Archive for the ‘Spanish Language Translation’ Category

English and Spanish Dictionaries and Glossaries

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

A dictionary is a simple tool which helps us with the pronouciation, spelling and grammar needed for correct and effective communication. A glossary is an alphabetical list of technical terms in some specialized field of knowledge. The list below are helpful resources for general and specialized terminology in English and Spanish aimed for students, teachers, professionals and the general public.

English and Spanish Dictionaries and Glossaries

Accounting and Financial Dictionary English-Spanish dictionary provided by Spanish translator services, a site with free resources for English-Spanish translators

Biology Glossary English – Spanish glossary of technical terms used in ecology, evolution, and systematics

Business Dictionary English to Spanish terminology and vocabulary

Child Welfare Glossary English – Spanish child welfare terms from the Child Welfare  Children’s Bureau

Deaf & Blind Glossary English – Spanish glossary of concepts and terms from the National Consortium of Deaf-Blindness

Dental Terms Glossary English – Spanish dental glossary to improve dentist and patient communications Courtesy of Wake Forest University

Election & Voting Glossary English – Spanish glossary of key election terminology from the US Election Assistance Commission

Fannie Mae Glossary of English and Spanish Industry Terms Mortgage, lending and borrowing terms

Financial Glossary English and Spanish terms from the Financial Monetary Fund website

Forestry & Wildlife Glossary English – Spanish terminology used in forestry, range, wildlife, fishery, soils, and botany from the USDA Forest Service

Free Dictionary Online English to Spanish dictionary

HUD Glossary of Mortgage terms English to Spanish glossary of mortgage and financing terminology from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development

Internal Revenue Service Glossary English – Spanish glossary of terminology used in Publications issued by the Internal Revenue Service

OSHA Dictionary-Construction Industry Terms English – Spanish glossary of Occupational Safety & Health Administration construction industry terms

Political Science Glossary English – Spanish glossary of important political science terms from Thompson Wadsworth Learning

Royal Spanish Academy Dictionary Spanish language dictionary

Special Education Glossary English-Spanish glossary of special education terminology provided by the Van Buren Intermediate School District

Superfund & WQARF Terms English – Spanish environmental quality glossary from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality

Technical English – Spanish Glossary Technical terminology courtesy of the Technological Institute of Buenos Aires

Tomisimo English-Spanish & Spanish-English dictionary

WordReference English to Spanish & Spanish-English dictionary

English Spanish Glossaries Portals and search engines that take you to a large number of glossaries on every topic imaginable, as well as general dictionaries, encyclopedias and other resources for translators. If you are looking for a very particular glossary that does not fall in the other categories, check the portals in this section

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The Legality of Translations in Court

Friday, December 11th, 2009

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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

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Song Translations

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Veo arboles verdes, rosas rojas tambien louis armstrong

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.

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Translation of the US National Anthem

Friday, June 5th, 2009

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:

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Ipod Translator Tool for Civilians

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
Ipod Translator

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.

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Translate Your Twitter

Friday, May 8th, 2009

twitter_logo_headerTwitter, 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_

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The Georgetown Experiment

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

ibm701consoleThe 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.

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Glossaries

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

self_help_library_home

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.

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Disambiguation and Context

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

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…
turtles44

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The Future of Language

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

I often wonder about the future of language.

And yes, the singular “language.”
In 2003, Hollywood released Code 46m a film that discusses something very similar to what I’d been wondering about. The movie takes place in the not-so-distant future with people “inside” and “outside” of a very controlled system in which “papeles” (papers in the pidgin language everyone speaks) are required for authorization. All of the characters speak a language that is essentially English, but with different words from Spanish, French, Arabic, Italian, Mandarin… For example, people greet one another in Mandarin, saying “Ni Hao.” Everyone has a “palabra” as a password and can get “Outside” if they have their “papeles.” Couples say “Ti amo” to one another and when William (Tim Robbins) is asked if he has children, they ask him “Chico or chica?”

A lot of sentences are put together like these:code_46-150x150
“You ever live afuera?”
“Did you have a cerveza?”
“I can’t find my cosa!”

Will the world communicate this way in the future? And if so, in a not-so-distant future? I actually feel that with the growth of “Spanglish” (and other combinations of languages), we are already on our way…

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Bilingual Education in the US

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

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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.

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Ideal Nol versus Esperanto

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

global-languageAfter 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.

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The New Esperanto?

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

indy_collageIn 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!

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How Many Words Does a Language Have?

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

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” more-than-wordsindividuals (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.
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* “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)

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Acronyms and Initials

Friday, March 13th, 2009

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!

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Beautiful Versus Faithful Translations

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

beauty“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.



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The Do’s and Don’ts of Translating

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

Several colleagues who spend day after day, week after week toiling as editors- that is, correcting translations day after day, week after week– and I have gotten together and after much discussion, we have set down this list of guidelines and suggestions that we feel will be very useful for translators, especially the newer ones… or maybe not.

1. Dictionaries don’t bite. Especially ones online. Do us and do yourself a favor and use them. If you’re not sure of a word’s meaning, look it up! If you are sure, double-check it!

2. Follow the instructions. If the client (or whoever gave you the job) tells you to use certain words or a style that you don’t particularly like, do it anyway! The client is always right. And the boss… (That goes without saying)

3. We are sorry to report that the translator cannot choose the project’s topic, type of file, inclusion or deletion of tables, images, etc., so translate what’s in front of you, don’t turn in the project that you wish you had been given. If there are tables, translate them. If there are images, include them. And if they have text… (Figure it out?) Translate it!

4. There are expressions that you love. Understandable, we all do. It’s like your worn out jeans that fit just right and we keep using despite the holes and the fact that they’re falling apart… Well, when you are writing your autobiography, use these expressions as much as you like. But while you’re translating, please use the correct expression, and try not to use your favorites ad nauseam. (There are times when something is just “about,” not “regarding,” not “concerning,” etc.)

5. There are some writers who are “ugly” editors, we know. Sometimes the source text even comes with errors. The translator’s task is not to improve on the original, but rather to provide a good translation. Seems obvious, but not everyone gets it. Just to make sure we’re clear: what you should do is TRANSLATE, not make the source text prettier in its new language…

6. To err is human and to edit some errors is not divine. Please, reread what you write: make sure it doesn’t say the opposite of what the author said. Make sure commas are where they should be, if one is missing, if an s got skimmed over, if a preposition got left out, if the verb is in the wrong tense… Ah! For those who haven’t yet heard, Word has a little tool called “spell check.” Use it! Although it doesn’t work miracles, it always helps.

7. To wrap things up, a small piece of advice. We know that it’s hard to do this while simultaneously doing all the other things that have to be done while working: checking email, chatting, texting, talking on the phone, keeping an eye on the TV (don’t deny it…). But please, pay attention to what you’re reading (and translating).

8. And last but not least: THINK. Use that wonderful thing known as a brain. And when all else fails (dictionaries, forums, glossaries, more clear-headed colleagues..) and you feel that there’s nothing you can do, that you’re on the edge of a breakdown, that you can’t go on another minute, please, for your sake and ours: QUIT! Quit using the computer, quit translating, QUIT!

Well, quit working for a while: go outside, have some tea, clear your mind and come back later.  And although this advice is valid, please don’t take the comments too seriously…

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Rookie Translation Mistakes

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

mistakeNo 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.

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What to Do When All Else Fails

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

As we’ve talked about in previous posts, while it is possible to drag out the old typewriter and our trusty Simon & Schuster’s and put a translation down on legal paper, we live in the twenty-first century and these days we have: a) a computer, b) a fairly high-speed internet connection, and c) one or more computer translation programs (not essential, but very valuable): a CAT tool like Trados, for example.
Furthermore, we keep our trusty dictionaries on hand (that is, in our computer bookmarks and favorites) a bilingual one, a monolingual one in the source language to check definitions, a monolingual one in our native language to make sure the term we chose is correct, and finally some specialized dictionaries for the particular text:  medical, technical, legal, etc. For the most specific texts, we can check a glossary, bilingual if possible. Maybe the client has sent a “memory” or glossary which may serve as reference or simply tell how the client prefers certain terms are translated.
Ok, now we are ready. What steps do we take?
The first thing to do is read the text. A lot of translation professors recommended reading the entire text before starting the translation. While useful, this is not always easy when we’ve got a tight deadline (as we almost always do…). But it is useful to skim the first few paragraphs to see what we are dealing with, be it a technical manual for some machine, a lease or a love letter… We don’t translate each word by itself, which means that going over the original will let us see what the general topic is and help us keep the proper vocabulary (and style) in mind.
But then halfway through the project comes the big conundrum: what to do with a “problem” word or phrase, something we can’t find in a dictionary, in the glossaries… We’ve mentioned “Googling” words before, and while it’s not a definitive resource, it can help us find out if the word at least exists, is used somewhere, the phrase is correct, etc.
Finally, it is ideal if we can consult a specialist in the field or expert on the topic we are translating (a doctor, engineer, computer tech, etc.), but this is usually a luxury due to the difficulty in getting in touch with the person you need while facing time constraints.
My advice, and what I’ve learned from my personal experience, is to consult a colleague: a different perspective can’t hurt and teamwork can be an excellent idea. Another translator can “help us think,” give us an option we hadn’t thought of or corroborate something we hadn’t been able to verify any other way.
If we also have the good fortune to have a colleague who is a native speaker of the source language in our corner, then this is an added bonus. But this is only if we’re lucky enough to have them. ;-)

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Google Translate

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

handsThose in the translation industry have long laughed at machine translation and its incorrect wording, awkward sentence choice, etc., so when Google Enterprise product manager Cyrus Mistry proclaimed that the new Google Translate would be “analogous to giving every employee in a business 34 translators sitting at their desk and translating everything they want to look for within a 10th of a second,” professional translators the world over spit their collective coffee onto their computer screens.

With the shortcomings of computer translation programs like Babelfish and Promt no secret within the industry and, to some extent, in the general public, Google’s bold claim seemed outlandish. Google Translate however, is based on statistical analysis, a radical departure from the traditional “rules-based” approach to machine translation. Starting with over twenty billion words in seven languages (from official United Nations documents), Google Translate solicited contributions of human-translated documents in other languages to add into its database. What truly sets this program apart however, as more bilingual text is entered into the program, the results of the statistical analysis, and therefore the translations, become that much more accurate. By cross analyzing the new sources with the old, it is essentially improving its own translations.

Rather than write a scathing critique on how translation will always be an art form done by humans or wave a white flag and start looking at careers on monster.com, I will leave you with a few lines from John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, its translation by Google Translate into Spanish, and the back translation into English.

Original

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

Spanish

En la larga historia del mundo, sólo unas pocas generaciones se han concedido el papel de defensa de la libertad en su hora de máximo peligro. Yo no rehuir esta responsabilidad-que acojo con satisfacción. No creo que ninguno de nosotros sería el intercambio de lugares con cualquier otro pueblo o cualquier otra generación. La energía, la fe, la devoción que aportan a este esfuerzo se iluminará nuestro país y todos los que sirven y que el resplandor del fuego que puede verdaderamente la luz del mundo.

Back Translation into English

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I will not shirk this responsibility, which I welcome. I do not think any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. Energy, the faith, the devotion they bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who served and that the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

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