Competition as fierce as for power-sharing and representation in a national government

It is quite amazing what volunteers can achieve when it comes to national pride.

Pejoratively known as the Galla by the rest of Ethiopia, the Oromo form around 47% of the Ethiopian population. They have a history marred with conflict and attempts of self-determination. Many of them ended up as refugees throughout the world, due to their political activism.

Now Google has given them a reason to show some national pride.

On the Oromo forum Gaada, Qeerransoo Biyyaa writes about the translation of main Google pages into their language Afaan Oromoo. The whole project was done by volunteers.

"The pleasure of seeing one’s language go global has been what, I think, made the voluntary translation a huge success for Google. Often, poor people have devoted hours and years of translation for Google, without compensation. Imagine marathon human translators in Africa, making sacrifices for Google and themselves. Within each country, I have witnessed groups competing to make their own languages go global and technological on Google.

I was part of a Google Translation Group known as the Gumii-Dagaagina Afaan Oromoo, established in the US to translate Google products into Afaan Oromoo or Oromo, the language spoken by nearly 50% the Ethiopian population. It struck me to see how the political competition among nationalities in Ethiopia also translated itself into competition to be the first to make one’s language part of the giant search engine on earth. This feels like technological nationalism.

The Afaan Oromoo group started translating Google products in the year 2005. The team was composed of about 40 people. High-profile college and high school students, linguists, and technology geeks were involved. Nevertheless, the high dropout rate of volunteers was a major problem down the line. Qeerransoo Biyyaa persevered to complete two important products 100%, Google Main Search Site and Main Search Help Pages — both important for accessing Google Interface.

The translation was a huge struggle as a person needs to integrate concepts from technology, language and culture simultaneously. It was sometimes hard to find equivalent technological terms in Oromo or other language from Ethiopia. This is simply because technological terms are as foreign as the technologies themselves to Ethiopia.

Among the Horn of African languages, the competition among languages is as fierce as the competition for power-sharing and representation in a national government.
One hopes that the availability of Google in African languages will play a certain role in improving the unfair New World Information Order, where information flows predominantly from the global NORTH to SOUTH. When Google fully develops support for languages like Afaan Oromoo, Amharic, Tigrigna and Somali etc., information may gradually start to flow in both directions, from South to North and vice versa. If that happens, it can be dubbed ‘the Grand Information Justice’. Naively speaking, information justice can lead to better understanding among world’s nations, peoples, cultures and languages. It can foster more co-operation and friendship among peoples, nations, and ethnic groups."

Good on you, folks!

Interpreter Pay in Australia (the Fair, apparently)

One of my colleagues in Brisbane, a Spanish to English translator, quoted the following as a comment on the fact that interpreters seem to be paid $20.00 per hour:


Kim Chap 12 (Hurree Babu)

"Of course I shall affeeliate myself to their camp in supernumerary capacity as perhaps interpreter, or person mentally impotent and hungree, or some such thing."

Hurray to Hurree!

First Casualties

The Boston Business Journal announced that Lionbridge Technologies Inc., a provider of technology translation and testing services for companies expanding internationally, will lay off roughly 325 employees as a part of a restructuring plan to reduce overhead costs.

Lionbridge swung to a $114.2 million net loss in 2008 compared with a $9 million net profit in 2007 on a $120.5 million writedown on its goodwill value. Revenue for 2008 rose about 2.1 percent year over year to $461.4 million.

“This plan allows up to adapt our company to the current demand levels and preserves our ability to invest in strategic initiatives such as our cloud-based language platform and global sourcing and search capabilities. We are moving forward as a leaner company while maintaining our focus on innovation and customer quality,” said Lionbridge CEO Rory Cowan in a statement.

*****

So basically Daniel Gouadec's prediction of consolidations and the return of the inhouse translator might not withstand the realities of recession. A survey of members of the Spanish translation company association, ACT has shown that the economic crisis is hitting the translation sector hard. Fifty percent of ACT’s current membership took part in a telephone survey. Nearly 50 percent revealed that their sales were down in the second quarter compared to the first. While 29 percent said that trading had not changed, just 24 percent said that they had experienced an increase in sales during the period. Analysis of the results suggests that this is likely to be as a result of niche or particular sector marketing, which has helped some translation companies expand its order book.
“Despite the world economic gloom most Spanish translation companies that responded to the survey said, although invoicing was down, they felt that their companies are standing up well to the crisis.
“More than 80 percent said that they were still honouring their commitments to suppliers at the normal payment terms. Twelve percent said that their current trading allowed them to honour their commitments to suppliers better than usual. Only six percent said that they were finding the going tougher.”

How many of them lied?

"Members of the Dutch Association of Translation Agencies are bracing themselves for the full impact of the financial crisis. Soundings taken at the November 2008 general meeting showed that members had yet to be affected, but there was an expectation that some may not survive."

That was 5 months ago. I wonder what has changed by now.

And while everyone else is going down the gurgle, the US Army still spends money chasing the wild dream of MT - it just gave BBN Technologies $2.7 million in additional funding to continue refining a translation system for military personnel to use in tactical situations. The program’s purpose is to field two-way translation systems that allow speakers of different languages to communicate with one another. What the heck for? Killing does not necessitate two-way communication. Just shoot.

Cockroaches????

From Mother Jones:

Lawyers representing more than 100 current and former contract linguists in Iraq are preparing to file a class action suit against Falls Church, Virginia-based GLS, which is majority owned by DynCorp International. The linguists allege that the company illegally changed the terms of their employment agreements, using threats and intimidation to coerce them into signing modified contracts for far less money. GLS denies any wrongdoing, holding that the pay cuts were not only legal, but also a financial necessity given the firm's narrowing profit margins. But Robert Burlison, the linguists' lead attorney and organizer of the class action, says that greed lies at the root of the case. The company, he says, has undertaken "a concerted effort to make more money and to do it on the backs of the linguists."

Underlying the impending class action is the question of whether GLS broke the law by unilaterally modifying the terms of its linguists' employment agreements midcontract, before they came up for renegotiation.

Aggravating the situation, according to numerous written complaints and former GLS linguists interviewed for this story, was the firm's alleged attempt to strong-arm personnel into modifying their contracts. Knowing that a revolt was brewing among its contractors, GLS "began sending mobile teams to get signatures for the modification of the contract, [and] that's when they started intimidating and harassing linguists," says Elboraii. The stories collected on the protest website are strikingly similar: allegations of GLS managers demanding signatures on the spot, often not allowing linguists to review the modifications in advance, and threatening them with termination should they refuse. In one case, when a team of linguists requested more time to consider their options before signing, a GLS manager allegedly said, "Your names will go on a shit list tonight if you do not sign…[and] once you're on the list, it will be extremely difficult to pull you off." GLS managers also allegedly shamed interpreters for abandoning US troops, warned that there were plenty of other qualified candidates to replace them should they refuse to sign, and said those who didn't would likely wind up on the unemployment line, competing with thousands of others thrown out of work by the recession. In a few cases, things seem to have turned even uglier. "They actually started humiliating linguists and calling them names," says Elboraii. One linguist reported a conversation he had with a GLS manager in the chow hall of his base, where the manager allegedly shrugged off the linguists' complaints, saying, "You know the Arabs…when they hear they're going to be fired, they will all spread like cockroaches."

Read the whole story here.

Overloaded, overcharged?

Kim Gizzard from The Daily Reflector reports that "In her first visit with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Secretary of State Clinton presented him with a “reset” button designed to symbolize that the United States was interested in starting a new relationship with Russia. The only problem was that a two-letter difference turned it from the Russian word for “reset” to the Russian word for “overcharged” or “overloaded.”
“We worked hard to get the right Russian word,” Clinton told him. “Do you think we got it?”
“You got it wrong,” he answered, in English.
(...)

Working with interpreters in Moldova, I learned that translating is no walk in the park. For phrases like that one, you can't merely substitute one language for another. A language teacher once told me that American idioms like “chew the fat” and “face the music” are a nightmare for people trying to learn English.

Some ideas simply cannot bridge the language barrier. For example, the teacher told me, when a minister from the South tried to get his translator to tell a congregation in Africa that he was “tickled to death” to meet them, the terrified churchgoers were told that their guest speaker had “scratched himself until he died.”

It's like the time I bought my husband an anniversary card that was written in Romanian. The way the translator explained it, the card sounded romantic. But when I got home and tried to write it in English using a translation Web site, it read, “I love your red blood corpuscles.”

(...) the Russian word for reset is perezagruzka, not peregruzka. But since Lavrov speaks English, maybe Clinton should have skipped the translation altogether. She could have just told the Russian foreign minister that she was “tickled to death” to see him.

Translation Issue

The current issue of the prestigious Hudson Review is dedicated to translation of literature and poetry.

There is also an interesting article on the translation of poetry. Apparently "many more poets than before are interested in translation" and thinks "poets are drawn to the challenge . . . the discipline appeals to them," because "the digital era means all poetic forms and media from all places circulate rapidly and incessantly. Language differences, not distances, are the only barrier. Translation thus breaks down the final obstacle to the true international poetry community."

Which brings us to the Globalization of Poetry! Can't they leave anything intact, these globalizers??

Talking of poetry and translation, if you don't mind didactic nonsense and mouthfuls of air, here are the woes of Arab translators in Dubai. They are scared, apparently, to work on poetry: "How do we make Chaucer understandable in, say, Arabic translation? Would it show Chaucer’s original poetry with Arabic equivalents or a modern version of Chaucer?" Obviously individualism did not hit there yet - no one is saying "each one of us will translate Chaucer as we personally interpret his work, as he speaks to our gut and heart". Mr. Huwaireb, who is organizing some form of an international poets symposium in Dubai, bemoans that "translation remains a hurdle towards enjoying a variety of world poetry, especially at a prominent gathering of world poets". Why? Because "translation of poetry goes beyond conventional elements of literal translation as far as ambiguities and mystic speculations are concerned, making it an art of its own"

I am not sure if it is a typo, or the writer is a LOTE speaker, or what - but the "literal" translation has very little place ANYWHERE. And yet again and again, I mentor young Arab translators working from English, and the hardest thing to beat out of them (that's not literal, ok?) is this need to do it "literally".

"I feel quite strongly about translators because they're so underestimated.."

Christopher Hampton, a British playwright, screenwriter and translator, is translating "God of Carnage," a searing dark comedy by French playwright Yasmina Reza, from French into English for its London debut, and then from British into American English for the Broadway production.

Mr. Hampton, an Oxford-trained linguist, has translated five of Ms. Reza's seven plays, among them "Life x 3" and the smash-hit "Art," which grossed more than $300 million world-wide.

"I feel quite strongly about translators because they're so underestimated," says Mr. Hampton, a 63-year-old with shoulder-length gray hair. "Sometimes you read a novel and you can't see who translated it, or they get paid very badly, and I think it's a very vital cultural exercise."

Translating Ms. Reza's plays, which are littered with slang and technical jargon used by lawyers and other professionals, can be tricky, Mr. Hampton says. He usually works on them alone for five or six weeks, and then sends her the results and waits "for the complaints to come in."


You can read more about Hampton's work here

"Nothing To About Worry Microsoft From"

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/032009-microsoft-invites-developers-to-test.html

The title already starts on the wrong foot, nu? "Microsoft Invites Developers to test Web-site translator". I was married to one of those (developers, not translators). They speak in tongues at the best of times, C++, Java, etc.. and it mostly isn't coherent. To expect them to decide if they like the output of this widget - whose amazingly incoherent performance can be tested here - will be an absolute success: both parties talk gibberish.

Couldn't they buy something more functional from Systran? Even Google does it better!

Incidentally, the testing website has a "slogan" on the top that does not get translated. It says: “And this one thing is what gives the confidence, however out of place this confidence might seem, to be absolutely unworried about the permanence of this bond. How can you somehow lose your reflection?” - Vikram

Can I safely assume this is the Widget translating from Hindi into English? Or maybe, it is the widget itself talking :-D

We will stay in business for a long time yet, fellow translators. No, nos moverans. Not by Microsoft, anyway.

More translated literature wins awards

This time it is Latin America - and I need a new reading list!!

From Daily News:

Latin American literature got a high spot at last Thursday’s first Best Translated Book Awards.

Although the top prize for best fiction went to Attila Bartis’ "Tranquility" (Archipelago Books), translated from Hungarian to English by Imre Goldstein, the two finalists were Latin American novels.

Chilean Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous "2666" (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, and "Senselessness" (New Directions), by Salvadoran Horacio Castellanos Moya and translated by Katherine Silver, were among the final three.

The event highlighted the domino effect of translations of Bolaño — starting with "The Savage Detectives" released in 2007 — which put the spotlight on contemporary Spanish-language literature.

"It always helps us when a writer has that kind of impact because it opens the door for everybody," said host Francisco Goldman, a journalist and author of Guatemalan descent.

"Translation of Spanish-language literature is leading the way of this whole translation boom we’re seeing right now."

Bolaño’s last novel, "2666," was originally published in Spanish in 2004 and centers on the unsolved murders of hundreds of young women in Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez. The author died in 2003.

"Senselessness" is the first of Castellanos Moya’s novels to be translated into English.

Only 160 pages long, it’s the story of a freelance journalist hired to edit a Catholic Church report on the military massacres of indigenous people in an unnamed Central American nation. The author, who was born in Honduras, uses gruesome details and humor to describe the events.

The 2009 Best Translated Book Awards were presented at Melville House Books of DUMBO, Brooklyn.

They are the brainchild of Three Percent, a University of Rochester online blog and resource for reviews that takes its name from the fact that only 3% of books published in the U.S. are translations — and of those, only .7% are literary fiction or poetry.

Takashi Hiraide’s "For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut" (New Directions), translated from Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu, won for best translated poetry book.

"A translation is a new thing," said Chad Post, director of Three Percent and Open letter, a translation press. "It’s not just taking [the original work] and putting it in a new language. It’s about finding the spirit of that book and making it its own entity."

The awards, which will become an annual event, are presented to the translator and publisher for works published the previous year.

The English Not Producing Enough Interpreters

From BBC:

The European Commission has launched a recruitment drive for native English speakers, predicting a serious shortage of interpreters.

The demand for mother-tongue English translators is fuelled by the fact that it has replaced French as the "lingua franca" of the EU's civil service.

EU bodies risk losing about half of their English-language interpreters in the next 10 years, the commission says.

It says English-speaking countries are not producing enough linguists.

Many native-English linguists were recruited from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s after the UK and the Irish Republic joined the EU.

But the commission says that as they reach retirement age they are not being replaced at the same rate.

The commission says it is looking to recruit about 300 English "native speaker conference interpreters" within the next 10 years.

It acknowledges that it faces competition from UN bodies for top linguists.

"There is a tangible deficit in the number of English booth interpreters available... at peak times," it says.

EU institutions employ an army of interpreters to cope with the needs of the 27-nation bloc.

The European Parliament alone employs up to 1,000 interpreters for its full sessions. With 506 possible language combinations the interpreters often work via a third, or "relay", language, such as English.

The EU has put a video clip describing the role on the YouTube video-sharing website, to interest young English speakers in interpreting.

The commission says there is also a shortage of Romanian, Latvian and Maltese interpreters.

Commenting on the commission statement on Thursday, Conservative MEP Richard Ashworth deplored the decline in language skills in the UK.

"The lack of fresh graduates with adequate language skills is a great concern and reflects years of declining importance of foreign languages in our schools...

"Hundreds of future linguists are not being given the start in our schools that they need. Great talent is being allowed to slip through the educational net and the results will be felt in our economy," he said.

No Appeal For Translation

From the ABC:

Lawyers for former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan have lost an appeal at the United Nations-backed genocide tribunal underway in Cambodia to have his case-file translated into French.

Khieu Samphan and his legal team had argued that French was one of the court's three official languages, and that if the associated documents were not available in that language, he would not receive a fair trial.

The appeal was lodged with the tribunal late last year, with Khieu Samphan's French lawyer, Jacques Verges, arguing that less than 3 percent of the 60,000-page case file had been translated into French.

However Judge Prak Kimsan, the head of the tribunal's pre-trial chamber, ruled the appeal was inadmissible because the court's rules do not provide for appeals relating to translation issues.

One Name - 50 people?

Dublin - The mystery of Ireland's worst immigrant driver, a Pole logged on the police computer as Prawo Jazdy for more than 50 motoring offences, has been solved, local media reported on Friday.

Prawo Jazdy seemed to repeatedly get tickets after being stopped by traffic personnel throughout the country for a range of motoring offences.

It appeared that to keep one step ahead of the authorities, the Polish motor menace gave a different address every time he was stopped.

Finally the vital clue emerged that brought Prawo's motoring mayhem to an end: Police realised Prawo Jazdy means driving licence in Polish.

An internal police memo from a member of the police traffic division leaked to The Irish Times newspaper says that it had come to his attention that colleagues inspecting Polish driving licences were noting Prawo Jazdy as the licence holder's name.

"Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence," the memo said.

The policeman found that computer system had created Prawo "as a person with over 50 identities".

A police spokesperson told reporters that as soon as the misreading of the licences had been discovered "the matter was rectified very quickly". - AFP

Book on translation theory wins Sheikh Zayed Book Award

Abu Dhabi, 22nd Feb. 2009 (WAM) -- Secretary General of Sheikh Zayed Book Award Rashed Al Oraimi announced Saturday winners in two categories, arts and translation for the 2009 Sheikh Zayed Book Award.

The award for best translated book is granted to Dr. Sa'ad Abdulaziz Maslouh, Professor of Linguistics in the Faculty of Arts / Kuwait, for his book "Translation theory: contemporary trends" for the interpreter's ability of transcending from a simple "transfer" of knowledge and technology to a broader framework that encompass science,culture and novelty.

"This valuable work adds a new prospect in translation/interpretation by investigating the correlation between comparative literature and linguistics; an approach that has been studied in the western academic world three decades ago whilst lacked attention in the Arabic universities.

The book provides the reader with insight into the nature of translation, language and communication across cultures. The book includes five new approaches and explores strengths and weaknesses of each. It was highly commended by the selection committee" said Al Oraimi.

Lending their voices so nothing gets lost in translation

An interesting insight into community interpreting in the USA. Oh, and please read the comments at the end of the article!

Charles Sheldon took a seat outside Medford Municipal Court Thursday morning and waited to become someone's voice.

Sheldon, 77, has worked as a state-certified interpreter for Jackson County courts for 23 years. He is one of several freelance interpreters working daily to bridge language barriers across the Rogue Valley.

Freelance interpreters remain on-call for government and private businesses when they need help communicating with non-English speakers, primarily Jackson County's growing Hispanic population. According to 2007 figures by the U.S. Census Bureau, 8.7 percent of the county's residents are of Hispanic or Latino origin.

The basic description of the job is to accompany a non-English speaking person to a doctor's appointment or a criminal trial and translate verbally what is being said by everyone involved.

Sounds easy enough. Right?

An interpreter has to communicate in real time as the events in the courtroom are unfolding. It requires quick thinking and the ability to wrap your tongue around "legalese" in two languages simultaneously.

"It can be exhausting to interpret for long periods of time," Sheldon said. "Often during trials, more than one interpreter will be inside the courtroom to spell each other."

Sheldon works primarily out of Medford Municipal Court, which deals with minor infractions such as speeding tickets within the city and various code violations.

Sheldon said his services are required about 50 percent of the time. He usually meets with the person scheduled to appear for a few minutes before he or she enters the courtroom. He goes over a few details surrounding the case, which may make it easier to interpret complex terminology during a swift-moving trial.

Sometimes, though, the terminology is not so complex.

"You have to say exactly what a person says, to the word," Sheldon said. "That means if someone curses or swears at the judge, you have to say that."

On Thursday, no Hispanic defendants appeared on the docket, but Sheldon stayed for 20 minutes after court began.

"Just in case," he said.

The old days

There was a time when few gave interpreting much thought.

Sheldon remembers when interpreters did not require formal certification before stepping into a courtroom.

"It was a very loose arrangement," he said. "Sometimes defendants would just bring a friend along to interpret."

Most Oregon interpreters are freelance workers who make themselves more marketable by achieving certification in their chosen language.

Rebecca Segura, who owns Segura Language Services based in Medford, said the tests to become certified are rigorous.

"The written tests are very difficult," Segura said. "After passing it, you have to take an oral exam that is just as hard."

Sheldon, who grew up speaking Spanish in Southern California and has done missionary work in Costa Rica, admitted he did not pass the legal-interpreting test the first time.

Oregon employees 100 certified interpreters proficient in languages ranging from Russian to Vietnamese. Interpreters are paid $32.50 per hour, according to the Oregon Department of Justice Web site.

Spanish interpreters make up the bulk of the program, according to Court Interpreter Services Program Manager Kelly Mills.

The need for Spanish interpreters in the court system remains strong, though the numbers of interpreters hired recently have not spiked, Mills said.

"The majority of cases today do not go to trial," she said. "They more often than not reach plea deals."

State-certified interpreters must pass a code of ethics test before they are allowed to serve the public.
The job often puts those in need in a vulnerable position, as they are at the mercy of their interpreter. There have been reports of interpreters bilking clients out of money.

On Feb. 14, The Oregonian reported that court interpreter Phuong Anh Ly, who worked in the Portland area, was arrested for embezzling money from Vietnamese-speaking clients. She was on the lam for stealing the identity of a client when she worked in a medical clinic.

"You are held to a high standard in this work," Sheldon said. "The justice system relies on that."

Something different every day

There is no typical day for a freelance interpreter. The job requires the ability to switch gears to meet challenges in a wide range of situations.

An interpreter can spend the morning at a trial and then accompany an Occupational Safety and Health Administration official to a construction site to interview workers to see whether the company is following state labor-safety laws.

The interpreter could then end the afternoon at a doctor's office with a non-English-speaking patient who faces cancer surgery.

Medical interpreting remains a highly valued skill in the community, and often is traumatic for the interpreter as well as a patient who receives bad news from a doctor.

Natalie Stawsky, 43, has worked as an interpreter since 1994. She started as a journalist with a Spanish radio show in Los Angeles. She then discovered the need for medical interpreters and decided to give it a try.

Stawsky works as a yoga therapist at the Rasa Center for Yoga and Wellness on State Street in Medford. She has a Spanish-speaking woman in one of her yoga classes who benefits from Stawsky's ability to communicate in her native language.

"I started interpreting for fun," Stawsky said. "Translating keeps your mind sharp."

When interpreting for medical clients, Stawsky said she endeavors to build a level of trust with patients, as many are nervous going into a doctor's visit.

Job can be stressful

The job can be tough, especially when an interpreter has to communicate bad news. Stawsky has been in situations when a doctor has told a patient he has a terminal disease. She also has worked as a 9-1-1 operator and been part of some extremely stressful calls.

"I have had to take breaks from interpreting because of these situations," she said. "As an interpreter you cannot say to the person, 'I am so sorry for what I have to tell you' and then say what the doctor said. You have to say exactly what the doctor says without putting yourself into the conversation. It can be hard."

Some of Stawsky's most trying jobs involved debtors seeking to collect money from poor families.

"Those calls are probably the most stressful," she said. "Debtors can be very harsh."

Neither Stawsky nor Sheldon give a thought to a client's immigration status. It is not for them to decide who is allowed to remain in the country or whether someone is committing an illegal act, they said.

The service does have unexpected rewards. Stawsky has interpreted for women who are in the midst of childbirth.

"I have had several babies named after me," she said. "Which is funny because some of the time I only dealt with these people on the phone and have never met them."

"Oh, he doesn't speak English!"

It takes an English-only-speaker to do something like this in public :-)

Michael Feingold On Translating Brecht

From Press Telegraph, Long Beach CA:

Q. A Google search turns up a director who criticizes your translation, comparing it unfavorably with the 1952 translation of the Threepenny Opera by Marc Blitzstein. How do you respond?

A. Most people have only vague notions of what's involved in translation. They don't know either the original language or the musical score. The fellow you quote is dealing in generalities and doesn't really say much about why Blitzstein's translation might or might not be preferable to mine. Blitzstein was a very great artist in his own way; what he did was right for his time, and a lot of it is still effective. But a lot of it has less to do with Brecht and Weill than one might wish. There's an additional problem in that Brecht loved to rework, and developed big disagreements with Weill, as many composer-writer teams do, about the shape of the work. Later versions published by Brecht have often been produced by people who mistakenly thought they were performing the work as seen in Berlin in 1928. The two estates specifically commissioned me to translate the original 1928 version.

Q. Do you incorporate Brecht's theories and instructions designed to keep the audience at a distance and teach them his social lessons rather than involving them in the characters?

A. Brecht's theories are mostly a matter for directors and actors to use in approaching the work. I translated his stage directions as I found them. The really hard part was capturing his poetry. Brecht was an extraordinary writer; it's possible to say that people put up with his theories for the sake of his poetry. Theory isn't really very important in art - it's something for academics to jaw over.

Welsh Getting No Justice

RED-FACED Whitehall bosses are spending £4m upgrading a new courts IT system – because it can’t translate documents into Welsh.

But despite the whole project taking more than a decade to develop it was not programmed to send out summonses in Welsh, as courts are required to do by law. The Ministry of Justice has been translating summonses manually on request since Libra was introduced, and will continue to do so until the problem is fixed in September. However, the ministry has yet to sign the contracts for the upgrade work, and admits the £4m cost is only an estimate.

The case puts the Government’s notorious record on IT projects back in the spotlight – even the defective Libra project was seven years late and £260m over budget.

(Sort of like Queensland's SmartCard venture. It still doesn't know the Exhibition Station exists!)

A classic case of "Computer Says No" in the not-so-little Britain?

Asylum-seeker language test under scrutiny

ABSTRACT: "Language tests in immigration contexts typically perform a gate-keeping role in decisions about whether an applicant should be granted residence or citizenship in a new country. In refugee contexts, so-called language tests or language analyses also play a gate-keeping role, but a more ambitious one; namely that of providing answers to questions concerning the genuineness or honesty of asylum seekers' claims about their origins, whether national, regional, or ethnic. That is, the way that an asylum seeker speaks in an interview with immigration officials is analysed or assessed to help in the determination of whether to accept this person's claims about their origins. It is this assessment of language that is the subject of this article, in which I will explain the methods used and then highlight some problems that have been addressed by linguists. The acronym LADO is used to refer to such “language analysis” used for the determination of origin, but it should be understood that much of the “language analysis” in this area appears quite superficial"

Thus starts Dr Diana Eades article in the latest issue of Language Assessment Quarterly, warning that it is anything but scientific. "[They] are based on several folk linguistic views about the way people should speak that aren't borne out by the research on how language works," says Eades. A common or 'folk' view is that there is a one-to-one correspondence between nationality and language, but this is not true.

First, with widespread migration, there are immigrant groups in most countries who speak different languages. For example, Turkish in Germany, Vietnamese in Australia and Urdu in Afghanistan.

Second, national borders do not always coincide with linguistic borders. For example, a number of languages are spoken by indigenous people in Afghanistan as well as in neighbouring countries, including Dari (Farsi), one of the two national languages. In cases we have considered, members of the Hazara ethnic community from Afghanistan speak a variety of Dari which is also spoken in neighbouring Pakistan and Iran; Urdu, which is the official language of Pakistan, is also spoken by some communities of speakers in Afghanistan.

Many people believe that a person's national or ethnic identity can be determined by the use of a particular word or the way it is pronounced. But this is not necessarily true, because of two factors: language spread and linguistic change. Eades says that there are lot of subtleties in the way language works that makes this job not as easy as it would seem. There is language morphing and language leakage, for example, which means that there is nothing really called an "authentic" language for a particular area.

Not to mention that only trained linguists can provide some insight into the probable origins of a person. Many commercial companies being hired by governments (read the Swedish Eqvator) to analyse language are offering it as some kind of scientific fix that is relatively easy. "The department just sends off a cassette recording and some money and then they get back one of these one and a half page reports." The companies often use the judgement of native speakers who don't have linguistic training and have a narrow view of how the asylum speaker should speak. "It's equivalent to saying that because someone used the US term 'elevator' instead of 'lift', they are not from Australia, That's the level that these reports are operating on."

Eqvator and its notorious "language analysis" have been discussed since 2002. Tim McNamara, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, published a paper in 2003 called "Linguistic Identification in the Determination of Nationality", in which he revealed that Eqvator, a privatised offshoot of the Swedish Immigration Board, carried out the language analysis relied on by the Australian government in determining whether it owes protection obligations to asylum seekers who arrive here without documentation. The work is done by interpreters, often themselves former asylum seekers, and others with varying but undisclosed degrees of linguistic training. The work of Eqvator has been the subject of ongoing criticism by linguists in Scandinavia. Professor Ruth Schmidt from Oslo University pointed to a number of problems with two Eqvator ' language tests' which she examined in 1997. She found that neither of them contained any scientifically recorded data for pronunciation or grammatical features, nor did they contain an adequate description of the language situation in the country from which the speaker claimed to come.

If this had been a simple linguistic discussion, that would be fine. But refugees are being refoulled back home to death and torture, because they happened to pronounce one word in 15 minutes of an interview in a language perceived as not their own!

Writing us out of the job??

I heard it somewhere just a few months ago: translation agencies, squeezed by a diminishing market in the recession, will opt into selling their clients technology instead of translators. And you thought that Machine Translation was bad? Think again, it saves us time. But we used to be able to make extra money editing, typesetting, DTPing.

"TransPerfect has provided translation services for various divisions of Arch Chemicals for over 4 years. Through the expanded relationship, Arch Chemicals will also implement TransPerfect's GlobalLink GMS technology platform which will automate many of the manual and labor-intensive tasks associated with procuring translation services. GlobalLink technology may be either installed or hosted; Arch will implement GlobalLink's hosted solution, which enables the company to benefit from drastically reduced project management time, more cost-savings from enhanced leveraging of previous translations, and faster time-to-market for translated content, all through a secure and intuitive web interface. "

This "leveraging of previous translations" simply means that they will be writing less in simpler English, unify the terminology, and produce information in a way that will not necessitate the presence of a human translator.

According to John Hott of Arch Chemicals' global Regulatory Affairs department, "Based on our longstanding relationship with TransPerfect, we knew they would provide our company with exceptional service and translation quality. By centralizing our translation projects with TransPerfect and implementing their GlobalLink technology, we will now also benefit from more consistent terminology and more efficient project management."

Oh yeah. Meanwhile, TP will try to offload the REAL translations, in hundreds of thousands of words, at some peanut rates and incredible deadlines. Simply because they think humans are part of the GlobalLink, too. Kegs. Bytes. Zeros and ones.

More carnage for translators

Translating religious texts has often been wrought with danger for the translator. William Tyndale's was the first English translation to draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, and the first to take advantage of the new medium of print, which allowed for its wide distribution. In 1535, Tyndale was arrested, jailed in the castle of Vilvoorde outside Brussels for over a year, tried for heresy and burnt at the stake. Most well known for his translation of the Bible, Tyndale was an active writer and translator. Not only did Tyndale's works focus on the way in which religion should be carried out, but were also greatly keyed towards the political arena. He wrote, "They have ordained that no man shall look on the Scripture, until he be noselled in heathen learning eight or nine years and armed with false principles, with which he is clean shut out of the understanding of the Scripture."

Five centuries later, very little has changed.

In 2007, Ahmad Ghaws Zalmai, a spokesman for the attorney general, helped print 1,000 copies of an Afghan language translation of the Quran. Some of the men of the mosque said the book would be useful to Afghans who didn't know Arabic, so they took up a collection for printing.

Because the translation did not have the original Arabic verses of the Quran, Islamic clerics accused Zalmai of breaking Shariah law by modifying the holy book. Many clerics rejected the book because it did not include the original Arabic verses alongside the translation. It's a particularly sensitive detail for Muslims, who regard the Arabic Quran as words given directly by God. A translation is not considered a Quran itself, and a mistranslation could warp God's word. The clerics said Zalmai, a stocky 54-year-old spokesman for the attorney general, was trying to anoint himself as a prophet. They said his book was trying to replace the Quran, not offer a simple translation.

Zalmai has been in prison for more than a year, along with cleric Qari Mushtaq Ahmad of the Kabul mosque, who asked him to reprint the translation.

Last year, Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh also faced execution for allegedly distributing literature questioning the role of women's rights in Islam that was deemed insulting to the faith.

Under the universal right of freedom of religious expression and even the Constitution of Afghanistan, these men violated no law in translating the Quran as they did.

******
A little bit of common sense would tell us that if you believed God to be omnipotent, then you'd have to believe that you were a tad above omnipotence to be able to "warp God's words" by translating them into another language. Besides, even if Zalmai and his crew had put the Arabic text alongside their translation, the average Afghan would have no clue whether theirs was a faithful rendering of the text, since they cannot read Arabic. Besides, one would have thought the Almighty to be able to smite the translator outright, and not need the support of rather ignorant clerics for that!

*******
Reminds me of the translation by Dr. Laleh Bakhtiar, who cause a furore in 2007 by translating the notorious 4:34 verse to mean "send away" instead of "to beat" (we are talking domestic violence here). The discussion of the verse by Dr. Bakhtiar can be found here. Mohammad Ashraf, the the head of one of Canada's leading Muslim organizations said he would not permit Bahktiar's translation to be sold in the bookstore of the Islamic Society of North America (Canada). His logic? "This woman-friendly translation will be out of line and will not fly too far," he says. "Women have been given a very good place in Islam."

*******

NZTC Doing Well

In case you are asking why I am writing a sales pitch for a Kiwi company - I know Liz Seymour. She brought 4 of her staff to the AUSIT Biennial Conference last November, and is a very nice person to talk to. My comments are in brackets.

The Dominion Post yesterday was quoting Liz as saying that "export's success is anyone's language", and followed it with some interesting data: 60 per cent of NZTC's 1500 clients are based overseas, mainly in Europe, Asia and North America (nota bene: NOT IN AUSTRALIA). The centre has 32 staff in Wellington, marketing representatives in Auckland and Melbourne and 1000 contractors worldwide. Its annual revenue is less than $10 million; it translates into more than 70 languages and specialises in high-end technical translation, which can include localising software for exporters and translating user manuals and promotional materials for medical equipment companies.

In-demand languages include Maori and Pacific languages, French, German, Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese. Now being in-demand does not mean they are expensive - apparently the most costly are Maori, Niuean and Amharic, an Ethiopian language, at $85 per 100 words translated, while French, Dutch and German are cheapest at $40 per 100 words.

Ms Seymour says translation trends follow the economic fortunes of countries.
If a country was economically strong and exporting many goods, demand for translation of its language would be strong (so we shall see a dearth in translating from English, now that the USA has capsized belly up). The addition of eastern European countries to the European Union has increased demand for translation in those languages (but they don't pay well!). New immigrants coming in, such as Somalis, also create new demand (again, no money in this - community translating is cheap, and public service will be the first to cut translation out of its budgets with recession). The centre is yet to see recession-wary firms reduce translation services. "Some companies have been asking if we can do more work. They want to boost sales and marketing efforts overseas." (Not what I am hearing from Europe).

Good luck, Liz!

If You Thought the Tax Office Could Kill..

..then you have seen nothing yet! For some, being killed because of taxation is a real threat.

Form D/4a from the Iraqi Ministry of Finance is sending waves of anxiety through the community of Iraqis who work as linguists, translators and interpreters for the U.S. military in Iraq. For the “terps,” as many U.S. troops and diplomats call them, the form is a prelude to a disaster. Unless their identities are kept a closely guarded secret, they fear, they and their families will be hunted by insurgents, militias and death squads — many of whom are tied to or work for the Iraqi government — for collaborating with the U.S. military.

http://washingtonindependent.com/28443/iraqi-translators-fear-retribution

It is not the first time in history that interpreters are perceived as traitors to their own country. La Malinche, was born the daughter of a cacique during the rule of the Aztecs in the early 1500s. As the daughter of a cacique, she was considered part of the noble class and allowed the opportunity to attend school. She was sold into slavery, eventually ending up in the hands of Hernan Cortes and the Spaniards during their conquest of the Aztecs. As an interpreter. One could argue that without Doña Marina serving as his interpreter and enabling him to communicate with the Indians, Cortes may not have been able to defeat the Aztecs, or at the very least, not as readily. Several accounts indicate that La Malinche was also responsible for foiling more than one Aztec plan to attack Cortes and the Spanish army. Her various roles as interpreter, Cortes’ mistress, and informant, led to the less desirable labeling of her as “La Chingada” (not a very polite term) by modern Mexicans. Understandably, many Mexicans regard La Malinche as a traitor. Her role as an interpreter has often been sullied by this perception. She has become the embodiment of the famous saying “Traduttore, traidore.”

The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker and Kirsten Malmkjaer, says this: "In the colonial context, we find translators and interpreters, but particularly interpreters, taking on an amazing range of responsibilities which go far beyond linguistic mediation. Interpreters in the colonial context acted as guides, explorers, diplomats, ambassadors and advisers on Indian and local affairs; that is why they were sometimes branded as traitors, because they were indispensable to the colonial authorities".

In his article "Interpreters in conflict zones: what are the real issues?" , AIIC member Eduardo Kahane talks about "US army, NATO, the UN peace keeping forces, the European Union, ministries of foreign affairs, journalists and humanitarian and development NGOs like Médecins du Monde" as well as major companies who use interpreters in areas of conflict: "It does not occur to these organisations to use professionals because a makeshift arrangement with locals is cheaper than taking on the financial responsibility of offering proper pay and conditions, danger money, and life, invalidity and sickness insurance. This is a cost of conflict and war that nobody has quantified because it is not paid in money, but with the lives and sacrifice of local interpreters (their lives are apparently not worth much) and the lives of their families, who likewise bear the brunt of conflict. We must not forget that once the occupying forces and humanitarian agencies have left, the interpreters are vulnerable and without protection because their previous activity marks them out for the warring factions as traitors to the cause or collaborators with their employers or the enemy. "

Over 200 interpreters died in Afghanistan in just 2006. "Using people suffering economic hardship, who are badly informed and not properly covered for the risks they run when working (often kidnapping and death) is similar in more ways than one to using human shields in war, something that has been defined and strictly banned by the Geneva Conventions."

Anyone there listening????

Idiomatic African and not so idiomatic translations..

From Cape Town with love - some comments on how the very idiomatic expressions in isiXhosa are being translated in mass media into English by less than qualified translators:

isiXhosa: Mabayeke ukuthakatha nga bo mama nabo gogo bethu ku ma-TV ngenjongo zokufumana amavoti
What it really means: people must stop abusing the elderly for political gains
English translation - painfully literal: they are using old women for witchcraft

isiXhosa: Sithe masize apha sizokhahlela oo Kumkani
What it really means: We are here to salute our kings
English translation: the ANC is here to kick the chiefs into line

Sesotho: "Dikgetho tsena etlaba ntwa ya dibono"
What it really means: "These elections are going to be hotly contested
English translation: "This shall be a war of the buttocks".

Zulu: "Siyobona ukuthi iyozala nkomoni" -
What it really means: "We anticipate the real outcome"
English translation: "We shall see the type of cow it will give birth to".

Sepedi: "Kgankga oja nkgawane" -
What it really means: "It's a challenging situation"
English translation: "Kgankga is eating the smaller one".

Comical it is not.. even in comics

What does Bill Jemas know about Biblical Hebrew? So he has a Juris Doctor from Harvard. And he brought Marvel Comics back from the dead by rejuvenating Superman. Great achievement, indeed, for a JD.

But to rejuvenate the Book of Gensis though a new translation that reminds one of sci-fi sounds like so much postmodernist crap, that one wonders if anything in this world remains at all sacred. Listen to this:

The King James version: "In the beginning, God created the heaven and Earth."

Jemas' verbatim translation reads: "‘in principles conceive powers-that-be unto the heaven and unto the earth.”

Did he use Babelfish, or mescalin? He calls this a Freeware Bible, and even presents his point of view as regards the translation: "The translation data comes right from traditional translations and their annotations, from articles and books by respected Biblical scholars, and from other concordances (Bible dictionaries). I can not promise that the database is perfectly accurate and all-inclusive. But I can say it comes from reputable sources and that I did my best to be objective in deciding what to include and exclude, so that you can come to your own understanding of the original ideas.." So you can come to your understanding? Geez, most people can't understand the news they read in the daily paper, or a manual on how to start a video player. And Jemas expects them to have the erudition to use a concordance to decide on the best translation of a long dead language? Even modern Jews disagree on that, and agree to disagree.

Then comes the "methodology" that would make any educator aghast: "The first step in the translation process is to read the ancient scripture one word at a time and try to figure out which modern words best represent the ancient ones. " READ ONE WORD AT A TIME? Now we are in the domain of R2D2? I wonder what reading Homer, or the Vedas, or maybe the American Constitution one word at a time do to our comprehension and the unity of the text!

I am sure Billy Graham and the Chief Rabbinate will be highly impressed with the new work.. but any chances that it will be part of a curriculum at any seminary is extremely low. Unless Yoda starts one.

Corona (Queens, NY) City Council Elections Tend to Become Anal

The perpetual error in Spanish that seems to beleaguer English-speakers. An election campaign poster for a Council candidate in Corona, Queens, NY. In English and Spanish. Años and anos..

"Solamente e los 15 años..." a few years without a tilde makes you into a multiplicity of backside openings, or whatever.. Might be helpful in a City Council to be more.. err.. open...

Iraqi translators in a new stage production

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, which won several awards and was named by The New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2005. He has published The Village of Waiting (1988), a memoir about his years in the Peace Corps in West Africa, and Blood of the Liberals (2000), a three-generational political history, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. Packer is the editor of The Fight is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World (2003).

In early 2007, George Packer published an article entitled "Betrayed" in The New Yorker about Iraqi interpreters who jeopardized their lives on behalf of the Americans in Iraq with little or no U.S. protection or security. The article drew national attention to the humanitarian and moral scandal. Based on Packer's first-person interviews in Baghdad, the stage adaptation of BETRAYED tells the story of three young Iraqis, two men and one woman, motivated to risk everything by America's promise of freedom. Hailed as "eloquent" and full of "sharp dramatic impact and beauty" by The New York Times, BETRAYED explores the complex relationship between a Sunni and a Shiite Muslim who build a rare bond as they face the daily dangers of working for the American authorities after the 2003 invasion in Baghdad. Joined by a woman who refuses to submit to Islamic law, all three struggle to realize their dreams and hopes for a new world in a country that is collapsing around them.

And now it has been staged by Berkeley's acclaimed Aurora Theatre Company. The play, which is a provocative theatrical adaptation of Packer's eye-opening 2007 essay in The New Yorker, has already won the 2008 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play. Robin Stanton helms this astonishing play, featuring Bobak Cyrus Bakhtiari, Keith Burkland, Denmo Ibrahim, Alex Moggridge, Amir Sharafeh, Khalid Shayota, and James Wagner.

A review of the play can be read here.

New York Times Makes the Pope Majestic

OK, I don't like Ratzinger. We have family reasons dating from early 1940s not to. So when an article about Catholic-Jewish reconciliation was published in Wednesday's New York Times in which he was said to have called on Jews to meet his conciliatory gesture with “ a commitment on their part to fulfill the further steps necessary to realize full communion with the church,” including “recognizing the majesty and authority of the pope and of the Second Vatican Council,” I thought "right.. first a demented infallibility, now he wants to take on some more G-d's attributes and become majestic as well?? And this is supposed to be re conciliatory?"

I was wrong.

Ratzie actually said the following: "Auspico che a questo mio gesto faccia seguito il sollecito impegno da parte loro di compiere gli ulteriori passi necessari per realizzare la piena comunione con la Chiesa, testimoniando così vera fedeltà e vero riconoscimento del magistero e dell’autorità del Papa e del Concilio Vaticano II."

I know enough lame Latin to be aware that magistero and maesta are two different items. Magisterium is Latin for teaching, instruction, or advice, and it means in this context the teaching authority, of the Roman Catholic Church. So the guy wants us to recognize the teaching, not his personal majesty.

Well, I am not sure about us accepting this, Ratzie, but at least it is a relief to know you are not in the process of usurping Adonai.

From "Religion Dispatches" - Translating Rumi

Coleman Barks, Rumi's most popular "translator" in the USA, can neither read nor speak Farsi. Being a poet himself, Barks “re-Englishes” existing translations, releasing, in his own words, “the fire and ecstasy of Rumi’s ghazals” from the stale confines of their scholarly translations.

It doesn't make his critics happy! Read Ryan Croker explaining why they are wrong here.

Barks is also known from his very emotive letter sent in 2003 to President Bush, in which he called for sending translators and peace activists to Iraq instead of bombs: "Now imagine some other way to do it. Quadruple the inspectors, or put a thousand and one U.N. people in. Then call for peace activists to volunteer to go to Iraq for two weeks each. Flood that country with well-meaning tourists, people curious about the land that produced the great saints, Gilani, Hallaj, and Rabia. Set up hostels near those tombs. Encourage peace people to spend a bunch of money in shops, to bring rugs home and samovars by the bushel. Send an Arabic translator with every four peace activists. The U.S. government will pay for the translators and for building and staffing the hostels, one hostel for every twenty activists and five translators. The hostels are state of the art, and they belong to the Iraqis at the end of this experiment. "

You can listen to a sample of Barks "translations" of Rumi's 'What Was Said To the Rose' here

"Slumdogs", idioms and translation

According to reports, an aggrieved Indian has filed a petition in a court against the producers of the film, Slumdog Millionaire

Niranjan Desai, who worked as the press counsellor in the Indian high commission in London in the eighties, makes some good comments on how idioms get lost in mis-interpretations:

"The English cricket team was in India and there was a middle-page spread in an evening paper of photographs of the two teams basking in the sun in Indore, if one remembers correctly. The caption was, 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the sun!' I got a telephone complaint from an Indian with a thick Punjabi accent soon enough. I was asked to immediately take up the issue with the editor because the reporter had dared to insult all Indians as mad dogs ! I tried to explain to this gentleman about the origin of the phrase and assured him that this in no way implied that Indians were mad dogs. He quickly brushed aside my explanation and accused me of being a coward in not standing up to the 'gora'! "

A New Translation of Shalom Aleichem's "Wandering Stars'

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sholom Aleichem.

The Ann Arbor-based translator and author Aliza Shevrin, who has also done eight other Aleichem novels from Yiddish, said in an interview that hers is the first complete English version of "Wandering Stars" - a different translator in 1952 abridged the text and gave it a happy ending completely different from the Yiddish original. Shevrin's fluid translation captures the idiomatic richness of the original Yiddish and brings Aleichem's vanished culture to vibrant life.

Sholem Aleichem is the pen name of Sholem Rabinovitch (1859–1916), the most beloved writer in Yiddish literature, whose most famous work is "The Fiddler on the Roof". Born in Pereyaslev, Ukraine, one of nine children in a poverty-stricken Jewish family, complete with an evil stepmother, Sholom Rabinovitch (the writer’s real name) fled the pogroms and immigrated to New York in 1905. At 16, he took a job tutoring the daughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman. He promptly fell in love with his 13-year-old student. After several years the two eloped, to the businessman’s despair. But shortly after reconciling, his father-in-law died and left Rabinovitch, already the author of several stories under his pen name, a vast fortune.

In Wandering Stars, Reisel, daughter of a poor cantor, and Leibel, son of a rich man, fall under the spell of a traveling Yiddish acting company. Together they run off to join the theater but quickly become separated. Reisel goes on to become Rosa Spivak, concert star, and Leibel becomes Leo Rafalesko, theatrical sensation. Kept apart by their own successes and by the managers who exploit their talent, they tour the world until their wanderings bring them both to New York. An engrossing romance, a great New York story, and an anthem for the theater, Wandering Stars is a long-lost literary classic, rediscovered here in a vibrant new translation.

The new translation will be published in May 2009.

Read more here

There is an excpert from the new translation here .

Inquiry into trial’s use of unqualified interpreter

Comment: Why do I have a sinking feeling that the worse the recession becomes, the more I am going to see of such cases? Hungry students, agencies scraping the bottom, hapless victims and a miscarriage of justice?

By John Bynorth
http://www.sundayherald.com/search/display.var.2468270.0.inquiry_into_trials_use_of_unqualified_interpreter.php

An urgent inquiry has been launched into how a jury trial of a migrant collapsed after the sheriff discovered the accused’s interpreter had no qualifications.
AN URGENT inquiry has been launched into how a jury trial of a migrant collapsed after the sheriff discovered the accused's interpreter had no qualifications, nor had she previously been engaged in a trial.

Sheriff James Tierney halted the trial of Krzysztof Kucharski on the second day after the freelance interpreter admitted her inexperience in open court, despite reassurances from the interpreting firm that she was suitably qualified. She herself had, at the start of the trial, confirmed that she was able to undertake the work.

The Scottish Court Service (SCS) hired criminology and psychology student Beata Kozlowska from Alpha Translating and Interpreting Services, the country's largest interpreting firm. Kozlowska was to interpret in the case against Kucharski, 24, at Aberdeen Sheriff Court last month, despite not possessing the Diploma in Public Service Interpreting (DPSI), the minimum industry benchmark qualification for linguists working in the public sector.

Kucharski, a car valet from Aberdeen, was alleged to have repeatedly struck his victim, Fryderyk Polak, on the body with a knife or similar instrument to his severe injury on October 12 last year. He has always maintained his innocence.

Kucharski's defence lawyer, Taco Nolf, himself a qualified translator in two foreign languages, formally objected to Kozlowska's handling of key evidence from two Polish witnesses.
The sheriff then investigated the interpreter's qualifications and deserted the case pro loco et tempore ("for the place and time") and discharged the 15-strong jury. Legal sources have indicated it is unlikely the trial could be re-staged.

The event highlighted how the SCS is continuing to use inexperienced foreign students - without the DPSI or any other interpreting qualifications - despite issuing guidelines in June that interpreters should hold the DPSI with the option in Scots law "or an equivalent qualification of similar standard".

The Sunday Herald revealed this year how mistakes are being made that could lead to miscarriages of justice, and that migrants without the DPSI are exploiting a lucrative trade in court interpreting.

Labour's justice spokeman, Richard Baker, said: "If cases are being lost like this due to translation errors then something is seriously wrong with our prosecution system. There is a principle that everyone is entitled to fair representation but from this evidence it appears this is not the case when some translation companies are involved."

In 2006, Nolf was representing in an assault case at Wick Sheriff Court that collapsed because of an error made by one of Alpha's unqualified freelance interpreters.

The lawyer said: "This is the third trial in which I have been involved that has been deserted because of incompetent interpreters, all of them supplied by the same agency."

In a statement, the SCS said that an interpreter with the DPSI plus Scottish law option qualification was "specifically requested in this case", and that Alpha provided a note to the court explaining why it thought the interpreter had other suitable qualifications, which was accepted.
It added: "The matter has been urgently raised with Alpha Translating, and we are awaiting the outcome of their internal inquiry."

Saif Shah, head of interpreting at Alpha, said it followed the guidelines in providing all relevant details about its interpreters. He added: "We are very disappointed about this development and will be investigating the matter internally and with our clients at the SCS."

An Englishman’s life in translation

Having coffee with Denys Johnson-Davies does not seem all that remarkable – until you remember that this silver-haired Englishman shared a table with Tawfik al Hakim three decades before you were born. Hakim may not be as familiar to western readers as Naguib Mahfouz, but he was a much bigger deal in his time. Then again, Johnson-Davies was a literary figure in Cairo long before Mahfouz made his name.

“Can you imagine,” he says, recalling his early days with the BBC in Evesham, where the broadcast company’s headquarters were relocated while London was bombed during the Second World War. “Here was Britain, with this enormous empire, throughout the Arab world – it didn’t have anybody who spoke Arabic. They did have this one Scotsman, Cowen,” he corrects himself, “but when the war came, there was nobody in Cambridge apart from me and Abba Eban,” he smiles, “who later became the Israeli foreign minister. When I started learning Arabic I was 15; they wouldn’t take me at Cambridge so I went to London, and I went to Cambridge when I was 16. The BBC had obviously contacted Cambridge and said, ‘Do you have anyone studying Arabic?’ And so I went to London, and I remember being taken into the studio to listen to a news bulletin in Arabic, and I didn’t even know what the subject was, let alone understand a word. But they took me on.” It was in Evesham, while living with the Arab employees (“mainly they were Egyptians”) in bunks in an army-managed dormitory, that Johnson-Davies began to learn Arabic for real: “It was a third university for me, and very much better than Cambridge or London. Directly I was released, I went to Cairo...”

Nearly six decades and numerous seminal translations later, Johnson-Davies received the inaugural Personality of the Year Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2007, adding incentive to complete his new book of Emirati short stories in translation, a project begun several years ago to be published by the American University in Cairo Press with support from the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage in time for the next Abu Dhabi Book Fair. He is here with the final proofs, to revise them with Juma al Qubaisi, the director of the Abu Dhabi Book Fair, to catch up with the poet Ahmad Rashid Thani and other friends and to reflect on his relationship with the Gulf. On his way to Abu Dhabi, Johnson-Davies stopped in Doha, and was amazed to find absolutely no sign of the city he first knew in 1951. “I would ask about certain things and say, ‘It was here a long time ago.’ And people would say, ‘How long ago? In the time of Sheikh Khalifa?’ No, Sheikh Ali [bin Abdulla Al Thani]. ‘Sheikh Ali!’ It was as if I was talking about prehistoric times.”

Johnson-Davies originally went to Doha to represent an American oil company: “I had signed a two-year contract, but after a year they said there was no oil in the sea – it was a marine company. And then while I was there, somebody came along to me and said that in Dubai, they want a translator to translate for Sheikh Said bin Maktoum, but they have no money, so are you ready to perform this service? And I said yes; I’d love to see Dubai. So, I went by private aeroplane. There was no airport or anything in Doha, and nothing at all in Dubai, no hotels or amenities. They put me up in a place belonging to the sheikh, and I translated for five days or so, but I saw Dubai in 1951. And then,” he goes on in the same breath, “I came here as the head of Sawt al Sahel (The Voice of the Coast), which was a radio operated by the English, an Arabic broadcast, and all the employees were Palestinians, poor and cheerful men. The place was headquartered in Sharjah, but I would travel all round, to Ras al Khaimah, to Abu Dhabi. That was in 1969... So,” Johnson-Davies winds down abruptly, “I had experience very early on here.”
And as he gets up to greet the head waiter at the Beach Rotana, who welcomes him as an old friend, it suddenly dawns on you just how remarkable having coffee with Denys Johnson-Davies really is.

Youssef Rakha
The National (UAE)

Copywriting Thoughts

Some decades back, in the magic country of India, a print advertisement for a two-in-one battery was designed. The copy simply said: “Revolution in the world of batteries”. Most of the target users lived in the hinterland, hence translation of the line was essential. The translator took less than half an hour to come up with "Battery ke duniya mein yugantar". The copy chief knew no better. So that line got translated in all vernacular languages. In the Bengali ad, the copy read somewhat faithfully “Battery-r jagate jugantar”. "Jugantar" or "jug er antar" means beginning of a new era.

A smart brand manager, sensing the criticality of the language ads, recommended an advertising pre-test. A handful of consumers living in a small town near Calcutta and its surrounding rural areas saw this ad and said they liked it. When asked what they understood from the ad, all of them said the same thing: "The house of Jugantar is bringing out a new battery". Jugantar, incidentally, was one of the two top Bengali dailies in the state then.

A few questions to ponder here:

Is comprehension equal to persuasion? Does understanding of what is being said or shown in an ad in Hindi or for that matter in English — neither being the language of comfort — ensure automatically that I will be convinced or cajoled by the message? Is comprehension only a necessary condition or is it also sufficient?

The touch point for persuasion does not reside in the language but in what the language envelopes. A language is not merely the letters, the words and their grammar. It is the cultural DNA of a consumer world. To a Bengali or an Oriya, to a Marathi or an Ohomiya, the soft points of titillation are rooted in their native culture encoded in their own language. Sure, the Hindi ad can do a reasonable approximation but it possibly can never do as great a job of persuasion in Bengal or Assam as it will do in UP or Bihar. Even in these days of satellite transmission, enticing someone still needs tribal idioms. Translated advertising thus can never be an adequate surrogate.

Translating Religious Texts

"One who wishes to translate from one language to another by rendering each word literally and adhering to the original order of words and sentences... will end up with a translation that is difficult and confusing. Instead, the translator should first try to grasp the sense of the subject and then explain the theme, according to his understanding, in the other language..." - Maimonides to his translator, Rabbi Shmuel ibn Tibbon

This is elementary to any translation attempt. But every translator faces the dilemma of how far is it permissible for him/her to go? Two conflicting aims play a part here: the aim of faithfully conveying the content of the original, and the aim of making it not only understood to their intended audience but also as attractive and as "natural" as possible in its target text version.

This dilemma is doubly acute when it comes to conveying the teachings of any "sacred texts" to an audience whose primary point of reference is western and secular, because the translator - or "adapter" - is attempting here to bridge two worlds which differ in far more than language and idiom; two worlds which differ in their very conception of intellectual discourse and articulation.

The modern Western mind recognizes no sacred ideas or inviolable axioms. "Taking yourself too seriously," being "dogmatic" and failing to offer a "balanced view" are rhetorical "sins". Nothing is for sure: the author has to keep it light, with a periodic wink at the audience that says, "Hey, guys, we're just throwing some ideas around." So called "sacred texts", on the other hand, unabashedly inform and instruct readers, being written as blueprints for existence, without any self-depreciating humor or moral ambivalence. They presume that the reader will take them seriously and regard the "truths" they convey with reverence.

So the translator - or is it "adaptor"? - has two options:

(1) They can limit their tampering with the original text or idea to its re-articulation in the new language, while preserving the source text's style and approach; or

(2) They can assume, to a certain extent, the tone of modern writing, by attempting to truly translate: "to grasp the sense of the subject and then explain the theme, according to their understanding, in the other language" not only in the dictionary sense of "language" but in the broader cultural-conceptual sense as well.