced not only as the prominent translator who has delivered some 15 outstanding works of Arabic literature to English speakers, but also as the "audacious" man who gave up promising careers that his doctoral degree from the University of California and his employment at Non-Governmental Organisations operating in Egypt, Palestine, Sudan and Tunisia would have facilitated. "I love words for their own sake," commented Davies with charming self-awareness, asserting that his ultimate choice of a career in translation has, despite possible odds, allowed him to "pay the bills, put bread on the table and go on vacations. I definitely encourage a career in translation for those who have the same passion for words."

His first published translation, in 2000, appeared in Banipal -- it was Sayed Ragab's short story Rat, in Egyptian Arabic -- affording Davies the first "bread" from his burgeoning career as a translator. The hook, however, had presented itself three years before, in the form of an extremely ambitious project that both "confront[ed] me with many tough translational issues, and [became] addictive, and encouraged me to try my hand at making a living from translation and allied skills," he is quoted in Banipal. The work in question was the "preparation of a critical edition, translation and lexicon of an Egyptian work of the Ottoman period, Yusuf al-Shirbini's Hazz al-Quhuf bi-Sharh Qasid Abi Shaduf (Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded)". He became "manic" about words, and so "confident" in the certitude of his ardour that he did not "feel the risk" inherent in turning translation into a career, especially as the post-9/ 11 world and increasingly globalized international community made translations from Arabic a commodity in much higher demand than it was 20 years ago.

Davies' allure as a person, in fact, partly lies in his loyalty to his inner beliefs -- which seem to have repaid him, in time, for his keen self- perception and devotion. It all began with a "mid-adolescence crisis" which erupted when he realised that he "hated" both English literature and his presence among the throngs who were enrolled in its study. He needed a subject with a "more intimate atmosphere [and so] took a leap into the dark" -- a student of English literature among hundreds, he became one of the four enrolled in the study of Arabic language at Cambridge. From then on, the need to engage with the Arab world became increasingly pressing -- the driving force being "putting oneself in others' shoes," especially as further study of the language yielded an awareness of its unfathomable complexity and richness.

Although he initially envisioned the option of translation in short-term goals, stumbling upon the English translation of Marcel Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu irreversibly internalised Davies' notion that a translation can be a great work of literature in its own right. Although he had "never taken a creative writing course in my life [and] never written a primary work of literature in English," Davies, consolidated in his profound mastery of both colloquial and classical Arabic, began translating the works that he personally esteemed to be of artistic value, as a reader. When asked to define what he viewed as "artistic value", this man of "instinct", seemingly lost for words to explain what he perceived as obvious, shrugged while attempting to clarify: "artistic value is... it's what turns you on". As for the reader he has in mind while translating, Davies' answer was witty, truthful and simple: "Someone well educated, highly cultured... someone like me." On numerous occasions Davies managed, effortlessly, to extract laughter from the audience -- his modest, yet secure, demeanour so engaging that the evening was as fluffy on the soul as it was dense on the mind.

The role of the translator vis-à-vis both the text and the author were extensively addressed, breaking with the image of the translator as someone cloaked in invisibility, living in the shadow of the author. Although Davies took this opportunity to congratulate AUC Press on their respect and appreciation of the role of the translator, evidenced in their placing the latter's name on the cover of the book, he still asserted, "invisibility is a relief for me," clarifying that he has "a preference for what I might call 'deep meaning' and 'function' over surface and form." What continues to test this particular translator is the increasing tendency of modern Arabic literature for "free and direct speech, in which the text flows in and out of tense without any particularly referential context. Tenses are slippery in Arabic," he says, adding, "punctuation conventions in [a state of] flux". The often weak state of copy editing adds to the mix of challenges he struggles with. "When you call the author to ask him if he meant 'put his feet on the bath' or 'put his feet on the path', you really feel like an idiot," he chuckles.

Is his relationship with the text one of submission or control? "Submission," he replies. "The sort of question that goes through my head while translating is, what does the author really mean here and how would I say it if I were using English?" The historic debate on "domesticating versus foreignizing translation" is, according to Davis, one the "most fascinating, complex and important issues in translation theory... I give it no thought." Other considerations that have no bearing on Davies are issues of gender and politics -- I've Had Enough by Effat Yehia being one of only two works by women translated by him. "In don't think in these terms," he explains. "My only consideration is finding the book artistically compelling." Nor does he feel he should be shouldering the responsibility for canon formation; "it would be presumptuous of me to believe that I would have an impact on forming the canon. The canon will form itself."

Every single author, ultimately, will present the translator with challenges, be they "intense lyricism, helter-skelter rushes in streams of consciousness or unfamiliar slang that may be unknown even to the readers of the original language." Can any work of literature be untranslatable? "I philosophically don't want to believe that. There is no such thing as a book that cannot be translated. There are only texts that haven't found their translators yet."

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/.

Nothing But Good News

2010-03-03T22:57:00.004+10:00

Jessica Lambertson from Government Executive (USA) on how the US Administration is spending money on translations:

- Federal spending on language contracts skyrocketed from nearly $14.9 million in 1990 to more than $1 billion in 2009.

- The Army, for instance, went from spending $260 million on language contracts in 2007 to $834 million in 2008.

- The Homeland Security Department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration have increased spending on such services significantly since 2007. ICE's spending on language contracts grew $5.6 million from 2007 to 2008, for instance, rising from $19.5 million to $25.1 million.

- spending on language service contracts will continue to grow during the Obama administration. Despite the ballooning deficit and spending crunch, President Obama's programs for foreign trade, diplomacy and domestic multiculturalism urge the federal government to continue to use translation and interpretation services, the research group noted.

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/.

"Québécois" TinTin causes offence

2010-03-03T22:45:00.003+10:00

Since the publisher of Tintin first introduced "regional-language" editions of the popular comic book 30 years ago, readers in places from Alsace to Tahiti have been charmed to discover the boy reporter using their local dialect.

Not in Quebec.

Graeme Hamilton, from the National Post, reports that far from being flattered by the Québécois "translation", some are offended by the fact that it is written in a dialect. Which means it isn't pure. It isn't pure means it isn't French..

"In Quebec, we may speak strangely, but we write in French, and little Quebecers can read Tintin in the original, even learning a few new words along the way," Odile Tremblay wrote in Le Devoir. "So, a translation.... We have a bit of pride left. Don't go taking that from us. Seriously!"

Seriously! I agree. I should send the article to every time an agency asks me to give the a translation in "Sudanese Arabic" or some other such anomaly. Spoken dialects are one thing - but "they write/read in Arabic"...like all civilised Arabic-speakers. It is a mark of being educated and cultivated. If you can't read it, then you won't be able to read it in some weird dialect either.

"We have a bit of pride left. Don't go taking that from us. Seriously!"

When Languages Die - an interview with K David Harrison

2010-03-03T21:30:00.005+10:00

BBC article by K David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, and director of research for the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, stresses the tragedy of dying languages..

The Linguists, a film featuring the work of Professor K David Harrison and colleague Gregory Anderson as they travel the world documenting the world's vanishing tongues, was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008. He also write the book "When languages Die." A sample of that fascinating book can be read online.

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/.

Marsot's "Langue étrangère" untranslatable into French

2010-03-03T20:06:00.003+10:00

I wrote about Vanina Marsot in April last year.

Now Marsot speaks of her experiences as a bilingual writer writing about the differences between her two languages..

"As I was writing it, I noticed there weren’t any novels that addressed my particular pet idea. There are lots of books about people moving to France, but they tend to be written by outsiders looking in: people entranced or repelled, caught up in the humor or frustration, privilege or disadvantage of being a foreigner in France. The French, they are so: puzzling, frustrating, intriguing, annoying, rude, smelly, precise, chic, and/or (insert your adjective here). But a bilingual woman is both an insider and an outsider.

Funny, then, that it turns out my novel seems to be untranslatable, at least into the other language it is about, French.

There’s a lot of French in my book. I think and hope it’s written so that even if you never studied the language, you can still understand what’s going on in the French passages, which are commented upon in English by my narrator. But here’s the crux of the matter: the French phrases and expressions in the book are dissected in English; that is, understood and parsed through English. So, though the novel is in English (the protagonist), there’s a necessary tension with French, the antagonist. If you translate everything into French, the tension is gone. You’d have to convey that the French-language voice is that of a bilingual American, who is commenting on the French language; so, you’d read a French voice puzzling over odd French phrases — in French! Perhaps a really good literary translator could do this, but I’m not sure how."

Here is an interview with the writer...

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/.

What if We Only Had One Language?

2010-03-03T19:47:00.004+10:00

Catherine Porter, MLA President, has a wonderful entry on the Asian Languages blog. Here is an excerpt:

Lately, as a thought experiment, I’ve tried to imagine living in a world without translators. A preposterous notion, to be sure, although perhaps no more so than others we accept as premises for entertainment, for example, the notion that a certain Benjamin Button is born old and proceeds to grow younger. In any event, to anchor the exercise in a bit of science fiction, I’m positing that the human brain has evolved to permit the learning of just a single language; translation is thus out of the question. The resulting world, as I picture it, is radically and starkly diminished. Pursuing the experiment through the prism of my own tradition, which members of my generation typically encountered in curricular form as “ancient history” followed by “Western civilization,” I see that the Arabs, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Hebrews, and the Romans learned nothing from one another. There has been no New Testament, no Renaissance, no Reformation, no Enlightenment, no scientific or industrial revolution. There is no American Constitution, no United Nations Charter, no European Union. Works of literature, philosophy, scholarship, and science that may have been produced in other linguistic contexts are forever inaccessible to speakers of English—and of course the English language itself has not developed in anything like its present form.

Fortunately for us, the human brain in its plasticity took a more propitious evolutionary path. Human beings can and do learn multiple languages; translators and interpreters have always been with us, and we need them as much as ever.

Porter then gives reasons for the need:

(1) Despite the advances in Machine Translation, it is not clear when these software programs will be able to handle the syntactic, stylistic, and cultural complexities of literary, philosophical, or scholarly texts, if ever.

(2) English is not always an option, and multilingual people have a demonstrated advantage over only-English monolinguists.

(3) Globalization + knowledge explosion facilitated by digital media = increasingly diverse sources of new knowledge, and translators will be in increasing demand.

(4) Apparently, there is a great unmet demand for educated translators and interpreters, and translation is an ideal context for developing translingual and transcultural abilities as an organizing principle of the language curriculum.. (so why aren't they paid as much as brain surgeons??)

Now the painful truth:

"[in] the history of the Anglo-American tradition [a]good translations must be fluid and transparent and good translators must stay out of sight. The invisibility of the translator has become a cliché, but it is by no means a myth. Presses don’t want to advertise books as translations. Newspapers sometimes publish translated texts without acknowledging the fact. Academics have been known to remove translations from their curriculum vitae to avoid jeopardizing their chances for promotion or tenure. And until recently, few universities in the English-speaking world have acknowledged translation as a legitimate area of study."

Arrrrgh.. This is, of course, Venuti, trying to make a translator visible by using words such as 'swell"..

And Porter is right: no where else in the world would a sane academic remove the fact that they have translated serious work from their CVs. So when migrating to places such as UK, USA or Australia, translators from non-English speaking backgrounds quickly feel the frustration of becoming nobodies.

The Chronicle also published a recent article about literary translator visibility in recent years.

"Translation is having a moment, or a series of moments. But its champions say the fight is far from over to have translation—not the theory of it but the hands-on, roll-up-your-sleeves, get-out-your-lexicons variety—recognized as a legitimate scholarly activity. In the United States, it's nearly impossible to make a living as an independent literary translator. It's almost as hard to get an academic job as one." Scary! In Egypt, you wouldn't even dream of getting a publishing house to approach you with a book translation of you do not have a PhD in the discipline you are translating about.

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/.

Japanese Human Translators Here to Stay

2010-03-03T19:38:00.004+10:00

..says Ry Beville, himself a translator from Japanese to English..

The reason, says Beville, is that translation programs like those provided by Google and Babelfish can handle business letters and websites to a reasonable degree; they at least convey the gist of a text, but they still have a long way to go before they become truly viable. The fact that their translations need to be heavily edited isn’t the problem. It’s all the meaning that is lost, especially between Japanese and English. Linguistic science tells us these languages are worlds apart. For a native-English speaker, Japanese is a level-five language, meaning the hardest to master (a distinction it shares with Arabic). Creating a program that can negotiate such vast differences seems like a quixotic dream perhaps exceeded in difficulty only by the pursuit of robust artificial intelligence.

Beville is no Luddite himself, and freely acknowledges the debt of online dictionaries in his career. His proposed solutions are quite interesting in themselves: an open-source translation program that works by concensus, its entries by no means absolute, but rather refined through increasing participation in the project. A program could always map out the structure of a given sentence (remember diagramming sentences?) and use those discrete values to create a correspondence in the target language. The second option would be to begin compiling publicly available translations of identical or similar structures and finding a kind of average or typical rendering of those structures.

But that won't always work, because even though generally accepted grammar structures are finite, possible combinations of words and their meanings within those structures approach infinity. Mapping structures, compiling known translations, refining the system — it all seems so Sisyphean, even for a computer or enormous open-source project.

The full article, worth reading, can be found here.

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/.

Australian English Regionalisms

2010-03-03T19:08:00.003+10:00

If you are interested in hearing how Australians from different parts of the continent pronounce English words, all you need to do is to visit Macquarie University website and do a few clicks on the map..

A new interactive website launched this Australia Day is the first publicly accessible resource to detail information about the formation of the Australian accent and how it has evolved.

Australian Voices was developed by Macquarie University speech scientists Dr Felicity Cox and Dr Sallyanne Palethorpe as part of an ongoing study of the way Australians speak.

Visitors to the site can listen to audio files and compare accents and dialects belonging to different cultural, social and regional groups, and can even participate in the research by submitting audio files of their own speech or that of family members.

A person's accent can vary depending on their age and gender, as well as their social, cultural and regional history or affiliation. Until recently, researchers classified speakers of Australian English - those born in Australia or raised here from a young age - into one of three categories - either broad (colloquially described as ‘ocker'), cultivated (a more British sounding accent type) or general (the accent spoken by the majority of Australian English speakers).

To more accurately define Australian English as it stands today, Cox and Palethorpe have broadened the definition of Australian English by identifying three different dialect sub-groups - Standard Australian English, Australian Aboriginal English and various Ethnocultural Australian English varieties - and say this new classification system is more inclusive of the variation that is present amongst Australian English speakers.

Accents are always changing, and Australian English today is very different from that which was spoken 100 years ago. Milestone events in Australia's history have been paralleled by linguistic change, and so even speakers of general Australian English sound very different today than they did in the past.

"The way we speak is closely tied to identity, social dynamics and social cohesiveness," Cox said. "It's an instinctive thing - we find ourselves slotting into the speech patterns of the people we spend the most time with and this is particularly true of children and adolescents who are the initiators of accent change."

The website invites users to explore accent change through the extensive use of audio files, which take listeners on a linguistic journey spanning 100 years.

"People are often reminded of their grandparents when they listen to our early audio clips," Cox said. "Many factors have played a part in shaping the way we speak, from the dialect mix that was present in the early days of the colony, to social change during World War I, the dismissal of the Whitlam Government, and the increasing linguistic diversity resulting from Multiculturalism."

Swell Venuti

2010-03-03T17:45:00.003+10:00

An article from Temple University talks about Lawrence Venuti's translation from Catalan of Ernest Farrés’s Edward Hopper , a work that has won Venuti the second annual Robert Fagles Translation Prize, sponsored by the National Poetry Series.

A leading theorist in his field, Venuti is at the forefront of what might be called a translation renaissance. Once invisible in their behind-the-scenes roles, translators are increasingly recognized in academic and publishing arenas for their contributions to the literary process.

The most prevalent translation strategy has been to adhere to the current standard dialect of the translating language, which is the most familiar and least noticeable to the reader. This kind of translation, according to Venuti, effaces the translator’s presence and erases cultural distinctions.

“Translation rewrites a foreign text in terms that are intelligible and interesting to readers in the receiving culture. Doing so is akin to committing an act of ethnocentric violence by uprooting the text from the language and culture that gave it life. Translating into current, standard English at once conceals that violence and homogenizes foreign cultures,” he said.

Ah! The white man's guilt complex...

Today, Venuti’s impressive collection of translations includes everything from Gothic tales to scandalous contemporary best-sellers. The stylistic innovations he undertakes in his translations are called “elegant” and “brilliant” by reviewers.

I assume his reviewers are bilingual translators.. Otherwise, they would have no clue what they are talking about anyway..

“When I devise a translation project, my aim is to write a translation that will make a linguistic and cultural difference in English,” he said.

You can't. You would have to destroy English as a language of power first. English sucks in differences, linguistic and cultural, like a sponge, making them its own without necessary having to acknowledge the debt.

The best part is the explanation of "swell" used by Venuti in this translated poem:

Face stern, hair
more or less blonde, eyes
with an inward-looking glint,
skin in the pink, wearing
a stare-till-you’re-bored attitude
in a black dress that hugged her breasts
and a pair of long legs, in good working order,
she looked real swell, sure enough,
and “independent,” as the saying goes.

The explanation of this AMAZING term states that..

Venuti’s translations purposely use non-standard English colloquialisms, slang and dialect, requiring the reader to read the translation as a translation. In the above poem, swell—not Standard English, not even contemporary slang—was commonly spoken by American painter Edward Hopper, so Venuti selected it when bringing this poem, which describes Hopper’s 1938 painting, from Catalan into English.

DUH? I am only half a century old, and "swell" was used this way in my teenage years, and is still used by some of my friends today.. Maybe the person who wrote the review should mingle a little with different classes of people in different places before she writes such stuff?

Phoenix not Rising Out of Anything

2010-03-03T17:44:00.001+10:00

This pathetic article does such injustice to translators, and shows so much ignorance about what we do, that if the training institution it promotes really is affiliated with Phoenix University, then it is should be renamed the Dodo University. Dead as..

Professionally trained translators who specialise solely in "business language" do not make all the killing. Those who specialise in highly intricate legal jargon, in medical technologies, in engineering and the financial markets, if they are VERY GOOD at what they do, can make a decent living. On the other hand, businessmen who can properly speak a second language open doors for themselves to promotion, but they will never become professional translators unless they undergo proper tertiary training. Not some language course, but theory and practice in the field of language transfer.

Translators might become interpreters, and although these are two related fields, interpreting is much harder than translating and needs a much more rigorous training than translating in quick problem solving techniques, memory skills, note-taking, working with difficult (violent, dying, not altogether there and so on) clients, and mastering by heart whole glossaries of specialised terminology in both languages.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

So the statement that "if you undergo translation training you can even work as an interpreter" followed by "you will be in a position to carry out a variety of ways of interpreting" which includes simultaneous (known as conference) interpreting is misleading. To become a simultaneous interpreter you don't just need two languages. You need to be widely read, very well educated, and politically savvy, because this is a job for people who will work at the UN, the EU, the Congress, etc. interpreting in situations where an incorrect term could lead to a war.

Global Language Training either got a writer who stuffed up their write-up, or they aren't really training people in Translating and Interpreting.

Being a court translator is more than having the skills

2010-03-03T17:42:00.001+10:00

From Laramie Boomerang

When Julie Sellers is in a courtroom, she’s oftentimes thinking in two languages.

For nearly 10 years, Sellers has been a courtroom translator, providing an impartial voice for Spanish — speaking people who do not have the English language skills necessary to follow the proceedings of court.

It’s not easy — while many people are knowledgeable in more than one language, it’s often Sellers’ duty to translate English to Spanish — and vice versa — simultaneously. This means forever being on the edge of overwhelmed — Sellers explained that to many people, the feeling of perpetually being behind in their translation can be too much.

“Just because you speak some or even a lot of both languages doesn’t mean you have the skills to be an interpreter,” Sellers said. “I found that I did; I was able to stay calm, and that’s one of the things when people first start — especially with simultaneous interpreting — they just freak out because you’re five words behind, and you always feel like you’re never going to be able to cover everything, to remember everything and have the words come out correctly.”

Recently Sellers completed a rigorous course in order to become a federally certified court interpreter — a course that Sellers said has only a 10 percent pass rate. Although Sellers has been translating in Wyoming for years — the Equality State has no certification requirements for court interpreters — her federal certification now means that she can serve as a translator in any federal case, all of which require the use of a certified translator.

“I can be called anywhere there is a federal trial, that could be here in Wyoming or elsewhere. As far as I know there are no other federally certified interpreters in the state of Wyoming so they’ve been having to call people in, mostly from Colorado but they’ve also flown people in from places like Miami,” Sellers said.

Translating for a court means understanding a veritable cornucopia of languages within languages — everything from national to regional slang, Spanish equivalents of legal terms, and everything else from weapons and drug terminology to the tiniest parts on an automobile.

“I knew a surprising amount of weapons terminology, partly because I grew up on a farm in Kansas so I’ve shot,” Sellers said. “But there are other things that were less familiar to me, like intricate vehicle parts. I’ve had to crawl under our truck before so I could look at things and better remember them.”

But being a successful court interpreter means more than just having a seemingly endless knowledge of a second language — it also means doing nothing more — and certainly nothing less — than translating languages. That means when a Spanish speaker asks Sellers what a legal term or phrase means, she immediately translates into English “What does that mean?”

“I absolutely, for the professional code of ethics, cannot offer advice or a legal opinion. I cannot do anything that would give an appearance of partiality,” Sellers explained. “That’s hard, especially in cases here where there may be no one else around who’s spoken Spanish to them since they either were arrested or had contact with the justice system. I’ve had families follow me out before, and I have to tell them, “I cannot talk to you.” It’s hard, because it comes across as rude but that’s the ethical code of the profession which, again, is why it’s important when lawyers or judges are looking for a translator that they have someone who is a professional.”

In that vein, Sellers said that she has been working with a number of local judges to get a more concrete interpreter policy installed in Wyoming.

“The state needs to have that for their own benefit and protection and also to make sure that anyone participating in the judicial system in this state can do so fully and fairly,” Sellers said.

Darwish Celebrated in Film

2010-03-03T16:54:00.005+10:00

From the Daily Star

The late-Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was one of the towering figures of late-20th century Arab cultural production. Among Palestinians, Darwish’s stature was unrivaled.

Recognized as one of the great Arabic-language poets in living memory, he was also an
unreconstructed nationalist with a long record of critically minded activism within Yasser Arafat’s PLO.

To follow his decades of output is to find poetic expression of the urgency of Palestinian militancy and the accumulation of Palestinians’ despair and anger at the ineffectual political classes that have claimed to represent and support their right to retain possession of their ancestral lands.

Straddling the worlds of art and politics, it’s no surprise that Darwish has cut such a heroic figure in the cultural life of his countrymen – whether they reside in ’48 Palestine, the Occupied Territories or among the Palestinian exile community.

His poems are memorized and recited by elementary school children, set to music and performed by Arab artists throughout the MENA region and have been translated into 30-odd languages, including Hebrew. From time to time, Darwish’s work is adapted to film.

“As the Poet Said,” the latest feature-length film by Lebanon-based Palestinian documentarian Nasri Hajjaj, is one of the more ambitious efforts to bring Darwish’s poetry to the rest of the world through film.

The premise of the film is simple, setting out to take the audience on a tour through the poet’s life. Accompanied by Darwish’s work, Hajjaj takes the camera to some of the places the poet lived in the Middle East and Europe. The journey is linear but in execution the project is
multi-layered. The filmmaker has assembled a distinguished group of colleagues, friends and admirers to participate in the tribute.

Several Palestinian poets – Ahmed Dahbour, for instance, and Dalia Taha – are augmented by cast that include Nigerian writer, poet and playwright Wole Soyinka, dissident Israeli poet Yitzak Laor, Iraqi Kurdish poet Sherko Bekas, American Michael Palmer, Lebanon’s Joumana Haddad, former French Prime Minister (and, it seems, poet) Dominique de Villepin and a troupe of school students from Sidon’s Ain al-Hilweh camp.

The camera (wielded by Jocelyne Abi Gebrayel) captures this cast of characters in a dozen or so different locations, within Palestine, around the Middle East, in Africa and Europe, places loyal to the memory of the poet and to which the poet was loyal – his favourite room in Paris’ Madison Hotel, for instance. Whether by design or happenstance, many of these locations are in a state of repair, or disrepair – an abandoned railway station, a university auditorium filled with scaffolding, an abandoned theatre.

For the most part each setting affords these figures an opportunity to read lines of Darwish’s poetry. They do so in several languages – Arabic, of course, but also English, French and Kurdish.

The poetry can be interpreted in other terms as well, of course. A weighty piano piece, composed and performed for Hajjaj by Lebanese composer Hiba al-Kawas, opens the film and is revisited throughout. This pounding score is augmented by the work of harpist and composer Tara Jaff, and dancer Lorca Sbeiti can be seen navigating various derelict spaces at certain points in the work.

The effect is to testify to the wide range of people that have been moved by, or at least exposed to, Darwish’s words. This approach gives the film an oddly selfless aspect, since Hajjaj’s cast is given so much latitude to interpret Darwish’s work in his or her own terms.

Moving literature between genres is challenging work. No few lines of film criticism have complained about how some hack scriptwriter or director has tried to adapt a much-loved novel or short story to the screen and made a hash of it. If adaptations of prose works to film are hard to pull off, translating poetry to film is inestimably more difficult. It has been amply demonstrated that the shooting and editing of moving images, whether proper film or digital video, can be “poetic.” It is difficult, though, to approximate the impact of written poetry – the resonance of words and their breadth of meaning within individual readers – even within
other languages, let alone in visual media.

Filmmakers are still compelled to try. One compulsion, presumably, is the desire to secure increased exposure for the poetry, liberating work that, if left between the covers of a book, might languish in obscurity. There is less danger of that being the case with the work of
Darwish, which is probably better known in the non-Arab world than that of any other Arab poet. The desire to free Darwish’s work from its genre, and its appeal to both filmmakers and audiences, was nicely illustrated at last December’s Dubai film festival, where “As the Poet Said” enjoyed its world premier. It wasn’t the only Darwish poem in competition.

Lebanese filmmaker Talal Khoury’s “9 August,” his second effort to render a Darwish poem on film, screened in DIFF’s short film competition. Furthermore the trailer that DIFF’s production team worked up (to project before the festival’s gala screenings) was drawn almost exclusively from a particularly effective passage of Hajjaj’s film. That sequence sees a deaf actor sign a passage of Darwish’s poetry – an avalanche of verbs the poet deployed as if grappling to depict
the complex range of feeling his lover, and country, evoked in him. Audiences invariably applauded generously. It wasn’t odd to hear the word “beautiful,” in various 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/.

Our Own Sykes-Picot

2010-03-03T12:53:00.006+10:00

The Gulf News recently published an opinion piece worth reading [I have fixed the English a little, and rearranged it so that it makes sense to Western readers]:

We Arabs are the worst collaborators against our own language. We always talk about conspiracies being woven against the Arabic language, while, in fact, we are Arabic's arch enemies.

Instead of calling upon all Arab satellite channels to use proper Arabic in their broadcasts, some Arab media officials do exactly the opposite. They call upon male and female presenters to use their colloquial regional dialects instead, which can hardly be understood in other countries.(...) It is true they have their own accents, but the language they speak is perfect English, while, on the other hand, the colloquial Arabic spoken by the Libyans, for instance, has nothing to do with proper Arabic. That's why no other Arab can understand it well when spoken on television.Arab films (..) tend to portray wedding registrars who use Quranic Arabic as clowns, as if telling the viewers not to learn this type of language, when they should.

(...) Isn't this a lingual Sykes-Picot, argues an Arab analyst? Isn't it enough that the Arab world has been carved up geographically and politically by the British and the French colonialists? Why do we try to fragment it linguistically now through the media? Is this done on purpose by media officials so that they prevent any kind of cultural communication amongst Arabs, which might lead later to real unification envisaged by Arab pan-Arab nationalists?

(...) It is true that the Arab satellite television channels that use proper Arabic have, as I mentioned in an earlier article, succeeded in unifying the Arab people where Arab nationalist parties have failed, but the TV stations that encourage the use of dialects have a parochial regionalist slant. In other words, they are an extension of Sykes-Picot.

[and so on and so forth - bad teachers, national leaders who can't string a sentence correctly, etc. etc..]

[Then the bomb]

Thanks to the West for protecting our language!

One cannot but also thank the BBC for using the best standard Arabic in its broadcast over half a century, while our supposedly national televisions and radios are using slang ‘cockney' Arabic.

And were it not for Google or Microsoft, the Arabic language would probably have missed out on the Internet and computer revolution. Thanks to Microsoft, proper Arabic has found a place for itself in the computer industry. And thanks to Google, Arabs can now use their proper Arabic to look for information on the World Wide Web. Were it left to Arabs themselves, they would have debased their language as they have done over the years.

[Not sure about the last part - Google just pulls up any rubbish in Arabic letters as Arabic, be it machine produced, or even Dari]

The unity of written Arabic is a myth, too. I have never been able to stomach literary works or academic materials written by scholars from North Africa, because the syntax is French.

The myth hits hardest when working as a copy editor. Businesses want to target the "Arab" world (another myth) but what sells in Lebanon does not sell in Riyadh or Aden. Just try selling car parts.

One could add to this myth the problem of almost non-existent technical terminology. Although many Arabists have tried unifying the terms used in pure and applied sciences, localisms are still more than common, and more than necessary.

I wouldn't blame the Arabic language teachers - they are bred to teach a language that is archaic and does not move with times. In the age of the Internet, fusha is making less and less sense to the younger generation. Time to stop being our own arch enemies, and modernise this dinosaur.

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/.

ITI Warning Against Machine Translation

2010-03-03T12:42:00.004+10:00

From International Trade

The Institute of Translation & Interpreting (ITI), with 3,000 members worldwide, is one of the UK’s primary sources of information on language services for government, industry, the media and the general public. ITI promotes the highest standards in the profession and its members play a key role in promoting cross border trade in products and services. In this article ITI general secretary Alan Wheatley highlights the growth of machine translation services offered by global phenomena such as Google and Facebook and warns against relying on machine translations for business.

If you’re reading this you probably rely heavily on the Internet for your business. Most do, and not just for emails and finding information, but for strengthening brand awareness, and engaging with stakeholders. The interactive nature of Web 2.0 platforms, social media sites such as Facebook and blogs such as micro blogging site Twitter, mean that it’s easier and faster than ever for businesses to communicate on a global scale.

As an international trader, you’ll appreciate the necessity and benefit of having your company literature – and hopefully by this stage your website too – translated into the languages of your target markets, but what do you do when you begin to embrace social media on a wider scale and set up a company Facebook page, a blog, or a Twitter account?

Google Inc is one corporation who believes that having all your online communications translated into the relevant language/s is important and claims to be the largest free language translation service online. Its Google Translation website lists a total of 52 languages available for translating websites, documents, searches and individual words – and all by computers using mathematical equations, at a click of a mouse, without any human translation. In theory, this means that if you have a corporate blog you can simply paste the URL into the Google Translate facility and your blog will appear instantly in a language of your choice.

Others think it’s a good idea too and have their own translation tools. Facebook Inc – with more than 300 million users most of whom are outside the US – for example, has approached it slightly differently and has crowdsourced its users – again not necessarily professional translators, although some reportedly are – to translate the website into 65 different languages. It goes further. Facebook thinks its pro bono crowdsourced translation approach is so good it wants to patent it. It’s also offering users of Facebook Connect the opportunity to tap into the Facebook community to enlist help translating their sites into any language.

Even Twitter has jumped on the crowdsourced translation bandwagon to have its service available in French, German, Italian and Spanish, in addition to English and Japanese. Twitter plans to enlist its users to offer translations, reportedly alongside some in-house translators.

Where’s the harm in any of this, you might ask? Perhaps none, if all you want to do is exchange a few personal emails with a colleague half way across the world whose language you don’t speak. But if you think you can use Google Translate, for example, to publish your website or blog in other languages, replacing human translation with machine translation, you’re putting your brand and reputation at serious risk.

How can a machine translation ever guarantee accuracy and quality? It’s quite simple – it can’t. Although Facebook and Twitter offerings do have some human intervention in that humans supply possible translations and others vote and the winning vote is applied, there’s still no guarantee that it’s the best translation in that particular context. Translation is a complex task requiring a lot of skill and knowledge. Would you trust an unqualified teacher to teach your children, or an unqualified lawyer to offer you legal advice? If it were easy to speak each other’s language we would all be able to do it by now and the profession of translation, which is almost as old as language itself, wouldn’t exist.

There is much more to being a translator than meets the eye. A good translator has an exceptional command of the native or ‘source’ language and can provide outstanding copywriting, proofreading and editorial services. They usually operate in highly specialist fields and possess the relevant technical vocabulary. They guarantee your communications are fit for purpose. Professional translators also identify unarticulated needs, thanks to their acute appreciation of cultural differences and approaches to business and industry practices.

It’s true that professional translators themselves use technology to speed up their work. However, specialist computational linguists have been working for over 50 years to achieve a high degree of quality and the translators themselves programme their software to suit their particular area of focus. A professional translator would never rely purely on a machine translation because computers will never understand how a language works and therefore neglect the essential aspects of good communication – accuracy, clarity, style, nuance and cultural sensitivity.

Errors in translation and interpreting can waste enormous amounts of time and money, resulting in incalculable costs in terms of misunderstanding and loss of prestige. Professional translators understand this and know business leaders care about the effect their online – and off line – communications will have on the business and will ensure the company communicates effectively to enhance the perception of your brand and reputation.

Sadly, it can be very easy to get it wrong by cutting corners and ITI members are often called in to rectify strategic translation errors. Rather than hiring a professional from the outset, some companies believe they can save money and achieve the desired result by using a machine translation or enlisting someone in-house who just happens to speak the language/s in question.

Poorly translated communications can mean your brand will be poorly perceived resulting in limited or no success, and by not using a professional translator you will not only waste money, but you will also miss opportunities, fail to attract appropriate media attention and damage your reputation. It makes sense to get it right from the outset and call in a professional translator.

To identify professional translators – and interpreters – there are some obvious checkpoints. You can start by confirming qualifications, references and memberships of professional bodies. A professional translator or interpreter will always be happy to provide these. ITI members, for example, demonstrate their commitment to the profession by joining the organisation and adhering to a strict code of conduct. This is essential in an unregulated profession. You can find the award winning ‘Translation Getting it Right’ booklet available in the Advice to Business section of www.iti.org.uk plus a Directory of Members.

You’ll know when you’re working with a professional because he or she will offer consultancy, add value, translate into their native language unless they are multilingual, ensure the end translation is fit for purpose, save you money, help safeguard brand reputation, offer specialist knowledge, request feedback, solve problems, think ahead and advise. No computer will ever be able to do all that!

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/.

Globalese?

2010-02-26T00:04:00.004+10:00

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..

2010-02-26T00:01:00.004+10:00

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

2010-02-25T23:50:00.004+10:00

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

2010-02-25T23:22:00.004+10:00

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

2010-02-25T23:15:00.003+10:00

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?

2010-02-25T10:47:00.004+10:00

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

2010-02-24T03:43:00.003+10:00

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

2010-02-23T22:21:00.003+10:00

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

2010-02-23T22:14:00.004+10:00

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

2010-02-23T18:35:00.003+10:00

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

2010-02-23T18:20:00.003+10:00

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

2010-02-23T17:56:00.003+10:00

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/.

GIGO and Marketing Jargon

2010-01-26T08:33:00.003+10:00

I am immensely grateful to Lauren Nemec from Applied Languages for the posting on why it is almost impossible to translate marketing crap from English into other languages, especially ones where obfuscation is not a measure of intellectual agility.

A few years back we landed a project for a tourism authority who wanted to "sell" what their area offered to the Arab World. They hired a copywriting company full of young heads and a month later we were presented with 80 pages of "young-head-Aussie" text.

Everything was "unique". And I mean EVERYTHING. Like, each sunset was unique. The sands on the beach were unique. You shopped in a unique atmosphere, buying unique clothes in unique boutiques, sipping unique coffee in unique cafes on unique streets lined with unique trees. And so on, and so forth..

And then there was the very relative, totally undefined term "fun". Getting wet on a unique waterslide was fun as was drying in the similarly unique air funnel. Eating out is fun. Driving down to Brisbane on the congested motorway was "fun". Kids were going to have fun and so were adults, and the dog and the cat.. and your wallet, I assume.

Amazing. Wonderful. Indescribable (how can you write about an indescribable entity, let alone translate it?)

As Nemec says in her blog, it was meant to impress. I translated. The agent in the Middle East read it, convened a phone meeting, and said very clearly: "The translation is very good. Change your copywriters. The English copy is crap."

The error that many companies in the English speaking world fall into is that they think they can smother opposition by the sheer amount of incomprehensible jargon. That might well work for some at the local level, mostly those who speak the same GIGO dialect. But when you translate your materials to Arabic, Polish, or even German (just to mention a few of the ones I know), information is paramount. Information, and cultural sensitivity.

The unique young-heads at the copywriting company did not even bother to think whether what they were saying would be acceptable, let alone attractive, to the Arab audience. So they put in bars and nightclubs as attractions - unique, mind you, until your third glass of whiskey, after which all nightclubs look the same. They marketed open air saunas for both sexes, and marriage ceremonies atop an air balloon. They waxed lyrical (amazing, unique, etc) about wine tours and working dog shows. And, to make things worse, they did not actually explain what all this was about.

I wonder how many of us would pay heavy money to go somewhere overseas for the sole purpose of watching sunsets, get mud baths, and spend the night in a night club drinking. Heavy money, because Arab tourists come over with wives (often a few per one male) and a progeny line the size of a football club. They come mostly to shop. Singapore is cheaper, and their Tourism Board material actually INFORMATIVE (we know, we did it). So Australia loses potential tourism income because we just can't think in other people's ways. It is all unique, mind you.

Someone out there needs to write a cross-cultural marketing course geared at young-airheads.

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/.

Website Translation for Business - what is involved?

2010-01-24T13:59:00.004+10:00

Nowadays, it’s easier than ever for the smallest of home-built businesses to network and trade on the international arena. But the first step towards doing so is to build a fully localized presence in your key target markets– and the process begins with adapting your company website for each country you plan to tap into.

(1) Prepare properly and allocate enough budget to sustain your multilingual marketing campaign - it is costly. Have an international marketing strategy that looks at understanding the consumers themselves it looks at the behavior and psychology of people from the country or market. When marketing internationally, the words ‘language’ and ‘local’ should always go hand-in-hand. Failing to do so can lead to a very costly global venture for businesses where funds may be limited.

(2) When understanding multilingual advertising you need to be aware of key terms, internationalization and localization and the different approaches:

(a) Internationalization - getting the websites designed with a macro view then localizing these websites at a later date.

(b) Localization - translating your original websites content and then putting it into a style which appeals to the target audience. English cannot be used for all international internet marketing activities. By creating localized content you can actually reduce costs whilst expanding business relationships with consumers and employees all around the world. By presenting websites in native languages you are making people four times as likely to buy products from you, also this will double the chances of people reading your website.

(3) Contrary to what many people think, fluency in a particular language doesn’t qualify someone to translate into it. To provide convincing translations, the translator requires first-hand knowledge of the culture of that language which is why most translators will only ever work INTO their native tongue from another language in which they are fluent. Furthermore, many linguists will specialize in a particular subject – such as marketing, engineering or agriculture. If your company’s products or services involve highly technical terminology, you will probably want to consider checking with the translation company that they have suitable candidates with the right level of experience. The important thing to remember when translating your website or any other marketing material is that what works in one country, might not translate the way you want it to in another. What’s clever and witty in one country, might be offensive in another. This is something only a native-speaking translator will know. It’s also important to be wary of dialects within languages. If you translate your website into Arabic, it doesn’t mean you can use it for all Arabic-speaking countries.

Results include a easy way to assess a new product or service in a new market before launching an offline marketing campaign, a significantly higher rate of return on investment, access to international best practices and technology, increased revenue, developing a global brand name and a larger customer base.

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/.

Social Media As the Universal Translator

2010-01-24T13:41:00.003+10:00

Two very interesting blogs last week - the first "Bloggers from Non English Speaking Backgrounds – Share Your Tips and Stories Here" addresses the problems faced by bloggers from non-English speaking backgrounds. According to the blog, they have two main issues:

Not knowing which language that they should blog in – should they blog in their own first language and have a smaller potential readership or blog in English where their readership could be larger but where they had challenges in writing as well?

Feeling isolated from other bloggers – a number reflected that at times they felt that they were not taken as seriously by bloggers in other parts of the world and found networking difficult.

Whereas the blog posting itself is short, the 179 comments (as of 13:30 Sunday) are a serious eye-opener into the hegemony of English in the business world. Reading through some of them, I would agree with the first of the two issues - some of the "Englishes" are so painful to read that it might turn potential audiences off.

To which the second blog entry, titled "Can Social Media become a Universal Translator?", albeit interesting, does not provide any tangible solutions. Automated internet based translations give the gist (sometimes) of what is said, but blogging is not about merely saying things. It is about showcasing how smart you are, your expertise, your marketing abilities. So to me, writing poorly in English, or writing in your own language and letting fishes or microbes or any other such animals translate for you into poor English is one and the same thing.

Is there a market for translators here?

I am very tempted to blog in two languages, having parallel translations of what I write in both English and Arabic. The only problem I have is finding the time to do so, coupled with the lack of any statistical data on how many Arabic-speaking readers are into blogging about translation, language and business.

Then there would be the problem of localising, as not everything acceptable in English would be culturally acceptable in Arabic. Localising, of course, could open a can of worms, with some bilingual readers wanting to know why the translations are localised (i.e. slightly different from the original) or - even worse - attempting to do their own translation of the source English. Maybe starting a brand new blog would provide a solution, but then you are losing your optimisation share (the search engines see it as two blogs, instead of a massive and continually updated single one).

I am open to suggestions.

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/.

The Pee Phone

2010-01-20T22:33:00.002+10:00

From the Globalization Group..

A few years ago, International Systems Research (ISR) released a softphone in Japan called the PPPhone (pronounced "pee pee phone"). Unfortunately, that name does not pass what some people call "the snicker test" in English and many other languages where "pee pee" is understood to mean something else. ISR had some good reasoning for using the PP acronym - they already had a product called PPPush (pronounced "pee pee push") and the two P's referred to other relevant acronyms that began with P and described the function of the product. If they had stayed exclusively in Japan, they might have continued to develop additional pee pee products. However, you will see that ISR has an office in the US and a website 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/.

Engrish Resources for Blooper Collectors

2010-01-20T18:54:00.003+10:00

The term “Engrish” widely refers to the incorrect usage of the English language – usually in written form – by people in East Asian countries, including Japan, Korea and China. “Chinglish” is the term used to describe incorrect usage of the English language in China or by Chinese people.

Things associated with the west, including English, are wildly popular in East Asian countries because they are seen as exotic. So the Chinese, for example, slap English sayings on anything from t-shirts to pencil cases to bubble gum wrappers. Sometimes the translations are done by professionals and checked for quality- but often they are done using raw machine translation, a dictionary or a person who knows very little English, producing the “Chinglish” phrases that we all love so much.

Now you can watch a slide show on Flickr over 1,300 photos of Chinglish, or visit Engrish.com to read about Engrish and see hundreds of hilarious photos of objects with Engrish texts written on them.

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/.

If you've Got Issues, Blame the Translators

2010-01-20T16:43:00.004+10:00

Had to smile, although this is rather pathetic.

The Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission is under fire for blaming the distribution ban on an English-language book covering the nation's modern history on poor English translation. Translators plan to file a suit against Lee Young-jo, the new head of the commission, for libel.

Last month, the commission ordered an end to the distribution of "Historical Background of Korea's Past Settlement," written by former chief commissioner Ahn Byung-ook, perceived a liberal, for its allegedly poor translation.

The suspension was made right after Lee, who was a key member of an affiliate of conservative group New Right Union, took office.

The book says that many of the killings of civilians were conducted by the Korean army, police and right wing organizations. It also says the Park Chung-hee military junta introduced an extreme right-wing fascist regime to Korean society.

One of the translators, named Kim, claimed that the former New Right member found the "truth" uncomfortable. "While the New Right focuses on the economic fruits of the past administrations, the commission has highlighted the human rights infringements," he said. "Citing the translational errors is a mere stunt to gloss over the ideological war. However, that has hurt our dignity and pride as professional translators."

Kim, who works both as a translator and interpreter, was invited to help in the commission's seminars and events after the book's release. "They shouldn't have hired me if I had problems with English proficiency," he said. The book was released last March, translated by three experts and proofread by three English-speaking foreigners. The commission has printed 2,000 copies and distributed 1,200 of them.

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/.

Slanging It in the UK

2010-01-20T14:57:00.003+10:00

The BBC last week had an interesting article on what public is saying about slang in the UK.

"Paul Kerswill, professor of sociolinguistics at Lancaster University, is studying street language in London. He says an entirely new dialect is emerging. "Young people are growing up with a new form of composite language. It's a bit cockney, a bit West Indian, a bit West African, with some Bangladeshi and Kuwaiti - and it seems to be replacing traditional cockney."

KUWAITI??? Hold on. They speak Arabic. Is the BBC writer a bit hard of hearing, or has Prof. Kerswill become a professor without knowing which language is spoken where. What is West African? Is that English as spoken in "west Africa" (which is what, exactly?)And Bangladeshi? That's,I assume, Bengali? Because if it is English as spoken in the subcontinent, then the Indians, Pakistanis, and Sri Lankans all speak the same way to my ears.

This "multicultural English" is now the ordinary way of speaking for many young people, he says. Instead of just using it to be cool or to fit in with peers, they use it when they speak to everyone. And those who use it are losing any sense of "appropriacy" - the important skill of turning it on and off in different situations.

"Appropriacy simply means using the right variety of language for the right context - using business jargon in business meetings, formal English in exams or slang in school playground," says slang expert Tony Thorne. "Language isn't just about communication, there is a strong social, political and emotional charge to it."

If that does not sound like attempts to impose middle class lifestyle on the lumpen proletariat, then I don't know what does :-D But then, I am a fair dinkum Aussie. But let us look at this from the causes point of view, not the symptoms. Why are these kids speaking like this? And what are schools doing? And if both schools and society have failed to improve this, then maybe it is time for businesses to start speaking slang, too? After all, these kids will be the managers in 20 years, whether we like it or not, and this "slang" will become the new English.

"It was clear many students found it difficult to get through a sentence without saying 'innit' or 'do you know what I mean'," says Maria Nightingale, principal for operations at the Manchester Academy.

Amazing. Here we are preaching multi-tasking and working at the speed of light, and when the kids come up with an immaginative way of squeezing 6 words into 1, we complain?

"We're a business and enterprise academy. It is really important our youngsters go into the world equipped with the appropriate use of language so they are not disadvantaged."

Disadvantaged only for as long as the 50+ middle-class, public service dinosaurs are in the seats of power. And they have no one to blame but their educational policies - no grammar, everything goes, englishes versus English, lets revamp spelling, and "studgesRus" mentality. Play games instead of reading. Multimedia experience instead of learning, and who needs a brain when you can plagiarise and when your 1T hard drive costs less than a monthly train ticket. Polite, classy language comes with lots of class baggage, and we want to do away with class, politeness, decorum, etc. So why are we whining now?

One school even goes as far as to enshrine this new form of English:

"A-level students learn where slang comes from," says Dan Clayton, a teacher at St Francis Xavier in Clapham. "They analyse it linguistically and think about what function it serves in conversations, as well as its links to identity." Not bad. They will become the intermediaries of the future, the new interpreters and translators from and into Slangish.

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/.

New Internet Slang Resources

2010-01-20T14:53:00.003+10:00

For those struggling with the new Internet slang, the site NetLingo helps you to demystify the technobabble by providing definitions for terms, acronyms and text message shorthand. Another site known as Twictionary defines itself as “a repository for the meanings and manglings of words and language on Twitter.” Users can contribute new words to the site as the Twitter vocabulary evolves.

These sites are quite useful, as traditional dictionary sources like Merriam Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary simply can’t keep up with the pace of change when it comes to techie buzzwords. For example, last year Merriam Webster added the term “vlog” to its Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition; however, this word has commonly been in use since 2005. Despite the fact that they’re a bit behind the times, the most authoritative dictionaries of the English language are making an effort to include social media and tech-inspired words like 2009’s Word of the Year “unfriend.”

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/.

Free TM software reviews

2010-01-20T14:41:00.003+10:00

OmegaT:

A CAT tool which some of its features include user-customisable segmentation using regular expressions, translation memory, fuzzy matching, match propagation, glossary matching, context searching in translation memories and keyword search in reference materials.

OmegaT uses international standard TMX (Translation Memory eXchange) as its native translation memory format which most CAT tools are able to import and export. TMX is an open XML standard which allows easier exchange of translation memory among translators with different application tools.

Although it lacks of features in comparison with other CAT tools, OmegaT is fast in segmenting a source file, compiling target files (known as ‘clean up’), and its fuzzy matching. In its earlier version, OmegaT segments the source file by paragraph, rather than sentences. Now, you can select paragraph or sentence-level segmentation. By using the function called Editing Behavior under Options, you can have the selection of displaying in source text or best fuzzy match. This is a CAT tool that is worth trying out.

OmegaT includes the following features: – Fuzzy matching – Match propagation – Simultaneous processing of multiple-file projects – Simultaneous use of multiple translation memories – External glossaries – Document file formats include:

- XHTML and HTML Microsoft Office 2007 XML OpenOffice.org/StarOffice XLIFF (Okapi) MediaWiki (Wikipedia) Plain text

- Unicode (UTF-8) support: can be used with non-Latin alphabets – Support for right-to-left languages – Compatible with other translation memory applications (TMX)

Some third-party software that can be used with OmegaT are OpenOffice.org, Rainbow, bitext2tmx, and Samuel Murray’s scripts and procedures.

Download

Anaphraseus :

ACAT tool for creating, managing and using bilingual Translation Memories. Some of its main features Include text segmentation, terminology Recognition, plain-text TM (Unicode UTF-16), fuzzy search in TM, UTF-16 TMX export/import, user glossary and OpenOffice. org extension.

Anaphraseus works in OpenOffice.org as an extension and work seamlessly with TM created in Wordfast. You can install it using Extension Manager under Tools in OpenOffice.org. During the translation process, Anaphraseus divides the translated text into segments or sentences. When a segment is selected, Anaphraseus displays the closest match found in the TM.

As an OpenOffice.org extension, it allows you to use all the features of the word processor “on the fly”. When it comes to performance, it is slower than Wordfast, especially when handling large files. Anaphraseus works with translation memory in TMX format, which allows you to work with most CAT tools in the market.

Anaphraseus includes the following features:

- Text segmentation – Terminology recognition – Plain-text TM (Unicode UTF-16) – Fuzzy search in Translation Memory – Unicode UTF-16 TMX export/import – User glossary

Since Anaphraseus is still in beta test, it currently works only with unformatted text, skipping all formulas, pictures and similar objects. If you need a CAT tool that won’t cost you anything and works with OpenOffice.org, Anaphraseus is worth a try.

Download

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/.

From 2.0 to 3.0

2010-01-20T14:37:00.002+10:00

Dr. Gege Gatt, founder and director of ICON, writes about the six trends that define the new generation of web services:

(1) Mobile applications have long been aimed at giving subscribers information specific to their whereabouts, but now we’re seeing even more intelligent ideas.

(2) Maps: Google street map hit the news early this year with its controversial drive-by views of people’s front doors and people themselves.

(3) Personal organisers: There’s no shortage of web services aimed at helping us organize our lives. But however digital our way of living, a lot of us still print out paper when we travel, particularly on business.

(4) Collaboration: Slideshare.net is a useful resource for anyone in business seeking latest thinking on an area of interest and reading it in succinct, generally well-put-together PowerPoint slideshows that are rated and commented on by users. 280slides.com operates in the same field, but is a ‘Cloud’ computing application at its best. It lets you create, collaborate on, share and store a slidedeck on the Cloud (their remote server), so you can access it anywhere in the world. You’ll never be caught short again on a business trip without your slidedeck to hand.

(5) Audio: We love audio-visual on the web, so it’s little wonder that this area is seeing new applications each day.

(6) Social media Intermediaries: There’s now an ever-growing range of tools to help us make sense of, filter and manage our Twitter and Facebook 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/.

More on website localisation..

2010-01-20T13:47:00.004+10:00

In the past, there were only two user interfaces in many corporations' cross country websites, that is, a native language website and an English language website. However, because of constant development of international business and increasing number of country-differentiated clients, misunderstanding appears in a lot of aspects and of course, client loss increases. But multilingual websites could effectively help solve such kind of problems.

The basic rule of website translation is not to change the original structure of the original website. Under the rule, the translated website is almost the same as the original one unless clients have some special requirements. Such kind of translation could help clients save cost, but it might not fit the local market culture, habits or other aspects.

Website translation and localization is different from usual document translation. Many other factors besides pure text translation will be involved in the process, such as:

(1) color option or culture consideration - calendars, for example, can differ for different countries.

(2) The code issue must be solved in the translation procedure. UTF-8 is a general code accepted by browsers of most countries and areas, so messy codes hardly appear if you use this code. But there are still some countries' browsers incompatible with this code.

(3) The letters sizes in the website need to be adjusted accordingly. Most western website languages' words are around 8pt in measurement because that size letter makes the whole websites look beautiful. However, characters in Arabic websites are usually more than 12px; if not, viewers couldn't see what the character is clearly. The words in Asian-language websites also need to be a little bigger. Once the words were adjusted, the structure of the websites was necessary to make some adjustment too for maintaining original appearance of the website.

(4) Website optimization is a value-added service. This job includes keyword arrangement in the web page, keyword density management, keyword translation of the webpage code, and the translation and the adjustment of relevant description. After the website go on line, it need to be submitted to important local search engines.

(5) A full-set service is not just confined to text translation, it also contains flash, picture and other elements. If clients are unable to provide such code, translation companies might spent more time on translating and localizing websites.

Website localisation is not easy, but it is worth the effort and the cost if you are serious about expanding beyond the parish green.

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/.

It is still Greek to me..

2010-01-20T13:40:00.003+10:00

..or rather, it is still Gibberish. Greek, provided it is correct, is fine.

The Oregon Department of Administrative Services announced Friday that the state’s official Web sites have added Google Translate, giving users the ability to view those sites in 25 languages in addition to English.

A product of Google, the feature is available on Oregon.gov.

“By adding this feature to our Web sites, we can make important government information available to more people who need it,” said Wally Rogers, Oregon’s e-government manager. “We are able to offer Google’s page translation service for over 40,000 pages without spending a dollar. Here in Oregon we have many residents who speak languages other than English, and we have increased our ability to reach out to them through Oregon.gov.”

Visitors to Oregon.gov will now find a “drop-down” box in the upper right corner of every state Web site for which the address ends in Oregon.gov. The label on the box is “Select Language.” The user simply activates the box by clicking on it and selecting any one of the 25 available languages. The page then quickly appears in the selected language.

The following languages are now available on the state Web sites, in addition to English: Arabic, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

Yikes! I would hate to live in Oregon and have to deal in legal issues through a Google translation..

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/.

Translating The Book of Shapur

2010-01-20T13:17:00.003+10:00

Julie Schwietert tells of how Leigh Shulman translated a novella written by one of her friends, an Iranian writer in exile, from Farsi into English - without knowing Farsi. Well, ok, the Iranian writer knew a fair bit of English..

Leigh Shulman is a traveler, writer, and translator currently living in Salta, Argentina, where she is developing an educational project to teach English through photography and technology. She is also editor of Matador Life. You can read more about Leigh and her travels on her blog, The Future Is Red.

An excerpt of their joint effort can be found here.

"First rule of translation, though, is the translator does not need the same level of fluency in the original language as the target language. We take the language, culture, ideology and thought process and pour it into the mold of the language we know best (...) The first step was to create a very raw and literal word-for-word translation of the piece. I sat in front of the computer typing out exactly what Ali told me. The product of that first step was completely incomprehensible, impossible to read.

Then step two. We smoothed the rough English into a real working English. Again, Ali and I sat side by side in his apartment in New York City. As we went through the sentences, I used my western United States view of the world to ask for specifics and clarification.

Language takes its culture along with it, so where ever possible we remain faithful to the original. Punctuation and sentence structure – which you’ll notice are often incorrect and misleading — follow the exact pattern of the Farsi. Alimorad designed the text this way intentionally to confuse and distract you as a reader, mimicking the way an exile feels while navigating a new land. (oh, postmodern deconstruction of our mental comfort zones).

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/.

Love in Other Languages

2010-01-20T12:37:00.003+10:00

A very touching posting from Jed Wolpaw at University of California, SF, on whether we feel the same thing when we say it in a different language. Just a quote here:

"This reminded me of how it felt to live in Costa Rica for a year during college and speak only Spanish. I went by a different name (they called me Jaime), lived with a different family, and spoke a different language. I was still me, obviously, but in some subtle but very real ways I felt like a different person.

Sure enough, the language of love was different in a different language. In Spanish, there are two ways to say, “I love you.” You can say, “te quiero” or “te amo.” Te amo is much stronger than te quiero, though that brief description hardly does justice to the language and I’m sure it would take chapters to tease out all of the nuanced differences.

But to me, as I was learning the language, I translated them both the same way in my head. They both meant I love you. Would it, then, be possible for me to really express my feelings correctly if I ever chose to use those phrases? Choosing one or the other would express very different meaning, yet they were equivalent in my mind.

I don’t mean to say that people can never learn to feel fully in another language. But it takes time and experience. You have to live the language in order to build up the meaning. You can’t have someone explain the difference between te amo and te quiero. You have to live the difference to truly understand it."

And the advice? If someone tells you they love you ONLY in your language but not theirs, look for an alternative partner!

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/.

Too Many Words, Too Short a Deadline - a solution?

2010-01-20T11:54:00.003+10:00

This was proposed by Oxford Translation Ltd in "Content for Reprint" (we are talking about 600 pages of a technical report needed in 48 hrs):

"If the translator cannot produce the best possible full translation within the time available, then an "optimal" solution should be agreed upon. Such translations could fall into one of the following categories: - "a translation that provides what is needed for the stated purpose" - "as good as possible in view of the customer's requirements" (...) Due to the obvious time limitations, a summary could be proposed as an alternative. This could have the additional advantage in that key bullet points raised for discussion in the international meeting would be more easily accessible in a summary. Of course, production of the summary would itself involve the translator reading all 600 pages of the report and that alone could probably take more than the two days available. So from a practical point of view, it might be that the person who is asking for the translation could provide a summary in his or her own language - after all that one person is most likely the one person who is fully aware of the salient points in the report (...) One of the ways in which an experienced translator can produce a long translation in a short space of time is by dictating the translation into a digital recorder and then emailing the translation to one or more typists who in turn type out the translation and send it back to the originating translator for correction before delivery to the customer. Using this technique, a translator can produce upwards of 10,000 words per day. Almost everyone can speak faster than they can type. [Sure, but can the typist type as fast as you talk? And do you "sight translate" at the same speed as you talk to your friends about the latest fishing trip??]...A similar technique uses one of the computer speech recognition programs, which have seen a great deal of improvement over the last few years. Using one of these systems, the translator can dictate the translation into a small microphone while at the same time his or her computer types the translation directly onto the computer screen. When completed, it can then be corrected, proof-read and sent to the customer. Of course a translation agency is always pleased to accept a long translation (as long as the deadline for completing the translation leaves enough time for the translation itself and proof-reading, etc.). [Unreal. My Dragon Speaks Badly was ditched after producing French text when I was talking in English to it. I don't speak French, and I don't have a French accent! As for proof-reading 600 pages, that needs a bit more than just 48 hrs, right?]If the original text is a technical document, translation memory systems can be used and this ensures that repeated expressions are translated automatically by the memory system. The reader is then reassured by repetition of the same phrase for the same action and vocabulary is standardized by the system, avoiding any ambiguity to the reader. The same word is always used for the same object. Lower costs can result from this, which can be passed on to the translation agency's customer. [Provided, of course, you are already in possession of such a TM and glossaries].

No further comments. I am a craftsman. I do not encourage clients to believe in myths. It would make much more sense to actually educate the client as to the need to include possible language needs into the business process from the very start.

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/.

The Tough Condition of Literary Translation in the USA

2010-01-20T11:17:00.004+10:00

Why is it so hard for foreign authors to get published in the US? It’s clear to anyone working in international rights that the sophisticated marketplace involving scouts, rights sellers and foreign publishers that exists to get American books out into the world does not exist to the same degree in the other direction.

There are a number of explanations for this phenomenon, very few of which have to do with stereotypes of American readers as being culturally insulated or lacking curiosity about the outside world.

(a) First, there are the unforgiving economic calculations that publishers face in taking a translation to market.

(b) Apart from economics, the often cited reason for the difficult of placing translations with American publishers is the limited number of US editors who speak a foreign language. It costs a lot to have something translated and get it gussied up and ready for the American market. They have to decide, is it really a book that’s likely to find a US publisher anyway?

(c) There is no mature translation market for any one language in the English speaking world, and the fact that books coming into the American market come from many different countries and languages makes it harder for editors here to develop the expertise in what any market has to offer, and which books from that country have the best shot of appealing to American readers. The books that are sold for translation here are more likely to come through the handful of US agents with close ties to one region or another, who are themselves usually working through professional relationships with particular agents or publishers abroad. What books by foreign authors that end up crossing an American editor’s desk, then, depends in no small part on chance and good connections.

(d) The "commercial mindset" versus "cultural mission mindset" that is progressively seeing the later outbeat the first. This difficulty restricts the number of translations Weil is able to take on, while he struggles with the fact that this leaves American readers without access to some excellent writers.

To read this article in full go here.

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/.

Advertising in Arabic-speaking Media? Read This!

2010-01-20T10:44:00.003+10:00

From The National (UAE)

by Hassan Hassan

ABU DHABI // Arabic-language online media outlets are burgeoning, but still have little advertising revenue compared with their print counterparts, says a report by the Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research (ECSSR).

The report, published in the latest issue of the centre’s Future Horizons magazine, argued that Arabic-language print media lacked quality, but continued to thrive because advertising buyers had not been persuaded of the value of online ads.

Most print media persisted because in addition to advertising, many publications also received funding from individuals, businesses or governments, it said.

If advertising buyers turned to online media, print media would be in “great danger”.

“Print media is suffering a crisis with their readers for failing to adapt to the constant developments,” said Othman al Umair, the owner of Elaph, one of the first Arabic-language electronic newspapers, which was established in May 2001.

Mr al Umair said the print sector was “trying hard to produce good-looking papers, yet with [poor-quality] news or information, while [electronic media] is succeeding in bringing high-quality news and information directly to the reader”.

The Arab Media Outlook from the Dubai Press Club and the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers said that internet advertising revenue in the UAE was expected to grow by 9 per cent a year between 2006 and 2012, while advertising was expected to grow 13 per cent a year at magazines and 16 per cent a year for newspapers in the Emirates.

Online advertising in the Middle East comprised less than 1 per cent of total advertising spending in 2007, the outlook said. In the UAE, print media accounted for 88 per cent of total advertising spending in 2007.

The ECSSR report noted that the continued publication of some Arabic-language newspapers was not an indication of their profitability. When an Arabic-language newspaper stopped publishing, it said, it often did so for political reasons rather than financial ones.

Ghassan Habbal, a researcher at the ECSSR and one of the authors of the report, offered the example of Al Safir, a Lebanese newspaper. The paper’s peak sales are about 10,000 copies, but it attracts about four times the advertising revenue of a website with more than 50,000 readers.
In general, a high-traffic website can expect to recoup about 2 per cent of its costs through advertising, the report said.

Muaffaq Harb, a media expert, said the value of the internet for the advertising community was demographics. Websites can easily collect data on readers, which are valuable for advertisers who want to make sure that their messages reach a specific group.

“Advertising is a decisive factor that would make up for the lack of subscription fees,” he said. “Fees are necessary for specialised websites and newspapers, not the general ones.”

Mr al Umair said the challenges to print media included a greater tolerance for free speech online compared to print.

Mr Harb agreed that the future of electronic media versus print depended on two issues: freedom of expression and advertising. “There’s no doubt electronic media is safeguarding freedom of expression for any individual who tries to express his or her views.”

He said, however, that the ease of online publishing often chipped away at journalism standards, a fact that was difficult for the public to recognise.

“People would lose the ability to differentiate between good and bad and here lies the problem with the internet,” he said. “The way to avoid that is to comply with highest journalism standards.”

The growth of electronic media would not lead to the disappearance of print media, he said. “It is too soon to speak of the destruction of newspapers.”

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/.

Speaking Together in Healthcare

2010-01-20T10:23:00.003+10:00

The US Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has published a very good toolkit for healthcare professionals explaining the need for proper language services in hospitals. The publication aims to improve the quality and availability of health care language services for patients with limited English proficiency (LEP). Ten hospitals with racially and ethnically diverse patients worked together for 18-months to study and improve their language services. This video highlights the achievements of the Speaking Together program and the important role that language services can play in eliminating disparities and improving quality in America’s health care system.

The whole toolkit, plus a videoclip, are online.

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/.

Japanese SF in Translation - Interview

2010-01-20T09:57:00.003+10:00

Nick Mamatas is the editor of the new Haikasoru line of Japanese SF in English translation. Here's what he has to say on the process of selecting which SF novels get the honour to be translated into English:

"Haikasoru’s editor-in-chief Masumi Washington reads Japanese SF (both magazines and books) widely and keeps an eye out for good titles. Then we commission quick translations of chapters and get synopses of, say, eight or ten books, and from there we’ll have some formal or informal discussions and pick three or four. We like to try a mix, so we try to be sure that we have a variety with each month of release."

And on the role of translators and editors?

"[Collaboration between the translator and the editor is] Certainly as integral as the editorial process is in a book published in an original language. A translation though, is a bit different because languages are conceptually different—English has much stricter rules as to what comprises a sentence for example—and tone can be a challenge. Natsuhiko Kyogoku, for example, uses a large number of very short sentences and sentence fragments in his work, creating haiku-like tonal effects over the course of hundreds of pages. In Japan, he even has a hand in the production of his own books, and tries to make sure that every page ends with a complete sentence, so that readers can stop if they wish to. Capturing all that in an utterly different language for readers with very different expectations as to pacing, characterization, the sorts and amount of information a narrator should give, etc. is very tricky. And the translator, unlike the author, cannot simply do wholesale rewrites to make something work. We’re playing a hand that has already been dealt. Then there’s the issue of translator skill; few have the ear of a novelist. That’s when I come in. I’ve managed to find some excellent creative translators, but can also nudge and pull and yank and tug at the work. So far I haven’t had to put in any footnotes to explain this or that untranslatable term or cultural reference, though part of my luck there has been the immense cultural exchange between Japan and the English-speaking world over the past two decades thanks to video games, manga, and anime."

(He endorses glossing and intervening in the text, I see.. I assume that is motivated by the fact that a brainier translation would not sell to no-brainers, and thus limit the market niche.)

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/.

Two Years Later, Kalima Delivers Words in German

2010-01-20T09:55:00.003+10:00

Good to see the project has not folded and is spreading into languages other than English. Here is an update from ME Online:

A workshop on the translation of poetry was held in the German city of Germersheim by Kalima, the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage translation project. The event was organized jointly with Department of German Language and Literature of the School of Translation, Languages and Cultures, Johannes Gutenberg University and the German Academy for Language and Literature.

The first day of the workshop, attended by the Director of Kalima, Dr Ali bin Tamim, witnessed heated discussions between elite group of Arab and German poets, critics, and translators. The issue was the translation of poetry in general, and German Poetry in particular.

A book exhibition was also held for the works translated jointly by Kalima and Johannes Gutenberg University.

"This workshop is only the beginning of a series of collaborative work conducted under the supervision of Mustapha Al Sulaiman, Professor of Interpretation at the Johannes Gutenberg University," said bin Tamim.

"The School of Translation, Languages and Cultures and Kalima are continuing their joint efforts to translate prose, poetry, children and youth literature, and books of thoughts from German in to Arabic," he added.

The scholars discussed various theoretical and practical subjects during the workshop, especially the important role played by translation as a bridge between cultures, the integration and differences in human creativity, and the relations between social values, culture and translation.

They highlighted the association of translation with the cultural needs, human creativity, and mutual recognition. They affirmed that translation is a cultural project by its own merits, a tool for cultures to complement each others, and an aim to form a humanity culture with creativity and mutual respect as its bases.

The workshop was attended by many poetesses and poets: Emiratis Nujoom Al Ghanem and Ahmed Rashed Thani; German Daniela Danz, Alreka Dresna, Ilma Rakuza, the German Academy for Language and Literature Chairman Klaus Reichert, Berlin Festival Director Joachim Sartorius, Kathryn Schmidt, Jan and Wagner; Syrian-German poet Adel Qarshuli; Moroccan poet Mohammed Benis, and Dr Faisal Darraj.

Writers, critics and translators participating in the workshop discussed the translation of poetry to be published by Kalima within its Modern German Poetry Anthology. The workshop concluded with a 'poetry night' with Arab and German poets reading verses of their poems on Arabic and German background music.

Meanwhile, the Mayor of Germersheim Dieter Hänlein received Kalima Director Dr Ali bin Tamim and the Cultural Attache of the UAE Embassy in Berlin along with the Dean of the School of Translation and the Chairman of the German Academy for Language and Literature. Hänlein emphasized the importance of the role played by Kalima in support of the translation movement in the Arab World, while he Chairman of the German Academy for Language and Literature highlighted the gains the German authors received by having their works translated and presented to the Arab-speaking audience.

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/.

"You Don't Know What You Don't Know"

2010-01-19T22:41:00.004+10:00

A bit about cultural competence in the business sector today from Wall Street Journal. I'll just quote the fun bits..

"Tom Bonkenburg, director of European operations for St. Onge Company Inc., a small supply-chain consulting firm in York, Pa., headed to Moscow in 2008 to develop a partnership with a large firm there.

But when he met the company's Russian branch director, "I gave my best smile, handshake and friendly joke... only to be met with a dreary and unhappy look," says Mr. Bonkenburg, who had already helped St. Onge land clients in 30 countries. It got worse, Mr. Bonkenburg says: The more he turned on the charm, the gloomier his counterpart became. The potentially lucrative partnership, he figured, was surely blown. Later, however, Mr. Bonkenburg received an email from the Russian, thanking him for a great meeting. Mr. Bonkenburg later learned that Russian culture fosters smiling in private settings and seriousness in business settings. "He was working as hard to impress me as I was to impress him," Mr. Bonkenburg says. Fortunately for St. Onge, the Russian was prepared for American business joviality."

Some were lucky to use a local talent..

"Last Spring, Dakar Sushi-owner George Ajjan wrote to a Senegalese government official—using the French language but in an American English tone—to request a business license for the restaurant. "I'm direct and I shoot to kill," Mr. Ajjan says of his usual correspondence. To proofread his French grammar, Mr. Ajjan gave the letter to a Senegal native who noticed that the tone was too jarring. If not rewritten in a more deferential voice, the request would likely get denied, his friend explained. "It wasn't just about translating, but about adapting phrasing to make sure you are in line with what people expect," says Mr. Ajjan.

Some were miffed, even in their native English..

"After Ron Gonen expanded his New-York based company, RecycleBank, into England last year, he encountered an unexpected language barrier. The company, which sets up rewards programs for individuals based on the amount they recycle, was offended when the press called the program a "scheme." "I would try to tell them that it was not a scheme, that it was a service," says Mr. Gonen, the firm's co-founder and CEO. "But then they'd turn around and say, 'Right, so it's a scheme.'" Because the press coverage was otherwise positive, Mr. Gonen soon pinpointed the miscommunication: The word "scheme" holds no connotation of deceit in Britain, as it does in America.

Some were outright unlucky..

"The price tag hit seven figures at Toronto-based AlertDriving, a firm that provides online driving training courses to companies with vehicle fleets. Between 2005 and 2007, AlertDriving, incorporated as Sonic e-Learning Inc., expanded into more than 20 countries before realizing that the product had cultural flaws. The dialogue in the lessons had been poorly-translated and the driving instruction failed to address geographic nuances. For example, AlertDriving teaches that the center lane is the safest on a multi-lane highway, but that is untrue in Dubai, where the center lane is used exclusively for passing. According to Gerry Martin, AlertDriving's chief executive, it took years to realize that the foreign clients were unsatisfied because "in some cultures, like Japan, criticism is considered disrespectful." Once the company got the negative feedback, it "had to redo what already was in the market," says Matthew Latreille, AlertDriving's director of global content development. The company spent about $1 million over 18 months revamping its existing product line, honing language dialects and local driving habits."

Thank G-d no one got "killed in translation".

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/.

The Divine Controversy in Malaysia

2010-01-19T22:16:00.003+10:00

I don't know how many of you have been following the right-wing show of muscle in Malaysia over the use of the term "Allah" by Christian Malay to describe G-d. What should have been the domain of linguists, theologians and historians, has become a church bombing exercise, despite the High Court ruling.

I have come across an article today by a progressive Muslim thinker whose writings I have been following for a while. Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer is a reformist-writer and activist who advocates a culture of peace, non-violence and communal harmony, and has lectured all over world. He has been awarded several awards, including the Dalmia Award for communal harmony in 1990, honorary D.Litt. by the University of Calcutta in 1993, the 'Communal Harmony Award' in 1997 and the Right Livelihood Award in 2004 (with Swami Agnivesh) for his 'strong commitment to promote values of co-existence and tolerance'.

So of course, bombing houses of worship for linguistic reasons is not something Dr. Ashgar aproves of. His article in today's Malaysian Insider is common sense, and for me at the explanation level of a 5 year old listener, but obviously facts and bombs don't go together, and Ashgar knows about it.

So who exactly is Allah?

"The word ‘Allah’ in Arabic was in use before Islam appeared on the scene in Mecca. As Maulana Azad points out in his Tarjuman al-Qur’an, the word ‘Allah’ is derived linguistically from pre-Islamic ‘eel’ as in Jibra’il or Israf’il etc. The word is Hebrew was also iloh or ilah and by adding ‘al’ (which in English is used for ‘the’), al-ilah (the God) thus became ‘Allah’ in Arabic and was used for supreme God.

In fact, Muslims should welcome if non-Muslims too use the word Allah for God or Ishwar etc. How can one object to use of ‘Allah’ by others? Anyone who learns Arabic and talks about God will have to use the word Allah.

All Christian Arabs freely use word ‘Allah’ in countries like Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon etc. No one objects to the use of the word. At least I do not know whether any Muslim Arab ever objected to such use."

(I happen to know a slightly different version of the etymology of the term, but I don't want to be controversial).

"As I always maintain, any language exists prior to any religion and not otherwise. A religion uses a language which pre-exists it. More than one religious community can use the same language and terminology of both the religions would appear very similar," says Ashgar. True. We need language to explain and visualise the divine. You also need language to create one.

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/.

Which Second Language??

2010-01-19T21:59:00.004+10:00

A few weeks ago, a Brit told the Bahraini press that the Bahrainis need to learn English if they want to get work in Bahrain..

Pakistanis, of course, already speak English as well as Urdu. But it looks like they are not getting enough work with that English. To remedy this, the Parliament is pushing for compulsory teaching of Arabic (plus the Koran, etc.) in schools. Possibly with the view of landing good jobs in the Gulf?

Smart.

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/.

Phonics Are Good for You, Kids!

2010-01-19T21:11:00.004+10:00

The introduction of phonics study in Scotland and England since 1997 seems to have delivered some 17% rise in the number of children who can read functionally, but that has not silenced critics. The Guardian of 19/01 has an interesting article on the debate..

Basically, (a) phonics is a good approach provided it is coupled with encouragement, not imposed from the top. Duh? I thought schools were for encouraging kids to reach their full potential.

(b) No amount of phonics will help kids become good English language readers if they don't have access to books. Lack of access to books in English is not - in my humble opinion - just a matter of socio-economic disadvantage. It can be a matter of socialisation, of "protecting" the child from "outside" influences, of parents not seeing books as something good and enriching, etc. etc. Lets not be simplistic, ok?

(c) What happened to grammar?

(d) Teaching kids needs special people with special gifts. Such people are rare. In UK (and Australia), those who end up doing a BEd are usually those who didn't get anywhere else. They have been taught rubbish at school, and so will pass rubbish on. Sorry if I sound dismissive, but I speak from sad experience.

So.. back to basics. Buy kids books and educational toys. Send the parents back to school. Divide time spent between games on the computer and real hard-copy books. Expose the kids to various things, grow their vocabulary, couple hands-on stuff with theory. Kids are NEVER dumb. We are.

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/.

Linguistic Zeal

2010-01-19T20:59:00.002+10:00

From Gulf Daily News

A BILL which MPs said would have reinforced Arabic as Bahraini's official language was blocked by the Shura Council yesterday.

They said it would cause legal and practical problems, particularly if there were errors in the translation of documents, though the vote against was swung by just four votes.

Parliament had approved a bill which would have obliged all ministries and government organisations to produce their official letters and other documents in Arabic, with a second language as an option.

All official (such as road names) and commercial signs would have had to be in Arabic, with an option to put the name of franchises in another language, in smaller size.

The bill also stipulated that foreign and local companies have to present their products in the market mainly in the Arabic language, while Bahraini products sold abroad should only have the tag "Made in Bahrain" in Arabic.

It proposed fines of BD50 and BD200 for violators, while government employees would be punished according to the Civil Service laws.

Council services committee chairman Dr Bahiya Al Jishi was in favour, saying that Bahrain's Constitution stipulated that the country's official language was Arabic.

"In reality Arabic is second to English, which shouldn't be the case," she said.

"We have nothing against other languages, but they should be secondary, with Arabic being the country's main language, whether in official letters or signs."

"The bill doesn't speak about medical prescriptions or studies, considering that we know that it is very difficult to implement."

But council public utilities and environment affairs committee vice-chairman Abdulrahman Jawahery said that the bill would be very difficult to implement as a whole.

"Most of the experts in the government - whether consultants or engineers - are expatriates and having them present their letters in Arabic would be a waste of time and money, as translators must be hired," he said.

"Having people sign documents that they cannot understand is against the law and in translation words could be omitted or misinterpreted and this could harm the person signing it."

Council foreign affairs, defence and national security committee chairman Abdulrahman Jamsheer said that it would be ridiculous to have the names of franchises translated into Arabic. "For example, if a brand name is Global then it would be illogical to have 'Alami' as the main sign, because everyone knows the company by its original brand name," he said.

COMMENTARY:

Ok, the zeal misfired because it was poorly thought through. But the Arabists will continue pushing for it, for two reasons:

(a) because Arabic is the language of the Koran - forget about nationalism, that's not really the issue

(b) because they see that the standard of Arabic in their country is deteriorating, and that is bad for their cultural heritage.

If they manage to think it through so that it does not adversely affect overseas business, and if they - like Saudi Arabia - start seeing the light and educate their own instead of depending on expats, then that might create a minor renaissance for translators into English. I might even change bases :-)

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/.

MRI, Your Brain and Words

2010-01-13T13:38:00.004+10:00

Brain imaging research has progressed to the point where researchers can detect regularities in the activation of the human brain when we ponder such words as "hammer" and "dresser."

At Carnegie Mellon University, Marcel Just and his colleagues have done just that, and have described it in an intriguing article in the journal PLoS One out on Tuesday. Just, a psychology professor and director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon, tried to pinpoint what our brains do when we think of the words that represent commonplace items--building parts such as door, window and chimney, body parts such as arm, leg and eye, different types of tools, vehicles, vegetables, animals or pieces of clothing.

Just and his colleagues put 11 right-handed volunteers into an fMRI machine and had them read a list of 60 commonplace nouns six times over in varying random order, taking a moment to reflect upon each. As the subjects did so, the researchers documented the precise coordinates of the brain's activity in response. They sifted out the brain activity that was common to all the words--say, activation of visual processing areas that play a central role in reading--and looked for patterns of varying brain activation that would reveal regularities in the way we "think" about common things.

Not surprisingly, thinking about a single noun like "truck" or "butterfly" sparked activity in many different places in the brain. That's just more evidence that the brain is a far-flung network of regions and specialized cells that exchange information and coordinate efforts in even the simplest task. But four dominant patterns of brain activation seemed to emerge--clusters of brain activity that were so regular, Just and his colleagues were later able to identify what word a subject was pondering just by looking at its "fMRI activation signature."

Those activation patterns suggested that subjects were sorting commonplace nouns into four lines: things that are manipulated; things that are eaten; things that represent shelter, or an entryway into shelter; and finally, words that are long. Some of the brain regions lighted up when a "manipulation" noun was read were areas that typically activate when we imagine grasping something. When a "shelter" noun was read, brain areas that have been associated in past research with looking at, recognizing and identifying buildings and structures became activated. "Eating" nouns typically energized a region of the brain associated with the coordination and movement of the lower facial muscles.

What's more, Just and colleagues showed that when it comes to thinking about everyday objects, we don't each have unique patterns of brain activation: On the whole, the regular patterns of brain activation that distinguished, say, "arm" from "airplane," or "telephone" from "shirt" were similar across all 11 subjects.

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/.

Got website? Globalising?

2010-01-13T10:07:00.003+10:00

According to Common Sense Advisory, more than 50 percent of Web users who purchased online buy only at Web sites where the information is presented in their language. (Going from Simple Translation to Successful Transactions on Global Websites, Common Sense Advisory, March 2007).

Here are the top tips to consider for translating Web content from Mark Tapling of the Language Weaver:

1. Pay attention to the content type

Every content type has an audience, a value that it serves for the business, and a value that it serves for the audience. Because of this, different content has different requirements for translation.

Some types of content – like advertising material – are highly influential and need to be perfect, thereby requiring human translation.
Other types of content - like documentation - need to be near perfect but don’t require the same nuance as other types of content; this type of content can be served up with translation software and post-edited by a human reviewer. (Maybe!)
Some content - like knowledge bases and FAQs - simply needs to convey facts (but needs to do so quickly); automated translation software from Language Weaver can be effectively leveraged for this type of content. (Oooops! Can't judge the leverage.)

When looking to start or add additional translation, take a look at the content in your organization and consider other translation options to cost-effectively translate the information while still meeting the needs of the business and the audience.

2. Match the translation cycle to the business need

Some types of content only need to be updated and translated every time a new product or service is introduced, such as product documentation, marketing material and product oriented Web content. Other types of content should be translated as soon as they are written, such as bug fixes, FAQs and knowledge base articles, in order to save on ongoing support costs for known issues.

3. Don’t forget about search

When updating Web content, think about how users will find that information if they speak another language. Search is how most people will find information, so keep in mind that content needs to be translated to make it searchable in a visitor’s native language. Some sites pre-publish all translated content to make it visible to search engines, others don’t. Companies that don’t translate content up front are subjecting their site to an unreliable user experience delivered by a free translation plug-in. In theory, this can work, but remember that free translation sites aren’t trained to understand your brand voice and terminology so there is risk built in when putting translation in the hands of free translation.

4. Maintain control of your brand

Whether you use human translation, post-edit output from translation software or use automated translation, brand and term management is something that is crucial for a growing business. Your company has likely spent a lot of money on its brand, so you don’t want it to be at risk when expanding into new regions. For example, what should your product name be in Chinese or Japanese? How should you describe a particular experience with your product or service in another language?

Identify the brand voice you want to maintain, key product names and references, and company terminology up front so that you know how they should be represented in other languages. Working this out ahead of time also helps any translation project go smoothly and lets you maintain more control of your brand across languages.

5. Use the "NOTRANSLATE" tag

A site owner can control content by ensuring proper tagging of the information. While there are several page-level tags available to exercise this control, the most exciting one was recently added by Google. At the page level, site owners can now add a tag called “NOTRANSLATE.” This tag is interpreted by the crawler as a “do not translate” instruction. By setting the “NOTRANSLATE” tag, you ensure that Google’s automatic translation is not offered as an automatic option to anyone performing a search – especially for those pages or parts of your site where you want to make sure YOU, the site and brand owner, decide what the translation should look like without handing over control of the translation to Google’s algorithms. (My favourite tag of the year, that one!)

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/.

10 Tips On How to Come Across Polite in a Business Email

2010-01-13T10:00:00.003+10:00

Here we go, thanks to One Hour Translations

1.Use the recipient’s correct title.

2. Use the correct greeting.

3. Introduce your company and yourself.

4. Write short, simple sentences. (This could backfire, though. Not all cultures respect simplicity as clarity)

5. Avoid idioms and slang language.

6. Do not refuse requests directly, and avoid criticism in emails or letters.

7. End your letters and emails properly.

8. Where possible, send the letter or email in the recipient’s native language. This shows that you respect and care for their language and culture. Using the recipient’s native language will usually be accepted very positively and will usually reduce cultural gaps or potential misunderstandings.

9. Use only native-speaking translators. The recipient will know immediately if the translator is not a native speaker of his or her target language. Avoid using machine translation (like Google Translate or Yahoo’s Babel Fish): automatic translation is still very far from producing an acceptable result. In many cases, it can completely distort the original meaning. (Sorry, had to copy this in its entirety)

10. If possible, use an independent proofreader who is also a native speaker of the target language: two pairs of eyes are always better than one. The proofreader can review the style, fix any typos and ensure the translation is perfect.

8-10 will cost you money. But it will cost you more if you offend your client.

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/.

Philadelphia Loves It

2010-01-12T08:50:00.003+10:00

Republishing this here so as not to be accussed of bias against the whole of the US - here comes the wobbly health care from Philadelphia, and they are getting their priorities right (although the comments under the article are the same old "must speak English or die" variety).

"Methodist Healthcare System is dismantling the language barrier with a new translation system. A state-of-the-art interpretation service makes communication with anyone from any country easier.
When you are in the hospital, time is of the essence. The last thing you want to worry about is whether the health care professionals can understand you.

“It’s very frustrating if you are trying to take care of a patient and you can’t ascertain the information that you need to make the appropriate choices in their care,” said Pam Dwyer, RN, director of nursing operations.

Methodist is the first hospital system in the southern U.S. to offer this service, a connection to interpreters within 15 seconds of dialing the phone. Hospital personnel dial up an office in Philadelphia where thousands of certified medical interpreters are available to help speed up the question and answer process.

Patients are happy for the help. “They are surprised. They are happy. They feel relief,” explained Tatiana Sultzbach, manager of diversity and inclusion. “And what better way than to be able to communicate your health care issues in the language you prefer.”

Web cams enable deaf interpretation on the spot. Where there used to be delays of an hour or two for language help, that aid is now immediate.

“We love it. We absolutely love it,” stated Dwyer. “It is essential to taking care of our patients in a timely manner.”

“We’re here not only to service the people who speak English, but everybody who needs it,” added Sultzbach.

The top five languages used by Methodist so far are Spanish, Burmese, American Sign Language, Arabic and Swahili."

Funny how the comments on the article do not demand that the deaf become hearing or leave the country. Funny how people born native speakers don't see language deficiency as a disability, but as a national issue to be dealt with. And interesting, too, that when they start griping it is almost always about the Spanish-speakers.

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/.