Translation - Language - Culture - Communication

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.

A handy research tool for German/English translators

I recently came across a new web-based tool for translators working with German and English: Linguee.

As you know, professional translators are not supposed to rely on bilingual dictionaries, because no matter how good they may be, they’re never perfect. Back at university, my professors told us incessantly always to use parallel texts (i.e., in the source and target languages) as our primary research resources.

This is why I usually go on Google, enter the term or expression I’m looking for, followed by “English” (or “Deutsch”, as the case may be), and then scour the search results for websites that are available in both English and German to find comparative material.

Of course, this method can be time-consuming. Sometimes, or, indeed, very often, such searches will capture websites that merely offer a Google machine translation into other languages, instead of an actual translation. So, you have to browse through the results and weed out those “duds”.

Quite often, too, websites that do provide authentic versions in various languages take a shortcut and tend to provide only bare-bones summaries in other languages. In other words, the page that contains the term you’re trying to research may not exist at all in the other language.

It can therefore take quite a while before you find the one site that delivers its information and content in a truly bilingual package (i.e., with a complete translation provided by human translators, rather than by machine translation).

Thanks to the new website Linguee, I’ve been able to do without that time-consuming “Googling”. Enter any term or phrase, and Linguee will throw up a split screen (German/English) of parallel texts, with the term or phrase in bold, so that the user can locate it more easily and faster.

Granted, some of the results are total nonsense, but the site does put up a warning sign in such cases, which is a helpful time-saver.

Here’s more on Linguee:

What is Linguee?

With Linguee, you can search many millions of bilingual texts in English and German for words and expressions. Every expression is accompanied by useful additional information and suitable example sentences.

What is the benefit?

When you translate texts to a foreign language, you usually look for common phrases rather than translations of single words. With its intelligent search and the significantly larger amount of stored text content, Linguee is the right tool for this task. You find:

• In what context a translation is used
• How frequent a particular translation is
• Example sentences: How have other people translated an expression?

By searching not only for a single word, but for a respective word in its context, you can easily find a translation that fits optimal in context. With its large number of entries, Linguee often retrieves translations of rare terms that you don't find anywhere else.

The funny thing is that I’ve been thinking about a service like that for the longest time. But since I don’t know anything about programming and creating such a site and search engine, building a site like that myself was never an option.

The brains behind Linguee are:

Linguee was founded by Gereon Frahling and Leonard Fink. CEO Gereon Frahling came up with the idea in autumn of 2007 after being a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Google Inc. in New York.

The site itself is still in its beta version, and hasn’t been live for very long. But I’ve been using it now for almost a week, and I have to say, chapeau! Well done, indeed.

I hope in future Linguee will be available in other language pairs as well (e.g., French/English, etc.).

Slave trade alive and well ...

... at least on some websites looking for freelance writers. Here's the latest "atrocity":

I need an Excellent writer to write 3-5 articles daily of 500 words.
I will give you work everyday at 8 am L.A. Time and you would have to send it to me at 11 pm(the same day).
This is a long term project for a year.I am willing to pay $3 per article.MONEY WILL NOT BE IN ESCROW and will be paid on every FRIDAY.
However,to build trust,i will pay for the first 3 articles as soon as you deliver them and i have checked them.They should be FREE OF ERRORS, NO GRAMMAR OR PUNCTUATION MISTAKES ,SHOULD NOT BE COPIED FROM A SITE(CHECKED THROUGH COPYSCAPE),in perfect english.If your samples are good but the work delivered is not up to the mark,PROJECT WILL BE CANCELLED IMMEDIAELY>

Work should pass copyscape and should be free of errors and grammar mistakes.Any work that is poorly done,is copied or has errors will not be paid and project would be cancelled.If you fail to meet a deadline,your pending payments will be cancelled so ONLY APPLY IF YOU CAN WRITE 3-5 articles of 500 words A DAY.
You will have to search online so your research skills should be good.

YOu should know about copyscape.Only bid with 2 samples of your work.
You should be a native to bid.Do not bid if you are not from Canada or USA or australia. Please,YOU WILL BE WASTING YOUr BID AND TIME>Work delivered at 8 am and to be submitted at 11 pm LA Time USA.Work is 6 days a week.If you want to work a sunday that is fine too.Also,kindly bid with $250.I am fed up of people bidding $30 and then vanishing after a feedback.
Thank YOU.

DO NOT BID IF YOU CANNOT WRITE OR SPEAK IN THE SAME WAY AS IT IS DONE IN US. Do not bid if you are not in my time zone please or cannot manage the time.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

YOU Will just be a ghost writer and cannot show the articles as samples or publish them with your name any where.All rights will be tranferred to me and will not be claimed as your work.
PAYMENTS WILL NOT BE MADE IF DEADLINES ARE MISSED FREQUENTLY OR WRITER IS NOT RESPONDING.

Yes, he does need a good writer, I'll give him that – for someone who "screams" at his readers about accurate grammar, etc., he knows precious little about spacing, punctuation and presentation.

But also look at the price: $3 an article of 500 words. He wants 3-5 articles delivered every day by 11pm – netting the writer a whopping $9-15 a day! What is more, he plans to put his name on all those articles; the writer receives no credit whatsoever.

I also find it funny that he thinks, apparently, that Australia is in the same boat as Canada and the U.S. linguistically.

What American, Canadian or Australian who meets all those criteria would be foolish (or retarded) enough to work for a lousy $9-15 a day under such conditions?

Some things never change

A reader has sent the following account of his/her experience with a well-known site for translators:

I joined proz.com a while ago, and was reading forum message boards, where I realized one needs to keep " answering" KudoZ questions in order to get themselves on the top of the list. OK, since I realized bidding on projects is more or less a para-Olympics race – even if you win, you are still a "schmuck", I decided to start answering KudoZ questions in order to raise my profile and draw clients to me, rather than me chasing them, because that's what every "successful" Kudozist/Prozist was suggesting as a sucessful tactic. Little did I know what a dictatorship regime and repression I would find in the Land of KudoZ, particularly for my language pairs.

Since I do not tolerate unprofessionalism, I decided immediately to fight it right there from the start, and never let amateurism take root, at least where it concerns me. The two moderators who moderate KudoZ questions and answers in my pairs are mere dictators! None of them is a linguist, and it is evident that they lack any substantial background in linguistic or languages. Actually, one of them comes from an engineering background, and another makes this revolutionary statement about "knowing" and "speaking" a host of different languages. I wouldn't pay attention to them at all, if they didn't buzz me every half an hour, indicating I broke this or that KudoZ rule. OK, it made me realize KudoZ rules are of utter importance to them, so I decided to take some time to carefully study them. Not only is it evident these rules are mocking basic linguistic principles and are essentially anti-linguistic, but most of them also go against the very basis of common sense. Nevertheless, I still decided to follow them and respect them, as much as it was possible, because it is hard to follow something that has very little logic and sense at its core. As I was active on KudoZ, I also noticed they are playing ping-pong with KudoZ points and are never there for linguistic reasons, whereas my crucial reason was to provide an accurate translation, because I am a professional who is aware of the importance of accuracy. They would " agree" with each other's answers, no matter what. I noticed they are " teaming" and basically leading the forum controlling the process of points awarding. I wanted to send a complaint, but today, as I tried to log in to my account, I realized I had been banned! I suspect it is because of a forum message I posted about the anti-linguistic and unprofessional basis of the KudoZ glossary.

Sadly enough, this scenario has been repeated over and over again since the days I was a member of that site.

As for KudoZ in general, I have always believed this to be "fraud" – a form of "aiding and abetting" those who are not qualified to be working as translators. Surely, you will have noticed that many of the questions posted could easily be answered if the asker had the necessary dictionaries at his or her disposal or if the asker had actually bothered to do three seconds of research. Most of those who post questions accept jobs they are not qualified for, and often for very low rates, but then expect other ProZ members to help them with their translation free of charge. I have seen KudoZ questions posted consecutively that, when combined, made up entire paragraphs or even pages taken from the asker's translation job he or she was working on at the time.

The "ping-pong" game of awarding points to one's cronies has also been a time-honoured "tradition" of KudoZ from the very first day (this is also why moderators tend to have the highest KudoZ scores).

For the most part, moderators are people who have too much free time on their hands, because no one will hire them as translators in the real world. Since they cannot be "big-shot translators" in the real world, they try to lord it over others who are within the confines of the virtual (i.e., utterly unreal) world of such "online marketplaces".

Scores of members have been banned for being a tad critical (i.e., pointing out some shortcomings of the site or its system) or for raising innocent questions.

While this may have mattered to those concerned a few years ago, it does not any longer. The lustre has come off all those "virtual marketplaces" for translators. A quick look at the types of jobs posted on those sites nowadays reveals that their popularity has plummeted, as most jobs advertised there are for "peanuts" or posted by agencies that are well-known in the industry as "non-payers" (they hire translators, pocket the money from the end client, but never pay the actual translator).

It may come as a shock to those who're still "in love" with those sites, but the world has moved on, and professional translators won't have their names sullied by creating a member profile on such websites. Real professionals advertise their services through a professional translators' association and/or their own business website.

Anyone who has ever been banned from those sites for raising issues of professionalism, therefore, should consider their banishment a "badge of honour and professionalism" and thank their lucky stars that they got out with their reputations still intact.

Some helpful online resources for translators

If you are anything like me, you will continue to use paper dictionaries until the day you die. Don't get me wrong: I am a fully-paid up member of the Internet and Web 2.0 club, but when it comes to dictionaries or newspapers, I still prefer to do my browsing or reading in print.

Like most of us, I also have some of the most common dictionaries on CD-ROM and installed to my hard drive, yet I find I use them less and less often. Why? Because, and this is no exaggeration, I am much faster finding what I need in my old and trusty printed dictionaries than I would be using a CD-ROM dictionary.

Having said that, I have to admit that I use some dictionaries or similar resources available online. The following is not an exhaustive list, as it covers only a few of the resources useful to any translator working in the same language pairs as I do.

http://dictionary.reverso.net: This one gives you free access to the best bilingual dictionaries out there, Collins. As we all know, all bilingual dictionaries are seriously flawed, but in this group, no one does it better than Collins. This one is available for most of the common language pairs.

http://www.dict.cc: This wiki-dictionary for German/English is quite useful, as it covers a lot of technical terms from various subject areas. As of this moment, this database contains 662,243 translation pairs – not bad at all. Users add terms all the time, while others vet them and make any corrections as necessary. Dict.cc plans to upgrade to include additional languages in the future, so stay tuned.

http://dictionary.reference.com: This is an extremely useful and comprehensive online monolingual dictionary for English. It comes with the dictionary, a thesaurus, a reference database and, more recently, a translation feature. Forget the machine translation, though, and instead appreciate the fact that some English terms in the dictionary now also indicate the corresponding words in other languages.

http://www.wordreference.com: Also based on Collins, but with a slightly different twist. Look up a word in, say, French to English, and at the bottom of the entry you will find a list of links to the Word Reference message boards, where users ask for help with terms and translations. Most of the proposed translations, however, are provided by non-translators and therefore tend to be transliterations, rather than actual translations.

http://www.wikipedia.org: Everyone uses this site. It makes researching a subject matter in two or more languages relatively simple (as compared to the good old days). Not every entry, of course, has a corresponding page in the foreign-language version of Wikipedia that you may require, but you will find what you need about 95% of the time. Make sure to bookmark http://www.wiktionary.org as well while you are at it. And if you want to learn another language, you might perhaps find something helpful in Wikibooks, or consider enrolling at the Wikiversity.

http://www.granddictionnaire.com: Quite useful, as it may contain some terms you may not find anywhere else. It is an official Office québécois de la langue française site and project. It is similar to, and essentially a smaller version of, TERMIUM, the database established by the Canadian federal government, but unlike the federal database, it is free – naturally, as the Québec government grabs the tax dollars paid into the "equalization system" by Canadians from other parts of the country to provide generous services that other provinces cannot afford, because they have already sent their money to Ottawa, which then funnels it into Québec.

PayPal scam - do not be fooled!

I am putting this warning out, because a lot of translators use PayPal and may therefore be targeted by this scam.

This afternoon I received about twenty of these bogus PayPal emails, informing me that I had made a purchase via my PayPal account. The email provides a link that allows users to dispute the charge.

Of course, no charge has been made to your account, but some people might panic when they see a charge like that, and they might want to reverse it immediately by clicking on the link.

The email itself looks authentic, so don't be fooled. The link for disputing the charge is some bogus and really long URL located in the UK somewhere.

Be safe out there – it's a rotten world!

Blogging ideal for dialogue

This post by a blogging translator has made me think about how things have changed in the online community of translators over the last, say, five years.

I still remember first coming across a site called Aquarius in the late 1990s. Aquarius was the first "virtual marketplace" for translators and buyers of translation services. It also provided the initial traces of online forums or message boards where translators could exchange ideas and views.

Then along came Proz.com. It followed the same established principles, but always aimed to be more than Aquarius. Not long thereafter, we saw similar sites shoot up like mushrooms (TraduGuide, GoTranslators, TranslatorsCafé, etc.). One thing most of them had in common was a discussion forum that was moderated by some volunteers selected by the respective site owner. Sadly, as happens with all message boards, user groups, etc., flame wars would break out, moderators would step in, sometimes ban members, and thus stoke the fires even more.

Yes, I was banned from Proz after a while, because I would insist on professionalism, rather than the dilettantism that had become the norm among the site's members (and the site owner wasn't any better either). Many others after me were banned for the same reason, who then went on to vent about their experience through mass e-mails to other translators, message boards, other websites and blogs. Even some of my most vociferous opponents at the time have either resigned from Proz or been banned in the meantime, after finally realizing that I had been right all along.

The change that Web 2.0 has brought about is that far fewer translators rely on those online forums. Instead, they have taken to blogging, which they enjoy much more, because they are in control and do not depend on the whims of a forum moderator (and moderators tend to be quack translators who have too much time on their hands, because they really stink as "translators", and so they fill their empty lives with lording it over others, who are much more qualified than they are).

It is no surprise, therefore, that sites like Proz have seen a major drop in site traffic in recent years. High-calibre agencies or direct clients don't really post jobs there anymore – the ones that still do are known non-paying and fraudulent agencies, those who look for slave labour in the form of 3 or 2 cents a word, and private individuals looking to have their personal documents translated (e.g. for immigration purposes). The latter seem to make up the majority of job postings these days.

Whichever of these one should choose to work for, it does not really matter, because payment will be either extremely low or not forthcoming at all.

Discussion forums are not the "eyeball magnets" they used to be either. As I said, translators nowadays prefer blogs and similar Web 2.0 technology to communicate and discuss translation-related issues.

I find it ironic in a way that those sites weren't brought down by their lack of professionalism (both in terms of site management and site members), but by the ongoing progress of the Internet – like the proverbial revolution that eats its children.

There is no such thing as machine translation

In a recent Maclean's article, the possibility of having a "universal translator", that is, a machine or computer for translating both written and spoken language, is explored in depth.

While some sources interviewed for the article are quite optimistic, one has to keep in mind that those are computer experts who don't know the first thing about the process of "human translation" – or language as such, for that matter.

Fortunately, the article also quotes someone more knowledgeable:

Denis Bousquet, vice-president of the Canadian Translators, Terminologists and Interpreters Council, says the technology would require artificial intelligence in order to do the job, and that is still generations away. "Machines are a bunch of zeros and ones and language is way more interpretive than that," he says. "Emotion and colloquial expressions come into play and you can't translate those with a strictly mechanical process."

Exactly.

The problem with automated translation is that language is one of the most human activities imaginable and therefore cannot be captured by zeros and ones. While individual words can be translated by a machine, or even very short and standardized phrases ("How are you?"), there is no way a computer can understand context. This is why human translators have to read the whole text to be translated first, understand and internalize it, and then translate it. Since the functioning of the human brain is not understood yet as to how language is processed by the brain in terms of words, syntax and, more importantly, nuance, there is no way of programming machines to imitate the very processes that scientists do not even understand yet. It will be several hundred years, if ever, before machines can fully replace human translators and/or do away with the need to learn foreign languages.