Translation - Language - Culture

Is it really another Shakespeare play?

They're known as the sniffer dogs of Shakespeare's plays - unstoppable academics who refuse to admit that the Bard's famous lost plays are really, truly gone forever.

You've never heard of Shakespeare's historical romance Cardenio?

That's hardly surprising, since it was performed just twice, in 1613, and then failed to crack the first authoritative text of the playwright's works published in 1623. But four centuries of absence haven't been enough to discourage Professor Brean Hammond of Nottingham University in England, who yesterday claimed that he had turned up the missing play.

via www.theglobeandmail.com

I have to admit that I have doubts about Prof. Hammond’s claim to have unearthed this “new” Shakespeare play. My area of specialization is 18th/19th-century English literature, but looking at the excerpt provided in today’s newspaper (see below), I don’t get the sense that it “feels” like something Shakespeare could have written, even leaving aside the rewrite imposed on it by Lewis Theobald.

It may well be possible that Theobald’s Double Falsehood used bits and pieces, or the general plot, of Cardenio, but whatever is preserved of it today can hardly qualify for inclusion in the Shakespeare canon, can it?

Lopez [to Fabian]: Soft, soft you, neighbour; who comes here? Pray you, slink aside. [They withdraw.]

Henriquez: Ha! Is it come to this? O the devil, the devil, the devil!

Fabian [to Lopez]: Lo you now, for want of the discreet ladle of a cool understanding will this fellow's brains boil over!

Henriquez: To have enjoy'd her, I would have given - what?

All that at present I could boast my own,

And the reversion of the world to boot

Had the inheritance been mine. And now -

Just doom of guilty joys! - I grieve as much

That I have rifled all the stores of beauty,

Those charms of innocence and artless love,

As just before I was devour'd with sorrow,

That she refus'd my vows and shut the door

Upon my ardent longings.

Lopez [to Fabian]: Love! Love! Downright love! I see by the foolishness of it.

The American by Henry James

"Oh yes, I should like to learn French," Newman went on, with democratic confidingness. "Hang me if I should ever have thought of it! I took for granted it was impossible. But if you learned my language, why shouldn't I learn yours?" and his frank, friendly laugh drew the sting from the jest. "Only, if we are going to converse, you know, you must think of something cheerful to converse about."

From: The American by Henry James

What a hilarious summation of what learning a foreign language should be all about, as expressed by “Christopher Newman” in The American by Henry James. In other words, language lessons, particularly conversation lessons, should always be about “something cheerful”.

LOST writers get it seriously wrong

In tonight’s episode of LOST, the character Sayid is shown in the alternate universe where the plane crash never happened. He’s just returned from a trip to Australia and is now back in the US, where he goes to visit his brother.

The brother goes on about Sayid being a businessman who constantly travels around the world. Sayid replies, “Well, translating contracts for oil companies is actually quite dull.”

Excuse me? No one hires translators and flies them halfway around the world to translate contracts. Instead of buying the translator an all-expenses-paid round trip, the client would send the documents either by fax or e-mail. This would be true even of a more “exotic” language pair such as the one Sayid works in (Farsi-English).

Besides, there are many Farsi speakers to be found in most parts of the Western world, particularly in Australia. There would be absolutely no need to fly Sayid all the way from the US to Australia to “translate contracts”.

Nor is it true that translators are rich globetrotters. If you want to be a wealthy tycoon flitting from America to Australia and back, you should choose a different career. It’s not going to happen in this line of work, I tell you.

So, to any buyers of translation services who saw the most recent episode of LOST and now think, perhaps, that translators are way overpaid, don’t believe a word of it. As one of my university professors used to say, translation is not a profession, but a vocation. You choose to be a translator, because you love the job. If wealth is what you are after, try becoming the kind of lawyer Malcom McDowell portrayed in this week’s episode of CSI: Miami: his character charged $2,000 an hour! (But he was also a crook.)

Stroke by stroke

People outside the community of Asian languages often wonder about how the Japanese or Chinese write on their computers, given the large number of characters they use, rather than a limited letter-based alphabet.

Well, it’s not as straightforward as typing in English or any other European language. In Japanese, for example, you’d enter your text using hiragana and katakana, and then the word-processing software throws up a list of Chinese characters (kanji) to choose from and insert into the document.

In a way, this is similar to the experience of users of European languages when texting on a smartphone, where the numbered keys must be tapped several times to arrive at the letter of your choice (e.g., tapping the “2” to get to “A”, “B” or “C”). Naturally, some have wondered about the texting experience of Chinese or Japanese users:

Chinese dialects, for example, contain between 9,500 and 22,000 characters. One shortcut is to use pinyin, a phonetic system used to transliterate Chinese words into the Latin alphabet. A person sending a text message begins by inputting the pinyin transliteration of a Chinese character, based on its pronunciation, which typically involves entering a few Latin letters using multi-tap. This throws up a list of Chinese characters that share the same pinyin transliteration. The user then chooses the desired character from the list.

There’s also another option:

A second shortcut that works for both traditional Chinese characters and their simplified counterparts reduces the written language to its physical components. Each Chinese character is composed of a number of strokes. The method offers five types: horizontal, vertical, a stroke down to the left, a bent stroke and a dot or stroke down to the right. Each stroke is mapped onto a single key. People can compose individual characters relatively easily by building them up a stroke at a time.

And this is how it works in Japan:

In Japan several different alphabets are used depending on the context. For sending text messages, people use kana, the Japanese phonetic alphabet, which has just 46 characters that can be mapped fairly easily to the 12 keys on a mobile phone handset. Kana is, itself, composed of two alphabets called hiragana and katakana. Then there is kanji, which has some 7,000 characters. If someone wants to send a message in kanji, he works first in hiragana or katakana. Tapping in the kana word produces a list of kanji characters from which the user can then pick the most appropriate.

To Westerners, this must seem laborious and hardly worth the effort, but once you get used to such input methods, it becomes second nature, like most everything else in life.

But the Japanese and Chinese have one clear advantage in the world of social networks. On Twitter, which limits messages to 140 characters, one can squeeze in a lot more content in Japanese or Chinese than would be possible in any Latin alphabet.

Tintin runs into trouble 'en Québécois'

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

But the latest volume, billed on the cover as "Tintin en Québécois," is getting a frosty reception in Quebec. Far from being flattered to see characters spouting such homegrown phrases as "Ay! Toé!" ("Look here!") and "ben là là!" ("Wait a minute!"), some Quebecers are offended.

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

via www.nationalpost.com

As it turns out, this will be the only Québécois edition in the comic book series. Quebeckers are deeply offended by the first (and now, only) attempt to adapt the comic for the Québec market.

Québécois and Parisian French are two distinct languages, with the two French varieties differing by as much as 85 percent with respect to vocabulary, idioms and grammar. A Québécois version could have been produced that reflected the average everyday language, instead of slang (joual), but someone at the publishing company wasn’t too bright, it seems. Tant pis!

Congratulations, ATIA

I’d like to take this opportunity and congratulate ATIA (Association of Translators and Interpreters of Alberta) on its new website – great design, very user-friendly and a major improvement over its old (bare-bones) website and online directory.

Send us your files; we will store them for you

Here’s an email I received from a translation agency (edited and anonymized, of course):

[…] is online backup software that allows you to protect your work if your computer crashes. We also use […] to send files too big for email. We have decided to offer all our translators a FREE 3.5 GB account.

First, I should mention that I don’t work for this agency. They regularly send me messages, but I have instructed my Outlook program to send all their messages to the junk folder.

Now, let’s see what’s wrong with this picture. A translation agency invites you to store your files on their server. Even if you password-protect your files, there is no way anyone can make me believe that those who own and operate the server can’t find a way to access the data parked there somehow.

I smell a rat here. No doubt the agency expects translators to store various documents and, possibly, translation-memory (TM) files on that server. I think this is a way for them to try to find out the names of the clients translators work for, so that they can go ahead and see if, perhaps, they can poach one or the other client. They may also be interested in their translators’ TM data – taking translators’ previous work efforts and making them their own.

My advice: If you get a message similar to this one from one of the agencies you work for, disregard it. If they keep pestering you about it, for example, if they continue to harass you as to why you haven’t taken up their “generous” offer yet, blah blah blah, tell them “No, thanks” and then drop them from your list of clients.

Maybe this particular agency is actually genuine about its offer. Who knows? But as a professional translator, you should never expose your clients’ information to any risk of unauthorized access. In fact, unless you have the express consent of your client, you cannot disclose to anyone (e.g., when applying for another job) that you have worked for them or on what project. Protecting your own computer and the data contained on it can sometimes be difficult enough, and requires state-of-the-art anti-virus and firewall programs. Uploading your client files or TMs to a third-party server, therefore, would be foolish and asking for trouble.

California school bans dictionary

Oh my! Someone’s been sitting out in the California sun for too long:

A Southern California school board has pulled the Merriam-Webster dictionary off its shelves after a parent complained about the entry “oral sex.”

The collegiate-level dictionary was being used in grade four and five classrooms. The school now promises to begin a thorough scouring of the dictionary for other offensive entries.

“It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” Menifee Union School District spokesperson Betti Cadmus told the local The Press-Enterprise newspaper.

Let’s file this under “Complete and Utter Nonsense”, shall we?

CAT: The Balkanization of the Translation Industry

I still remember the first translation I ever produced for a paying client. Back in 1987, I was given a 19-page technical document to be translated into English for a major electronics company. I think I had a Commodore 64 or Amiga at the time, but it was no good for typing up a professional translation. So, I used my Brother typewriter.

It was a lengthy process – and torture compared to how easy it is today to edit documents in MS WORD. Whenever I made changes during the proofreading process, I had to retype the entire page in question, and often the following page as well if the text had become longer and spilled over to the next page.

Looking back on those primitive means in 1987, I am thankful for PCs and Microsoft, as well as any other key maker of hardware and software that have made life, and work, so much easier. But with every silver lining comes a cloud, and in the translation business that cloud is known as CAT, Computer-Aided Translation.

CAT comes in many different forms, that is programs: Trados, wordfast, DVX, SDLX, Across, etc. It is not a form of machine translation, which doesn’t work and never will, but a management system that accelerates the actual – human – translation process. It stores previous translations and creates a rich database of terms, phrases and entire sentences or paragraphs that the CAT program will bring up automatically in your current translation project if it detects a suitable match.

This way, the translator using CAT ensures consistent style and terminology when working for the same client over a period of time. It also helps the translator to save time: a perfect (100%) match, for example, means that the entire segment (phrase, sentence or paragraph) found in the database (“TM” or Translation Memory) can be incorporated into the current translation, saving the translator the trouble of having to think about and write the translation of the segment all over again. Even a less-than-perfect match can still be a time-saver, as, perhaps, only a single word may have to be changed to make it a 100% match.

Words!

I’m all for making up lists every year that show the most popular words of the year past. The words most commonly used, or ones newly minted, say a lot about us as people and society.

What I can’t condone, however, is lists of words that should be banished. At year’s end, language columnists and others who write about language invariably come out with their own lists of words that they consider overused or obsolete.

Wrong. There is no such thing as an obsolete or overused word. If a word is used (too) frequently, it only demonstrates that there is a need for such a word.

The same is true of “obsolete” words. In our day and age, when a lot of people are not as educated as they should be (in Canada, functional illiteracy runs at almost 50 per cent!), the fact that some words aren’t used as often anymore is not a reflection on them, but on the state of people’s literacy.

Quite often we may be groping for the right word and can’t think of it, only to find out later that it does exist – but it may be labelled “obsolete” and contain more than three or four syllables.

The nerve!