Christof’s Blog

Recently I found a bit of a “strange” translation in a TM while I was doing some database maintenance. My eye only fell on it because the name of a cartoon character was mentioned - which seemed pretty surprising to me as I was working on a TM of a client in the financial sector. The translation was actually a good laugh (a script of a cartoon movie). Besides having this strange feeling that I just saw something that wasn’t meant to be seen by my eyes, I actually didn’t think anything more about it. At the end of the day it turned out to be just a few fragments of a job which the translator must have done (by accident I assume) with the TM we used for this client.

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xinhuanet and a few other Chinese papers ran a story about the Chinese translation and interpreting industry.

The main issue is this:
The translation industry employs around 500,000 people, including retirees, college students and returnees from overseas universities who work as freelancers. But only 60,000 professional translators can produce accurate translations from Chinese into a foreign language, according to Wang Xin, an official with the Training Center of the China International Publishing Group.
China currently has nearly 3,000 registered translation firms with more than 400 in Beijing, according to the Translators Association of China. But many of them are “briefcase companies” with only a telephone, a computer and one or two full-time employees. The part-time translators and interpreters they hire are not always qualified.

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It probably can’t get more embarrassing than that: about 20 German athletes at the Olympic Games currently held in Turin have to wear woolen hats with the Belgian national colours on it. It appears that Adidas (which used to be a German company until it was bought by a French enterprise years ago) had a production slip up that saw the caps being dyed black-gold-red instead of black-red-gold. Apparently it didn’t matter that the German flag would have had to be horizontally while the Belgian is vertical - because the stripes (all three of them) went front to back on the hats.

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Having done so much work for a large client in the travel industry with very (very, very, very) large quantities of translation, round-tripping almost sounds like a holiday. But it is not in the context of translation. It is actually right at the core of translation environment tools (aka CAT or TM). When confronted with a translation in any format, we always look at two items: the content and the file format and the actual formatting of each single word. CAT tools are poised to extract the translatable content, segment it into smaller portions and present everything to the translator. What we take for granted in this process is actually one of the most impressive technical achievements of these tools: to round-trip the content in a way that the translation “fits” the original file format.

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There were discussions in one of the forums about machine translation and about the funny stuff it comes up with. I think I already threw in my two cents by saying that MT has its place in workflows that involve human translation. It is actually no accident, because MT tools are actually ancestors of our CAT tools (or our Translation Environment Tools). Although there are some people rightfully critical about the use of CAT tools, it appears that the advantages often outstrip the problems. Don’t get me wrong - I am all for a critical position towards any translation memory application (in fact - towards any computer application). This critical distance is in particular useful for translators as our task is quite complex. But (and of course there is a “but”…) don’t dismiss MT to easily. There is a lot of stuff in a translation process that can be automated - and some of it even has to do with languages. Think, for example, of terminology recognition tools. They’ve come a long way since some computer linguists came up with concordancers and word lists. Today we do have bilingual concordancer, which are able to harvest terminology from bilingual files. And any translation memory file is by definition a bilingual file.
I remember that a few years ago I saw a demonstration of a prototype of Trados’ Multiterm. It was in Germany on a TEKOM exhibition. I was rather skeptical of the product for two reasons: on one hand the demo worked on a Greek to Finnish file (so there was no way for anybody to check the results) and secondly it costs 2500 Euro - so even if a Finnish to Greek translator came along, s/he wouldn’t be able to afford it.

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One of the issues with TMs that I found interesting are their different philosophies when it comes to terminology quality assurance approaches. While they all work in a similar way in supporting the translation workflow, the QA is a different matter. While translating, all tools basically help you to maintain a terminology list in (normally) two languages. The tools search the source text for a term that is in the list and then in one way or the other flag that sentence. When you come up to the sentence while you translate, the tool would usually make you aware of the source term and that there is one or more translations for that term available. It then helps you to insert the right term and everybody lives happily ever after.

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