Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth (via Wikitravel)

I’ve just come back from a conference in sunny Portsmouth where I gave a keynote on the subject of “the translator as writer“. Of course you can never be completely happy with your performance at conferences but overall I think my presentation went down pretty well. It was quite unnerving though that it was recorded on video so hopefully I won’t find it too painful when I get to watch it back. My topic was “Are technical translators writing themselves out of existence” and at some point over the next few days I’ll write something about it here.

The conference itself was excellent as usual with a good variety of topics presented by practitioners and academics from all over the world. The Portsmouth translation conference is, I have to admit, my favourite not just because of the topics discussed or the friendly, relaxed atmosphere but because it draws practising translators as well as researchers. For me, conferences that are solely for academics can be quite dull so to have presentations from the word-face too is quite refreshing. Sometimes academics can lose sight of what translation is about and focus on obscure issues far removed from the actual process of translation.

There were some hits and one or two misses at this year’s conference. I won’t name and shame the misses because that’s not nice but I will point out some of the highlights for me. First up was Arvi Tavast from Talinn University who gave a really interesting and really useful look at how translators view their roles and whether they should correct errors in the source text. Backed up with empirical research, Tavast showed that there was quite a significant difference in how translators approached, for example, errors in source texts. He also showed that opinion is divided among agencies as regards expectations for translations and translator behaviour. For me, this was one of the most relevant pieces of research I have come across in quite a while.

Quite a useful way of explaining punctuation as it turns out (via Air Guitar Australia)

I also went to a workshop by Janet Fraser which looked at how we teach writing skills to translation students although the activities, she stressed, could be used by professional translators as a “warm-up” exercise. Normally I run a mile whenever someone mentions workshop but this one was actually useful and fun. The activity involved giving participants several trigger words and asking them to write an advertisement aimed at tourists. The upshot of it all was that without exception everyone knew how to write texts like this. We all knew that particular linguistics structures and strategies were expected and we all produced quite similar texts. The challenge, then, is getting students to unlock these skills when translating.

Other highlights were Stephen Crabbe’s talk on the development of controlled language as well as the other keynote, entitled “Inspiration” by director and translator Neil Bartlett. Neil managed to persuade a room full of people to act out some bizarre circular arm movements to illustrate the need to be mindful of punctuation in translation. From the back of the room the result looked like the national air guitar championships. Classic stuff!

One theme which cropped up a lot over the course of the various presentations was that the public doesn’t fully understand what translation involves. Some of the examples of how this manifests itself included vague instructions for translation jobs, unrealistic expectations as regards the type of translation, unreasonable deadlines etc. This is probably true and it might suggest that there is a need to educate the general public and raise awareness among non-translators of what it is we do. But the thought also occurred to me that this might come across as some sort of cheap and desperate attempt to make people respect us, maybe even love us poor misunderstood translators. After all, do we fully understand what it is doctors, architects or pilots do? Nope! But we still respect them and trust their judgement. I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m still exhausted from the drive back from Portsmouth and could really do with a nap.

( © 2009 Doc Byrne's Translation Miscellany. All Rights Reserved. )

Traditionally, domain names have been restricted to 26 characters in the Latin alphabet and could include ten numerals and a hyphen. Critics have long argued that this was unfair on groups whose languages did not use English characters. In many ways this is true – is it really fair to expect someone in China with a Chinese keyboard to figure out how to input English characters so that they could visit a website in their own country? Absolutely not. Similarly, it is hard to justify forcing someone in Israel or in Saudi Arabia to transliterate the names of companies or organisations just so that they can get a website.

Part of the reason for this, as I have written about before here, is that the Internet, like computers in general, has its origins in the largely monolingual, English-speaking engineering community of the United States. There’s nothing wrong with this – they had to start somewhere although thankfully, these days, multilingual issues are usually considered from the start of development projects.

Things have changed, however, and computers are now a global phenomenon as is the Internet. In fact the Internet, more so than any other modern invention, is a truly global entity and it is only right that everyone should be able to use it in their own language. So from this point of view, ICANNs decision to permit Internet domains to be written in Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Korean, Hindi and various other non-Latin scripts is timely and to be commended.

But I can’t help wondering whether this decision might actually prove to be counterproductive, at least in the short to medium-term. Think about it. Up to now, English speakers have had it easy, no matter what website they wanted to access, regardless of what country the site was hosted in they simply typed in the address using Latin characters. Good for people with English keyboards but not so good for those who didn’t who had to figure out how to input Latin characters on their computers.

From now on, people will be able to access websites with names written in their own languages and they won’t have to bother with complicated foreign characters. But wait a minute. Whereas before, people only had to contend with Latin characters – and like it or not, English is still something of a lingua franca so quite a lot of people are at least familiar with the characters – now they are going to have to deal with Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Hebrew, Hindi and who knows how many other writing systems.By permitting different countries to use different writing systems for their domain names, ICANN have made the process of accessing websites from around the world much more complicated unless someone comes up with some form of domain name translation service to allow people to type in phonetic versions of website names and be brought to the correct website. Even then this wouldn’t solve the problem for people who don;t know how to pronounce foreign language characters.

I know I’m probably on my own in thinking this and I also know that this might be seen rather cynically as sour grapes that English has just lost its dominant position on the Internet (honestly, that’s not it), but what worries me now is that the new rules, while undoubtedly democratic and beneficial in many ways, will ultimately fragment the Internet by causing people to stick to those websites whose names they can actually type into their computers. Surely there must be a more practical solution?

Instead of reinforcing the Internet as a “worldwide” infrastrctural resource, by bowing to pressure to cater for national linguistic preferences means the authorities have lost sight of what the Internet is about and set the scene for numerous regional Internets, effectively making the Internet world smaller.  There are rumours that ICANN had no real choice but to approve the new internationalised domains because thefear of provoking a split in the international web community which would see the creation of new, separate and independent Internets, thus seeing its authority disappear. The only real benefactors as I see it are the domain registrars who will make a fortune registering billions of new domain names. I can’t be the only one to wonder what the next big counter-intuitive idea will be. Can I?

( © 2009 Doc Byrne's Translation Miscellany. All Rights Reserved. )

Ooh, it goes where?!

Respected German publisher of dictionaries Langenscheidt has teamed up with leading “sexperts” Erika Berger and Lilo Wanders to give us its latest novelty dictionary, “Langenscheidt Sex-Deutsch/Deutsch-Sex” – a pocket-sized, 128 page dictionary explaining the various terms and jargon one might encounter. All I can say is that – sweet and innocent soul that I am – it very nearly turned my hair white reading all of those dirty words. Now it’s written in German but if heavy metal is a good reason to learn a new language, then carnal gymnastics might  be too. Without going into too much detail for obvious reasons, it explains things like how the word “English” in Germany is used as a euphemism for S&M and what “Pornflakes” and “Clinton Monogamy” are – I won’t write it for fear of traumatising those of a more sensitive disposition.

In fairness, it’s a tiny little book and it’s probably not enough to corrupt the youth of our nation (no, hold on, it might actually) but – and this is important – it does actually perform a public service. Can you imagine trying to find translations and definitions for various coitus-related concepts for yourself? No matter how legitimate and pure your intentions, typing these words into Google will open up a whole world of nastiness right there on your monitor. Get it wrong and you could end up unemployed, divorced or on some sort of international register of sex offenders.

So yes, dictionaries can be useful but more than that, they can be quite funny too.

( © 2009 Doc Byrne's Translation Miscellany. All Rights Reserved. )

A more practical use for dictionaries?

But anyway, assuming that Newmark’s estimate is true and even taking into account the myriad types of texts where the proportion of terminology may vary slightly, you have to ask the question: So what? What’s the big deal with terminology?

Traditionally in translation circles researchers have only been interested in terminology but unless you’re actually a terminologist, to reduce technical translation down to the level of a purely terminological issue is downright blinkered and misses the point completely. This approach also had the rather unfortunate effect of supporting Friedrich Schleiermacher’s horrible claim way back in 1813 that technical translation is a mechanical activity that anyone with a grasp of two languages can do. I know that as a philosopher it was his job to spout all kinds of insane nonsense on everything from the meaning of life to how many sheets of toilet paper you should use for a number 2, but I’d still like to bludgeon him about the head with a couple of soggy dictionaries for saying that. Oh, if I only had a time machine…

If you ask any experienced technical translator they’ll tell you that, more often than not, it’s not individual terms that cause most problems, but the way those terms fit into sentences that cause the problems. To tell the truth, depending on the subject area and the language pair you are working with, specialised terminology is sometimes (though not always) the easiest part of a text to translate. In other words it’s the things in a text that aren’t terminology-related that pose the greatest challenges; it’s not the cargo but the ship that needs attention. Things like register, style, set phrases, references to laws or sometimes whether certain information is appropriate for the target audience or whether the way in which information is sequenced in instructions, for example, makes sense. Sometimes you just don’t know what it is the original author is trying to say. That’s what causes us problems and that’s what we should be concerned about instead of getting undergarments in a bunch about specialised terminology. It doesn’t matter how good our cargo of precious specialised terms is, if we’re going to load them onto a leaky old rust bucket which will probably sink before it leaves the harbour, we’re wasting our time. This isn’t to say that getting specialised terminology right is not important. It simply means that we need to put it in perspective; we shouldn’t devote too much time to it and risk neglecting other areas which are equally or even more important.

There are, however, two real issues at play here. The first is the tendency of people to become fixated on the specialised terminology in a text – perfectly understandable to a certain extent, particularly in the case of trainee translators or if you are less familiar with the subject area. When training to become a translator it is sometimes easy to become obsessed with finding the best specialised dictionaries because those specialised terms are so damn scary.

This leads on to the second point which is where should people go to find terminology.  Accepted wisdom would tell us to look in a dictionary but many people would disagree for the simple fact that dictionaries, like computers, become obsolete the second they are made. With technology, for example, evolving so quickly new terms are emerging while others fall out of use and even with the latest production methods, traditional dictionaries cannot be manufactured quickly enoughto stay completely up-to-date . The result is that dictionaries will contain words which are never used while omitting new terms which are used frequently. What’s more, you can never be really sure which of the possible words suggested by a dictionary is the right one. In the absence of detailed contextual information, using a dictionary can sometimes be a lottery and I often have a sinking feeling after using one. My students sometimes look at me in disbelief when I tell them to forget about dictionaries, that they are just a last resort – finding reliable parallel texts which contain the terms is always more useful because you get the translation as well as the collocation and other stylistic information to boot. Soon enough though, most people realise on their own that their efforts are best spent on finding parallel texts instead of searching for the ultimate specialised dictionary.

( © 2009 Doc Byrne's Translation Miscellany. All Rights Reserved. )

Technically I was learning Spanish here with my band Mortuum

I was toying with calling this post “The devil made me do it” or “Heavy metal made me what I am” but I was a little concerned about the kind of people that would attract to the site. Anyway, what I’m trying to get across is that in this day and age of global English and what many people regard as cultural homogenisation, heavy metal is one of the few remaining bastions where it’s actually okay not to be a “world citizen” speaking (and singing) in some clichéd mid-Atlantic variety of English.

This might sound like some pathetic exercise in jingoistic fist-waving at all things global but it’s really not. Spend more than a few minutes looking through the Myspace pages of various metal bands and you’ll notice something strangely curious. Lots of them are singing in their own languages. Even the people who speak languages that aren’t considered to be “beautiful” in the traditional sense. It doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t make sense, but for some strange reason it does.

A few months ago I discovered a band called Equilibrium who hail from Bavaria in Germany. They’re really good in the battle/folk metal genre but their vocal style means that unless you’re really used to this kind of music, they could be singing in any language. But in their press release they mention the fact that they have established a huge fanbase “despite the fact that they sing in German”. This seems to acknowledge the perception that in order to succeed, you need to sing in English. Thankfully, this seems to be changing primarily as a result of the folk metal movement where bands take pride in their cultural heritage and combine it with metal music.

One of the very first bands I can remember to brush aside the “rules” of heavy metal was a thrash metal band called Sepultura from Brazil. I’ll admit they’ve never been one of my favourite bands, mainly because they have a truly annoying vocalist, but they have had some rare moments of inspiration. Ratamahatta from their Roots album is one such moment and it is a mix of indigenous Brazilian rhythms combined with stripped down metal guitars and a whole dose of Brazilian Portuguese lyrics. Like most people at the time, I had never heard anything like this before: it was dark and exotic, sinister and a little bit hypnotic and I was absolutely blown away. The video was in stop-motion and with it’s voodoo, zombies and jungles it just served to add to the whole awe of the experience. It will probably be one of the best examples of national pride expressed in metal and it certainly made me realise that there’s a lot more to Brazilian music than samba and the Bossa nova and there’s more to Brazil than the carnival in Rio. It wasn’t long after that album though that fatherhood and various internal squabbles put Sepultura on a lengthy hiatus but at least they went out on top. [Although other bands like England's Skyclad were probably the first to fuse folk-influenced music with metal, Sepultura showed it could be done with mass appeal and without being cheesy]

Sepultura -- Ratamahatta

Some of the lyrics:
Biboca, Garagem, Favela
Fubanga, Maloca, Bocada
Maloca, Bocada, Fubanga
Favela, Garagem, Biboca, Porra !!!
Ze Do Caixao, Zumbi, Lampiao
Ratamahatta !!! …

Some of the best bands sing in their own language despite the commercial pressures to sing in English to satisfy the demands of the UK and US markets -- both notorious for their lower than average foreign language skills. But while singing in English can kick-start a band’s career -- it can have quite the opposite effect and can be quite be fatal for a band’s success. Look at Rammstein from Germany. The main reason I started listening to them was because they spoke German and heavy metal always sounds good in German. I was one of the few kids on the dancefloor who could sing along with the songs and I liked that a lot. But their brand of metal, a kind of operatic industrial hardcore, worked incredibly well in German. And so they got more and more popular, and more and more people I know started learning a bit of German. I know it definitely helped to motivate me and it made learning the language a lot more fun.

Then what happened? The fools started throwing in the odd English line here and there. Now more and more of their songs have English; some are even more English than German and in my opinion they have completely lost what made them unique. Now they’re no different to any other generic, middle-of-the-road rock band that plays to hordes of mopey-looking emo kids with dodgy hairstyles and too much eyeliner (and that’s just the boys!). The decision to start pandering to what they thought non-German speaking audiences wanted was seen by a lot of people as selling out and Rammstein have started to lose a lot of their shine .

But bizarrely enough a hybrid approach hasn’t affected bands like Korpiklaani who have many bilingual songs. It’s possible that they started out with varying degrees of bilingual-ness and so can’t be accused of suddenly changing their philosophy. Perhaps it is possible to combine more than one language but like, treason, it’s simply a matter of dates.

Some languages lend themselves really well to contemporary music, although many only really work well for particular genres. Think of French: perfect for love songs and folk music but terrible for rap (but then rap sounds pretty rubbish in most languages). And now, thanks to bands like Orakle, it turns out that French works for black metal too. Some languages like German are obvious choices for metal but there are surprises -- Finnish for example, has a particularly epic feel to it and Spanish can muster up a level of menace and intimidation that few others can. I’ll let you make up your mind about Master’s Hammer from the Czech Republic, Lithuania’s Obtest and Latvia’s Skyforger who all sing in their native languages.

People have tried to copy foreign music styles and transpose them into other languages. There’s a particularly dodgy band called Mortiis (don’t even bother looking them up, it’s really not worth it) who have emulated the sound and style of Rammstein really well except they sing in English (despite being Norwegian) but it still doesn’t work. Sometimes you need the va va voom of a foreign language.

On the other side of the coin are those bands who don’t sing in their native tongue but still manage to somehow avoid the acultural blandness of their peers and remain firmly rooted in their own culture. They actually succeed in bringing people into their cultural circle. Bands like Amorphis who base almost all of their lyrics on the Finnish epic poem the Kalevala but sing in English are a prime example. They have the accessibility that monolingual English speakers crave but still “get their message out there”. (Their lyrics are pretty corny in all honesty but you’ve got to give them credit all the same!).

Ireland too has a proud tradition in this particular approach. Possibly because, shamefully, not enough of us speak Irish to be able to write or understand the lyrics (myself included) or possibly because Irish is one of those languages that doesn’t lend itself to metal but the vast majority of celtic metal bands like Cruachan or Waylander sing in English but about themes from Irish folklore and mythology. But unlike bands such as Amorphis they incorporate lots of influences from traditional Irish music and culture, which in my mind, makes up for the lack of Gaeilge.

For me, one of the biggest aids for learning languages was listening to foreign bands -- Brujeria and Radikal Hardcore in Spanish and Rammstein, Die ärtze and Die Fantastischen Vier in German. I know a few people who have learned languages simply to find out what their favourite bands were singing about. I even know of Irish people who have learned how to speak Irish in order to play folk-based metal; sometimes even just to research the lyrics. For those of you not in the know, Irish children begin learning Irish in primary school and continue right through secondary school. Unfortunately for most of us, our competence rarely extends beyond “where are the toilets?”, “my name is…”, “what’s your name?” and “how are you? ” so this is some achievement.

What better way to practice your Spanish pronunciation than singing in Spanish about satanic Mexican drug dealers (this is me by the way!)

I would even go so far as to say that I am where I am today in part because of foreign heavy metal. It made languages even more relevant to me because it wasn’t just about getting a job it was about having fun too. Listening to German and Spanish metal bands helped me through those dark days when all I seemed to do was practice grammar exercises and nothing seemed to be sticking and I wondered if I’d ever make it as a translator. I even learned a bit of French so I could go to a festival. Metal has also helped me from an intercultural point of view. No matter where you are in the world, a Metallica t-shirt is always a Metallica t-shirt. You can be in the middle of a small village in the middle of nowhere, see someone in a Napalm Death and know that you have something in common and could probably have several beers and laughs.

But in all seriousness, given the fact that so many multilingual hairy rockers are wandering around because of metal shouldn’t more attention be paid to promoting music, not just metal but all types of music? Shouldn’t the EU, for example, promote and subsidise bands that sing in their own language. Not only will it make for much better music but it will undoubtedly provide another means of promoting its aim of multilingualism throughout the continent.

A Quick Crash Course in Non-English Language Metal

There are so many bands to choose from that the problem is deciding who to pick and which languages to represent. Some bands are far too extreme to include, whether because of their music, their vocal style or their subject matter so that helped to narrow the field somewhat. But there are still hundreds of songs. In the end I decided to pick stuff I like a lot so what you have here is a very short introduction which is very tailored towards my own musical tastes. All I’ll say is if you don’t have eardrums of leather and haven’t listened to much metal, turn the volume down a little bit but definitely give each song a proper listen.

Equilibrium -- Blut im Auge

From the lyrics:
Was ich sah auf meiner Reise,
Scheint zu wahr es zu erzähln,
Drum versuch ich auf meine Weise,
Euch mit mir dort hinzunehmn.

Wie ich einst auf dunklen Pfaden,
Weit von hier in Nordens Land,
Sah was mir den Atem raubte,
Was ich bis da nicht gekannt.

Blut Im Auge
Auf wunde Knie
So sank ich nieder
So fand ich sie

Korpiklaani -- Keep on Galloping

From the lyrics:
Lennä, laukkaa heposeni,
lennä, laukkaa hallavaharja,
kiiä halki kangasmaitten,
murjo poikki pientareitten,
kanna minnuu maailmalla,
kulettele kuskiasi,
näytä kaikki nähtävyyet,
uuet maat ja uuet paikat.

Mikäs täss’ on matkatessa,
mikäs täss’ on elellessä,
kaikkee saam mie matkav’ varrelt’,
kaikkee mitä tarvittenki.
Paljon nähty maailmalla,
paljon vielä nähtävätä,
monta maita minun mennä,
Kuulla noita tarinoita.

Finntroll -- Trollhammaren

From the lyrics:

Trollhammaren sveper igen!
Hugga ned, broder igen!
Hör det sista ropet -
Trollhammaren är här!

Trollhammaren!

Han är inte en människa.
Inte bräcklig och svag som dig.
Du ska vara maktlös.
Inga ögon ser din änd.

Trollhammaren!

Sedan mörkret övertog.
Räds den frostens kalla fingrar.
Som griper tag och förlever.
Under kommande vinternatt.

Brujeria -- La Migra

From the lyrics:
Siguen al brujo, te llevo por gratis
Trae to abuela, to tio, el lelo
Pinches polleros, viven pa’ feria
Te cobran to sueldo y largan to abuela
La pinche migra te esta esperando
Te devuelven despues de una paliza
La migra haya to abuela en el desierto
La mandaron a Tijuana pegada con palos
El brujo tiene contrabando bien bueno
Numeros de seguro y cartas verdes

Arkona -Pokrovi Nebesnogo Startsa

( © 2009 Doc Byrne's Translation Miscellany. All Rights Reserved. )

But when I went to open the source file to get a feel for the project I realised that there was no source file. Thinking that this must have been an oversight on the part of the PM I went back to the email whereupon I spotted the following: “This is a translation from Chinese. The client won’t give us the source text but we’re pretty sure that the translation is factually correct”.

Needless to say the prospect of trying to edit a translation without benefit of a source text for clarification didn’t appeal and certainly would have taken more time than I had to spare. Now this probably isn’t worth a post all of its own but I love the comedy value of an Irish translator, living in England who translates from German and Spanish into English being asked to review a translation from Chinese, a language he doesn’t speak. You really do have to love translation sometimes.

( © 2009 Doc Byrne's Translation Miscellany. All Rights Reserved. )

There are easier ways of weathering the storm

This year, however, I’ve noticed that we have a lot more students than we had last year and it’s gotten me wondering why. Last year, I don’t think anyone was surprised at the lower numbers because it came in the midst of the hysteria about the global recession and nobody was certain about anything. In such a climate, you can understand the reluctance of people to commit to the expense of higher education. Why would you leave a job to go back to university when there’s a chance you might not find another one for a while.

But while this explains what happened last year, it doesn’t explain this year. Now, we’ve all come to terms with the recession and most of the feelings of shock, horror and panic have gone, giving way instead to a grim acceptance that the economy will be in tatters for years to come and employment prospects are going to be quite dismal unless you do something beef up your arsenal with some new qualifications.

Are people realising that the best place to sit out a recession is in university? After all, providing you have the money set aside or can get a big enough loan, going back to university full-time means you have at least one full year where you don’t have to worry about whether you’re going to be made redundant. From my own experience here in Sheffield (which is purely speculative and by no means conclusive) this seems to be borne out in part by the make-up of students. We are seeing fewer international students but a lot more European students, particularly UK students. This would seem to suggest that the scarcity of money is causing people to reconsider the expensive business of foreign study; international students pay much higher fees than UK or EU students. But it does suggest that UK students are doing the sensible thing during a recession and waiting it out in the relative calm of university. I’d also wager that the same thing is happening in many other countries. By the time they’re ready to go back to the real world, they’ve survived another year of doom and gloom with their sanity relatively intact and they’ve acquired some new skills which will give them the chance to either change career direction or rejoin the workplace with a competitive advantage. It’s really not a bad idea at all!

( © 2009 Doc Byrne's Translation Miscellany. All Rights Reserved. )

Media types have always used wacky tactics or "wacktics" to get jobs

Video CVs are, apparently, the the next big thing. I’ve just read an article on Jobs.ac.uk by Catherine Armstrong in which she asks whether such an approach could ever work in academia. But the idea of presenting yourself on video to prospective employers is nothing new. People have been doing something similar for years, just think of actors and broadcast journalists with their show reels. All of this is perfectly normal for media-type jobs where personal appearance is important but it’s a weird prospect for a “normal” job.

Eager to find out whether this really is a daft idea I decided to do a minimal amount of snooping around to see if I could find an example of a video CV. Lo and behold, the first thing I found after typing “Video CV” into Google was a website dedicated to hosting people’s video CVs in a variety of languages. This site will host your video or, for a fee create one for you. There are three examples on their main page which are presumably some of their best examples but as sure as I’m sitting here they’re the best for all the wrong reasons. I’ve included them below for you to enjoy later. Chris Dautremont’s video looks and sounds like a cross between a media student’s over-the-top Big Brother audition tape and one of those public service ads persuading young people to stay at school. Then there’s poor Dilyara Risbayeva’s video which looks more like one of those videos kidnappers send to the cops with a ransom demand. Bless her, she’s so wooden and uptight that you keep expecting to see her holding up a copy of today’s newspaper while the muzzle of an AK-47 pokes out from the side of the screen. Finally we have David Merhi’s video which starts off like an audition tape for MTV’s Real World proclaiming his general “awesomeness” but then degenerates into a dating video. YouTube is littered with more examples -- just search for video CV or video resume.

A still from my never-to-be-released video CV

I know I shouldn’t mock. It’s possible and indeed, quite likely, that I’m simply projecting my own self-consciousness and painful awareness that I am not in the least bit photogenic. I know that if I ever did a video like this, people would either think it was a help the homeless ad or a heavy metal video. But it’s really hard to imagine how videos like these could help you get a job in any industry other than advertising or media. I try to imagine how a video CV for a translator would work: Bob or Mary translator showing off their computer, reading out a translation or even worse, giving a practical demonstration of how they translate. An academic video CV would be even more interesting considering an academic’s CV is often three times longer than a regular CV by the time you add in all the publications, grant applications and teaching details. It could end up being an epic production with a cast of thousands.

But is it really that daft for academics? After all, a key part of the job of a lecturer is being able to stand up in front of a group of people and communicate clearly, effectively and in an engaging manner. All academic recruitment processes involve the inevitable sample lecture where staff and students are rounded up to provide a ready-made audience where candidates can prove that they have this ability. A video CV could provide a glimpse into an academic’s presentation style and it wouldn’t involve as much organisation as a proper sample lecture. Okay there’s no way of recreating an interactive and high-pressure Q&A session but that’s what an interview is for, right? You would, however, have to factor into the equation the “old guard” that can be found in virtually every university. These are the academics who print off emails before they read them, still use transparencies and overhead projectors and generally eschew anything technical that doesn’t have Thomas Edison’s logo on it. For them wireless means the radio. Can you imagine them buying into this new-fangled technological flim-flammery?  It’s nearly worth the embarrassment of making a video just to see the look on their faces…

Rogues gallery

( © 2009 Doc Byrne's Translation Miscellany. All Rights Reserved. )

Should translators be at the mercy of agencies?

When I teach translation technologies to my students, I always make the point that we are not just concerned with the nuts and bolts of how the technology works but also with the sociological, commercial and financial effects the technology has on the profession. Acquiring skills in translation technologies, so the literature goes, helps translators improve themselves by adding new skills to their repertoire and this helps raise their self-image and raises the status of the profession. Tools like translation memories eliminate the mundane, repetitive tasks which are the less palatable part of a translator’s lot and allow us to concentrate on the creative, challenging and ultimately more satisfying aspects of translation. All true to a certain extent although from a translation and linguistic point of view, I’m still somewhat sceptical about the merits.

One of the key effects translation memories had on the industry is that it brought about a re-evaluation of payment practices and translation rates. This is well documented (for example, here, here and here). Although it is rather unfair that we lose money if we use translation memory tools most of us have come to terms with this, but I recently received an email from a relatively new client informing me that “given the current economic climate, many of their customers are demanding even bigger discounts for fuzzy matches” and as a result, they would be imposing a new pricing structure. This new structure involved even bigger discounts for customers and even less money for translators. What made the email so interesting and to be honest, more annoying was that it was a diktat; there was no question of negotiation or compromise. This was the agency’s decision and as a translator, I would have no choice but to comply. That’s what they think because I am going to exercise my right to choose never to accept work from them again. Or, to refuse to use Trados on any of their translations. See how they like that!

I’ve seen on other forums and blogs that this isn’t the only agency to chance their arm at squeezing a few more drops of blood from translators using the global economic downturn as a convenient yet cynical smokescreen. We shouldn’t be surprised because there is a long and ignoble tradition of translators being penalised for investing in the latest technology, which rarely comes cheap incidentally. I can’t be the only person who thinks that the price you pay for a service should reflect the quality of the service. So if you choose a service that uses the latest technologies, you should expect to pay more for it. It’s simple market economics really: the service provider invests in new technology and then factors this into their fees to reflect the improved service and ultimately to recoup the cost.

Of course you could always argue that by investing in technology, the service provider gains more business and, depending on the technology, will have a higher work rate and this will offset the investment. This is most likely the case with translation. But by imposing these increasingly grasping discount systems, translators are seeing any commercial benefits being eroded. The discounts are effectively negating the whole point in getting the technology. Can you imagine paying a doctor less for using a shiny new scalpel than if the doctor used a rusty old hacksaw? Or would you expect to pay less for a meal cooked in a modern, clean kitchen than you would for something cooked on a hot stone at the side of a busy road? Unlikely.

The more altruistic among us would say “Ah, but greater cost efficiency and less effort is only part of the story. The real benefit is an improved product for the client”. Such improvements might include greater consistency in translations, better safeguards of accuracy and fewer formatting errors. But the other benefits for the client and in particular, agencies, include the reduced costs as a result of discount schemes imposed for repetitions and fuzzy matches, faster turnaround times and, more worryingly, less dependence on a particular translator. You see, once upon a time a translator who worked regularly on projects for a particular client became, over time, an invaluable repository of useful information, expertise and know-how relating to that customer and their documentation. A regular translator would accumulate the kind of knowledge you simply couldn’t get elsewhere. And with all of this information safely stored in the translator’s head, agencies and clients had to keep using the same translator if they wanted to ensure the same level of quality, consistency and expertise. With translation memories the translator is no longer the guardian of this expertise – it is segmented, formatted and stored in translation memories which can be sent to any number of other translators if the original translator is unavailable or ceases to be economically viable. So by using translation memories, the translator not only loses money but also loses job security.

You’d almost be tempted to stop using translation memories altogether and start using a typewriter.

The only fuzzy thing around here is my...

( © 2009 Doc Byrne's Translation Miscellany. All Rights Reserved. )

When you switch on your computer and type up a letter, what language do you see? What about when you visit a website or play a computer game? Does your mobile phone speak your language? Chances are that each of these technological marvels of the modern age communicates with you in your own language. For many of us, this is so commonplace and seamless that we hardly give it a moment’s thought but behind the scenes there is a whole industry dedicated to making sure that technology bridges the gap between language and culture without you even noticing.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to use a computer for whatever reason, you had to be able speak English. The alternative was a tedious process of trial-and-error using a dictionary and your powers of deduction. The reason for this is that Personal Computers were originally developed in the sunny, English-speaking climes of Silicon Valley in the USA where engineers and programmers concerned themselves with producing the next technological break-through. Back in the 1980s it never occurred to companies that there could be people in the world who did not speak English, or worse, who, even though they spoke English, actually preferred to speak their own languages. Over time, however, companies realised that in order to break into foreign markets and maximise profits, they would have to provide foreign language versions of their software rather than expect those pesky foreigners to learn English.

And so, once software was developed it was sent back to the developers who were told to “translate” it into whatever languages were required according to the company’s sales and marketing goals. Developers were less than enthusiastic about this, naturally. After all, they had done their job and now they were expected to do even more work which, strictly speaking was not their job. What’s more, because individual products, like languages, had their own peculiarities, customs and conventions, the process of translating the software was often time-consuming, incredibly complex and not always successful. One way of describing this process is to imagine baking a fruit cake and then being told afterwards to remove the raisins from it!

Read the rest of this article on the Language at Work website…

( © 2009 Doc Byrne's Translation Miscellany. All Rights Reserved. )