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Archives for November 2010

Call for Participation

November 21, 2010 by Barbara Inge Karsch

What is happening or not happening on the North American market? And what do people in the content supply chain identify as the biggest communication problem? With a focus on terminology, of course. These are the goals, among others, of a survey commissioned by the International Network of Terminology (TermNet).

The survey targets communication professionals, such as translators, terminologists, content publishers, branding and marketing experts on the one hand side and project managers as well as decision makers on the other. They can be located anywhere along the content supply chain—in a company, at a language service provider or on the freelance market. But they should be working in or for the North American market. The survey is focused on several different industries, but not limited to the ones called out specifically.

or those who are not familiar with TermNet, it “is an international co-operation forum for companies, universities, institutions and associations who engage in the further development of the global terminology market. TermNet was founded on the initiative of UNESCO, with the aim to establish a network for co-operation in the field of terminology. In 1988, TermNet was registered as a non-profit organization being allowed commercial activities for the benefit of its members.”

lease participate in the survey and invite all your colleagues and managers! It should take no more than 15 min. You can opt in at the end to receive results and participate in a prize drawing. Click on the TermNet logo to begin.

Thank you very much!

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Denglisch, Franglais, Spanglish, Swenglist and the like—Guest post by Ivan Kanič

November 19, 2010 by Barbara Inge Karsch

It is a pleasure to have fellow blogger, Ivan Kanič, share some of his insights into language issues. As his website and his profile on LinkedIn reveal, Ivan has been interested in terminology topics, especially library terminology, for a long time. He talks about it on his own blog site, http://terminologija.blogspot.com/, which is in Slovene. You can check out the content through a convenient machine translation option, though. Thank you, Ivan.

Throughout the history, any language has always incorporated foreign words and phrases, to paraphrase Darwin, this was the development and “origin of languages by natural selection”. These days, most new words are English, predominantly American English to be precise. All historical attempts to “purify” a particular language proved largely unsuccessful, and many people, including linguists, doubt seriously that such efforts would fare any better today. English has already invaded the languages of Molière, Cervantes and Goethe, dominating above all the fields of technology and business, and spreading widely with the young generations and their jargon. Denglisch, Franglais, Spanglish, Swenglist, Slogleščina and the like were born, a natural linguistic blend of two languages bringing together their morphological, syntactical and phonetic peculiarities in one sentence, often in a single word as well. It occurs mostly in sports, computing, and business where the domestic language, for some reason or the other, lacks words for some concepts, like the word “serve” in tennis, or the domestic word is less well known, e.g. “stock options”. It also occurs when a word is to be “modernized”, shortened or otherwise updated, like “outsourcing” in business, where people go to the “office”, attend “meetings”, work in “teams”, participate in “workshops” and consider “stock markets” in a number of languages. In Slovene, for example, the situation is even more complex because it is a highly inflected language (a single verb, noun, adjective has a vast number of different endings as a rule) and has an almost “phonetic” writing, so we may encounter doublets like tagirati / tegirati (to tag), tagiranje / tegiranje and the shorter version taganje / teganje (tagging) or verbs like surfati, torrentati (mind the double r, which is not a Slovene feature), printati, downloadati (w is not Slovene), keširanje (I am sure you can understand them, I should help you perhaps with the last one – caching).

Another vast field of invasion is the colloquial language and the jargon of the street, international examples would be cool, kids, trendy, sexy, wellness, in Slovene language ful(l) + adjective makes the superlative, or sich relaxen, ich habe gejobbt, wir shoppen etc. in German, or French sentences like: Je vais driver downtown. Je suis tired. Je ne care pas. J’agree. Not to forget that naming a mobile phone a “handy” is an absolute invention, made up by Germans and has never been printed in an English dictionary.

Unlike the French, who almost religiously guard against the invasion of foreign (read English, and forget for a moment that French had fed it in the history immensely) words, many other languages have embraced Anglo terms and phrases with almost careless abandon in recent years. For example hybrids such as surfen, downloaden, updaten, emailen, chatten are frequent even in German technical language. Opposed is the French “stubbornness” to fight the Franglais formally in most facets of life, thus it is one of the rare languages (if not the only) not to have “digit” and all the derivatives (numérique, numérisation, numéroter instead) and “logiciel” is a fine example, too.

At the moment I would stick to the technical or semi-technical language only, not the jargon. I would ask the opinion, experience and expertise of the readers in this respect. How do you feel and deal with it in your particular language(s) and subject field(s), being terminologists?

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Machine translation and excellence

November 2, 2010 by Barbara Inge Karsch

What does machine translation do in a blog on terminology management? And how on earth can MT and excellence appear in the same sentence? Terminology management is one of the cornerstones of MT. And excellence isn’t tied to a technology, it is tied to you!

After a seven-year hiatus, I finally joined my friends in the American Translators Association again this year. And last week, I was in my former US hometown of Denver at the annual conference of the ATA. I was surprised about a couple of things.

For one, the profession has matured incredibly since I last attended the conference in Phoenix 2003. The number of government representatives who attended and spoke coherently about the field bears witness to that. There was great news coverage. But most of all, I could sense a different attitude among attendees many of whom I have known since I first joined the ATA in 1996: There is pride in what we do and the courage to stand up for it!

The other surprise was that this apparently was the first time a real interaction between representatives of human AND machine translation took place (“Man vs. Machine,” a panel discussion of representatives from both camps moderated by Jost Zetzsche). That is stunning to me, since I spent the last six years in an environment where MT is routine.

As terminologist, I look at MT as an opportunity for cooperation. In fact, it was Microsoft Research, where machine translation research is located within Microsoft, who declined, when we first suggested collaboration years ago. It made sense to us to supply well-researched terms and appellations to support MT. Terminology from Term Studio has since been integrated into the MT process at Microsoft.

I suppose it is fear that still seems to have a hold on translators. It might be the fear of losing market share, of needing to change to more tools or automation, or of failing with clients. Let’s go through this one by one.

In my mind, there is one market for translation; we could even say one market for content production in target and/or source languages. This market consists of different segments, and we, as language professionals, have a choice on where we want to play. The segments are not strictly delimited, meaning a translator could move between them, but let’s focus on the following three.

  • A Chris Durban, who represented human translators in the panel discussion and who is serving the high-end translation market (marketing, financial reports, etc.), chooses to stay away from automation. I venture to say that her work is better carried out without automation. The key is that she achieves excellence in what she does. And she asks to be paid for it, and paid well.
  • Another translator might choose to focus on the high-volume market of manuals and handbooks in a particular industry. He will work with what Jost Zetzsche calls translation environment tools, short TEnTs. That will enable him to produce higher volumes than Chris, but with equal excellence.
  • And then there are those, such as the translators at PAHO, the Pan American Health Organization, who post-edit machine translation output. Again, they have a different environment, but they do what they do successfully, because they strive to do it well.

At times, an individual might choose to stay in the segment they are in or to make a transition into another segment, which requires flexibility and diligence. If you thought you could get away with less than hard work, you might have chosen the wrong profession (or planet, for that matter). I believe in that, but I also believe in the fun and gratification that comes from delivering excellence.

The last point is working with clients. The need for client education is high. The ATA has contributed a lot in that area. If you are a member, just check out all the different resources available to us. True, it is tough to do client education when you are making a living being paid only for the word in the translation. It takes skill to find the right balance. Nonetheless, clients must be informed about what they ask for, especially those who say that “quality doesn’t matter,” because very likely they have no clue. Once you have done your duty and the client still insists on some form of “quick and dirty,” you can always say no to the job. I saw projects not succeed despite warnings and suggestions. But it is not the end of the world when someone insists on, say, machine translation without preparatory or complementary work and then fails with their own customers. You could consider it self-education. You just don’t want to be in the middle of it.

In my experience, if we aim for excellence, we will be financially successful and professionally gratified. Then, it doesn’t matter so much whether we chose “pure human translation”, decide on some form of translation automation environment, or focus completely on terminology management.

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