What is Plain English?

Plain English (sometimes referred to as plain language) is a style of writting that is simple and direct. It “emphasise clarity, brevity and the avoidance of technical language”.

Why Plain English?

“Notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained in any other document (or any part thereof)…”

All documents in plain English should be easy to read and use. Gobbledygook, jargon and legalese can be hard to understand, as it does not have the general audience in mind. It can also be time consuming and cost you money if you don’t understand what you’re reading -or signing.

Using Plain English

There are numerous government and non-government organizations that works to improve public communication by caimpaining in favor of plain English in public communication. These organizations believe that everyone should have access to clear and concise information.

In the late 1990s, President Bill Clinton made Plain Language a major initiative of his administration. In a presidential memorandum he formalized the requirement that all new rules and regulations of his government be written in this style.

The U.S. goverment has a Plain Language Website which aims at improving communication from the Federal Government to the public.

Plain Language in Spanish

Plain Language is not limited to the English language. The plain language campaign can also be found in Latin America.

Argentina

Since the mid 2000s, Argentina implemented a project entitled Comunicación en Lenguaje Claro, which is included in the technical assistance program in order to strengthening the National Public Investment System (FOSIP). It aims to follow guidelines similar to the Plain Language Movement. In its first stage, the project has focused on internal govermental communication; later it will regulate the communication between the government and the public.

Chile

In August 2004 the President of the Senate of Chile opened the seminar Transparency, language rights for citizen, in which academic leaders were involved. The seminar analized challenge of communicating legislative work to the public through clear language. The senate now face the challenge of transferring their work in a language that ordinary citizens understand.

Mexico

On October 5, 2004, President Vicente Fox launched the inniciative Citizen Language to begin to simplify the language used by the government. Its purpose is to communicate government messages in a simple, clear and precise way, to achieve full understanding and to prevent complex and obscure communication.

Plain Language in Translation

Using Plain Language means more customers can access the information and services you offer. When readers understand the material, they are more likely to respond favorably, make fewer errors filling out your forms, and comply more accuratly and quickly with requirments. And they need less support over the phone, online or in person.

Plain Language documents make foreign language translations easier and more cost effective. If your English documents are easy to read, use and understand, so will your translations. A Plain Language document typically can have up to 40% fewer words than the original. As translations are billed per word, translation costs will be lower.

For more information, visit Spanish Translation Solutions

In the US, when a transcript contains a translation of conversations spoken in a foreign language, a qualified witness must authenticate and verify the translation. See United States v. Llinas, 603 F.2d 506, 509-10 (5th Cir. 1979).

A party who wishes to challenge the accuracy of a translation is responsible for presenting another translation. The jury may then choose which version to believe. United States v. Rosenthal, 793 F.2d 1214, 1238 (11th Cir. 1986) (citing Llinas, 603 F.2d at 509).

For more information, please visit:

http://www.leagle.com/unsecure/page.htm?shortname=infco20091124124

I’ve talked before about the list of glossaries that a friend of mine put together (and which I’m sure she’ll add to in the future). While going through these glossaries, I came across a couple of little grammar problems in Spanish that can be troublesome.

The first topic is the use of the personal pronoun “se“. www.elcastellano.org has a good list of the uses of this pronoun, along with some very clear examples of use. This list can be especially useful for non-native Spanish speakers who may have difficulties understanding these constructions. “Se puede” learn on this page.
Another topic that is generally easy for native speakers but trips up speakers of Spanish as a foreign language is the use of “que“. That same site ,elcastellano.org, has another area that talks about the different uses of the pronoun que (interrogative, exclamatory, relative) and the conjunction, letting you know which ones have an accent mark and which don’t. It also has a little bonus on “dequeísmo“, which is the ever-growing error (by both native speakers and others) of using “de” incorrectly. In order to avoid misusing the preposition, we often convince ourselves that de que is incorrect when it actually should go there.

To wrap up this summary of “mini-topics,” I also found this area that discusses common errors and questions on accent marks. Who hasn’t been unsure of whether or not to put an accent mark on “ti”, “éste”, “aún”…? Well, éste is a great site to find explanations and examples all together.

Veo arboles verdes, rosas rojas tambien

Las veo florecer para ti y para mi

Y pienso para mi mismo, que mundo tan maravilloso.

Sound familiar? I came across a site last week called Song Translator that while entertaining, shows just how difficult it is to produce a top-notch song translation. Like poetry, music lyrics have a rhythm, a feeling, a sound that are notoriously difficult to replicate. The rhyme scheme goes            out the window, the subtle innuendos and word play are often lost and the translated lyrics typically come out stilted and clumsy.

That being said, the site is great if you want to have some fun, maybe laugh at how silly some songs would sound in another language.  Guns N’ Roses in Spanish? Luis Miguel in English? The site is however well put together, showing the lyrics in Spanish and English, sometimes along with a Youtube video of the original.

Poetry translations are notoriously difficult and force a translator to walk the fine line between accuracy and beauty. In a similar vein, song translations frequently receive a mixed reception.

Case in point: the US National Anthem in Spanish. There have been a number of  “Star Spangled Banner” translations, the most controversial being the hip-hop version “Nuestro Himno,” featuring Wyclef Jean, Pitbull, Carlos Ponce and Olga Tanon. The criticism ranges from the liberties taken with the translation (it is far from literal) to the topic of illegal immigration. Below are the “Nuestro Himno” lyrics and the “Star Spangled Banner”  lyrics for comparison, plus the  “Nuestro Himno” Youtube video.

“Nuestro Himno”

Amanece:­ ¿lo veis a la luz de la aurora

Lo que tanto aclamamos la noche al caer?

Sus estrellas, sus franjas flotaban ayer,

En el fiero combate en señal de victoria.

Fulgor de lucha, al paso de la libertad,

Por la noche decían: «¡Se va defendiendo!»

¡Oh, decid! ¿Despliega aún su hermosura estrellada

Sobre tierra de libres la bandera sagrada?

“The Star Spangled Banner”

O! say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming.
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming.
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Here’s the “Nuestro Himno” music video:

Accent marks can be somewhat of a mystery to non-Spanish speakers. Even if the Spanish student (or translator…) remembers where in the word to put the accent mark, he or she still might not be sure how to do so. There are three basic ways to write Spanish accent marks.

1. Keyboard Setup (Windows)

–Go to Start menu>Control Panel> Regional and Language Options

- From here, click on the Languages tab at the top and then the Details button

-Click on Keyboard and then Add. You can add any number of languages.

This will put the languages icon in your system tray, thus allowing you to switch back and forth between keyboard languages.

To type an accent mark, press the apostrophe key and then the vowel you want to accent. Ñ is the colon key and the two question marks (¿ and ?) are made by pressing the + and _ keys.

2. Ctrl. + Apostrophe + Vowel

This is a fast approach that is very easy to remember. Just press Control, the apostrophe key and then the vowel you want to accent.

3. Alt Codes for Spanish Accents

These can be helpful if you make a list and keep them by your computer. For short projects, it can be faster than switching your keyboard settings.

á = Alt + 0225

é = Alt + 0233

í = Alt + 0237

ó = Alt + 0243

ú = Alt + 0250

ñ = Alt + 0241

ü = Alt + 0252

¡ = Alt + 0161

¿ Alt + 0191

Ipod Translator

The Apple Ipod has taken the world by storm and, along with its sibling the Iphone, become the must have accessory for the 21st century. Each new Ipod has brought along a fresh idea, be it video capabilities or an insanely compact size. It has been heralded for much more than its entertainment capabilities, with advocates claiming that its large memory can be useful in everything from learning to diagnose heart murmurs to getting into shape. Duke University went as far as to issue a 20gb Ipod to all incoming freshmen. With all of these applications, surely there is something for translators, right?

Of course. And believe it or not, the most highly touted Ipod translator comes from the US Army. Vcommunicator Mobile has been used in Iraq for several years now and provides loads of options for communicating in Arabic and Kurdish. Phrases such as “May I see your ID?” are spelled out phonetically so that they can be read aloud, or for the US soldier with an imperfect Arabic accent, the phrase can be played over a mini-speaker to everyone in the immediate vicinity.

Although the details have yet to be ironed out, the translator (interpreter?) will soon be made available to tourists, businessmen and other foreign travelers who need to communicate in another language.

Twitter, tweet and tweak your heart out globally now with a number of new products and services. If you have not yet heard, Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows people to stay connected, and according to the New York Times, Twitter is “one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet.” Friends keep in touch with friends, companies keep their clients up to date on their business, and there is even a President Barack Obama Twitter, which, along with a Youtube channel and MySpace page, is part of the “WhiteHouse 2.0″ initiative (this will also coincidentally be translated soon). So evidently it’s huge in the U.S. But what if you want to twitter in Spanish? Or twitter in French?

As with any translated material, you can translate Twitter into any language with a human translation or a machine translation. Businesses that plan their twitter announcements in advance can send out to have a set of tweets translated for their multilingual markets. There are also of course programs that function as an automatic Twitter translator, but with an already condensed text space and a language of its own, this inevitably leads to garbled translations. Machine translations of tweets have proven to be nearly incomprehensible and much of the “wit” disappears into thin air.

So regardless of whether you want to twittear in Spanish or send out a gazouillisin French, human translation is your best bet for a Twitter translator. And to keep up to speed on the happenings at Spanish Translation, you can now follow us at http://twitter.com/TRANSLATION_

The idea of machine translation was introduced to the general public on the 7th of January, 1954. The project was a collaboration between the University of Georgetown and IBM, who provided a model 701 to serve as the “brain” for the translation. The machine was fed over 60 relatively simple sentences in Russian and provided a fairly accurate English translation. Keep in mind that this experiment took place at a  time  when computers were just being introduced to the world and were frequently called “robots” or “giant brains,” so the results were astounding and in some circles, frightening.

Here is an example of one of the more general translations:

Russian: “Mi pyeryedayem mislyi posryedstvom ryechyi”

English: “We transmit thoughts by means of speech”

So why did the scientists and linguists choose Russian into English? Perhaps this next example will make things a little clearer.

Russian:  “Dyinamyit pryigotovlyayetsya xyimyicheskyim protsyessom yiz
nyitroglyitsyeryina s pryimyesjyu yinyertnix soyedyinyenyiy”

English: “Dynamite is prepared by chemical process from nitroglycerine with admixture of inert
compounds”

Cold War, here we come.

What is a glossary? A glossary is basically a catalog of words from a select discipline or area of study in which the terms are arranged alphabetically and defined, discussed and/or translated into another language.

There are general glossaries on subjects like medicine, economics or art, for example, and then there are more specific glossaries within these topics, such as infectious diseases and public health, taxes and investments, or art history and photography. This categorization may be quite restricted, but the groupings generally overlap or include more than one area (a glossary on medical insurance may be useful for translating medical or insurance texts).

Some institutions and companies also have their own glossaries that aid the user/client in understanding the organization’s special terminology. These can be a lifesaver for a translator working on something from the company or in the same field.

Glossaries can be monolingual (the explanation or definition is in the same language), bilingual (the words and/or definitions are translated into another language) and can be used both forwards and backwards, meaning from either language, or even multilingual (translations in more than one language).

When using a glossary, it is essential to know exactly what you are looking for, what area or field you need to check and how precise the term needs to be.

A tip: If a bilingual glossary is not available, use a very specific monolingual one to gather a better idea of the true meaning(s) of the word you are after.

There are numerous sites that collect glossaries (by area, topic, language, etc.). Sometimes a glossary for a certain company or institution can be found on its website. And if you are facing an extraordinarily technical or specific topic, it’s not a bad idea to ask the client if a glossary is available.

I’d also like to share this link with you: GLOSSARY This is a compilation of different glossaries that a friend put together and which is divided by topics, subtopics, languages, etc.  Hopefully they will be as useful to you as they have been to me.

Every word has a meaning, but some words have more than one, such as homonyms: bark, bear, groom, etc. Sometimes a word means or symbolizes “something more” and the author can give it a special meaning or name (the best example is “Rosebud” from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane).

The dictionary defines disambiguate as “to make clear and (more) comprehensible and to state unambiguously or remove ambiguities.” This is what we do as translators. And it’s not always easy.

There are of course texts that are extremely ambiguous, but generally, we have enough “clues” to decipher the true meaning.
So what is it that helps us decipher the clues? A translator’s best friend:  “the context.” The context is “the part of a text or statement that surrounds a particular word or passage and determines its meaning.” In other words, it is the relationship one word has with the rest of the message.

The cartoon here presents ambiguity taken to the extreme…

The subject of bilingual education in the US is a hotly debated topic, but news source are frequently unclear in their definitions of what exactly bilingual education is. The general public is largely unaware that there exist a wide variety of programs for students whose native language is not English and assume that bilingual education means a fifty-fifty split in their two languages. Neither of the two most common programs, English as a Second Language programs and traditional Bilingual Education programs, uses this kind of system.

The traditional bilingual education program teaches core courses such as science and history in the student’s native language, be it Spanish, Chinese, etc. English is also taught, but as a special course. Programs vary by state, but students in traditional bilingual education programs generally spend only a small percentage of their time at school learning English. These are intended to be temporary programs that provide students with a foundation in their native language before they learn a second language.

English as a Second Language (ESL) programs are also temporary, but are more of an adapted immersion program. ESL students also take special classes on the English language, but core courses are also taught in English. These classes are modified to the needs of the students whose first language is not English, but instruction is in English and there may be a wide variety of cultures and languages represented in the class.

These two programs are quite different, but the distinctions frequently get lost in the cries of xenophobia and the lamenting of the supposed deterioration of American culture.

After having received several valuable comments from readers, I’ve looked into Ideal Nol and Esperanto a bit more in an effort to differentiate their purposes, current and projected usage, and challenges that the languages face.

Esperanto was created with the most honorable of ambitions: promote international understanding in an effort to foster wold peace. Creator Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof’s  romantic and idealistic goal for the language was for it to become the world’s second language. Ideal Nol was also of course created for a sort of international understanding, but more so between college students texting one another than the entire world. Another significant difference is that while Ideal Nol can be spoken, it’s niche lies more in the digital realm of SMS and MSN.

Finding current (and accurate) figures on the number of Esperanto speakers is quite difficult, but the most widely-circulated statistic puts the number of Esperanto speakers at somewhere between one and two million. There are songs in Esperanto, films produced completely in Esperanto and numerous books and magazines in the language. Ideal Nol is quite young, so there are no figures  available for it yet, but what the creators lack in followers, they make up for in optimism (talk of a Nobel Prize). The idea of a native Ideal Nol speaker sounds preposterous, but who knows..

Esperanto’s biggest foes have been Hitler, Stalin and English. While the first two made active efforts to suppress “the language of spies,” the latter has crept into a position as the world’s unofficial second language. Ideal Nol also has its detractors, as can be evidenced by the comments on last week’s post, and may prove to be nothing more than a flash in the pan.

In the same vein as ttyl, lmao and gr8, Ideal Nol is a new language created by Enric Cabrejas that combines the simplicity (confusion) of abbreviated text messages and messenger conversations with the simplistic rules of Esperanto. The new form of expression was devised as a way for individuals without a common language to communicate, be it vocally, over cell phones or online. According to the Ideal website, it is rapidly gaining momentum across European college campuses and the world.

Ideal Nol is based on 7 basic grammar rules and an ever-expanding lexicon that can both be consulted online. Next week I will provide an update on the current status and possible future of the language, but until then, bai!

How many words are there in Spanish? How about in English? Depending on who you ask, there are different answers… There is a certain tendency (among Spanish-speakers) to overestimate the number of words in Spanish as well as the overall variety of the language’s forms. Some say that it is out of a need to win some kind of competition more so than a defense of real numbers.  The problem is that there are no concrete figures… How does one go about counting the words?

I’d say that Spanish has a “ton” of words, or maybe even a “gazillion.” This makes me wonder: Does “gazillion” count as a word? What about other localisms and slang? You would also have to add the special terms used by certain groups: doctors, lawyers, artists of all types, “marginalized” individuals (locked up, drug addicts, etc.). You won’t find these words in dictionaries. And so I ask myself: Do you count all of the feminine and masculine variants, the singulars and plurals, the diminutives, the augmentatives….? And aaaaaaaaallll of the words that we make up each day, for text messages or chatting: some abbreviations, other “stretched” ones (like the second one in this sentence), other manipulated words or “vesre”* in Spanish? We also have “imported” words, the ones we copy, borrow and steal from other languages, plus those that undergo a slight phonetic modification and adaptation so that we can consider them new. And there are also bad words (which we’ve discussed here before) and although they are “bad,” there are a lot of them and they are widely used… even if they’re not in the dictionary. Does whoever counts words include those?

With everything said and done, whether it’s 100,000 or 300,000 words that “exist,” how many do we actually use? Depending on our cultural upbringing, I’ve heard that we use between 1000 and 10,000 words. How many more are there that we don’t use because while they are still in the dictionary, they are obsolete, out of style, etc.  Many are relegated to a catalogue of unused words that once belonged to our language. And many more will continue to be incorporated as language never stops growing.

However many they may be, they are our “prime materials” and we have to keep learning them in order to be able to use them in our daily lives.
_________________
* “vesre” («revés» en vesre) is to form words backwards: this is a type of word formation that consists of the permutation or metathesis of the syllables of a Spanish word. This stems from the Castilian Spanish spoken in the River Plate area of Argentina and Uruguay and was popularized by the tango scene at the beginning of the twentieth century. A few examples: “mionca” (camión), “ñoba” (baño). ( http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesre)

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.

No matter how beautiful your translation, there are certain errors, most often made by someone just starting out in the trade, that will peg your work as “rookie level.” Most of us are guilty of one or more of these seemingly innocent, yet disastrous mistakes. This article will hopefully point out a few of these

Literal translations– This is something that people just learning the source language are more prone to, but even the most seasoned translators can be guilty of this. One sample translation of a comic strip that I saw translated the English greeting “What’s up” as “¿Qué está arriba?” Don’t do this.

Changing the format– Don’t change the font color, don’t combine paragraphs and try to make your tables and images as similar to the originals as possible.

Accepting a job you are not prepared for– It can be tempting to take any project that crosses your path when you are just starting out in the translation field and hungry for work, but when the client complains that all the legal, medical or engineering terms are wrong, you’ll see why this is not a good idea.