Translation - Language - Culture - Communication

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!

No classics, you say? Really?

I recently completed an online survey on a fellow blogger’s website that asked a series of different questions about my social mores, political views and pastime activities. At the end of the survey, you are not only presented with your results – and a sophisticated analysis of the kind of person that makes you – but also with a separate ranking that highlights your answers that, when compared to other respondents’ results, are fobbed off as “uncommon”.

In the reading category, for example, I answered that I do read the “classics”. Apparently, fewer than 4 percent of those who had completed the survey before me shared my penchant for good literature and beautiful prose.

I learned from the general analysis of the existing results that the vast majority of respondents before me were Americans. While Canadians, and generally any non-Americans, look down their noses on Americans and their sense of culture, I was still shocked to see such a low percentage.

Interpreters helping their compatriots pass tests?

A serious allegation has been raised about the professionalism of interpreters in British Columbia. Mind you, it doesn’t strike me as particularly surprising, because these things do happen in Canada – including at Immigration Canada, where naturalized “Canadians” rubberstamp immigration applications from fellow compatriots from the “old country” even though those applicants do not even come close to meeting the requirements under Canada’s immigration laws.

The ICBC, the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, is apparently investigating discrepancies in the pass rates for knowledge tests taken by immigrants who wish to obtain a driver’s licence.

In 2008, 350 knowledge tests were conducted with a STIBC translator with a pass rate of 67%, compared to the pass rate of 48% without a translator.

It has also been noted that in some languages, the pass rate has gone up to well over 90%.

Of course, these things have been going on. I, and I am a certified interpreter myself, know for a fact that these things have been going on, which is why I refuse to interpret, or translate, for immigrants. Immigrants who don’t speak enough English and/or French to pass an exam, either for a driver’s licence or in their specialist field, shouldn’t be in Canada in the first place.

It is high time Canada adopted the Australian system. In Australia, you cannot immigrate unless you can prove that you have mastered English before entering the country.

CBC can't afford simultaneous interpretation

Ten years ago, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) hired me to do the live simultaneous interpretation on TV during the 10-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I got to interpret then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and few other dignitaries who chose to address the German nation and the world back then. (I must admit, however, that at the time I was already working in-house, on a daily news program for CBC Newsworld International. But the live interpretation gig was remunerated separately.)

Now, ten years later, the CBC slapped its viewers in the face by not providing interpretation during the 20-year anniversary broadcast. Canadian viewers saw and heard Angela Merkel, but didn’t understand a single word of what she was saying.

Hiring wannabe translators or interpreters can be deadly

Here’s why it pays to always hire a professional and fully-trained translator or interpreter:

Defence Minister Peter MacKay has ordered officials to look into allegations that innocent Afghans may have been sent to jail due to botched translations by Canadian military interpreters.

Mr. MacKay's statement in the House of Commons Monday came as a counterinsurgency expert said U.S. forces have been plagued with the same concerns.

A former language and cultural adviser to the Canadian Forces said he witnessed at least two instances where innocent people were wrongly labelled as Taliban supporters because Afghan-Canadian interpreters did not understand what had been said.