This little box here is the prototype for what Fuji Xerox claims will revolutionize the translation industry. How does it work? You put a document written in one language into it and the translated version pops out in the EXACT SAME FORMAT.

Currently, the machine only “reads” Japanese, but can translate into English, Chinese and Korean. Fuji Xerox has promised that more languages will be available shortly.

As for the quality of the translations, this remains unseen. The company is being very secretive about the translation technology employed, and more details have emerged on how the formatting is done than on how the content is translated. Too good to be true? Yep.

Fiction and folklore throughout the world generally has at least one story of a child living among and being raised by animals. The parents may be monkeys, dogs, and entire jungle family, etc., but the tale usually goes one of two ways. The child is brought up with a certain kind of “savage smarts” and uses these tricks when integrating into society, or the child becomes a dangerous and hideous monster. Real life examples of feral children, children isolated from human contact for extended periods of time, have shown that neither of these two scenarios are accurate.

Real life examples of children either abandoned, locked away by their parents, or even stolen by animals are most certainly tragic and heartbreaking, but linguists have found a silver lining to these cases while studying the childrens’ language capabilities at the time of their return to society and monitoring their process as they learn spoken language.

Attempts to teach feral children either spoken or sign language have met with very limited success. A number of children have returned from the wild mimicking animal sounds and behaviors and show no interest in human language. Others have learned an extremely limited vocabulary (< 30 words) and what could be generously referred to as the building blocks of grammar.

There are an infinite number of variables to take into account (age at which they were separated from human contact, time spent without speaking, mental stimulation while separated, etc.), but over the years some general hypotheses have been formed in regards to language acquisition and specifically, what is known as the critical period.

The critical period hypothesis basically states that humans have a “window of opportunity” to learn their first language. If that period passes without exposure to language, practice, etc., then the opportunity is lost forever. The term refers to the period of the brain’s physical formation more so than the amount of social interaction at that age. There is no definitive conclusion on this debate, as real life examples from feral children have provided evidence for both camps.

Pictured above is Genie, a young girl who was denied social exposure for the first thirteen years of her life. Her father kept her strapped to a chair nearly twenty-four hours a day.

A small yet difficult subject, especially for “rookies”: what to do when you come across an abbreviation, initials or acronym while translating. (This article does not differentiate between initials- the first letters of a group of words from a full expression or name, and acronyms- initials pronounced together, effectively forming a word: SONAR, SCUBA, etc.)

There are different ways to look at the subject, and here I have included a few general guidelines that will serve you when translating from English to Spanish.

1. Company or insitution names that are made up of initials should not be translated (FBI, CNN, UCLA, BBC). The full name of the entity should be translated, followed by the initials, a comma, and the phrase “por sus siglas en inglés”.  Agencia Central de Inteligencia (CIA, por sus siglas en inglés).

2. Large and well known international organizations generally have a standardized translation for their initials that you will need to find. (UN = ONU, WHO = OMS). The full name is written out with the initials in parentheses, or vice-versa.

Ex.: Organización del Tratado del Atlántico Norte (OTAN)

3. Acronyms and initials in the medical field (meaning names of diseases, procedures, compound names for body parts, etc.) usually have a standardized translation. You should try and find one and use it instead of the one from the source language. TC = CT (colesterol total), CT = TC (tomografía computada), ACL = LCA (ligamento cruzado anterior), AIDS = SIDA (síndrome de inmunodeficiencia adquirida), DNA = ADN (ácido desoxirribonucleico), STD = ETS (enfermedades de transmisión sexual).

4. Randoms: position names (CEO, COO, RR. PP.), political groups (IRA), country names (USA), military, government, international business procedures (SIGINT, CMOC, FIFO), electronic and computer systems (DOS, ATM, PIN), common phrases (FAQ). Some are traduced into words ( (CEO = Director Ejecutivo, COO = Director o Jefe Operativo, FAQ = preguntas frecuentes, ATM = cajero automático), some have a translation and new initials (IRA = Ejército Republicano Irlandés [ERI], USA = Estados Unidos de América [EE. UU.]), others should not be translated (like those in point 1; ex.: Centro de Operaciones Civiles y Militares (CMOC, por sus siglas en inglés), and others, especially computer terms, are the same as in English (PIN, DOS, CD ROM).

When in doubt, look it up!

“Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.”

—- Yevgeny Yevtushenko

The quote above is from Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, author of Babi Yar and known critic of the Soviet government. While this quotation is undeniably misogynistic, it does present an interesting point of view and reality of translations.

While translators generally focus on producing a translation  that is faithful to the original, what does one do when translating poetry, when portraying a feeling, a mood, is more important than meaning? How much creative freedom is granted to the translator?

Poetry is so nuanced, so particular, that it could be likened to recreating a piano sonata on a bass drum. The result may be interesting and may have a certain style to it, but it will never produce the same feeling as the original.