Is it time for a slow translation movement?

Andrew Neather in a thought-provoking piece ('We must make hard choices in Google's brave new world' London Evening Standard), touches on the problems faced by people who will be digitised out of a job by the emerging new 'Big Data' (Google, Apple, Amazon etc) trusts.

Translators are one of the groups Neather singles out as being threatened by this monopolisation of data.

As he puts it "... I can punch “I am writing an article about the future of the internet” into Google Translate and get a split-second Finnish translation — “Olen kirjallisesti artikkeli tulevaisuuden internet” — for free. But it in fact depends on thousands of translators’ previous work, their texts compared by Google across millions of pages. Their (uncompensated) labour is rendered invisible."

There is also the question of whether the 'translation' is correct. If you do not already know Finnish, how can you be sure?

But let us not despair just yet. The fact is, there is no substitute for a human doing the actual translation. The human translator will know what is right and what is not. The Translation Memory (TM) is a great help, and can speed up repetitive work, and Machine Translation (MT) is just that; neither can replace a human brain, for all its 77% water content.

The slow food movement was born out of the need to fight the onslaught of industrially produced anonymous foodstuffs, and to rediscover local produce made by real people. The recent news about product substitution in factory made food across Europe seems to vindicate the aims of this movement.

Perhaps it is time for translators to stand up for their own work and reject the industrially produced sausage meat which passes for translation in some spheres.

Translators of a future slow translation movement would provide true crafted work entirely fit for the purpose of human communication. Human Translation (HT) would become the norm for those seeking quality.

But this is no radiant future. This is the present, and most professional translators will recognise it as what they do every day.

It is up to us to continue to work to the highest possible standards and ensure our clients and prospective clients are aware of this.

Beware of the Cat

Couldn’t resist reproducing this (Comment by Clive Cookson - Financial Times) here.

‘Anyone who has used Google’s translation service to turn a foreign language web page into English will know how much help it still needs.

To test it, I requested an English translation of the French Wikipedia entry for chat (cat). Here is part of the response:

“It also means more familiarly by the cat pussy and pussy by pussy. This term, dating back from 1560, comes from mine, popular name of the cat in Gallo-Romance. This word is the origin of the expression ‘at the crack of dawn’, which means ‘good morning’.”

Admittedly, Google can do much better with its more specialised machine translation services. But even the most advanced technology for understanding, generating or translating human language by computer lags far behind the forecasts of AI (artificial intelligence) pioneers 30 or 40 years ago...’

So caveat emptor, or should it be cave canem or is that felis ?

Google translations - are they any good ?

It is interesting to use Google translations as a matter of curiosity and see how they fare.

They can amble along quite nicely and translate quite competently until something throws them. 

As long as the context is very straightforward and factual (the cat is under the table) all is well. 

But whenever the context changes or becomes more specific, as happens in the real world, you may end up with gibberish.

So while the Google algorithms are brilliant and produce quite good translations you need to have a human being read them and make sure things have been correctly translated, in context, with the precise vocabulary and terminology of that particular context.

To sum up:  use Google or any other automat up to a point. But have the results proof read. 

This is an expense which really isn’t.

Is translation worth it ?

I was fascinated by Ryan Opaz’ (www.vrazon.com) discussion on ‘Winery websites: the good, the bad and the ugly’ at the LIWF (London International Wine Fair) last May.

Ryan gave a great list of do-s and don’t-s for website owners. With a few simple rules a website can be an effective means of communication and not an expensive mistake.

Translating a website is not a given and should only be done if you really need it. This should mean that you spend time and effort to get it right. It also means that you should keep the translated bits as up to date as the rest of your content.

As we were reminded Google likes content and sites which update. This means you will be noticed, and this may help you get that lucrative distribution contract you have been looking for.

I would always spend a few more euros on getting my stuff well translated and having up to date content. It will always be worth it in the end.