Unprofessional Translation

Expanding the Abilities of Bilingual Youngsters

2012-01-29T02:22:00.000-08:00

Recently, Lionel Dersot posted a whole collection of interesting videos on his Liaison Interpreter website. To access them, click on the Liaison Interpreter in Japan link in the right-hand column of this page and scroll back a few posts.

One of them waxes enthusiastic about a programme that describes itself as Liaison Interpreting. And so it is, sort of (see Term below), but a particular kind of liaison interpreting that is usually called community interpreting or public service interpreting; or, since it involves immigrants in the United States, language brokering. But let’s ignore the misnomer and consider what it does.

The organisation behind the video and the programme is Cross Cultural Communication Institute (CCCI) of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. CCCI is very serious about standards and the training for them: see their website referenced below. It gives courses and issues diplomas. The interpreters it turns out therefore qualify as Expert Interpreters.

What interests us particularly here is where they recruit their budding interpreters. They say (my emphasis):

"We have taken a futuristic approach to building a bilingual workforce by consulting and providing trainings to middle and high schools. At the high school level, we have developed highly acclaimed programs that encourage young ones to view their bilingualism as a tool in the ever changing and evolving marketplace. In order to meet the linguistic needs of an increasingly diverse population, we supply organizations with the trainings and tools necessary to educate and assess their bilingual workforce.

"CCCS, Inc. created the Cross Cultural Communication Institute (CCCI) in order to meet the needs of interpreters. CCCI was the first accredited post secondary school for interpreters in New Hampshire and is in the process of applying for the same status in Massachusetts. We offer trainings, workshops, and presentations geared towards students at the Middle School, High School, and College levels. We can also offer customized trainings for healthcare professional institutions."

The age range can therefore be summed up as adolescents and young adults. The credits on the video indicate that the ones shown are mostly students from MIT. The video is full of their enthusiasm (see photo).

The emphasis in the recruitment material is on job satisfaction and not remuneration:

"Have you ever wondered what it is like to work as an interpreter? Many bilingual individuals find this work to be truly rewarding... The majority of us at one time or another has had difficulty communicating with someone else due to a language barrier. An interpreter bridges that gap, and, as a result, many times the other parties are very grateful and appreciative of your services. If you choose to become an interpreter you are choosing a career that is very challenging and always changing. Many interpreters state that every day is different and that they are always learning and perfecting their skills. Lastly, if you are fully bilingual you probably already interpret on occasions for family and friends, so why not receive the training so that you can take the next step."

From an educational viewpoint, this work is part of a movement to encourage and apply what are seen as special gifts of bilingual children:

"For immigrant youth still learning English or for others who are fully bilingual, their lack of English fluency is often seen only as a deficit: their bilingualism seldom encouraged... LIPS helps bilingual youth catalyze the use of their unique skills to promote their own development while also supporting the engagement of immigrant families in the civic life of the city."

This is a view that has been promoted for a long time by Claudia Angelelli of San Diego State University and is backed up by a comprehensive paper with a curriculum outline that she published recently (see References).

Term
Liaison interpreters (LI). They facilitate communication (hence they liaise) between individuals or small groups and normally work in the consecutive or whispering mode. They translate in both directions between the two languages. They often move around with their clients and even go on journeys with them; hence one of the synonyms for LI is escort interpreters. There are specialities within LI, notably business interpreters (who, like Lionel, interpret for businessmen) and diplomatic interpreters (as members of diplomatic missions). It can be very intensive work. I once met French President Mitterand’s liaison interpreter in Canada, and he told me he was worn out from being on call from eight in the morning till past midnight.

References and Links
Cross Cultural Communication Institute. Click this link.

Liaison Interpreter Program of Somerville. Click this link.

Claudia V. Angelelli. Expanding the abilities of bilingual youngsters: can translation and interpreting help? In M. J. Blasco Mayor and M. A. Jimenez Ivars (eds.), Interpreting Naturally, Berne, Peter Lang, 2011, pp. 103-122.

Image
LIPS interpreters at the Immigrant Health Fair and Flu Clinic. Source: Welcome Project.

Natural Translation Makes It Into Student Handbook

2012-01-25T10:12:00.000-08:00

First a word to those of you who've sent me 'Get Well' messages. I'm much better now, thank you. And just as well, because there's so much to write about. To start with, the following.

This blog has frequently bemoaned the way 'mainstream' translation studies as taught in the universities have blissfully ignored Natural Translation and for that matter Native Translation. It therefore comes as a pleasant surprise to find that a new publication from Benjamins of Amsterdam, Handbook of Translation Studies (HTS) Volume 2, includes a short chapter about NT. It's by Prof. Rachele Antonini of the University of Bologna, Italy (see photo), who's also the enterprising lead organiser of the First International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation this coming May.

Credit must likewise go to the editors of the volume, Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, for opening it up to a wider perspective.

Furthermore, recognising that the price of academic publications these days puts them beyond the reach of most individual buyers – academic publishers depend on sales to libraries and other institutions – Benjamins are making a special offer in connection with HTS. Students, but only students, can 'rent' both volumes of HTS for one year online for a subscription of 30 euros. To take advantage, get in touch with Isja Conen, isja.conen@benjamins.nl.

References
Rachele Antonini. Natural translator and interpreter. In Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer (eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies Volume 2, Amsterdam, Benjamins, 2011, pp. 102-104.

First International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation, May 2011. Click link here

For the Benjamins offer, click this link.

Image
Rachele Antonini. multimodality-lab.net.

Non-Expert Court Interpreting: the Reality

2012-01-18T09:20:00.000-08:00

From time to time somebody asks me when I think non-Professional translators (by which they mean non-Expert in my terminology) should not be used. (I was asked it on the Translation Advisor blog last year.) I usually start by answering: When the translation may have legal implications or consequences. It's not just a question of quality. A translation by an Advanced Native Translator may be just as good per se. It's also a matter of authority. If the translation is ever used as evidence or called into question in legal proceedings, then it won't be necessary to go through some procedure to establish the translator's ability if that has already been tested and sanctioned by some recognised body. One obvious area where the translating should carry such authority is court interpreting. But notice I say "should carry" . The observable reality is that the precept can't always be followed. There are many reasons, but one of the most common is that adequately qualified interpreters aren't available at the right place at the right time, and this is often due to the languages involved. Another reason which arises these days is that the interpreters have been trained in the traditional mode for court interpreting, which is consecutive interpreting, but the powers-that-be have decided to import modern technology and switch to simultaneous interpreting.

Several previous posts on this blog have commented on the linguistic aspect and problems of the Shafia murder prosecution in Canada. (To find them, enter shafia in the Search box on the right.) That trial is reaching it climax at present and is widely reported in the Canadian media (see References). Whatever the outcome, it's likely to go down in the annals of famous Canadian murder mysteries. However, there's been nothing new linguistically. On the other hand, other Canadian reports tell of one of the most frustrating and expensive things that can occur when the interpreting goes wrong: a mistrial.

"Words matter, and how.

A physical assault is not the same as a sexual assault. Touching between legs is not the same as touching the genital area. And a couple of weeks is definitely not two days.

But a Hindi interpreter mistranslated those phrases exactly that way in a sexual assault case in Brampton, Ontario, triggering a mistrial and sending ripples through the Greater Toronto Area legal community.

Superior Court Justice Casey Hill [see photo] declared a mistrial in a case against Vishnu Dutt Sharma, an Indian citizen on a work permit in Canada, because the interpreter’s Hindi interpretation of the proceedings was poor and substandard, according to court documents.

'In this case, the non-English-speaker was prejudiced by a denial of full linguistic presence at his trial on April 27, 2011, on account of pervasive departure from the guaranteed standard of interpretation to which he was constitutionally entitled, and in particular during the very details of the complainant’s factual allegations of sexual assault,' Hill said.

...audiotapes from cross-examination were sent to an expert in the United States, who, in a scathing report, said the interpreter 'did not interpret verbatim, summarized most of the proceedings and was not able to interpret everything that was said on the record.'

Umesh Passi, a member of the New York State Bar, said the interpreter spoke 'perfect Hindi but could not keep up with the speed required for simultaneous interpretation.'

Prashant Rai, Dutt’s lawyer, is fluent in Hindi and says that helped bring the problem to the forefront. The court may not have become aware of the inaccuracies otherwise, he added. 'She spoke well in Hindi… I don’t know what happened while interpreting,” Rai said."

Perhaps, at least in the examples quoted above, the non-Expert interpreter was inhibited by cultural taboos from using the literal translations.

For what it's worth, the interpreter in question was accredited and paid as a professional by the Ontario Ministry of Justice. Why? Probably because, in the words of Pat Band, a director with the Criminal Lawyers’ Association of Toronto, "The situation with interpreters is a crisis. There aren’t enough accredited interpreters and the standards (of interpreting) are almost impossible to tell.” In short, whether we approve of it or not, a great deal of court interpreting is still done by non-Experts. One of my correspondents even wonders whether "we have ended up the wrong way round in that demand for, nay a feeling of entitlement to, quality interpreting has outstripped our ability to provide the necessary training and support strategies to achieve it."

References
Paul Schliesmann. Sun News Shafia trial update-Friday. Video. Kingston Whig-Standard, January 14, 2012.

Raveena Aulakh. Mistakes by Hindi interpreter leads to mistrial in Brampton sex assault case. thestar.com, January 5, 2012

Image
Justice Casey Hill of Brampton Superior Court. Source: Toronto News.

Postscript to 2011

2012-01-08T03:03:00.000-08:00

Like a postscript to last year’s quadricentenary of the King James Bible and what I said last time about the importance of religious translation, comes this news from Norway – astonishing enough for The Guardian Unlimited to feature it on its front page (the emphasis is mine).

"The first Norwegian translation of the Bible for 30 years topped the country's book charts almost every week between its publication in October and the end of the year, selling almost 80,000 copies so far and hugely exceeding expectations. Its launch in the autumn saw Harry Potter-style overnight queues, with bookshops selling out on the first day as Norwegians rushed to get their hands on the new edition.
"'We only printed 25,000 to start with and thought it would last six to nine months, but it was launched mid-October and by the end of the year it had sold 79,000 copies – it's just incredible,' said Stine Smemo Strachan, who worked on the project for the Norwegian Bible Society. 'It has only been knocked off the number one spot once.'
"A 'literary' version with no chapters or verse divisions which 'reads like a novel', has also been published and has 'sold incredibly well', said the publisher."

The sales figures have to be seen in relation to the size of Norway's population, which totals less than five million.

"According to official data, 80% of Norway's population of belongs to the Church of Norway, but not all the new edition's purchasers are thought to be buying it for strictly religious religions. 'It certainly can't just be actively religious Christians who are buying it because it just wouldn't make these numbers,' said Smemo Strachan.
"Nor are last summer's murders in Utøya and Oslo viewed as a reason for the record-breaking sales. 'It's hard to tell: obviously it has had a great impact on the country and people here,' said Strachan. 'But the success is being attributed to the fact that its publication is seen as a cultural event, and to its readability.'"

Why a new translation? For reasons that are common in modern Bible translation: changes in the target language, in this case Norwegian, that make the existing translations seem old-fashioned and stilted – though that hasn't harmed the King James Bible much; and the new knowledge about ancient Palestine that has been brought to light by the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Obviously this blog can't examine the translation itself, but it can, as is its wont, take a look at the translators. Like most Bible translations, this one was the product of teamwork. There were three "full-time translators." We take this to mean Professional Expert Translators. They were probably needed in order to coordinate the work. In addition, there were "thirty consultant translators, priests and academics, who translated the Greek and Hebrew." These must have been well-acquainted with previous translations and were therefore either non-professional Expert or Advanced Native Translators. So far, a conventional make-up of a major Bible translation project. But then comes something new:

"a team of 12 literary authors including Knausgård and playwright Jon Fosse then smoothing out that text. 'Obviously it was very important to get the right translation but they also wanted it to be readable, to make sure it was good literary language,' said Smemo Strachan. 'None of these authors are religious - they are all just very good literary writers who thought it would be an interesting project to be involved in.'"

So out of a team of 45 (just slightly fewer than for the King James Bible), there were only three Professional Expert Translators; and of the rest, 12 had a function that is found often in translating but is rarely mentioned, that of the monolingual target-language style editor. As we see in this case, its importance is far from marginal if a translation is to succeed with the public.

Last but not least, the publisher. This translation wasn’t sponsored by a King or a Papal authority but by a bible society, the Norwegian Bible Society. They had enough profits on hand from the sales of the previous translation to finance this one. Most of the bible translations in Protestant countries are produced by bible societies. Bible societies are institutions that go back to the Bourgeois Revolution in early 19th-century Western society: the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded 1804, the American Bible Society in 1816, and so on. They’re among the most enduring and productive of all translation publishers.

References
Alison Flood. Bible becomes 2011 bestseller in Norway. Guardian Unlimited, 3 January 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/03/bible-2011-bestseller-norway.

Bibel 2011. [The Bible in the two main Norwegian language variants, Bokmål and Nynorsk]. Hans-Olav Mørk, Head Translator. Oslo: Norwegian Bible Society, October 2011. http://www.bibel.no/nb-NO/sitecore/content/Home/Hovedmeny/Nyheter/Nyheter/Nyheter2011/Nyhet32-11-english.aspx.

Stein Mydske. Bible 2011 launched in Norway. Bibel.no., October 2011. http://www.bibel.no/nb-NO/sitecore/content/Home/Hovedmeny/Nyheter/Nyheter/
Nyheter2011/Nyhet32-11-english.aspx.

Image
Norwegian Bible, Standard Edition, 2011. Source: Fonts in Use, http://fontsinuse.com/norwegian-bible-2011-editions/. This source is a very interesting article showing the great care that was taken over the selection of type fonts, another factor in marketing success because good typography gives an instant feeling of high quality.

2012

2012-01-01T09:12:00.000-08:00

That’s HAPPY NEW YEAR! in Valencian.

A Very Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year to Everyone, and especially to my 108 supportive Followers (there were 78 of you this time last year).

This year the blog will continue to proclaim, as it did on January 1, 2011, that:

Irrespective of language, place, time, type, training, age, circumstances and language proficiency; insofar as bilingualism is universal, so too

************* TRANSLATING IS UNIVERSAL *************

But a bout with the Demon ‘Flu leaves me too weak to write more for the moment.

Image: AMPA de l'IES Domènec Perramont

A Royal Child Translator

2011-12-31T04:49:00.000-08:00

Today is December 31.

On this day in the year 1544 – in the words of Anne Lake Prescott, a distinguished American scholar of the English Renaissance –

"the eleven-year-old Lady Elizabeth presented Catherine with her own beautifully bound and embroidered translation of Marguerite's long poem Le miroir de l'âme pécheresse."

This was a red-letter day in the annals of child translators. Lady Elizabeth was the future Queen Elizabeth I of England. Catherine was Catherine (or Katherine) Parr,

"the sixth and last wife of King Henry VIII, destined to outlive the mercurial ruler... She was an admirable wife to Henry and a loving stepmother to his two youngest children, Elizabeth and Edward. She was also the most intellectual of Henry's wives, caught up in the turbulent religious climate of the times."

Marguerite was Marguerite de Valois (aka Marguerite d'Angoulême, 1492–1549),

"queen consort of Henry II of Navarre. Her brother became king of France as Francis I, and the two siblings were responsible for the celebrated intellectual and cultural court and salons of their day in France... As an author and a patron of humanists and reformers, she was an outstanding figure of the French Renaissance."

As for her poem Le Miroir de l'âme pécheresse (The Mirror of the Sinful Soul), it is

"an outpouring of surprising intensity: over 1,400 lines of self-accusation and self-abasement. The Reformist orientation is apparent in the poem's Pauline-Augustinian bent, as in the prominence of biblical allusions. The speaker of the poetic monologue presents herself as a wretched sinner, who has so violated and betrayed her relationship with God that she is totally unworthy of his grace. Parsing out that relationship into a series of familial paradigms - daughter, mother, sister, wife - she explores each area of defection through an exemplary episode from the Bible."

So the translator may have been a child, but the text was no children's poem.

"Scholars sometimes assume that Elizabeth chose to translate this poem. In fact... someone older, possibly Catherine herself, would very likely have known of the book and pressed it on her.... Elizabeth could hope that by obediently translating the Miroir she could please an influential and affectionate stepmother....
“Neither do we know who, if anyone, helped Elizabeth with her translation. It seems unlikely she was utterly on her own, yet her errors and omissions suggest inattention (or inadequate French) on someone's part. She opens with a letter to Catherine. She knows of the queen's 'affectuous wille, and fervent zeale... towardes all godly learning.' So, to avoid idleness, she has turned 'frenche ryme in to englishe prose, joyning the sentences together as well as the capacitie of my symple witte, and small lerning coulde extende themselves.' Her effort is merely a beginning, so she hopes Catherine will not show it ot anyone ‘lesse my fauttes be knowen of many.’ Maybe Catherine can amend it. Happy New Year."

Who might have helped Elizabeth? Let’s not underestimate her. She'd been put through a thorough Renaissance Christian education that included learning, Italian, Spanish, Greek and Latin besides English rhetoric and French. So she no doubt had capable teachers. We know, for instance, that her tutor in Greek was Henry Savile, later one of the King James Bible team of translators. By the time she was eleven, we can suppose, on the basis of this education and the translation itself, that she was an Advanced Native Translator.

In spite of Elizabeth’s reticence about the quality of her translation, once she became queen it was obviously in some courtier’s or bookseller’s interest to publish it and that’s what happened. See References below.

There are some other noteworthy things about this translation:
* Author, translator and intended reader were all women, unusual for its time but indicative of a breakthrough by women into the literature of the Renaissance
* The important role of religious translation, about which I've often commented elsewhere
* The constant flow of ideas and literature between France and England, aided by translations
* It's a translation from rhymed poetry into target-language prose, a not uncommon technique used even by Expert Translators
* Elizabeth's self-criticism, her meta-translational awareness(pardon the term)
* The proof that sophisticated translations by children at the Advanced Native Translator level are by no means a modern phenomenon. This example pushes it back by nearly five centuries. Elizabeth was very intelligent but she was surely not unique. How many other literary and religious translations by children have been done over the centuries, and then lost because the child was not famous or royal?

References
Anne Lake Prescott. The Pearl of Valois and Elizabeth I: Marguerite de Navarre's Miroir and Tudor England. In Margaret Patterson Hannay (ed.), Silent but for the Word, Kent OH, Kent State UP, 1985, pp. 61-76.

Kaherine Parr. http://englishhistory.net/tudor/monarchs/parr.html.

Marguerite de Navarre. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marguerite_de_Navarre.

Marguerite de Navarre. Le Miroir de l'âme pécheresse. 1521. The full text is available on Wikisource, http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Miroir_de_l%E2%80%99%C3%A2me_p%C3%A9cheresse.

Susan Snyder. Guilty sisters: Marguerite de Navarre, Elizabeth of England, and the Miroir de l'ame pecheresse. Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 50, 1997, pp. 443-458. http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5000487330.

The Miroir or Glasse of the Synneful Soul. Elizabeth's manuscript in her own handwriting. The dedication reads:

"From Assherige, the last daye of the yeare of our Lord God 1544 ... To our most noble and vertuous Quene Katherin, Elizabeth her humble daughter wisheth perpetuall felicitie and everlasting joye."

Elizabeth probably also embroidered the binding. The book is now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The binding is illustrated in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miroir_or_Glasse_of_the_Synneful_Soul

A Godly Meditation of the inwarde loue of the Soule.Compiled in French by Margaret Queene of Nauerre translated by Princesse Elizabeth, Queene of Englande. London, circa 1570. There are three versions of this publication in the British Library in London.

Image
Elizabeth at age 13. Painter unknown. Source: Wikipedia.

From France to England via Imperial Russia II

2011-12-25T00:10:00.000-08:00

The previous post told how Charles Perrault's 17th-century French fairy story The Sleeping Beauty (Beauty for short) travelled eastwards across Europe to Russia and was transformed into a sumptuous ballet coordinated by the St Petersburg impresario Ivan Vsevolozhsky. That was in 1890. Here begins the story of its journey back to the West under the directorship of an even greater Russian impresario, Sergei Diaghilev.

In 1909 Diaghilev formed his own ballet company, Les Ballets Russes, and took it to Paris, where it was a sensational artistic success. Notice that, true to the bilingualism of the Russian elite, he gave it a French name, which it retained wherever it went; and he was better known in the West himself by the French form of his name, Serge.

This was a very different generation from Vsevolozhky's, one of new Russian vitality in the arts, and it explains the bombshell that exploded in Paris. Russia, the imbiber of Western culture, leapt to its fore. Not only did the Ballets Russes include young dancers who were to become legends: Nijinsky, Pavlova, Karsavina and others who set a new standard and repaid Russia's debt to Petipa. Diaghilev also brought as his artistic director Léon Bakst.

"Together they developed a more complicated form of ballet with show-elements intended to appeal to the general public, rather than solely the aristocracy. The exotic appeal of the Ballets Russes had an effect on Fauvist painters and the nascent Art Deco style."

In the same spirit, Diaghilev commissioned the music for three ballets from the avant-garde composer Igor Stravinsky. The most influential of these was The Rite of Spring (1913).

"The Rite, whose premiere provoked a riot, transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure, and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary, pushing the boundaries of musical design."

Yet through all those tumultuous times, Diaghilev didn't forget Beauty. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, he stayed in the West with all his troupe. In 1921, as an accommodation to British theatrical taste, he brought Beauty to London.

"It was a production of remarkable magnificence both in settings and costumes but, despite being well received by the public, it was a financial disaster for Diaghilev and Oswald Stoll, the [English] theatre-owner who had backed it."

There's a curious anecdote about the name under which the production appeared.

"Diaghilev insisted on calling the ballet The Sleeping Princess. When asked why, he quipped, 'Because I have no beauties!'"

But although Sleeping Princess might be justified as as an extralinguistic translation, since the star role is indeed that of a princess, it was a mistake because it failed to connect with the entrenched English tradition of the Perrault tales that I described last year.

As it turned out, the impact of Les Ballets Russes in Britain went far beyond that one production. It sparked a new taste for ballet in British culture and a new school of British dancers – another remarkable cultural transplant. In 1926, Marie Rambert, who had danced for Diaghilev, created the first ballet company in Britain, which became known as Ballet Rambert. She recruited a generation of outstanding British dancers and choreographers. Another 'spin-off' from Les Ballets Russes was Ninette de Valois. Despite her French-sounding professional name, she was actually Irish, christened Edris Stannus, and she made her professional debut as a principal dancer in pantomime! That was before Diaghilev spotted her.

"Later in her life, de Valois claimed that everything she knew about how to run a ballet company, she learned from working with Diaghilev."

The school and company she founded in 1931 became known as The Sadler's Wells Ballet (from the name of the theatre where it was housed). It was the first ballet company I ever saw, towards the end of WW2 when it appeared in other London theatres besides Sadler's Wells.

During WW2, the Royal Opera House in London, popularly known as Covent Garden from the district where it's located, had been turned into a dance hall for troops on leave. In 1946 it was cleaned up and reopened, and the opening night featured the Sadler's Wells production of Beauty. The company, which was by then nec plus ultra, became The Royal Ballet and its teaching branch The Royal Ballet School. In 1949 it made a triumphant tour of the United States with Margot Fonteyn as Princess Aurora in Beauty. And so it has continued, with Beauty in its repertoire.

The most recent developments have been due, as in so many fields, to the new technologies. There's a Royal Ballet production of Beauty available on DVD, and now the RB has turned to transmitting some of its productions live to cinemas across Europe and beyond. And that’s how I came to see it with friends last week on the big screen of a cinema here in Valencia. A magnificent production, dressed in the Oliver Messel costumes from the 1946 production. The prima ballerina looked very British, the leading male dancer was Russian as was the conductor of the British orchestra. Cultural fusion. The programme notes duly named Tchaikovsky, Petipa and Perrault.

References
Sergei Diaghilev. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Diaghilev.

Marie Rambert. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Rambert.

Ninette de Valois. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninette_de_Valois.

Oliver Messel. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Messel.

Term
Extralinguistic translation: a translation that results from other factors besides language ones.

Image
From The Royal Ballet's The Sleeping Beauty, 2009. Source: www.check-in-london.com.

From France to England via Imperial Russia (1)

2011-12-17T11:56:00.000-08:00

This blog has celebrated the last two Christmases with ‘diversions’ about folk tales written down in foreign lands, which by long process of translation and adaptation have ended up in a most unlikely form – one might say a travesty – the peculiar British theatrical institution called the Christmas pantomime. The first was Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp from The Thousand and One Nights, and the second was Cinderella from Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose. To find those posts, enter aladdin or cinderella in the Search box on the right. Both are well represented on the billboards this Christmas

This year I’m turning to another Christmas tradition in the British theatre. But whereas pantomime is popular entertainment, with its performers drawn from music hall –

“Aladdin brings panto fun to Llandudno [in North Wales]”

“This Cinderella is sexy, it's sassy and it's funny. Filthy-funny in parts, which is something of a departure for the Playhouse but not for the Liverpool audience. ” –

the other tradition is a true art form and appeals to a different social and intellectual class. It’s the Christmas ballet. Parents take their children to the panto for a good laugh; they take them to the ballet for wonderment and inspiration. The Christmas ballet audiences are sprinkled with children, especially little girls who dream of one day emulating the sylph-like dancers.

The favourite Christmas ballets year after year are The Sleeping Beauty (henceforth Beauty for short) and Nutcracker. I’ll deal with Beauty for now and leave Nutcracker for another year. Like Cinderella's, Beauty's lineage goes back to the 17th-century French writer Charles Perrault, who "laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with his works derived from pre-existing folk tales." Perrault gave it the title La belle au bois dormant; notice that au bois (in the forest) is dropped from the standard English title. Its route to the London stage is, however, very different from and much longer than that of the pantomimes.

By the late 18th century, the popularity of Perrault's Tales had spread across Europe and had reached Russia. They were published in Russian translation in 1765 (see References), and the publisher was the new Moscow Imperial University, founded in 1755, which says something about Perrault's prestige. They merged with a rich tradition of native Russian fairy tales (see the Wikipedia reference below).

That was the first stage. The next in this roundabout series of cultural transformations was not between languages but between media. Beauty became one the most famous and enduring of ballets, a brilliant jewel bequeathed to the world by Tsarist Russia.

Everyone who likes classical music knows that the music for Beauty was composed by Tchaikovsky, for it is often played as an orchestral masterpiece in its own right. Tchaikovsky knew the story, but whether he learnt it from Perrault doesn't really matter, as we shall see. Though Tchaikovsky is considered a Russian composer, his music, despite a Russian flavour in the melodies, is really firmly part of the Western European orchestral tradition that he and other 19th-century composers imported. Indeed some early critics thought his music for Beauty was too symphonic for a ballet.

Balletomanes are accustomed to seeing the name of the original choreographer of Beauty on the theatre programmes even today: Marius Petipa. He had a long career as Premier Maître de Ballet of the St Petersburg Imperial Theatres, a position he held from 1871 until 1903, but before that he had built up a reputation in Western Europe. He "is considered to be the most influential ballet master and choreographer of ballet that has ever lived." In his case there was no need of a translation from French, because Petipa was French. He was born in Marseille. And the ballet technique he taught wasn't Russian; it was the French and Italian tradition that he had brought with him – with an occasional touch of Spanish, for he spent several years of his youth in Spain. Another cultural transfer.

Then there was the third man, somebody far less well-known though he too played a crucial role in creating the ballet. His name was Ivan Alexandrovich Vsevolozhsky. As Director of the Imperial Theatres, it was he who commissioned the ballet from Tchaikovsky and Petipa for the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. (Incidentally, Beauty is on the programme of the Mariinsky this week.) Besides being a competent administrator, he loved the theatre. Actually he made a triple contribution to Beauty: he was the impresario, he designed the costumes for the original production (see photo) and he wrote the scenario from which Tchaikovsky and Petipa worked. What was Vsevolozhsky's source? The 19th-century Russian elite were Francophiles and French was widely used among them.

"All libretti and programs of works performed on the stages of the Imperial Theatres were titled in French, which was the official language of the Emperor's Court, as well as the language in which balletic terminology is derived."

Therefore, although the Russian translation of Perrault was available, it's just as likely that Vsevolozhsky read it in French. In any case, there was a bilingual edition of the Voinov translation published as early as 1797. Furthermore, Vsevolozhsky also used another version of the story, the one that appears in German with the title Dornröschen in the folk story collection of the Brothers Grimm.

Hence the ballet that reached the stage of the Mariinsky in 1890 was an amalgam of several traditions, made with or without translations but certainly with cultural transfers: French and German fairy story literature, Western European orchestral music and French and Italian dance. All brought together by Vsevolozhsky to satisfy his Russian patrons' taste for spectacle.

To be concluded.

References
Angie Sammons. First night: Cinderella/Liverpool Playhouse. Liverpool Confidential, 13 December 2011. www.liverpoolconfidential.co.uk/Entertainment/Theatre-and-Comedy/First-night-Cinderella-Liverpool-Playhouse.

David Waddington. Review: Aladdin brings panto fun to Llandudno. North Wales Pioneer, 12 December 2011. http://www.northwalespioneer.co.uk/lifestyle/108735/review-aladdin-brings-panto-fun-to-llandudno.aspx.

Charles Perrault. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Perrault

Charles Perrault. сказки с нравоучение. Translated by Lev Voinov. Moscow: Moscow Imperial University, 1768.

Category: Russian fairy tales. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Russian_fairy_tales.

Ivan Vsevolozhsky. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Vsevolozhsky.

Mariinsky Theatre Official Website. www.mariinsky.ru/en

Brothers Grimm. Dornröschen. In Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 1st edition, 1812.

Image
Some of Vsevolozhsky's costumes for the original production of Beauty at the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, 1890. Source: Wikipedia.

Terp Bounty Money

2011-12-03T06:40:00.000-08:00

I break silence to respond to a Comment. It was made by a New York attorney in connection with my post of November 21, which bore the title 'The Go-Betweens' and which quoted Michael Griffin's book The Broken Road: America's War in Afghanistan. (To find it, enter attorney in the Search box on the right.) He complains:

"This past weekend I reviewed a translation contract for a friend. She is a retired teacher, U.S. citizen, immigrant from Afghanistan, who is a native speaker of Pashto, also speaks Dari and Arabic and holds degrees from Kabul and graduate degrees from 2 U.S. universities which she attended on a Rhodes scholarship. She is an expert teacher and translator. When she sent my comments to Worldwide they terminated her offer and security clearance. They said that having their contracts (which are incredibly one-sided) questioned is unacceptable. It shows their priorities."

Here's my response.

Your friend seems to have fallen on a hard-nosed and perhaps unscrupulous agency. It's not surprising that there are some when you see the money involved. There are internet ads offering up to $300,000 a year (yes, three hundred thousand) plus benefits. Those, however, are some of the most dangerous jobs that exist in Afghanistan and potential applicants are warned that living conditions may be rough. But there are also positions at $100,000 without putting a foot outside the United States. Provided you're a US citizen and have or can get security clearance. For one agency, a Green Card will do instead of citizenship, but the pay will be slightly lower.

A few ads state that translating/interpreting experience is desirable. Most ask only for bilingual fluency plus acquaintance with local culture:

"Must be familiar with the local culture, conduct oneself in accordance with local customs, and deal unobtrusively with the populace,"

And even the citizenship and security requirements are relaxed for telephone interpreting (see References). Alone the US Army offers training (see References).

Most surprising of all, though, is that there are several offers like this one:

"In addition, we do have a referral bonus of $6,000, if you refer a person of interest who will meet with the requirements we have in place."

And the advertiser adds:

"If you think you need brush-up or practice for that matter, I am gladly [sic] to provide my service to you."

So the level of recruits sought ranges generally from Natural Translators to Advanced Native Translators. Perhaps your friend is over-qualified for many of these jobs.

Nevertheless, since competition for the few available American Pashto and Dari translators and interpreters seems so fierce, your friend should look elsewhere and insist on $100,000 a year in comfortable working conditions, and of course with an equitable contract.

References
I've avoided naming employers, agencies and recruiters; but if you're interested, Google for interpreters pashto or translators dari. And remember that the US military still uses linguist in the sense of translator: see http://www.goarmy.com/linguist/contact-a-linguist-recruiter.html.

For Pashto telephone interpreting: https://languageline.taleo.net/careersection/unitedstates/jobdetail.ftl?job=51940&src=JB-10640.

Blogpost 201

2011-11-18T05:49:00.000-08:00

This is the 201st post on this blog. It was to have been the 200th, but the event reported in the previous post intervened unexpectedly to make it the 201st. Never mind, there’s still time to celebrate it with Spanish champagne (aka cava).

201 posts at a conservative average of 600 words each makes 120,600 words. Not all mine of course. I quote and paste extensively from other people, so probably no more than half – 60,000 words – are actually mine. But it’s quite a body of material and I need the Search box myself to find my way around it. No wonder I’m getting the keyboard equivalent of writer’s cramp; and unfortunately my little netbook is far too small to run efficient dictation software. (Why a netbook? Because it’s ultra-portable and space saving, communicates by wi-fi and, at 200 euros, it’s fantastic value for money.)

So I’m going to take a break. Not for very long. I already have things in mind for Christmas and New Year. And not a holiday: I have other pressing work to attend to, some of it very overdue. I’ll still sporadically answer comments and correspondence.

Not that there’s any lack of material for this blog (and I thank again all those who’ve sent me contributions). Like translation itself, it’s all around us. The wonder is that nobody else seems to be blogging it.

I have to start preparing for 2012. The First International Conference on Non-professional Interpreting and Translation at Forli, Italy (website http://npit1.sitlec.unibo.it/ ) is still six months away, but the months whizz by. I’m looking forward very much to meeting some of you there in the flesh.

Rest in Peace

2011-11-08T09:25:00.000-08:00

The dementia-stricken Englishman for whom I’d been interpreting Spanish with doctors and caseworkers for more than a year – it seems longer – died unexpectedly yesterday. For the whole story, enter Cullera in the Search box on the right.

I’d come to think of him as a close friend. Probably that’s an effect liaison interpreting has on you if you do it for the same person for a long time. After all, you share the person's thoughts, even if they‘re chaotic. To the end, he still recognised my wife and me even though he couldn‘t remember our names, greeted us warmly and thanked us.

In the course of it, I’ve learnt the rudiments of medical and social services interpreting, but also about dementia (of which Alzheimer’s is just one variety) and what a terrible, exhausting disease it is not just for the victims but also for their families and other care takers. It turns knowledgeable, capable, life-hardened adults back into young children who must be watched over day and night. It nearly killed this man’s wife. For the time being, I’ll still be interpreting for her.

If you get a chance to see it, there’s an inspiring Catalan film about Alzheimer’s. It features Pasqual Maragall, who was Mayor of Barcelona at the time of the Olympic Games there and is now stricken but is determined to fight it for as long as he can with the help of his family.

Reference
Bicicleta, cullera, poma. A documentary film by Carles Bosch. Barcelona, 2010. 96 minutes. In Catalan, available with Spanish and English subtitles. English title Bicycle, Spoon, Apple, from the three words a patient is asked to remember in a diagnostic test.

“Anything you say… may be used in evidence.”

2011-11-06T04:11:00.000-08:00

Long-time Followers and other readers of this blog will remember previous posts about the interpreting at the drawn-out series of hearings in Canada for members of the Shafia family. They are Afghans, up on a charge of murder for an alleged honour killing. (I’m avoiding the presumption of guilt and motivation that most of the media make). To find the previous posts, enter shafia in the Search box on the right. Now the case has finally come to trial. On the language side, some things have improved since the early days: the courtroom installation for the interpreters has been made less flimsy and some of the press correctly identifies the defendants’ language as Dari, not Farsi.

One might think that by now there would be nothing new to report about the interpreting, but in fact several points of interest have already come up in the most recent accounts from court reporters Christie Blatchford and Rob Tripp. (Christie’s ‘human interest’ style sometimes irks me – why should she mention that “his voice was soft, and he spoke slowly for the female interpreter”? – but she does have an eye for detail.)

* During the preliminary process of selecting jurors,

“A significant number of prospective jurors were rejected because they admitted they had hearing difficulties. The judge cautioned that because of the technology and the complex interpretation process, jurors must have good hearing.”

I don’t know why it should be harder to hear an interpreter than to hear the witness directly; indeed the use of headphones for the simultaneous interpreting ought to make it easier if the equipment is up to standard. But it’s an interesting new juror requirement.

* The police interrogations of the accused were videotaped. One of the interrogations took place entirely in Farsi (Farsi and Dari are closely related) and that taping has been introduced as evidence:

“The video played in court featured English subtitles. Jurors also had a transcript.”

This is the first time I’ve heard of prior subtitling of testimony and of jurors being provided with a prior written translation. Plainly the prosecution are being innovative in their measures to avoid any evidence being contested.

* What I find most interesting, though, is what we know from the videotapes went on before the trial, in the police interrogations of the defendants. The most successful interrogations, from the viewpoint of the prosecution, were not through an interpreter but by two police officers who speak Farsi as first language. One of them was “a trained interrogator and major crime investigator.” When interviewing the sole female defendant,

“he both spoke softly to her and flat out called her a liar, invoked their common religion, praised her role as a mother, twice put a comforting hand on her shoulder.”

This could hardly have been done through an interpreter respecting the conventional norm of interpreter neutrality. It would have required the policeman and the interpreter to work together with a common purpose.

In any case, the Farsi-speaking officers only appeared on the scene some while after the investigation had started, because they had to be borrowed from another police force in a distant part of Canada. At the very start it was a local Anglophone police officer named Dempster who did the first interviews, before they had become interrogations of suspects. He immediately phoned for and obtained an interpreter. During his first interview with the head of the family, “Shafia was by turns impatient with the translator and Dempster.” This illustrates the difficulty someone may have in keeping the personality of the interpreter separate from that of the person for whom the interpreter is speaking.

Police interpreters are an essential aid and there are many of them, either regulars or ad hoc. They are involved in crime work long before the court interpreters; and probably more often, because a case may never come to trial or a witness may never be called. But inevitably they work in the shadows. For that reason they might qualify for my category of unrecognized translators. Unlike court interpreters, their work isn’t subject to the scrutiny and checks that apply in open court; although when “anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence,” their accuracy is just as crucial. What is taken down, after all, has long been what the interpreter says – though that may change with videotaping, subtitling and translated transcripts.

References
Christie Blatchford: Accused in alleged honour killing showed no sign of distress. National Post, Oct 30, 2011. http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/10/28/christie-blatchford-accused-in-alleged-honour-killing-showed-no-sign-of-distress/.

Christie Blatchford: Mother accused of killing teen daughters had Karla Homolka moment with police. National Post, November 2, 2011. http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/11/02/christie-blatchford-mother-accused-of-killing-teen-daughters-had-karla-homolka-moment-with-police/.

Rob Tripp. ‘I haven’t killed them,’ sobbed mother accused of murdering her three teenage daughters. National Post, November 2, 2011. http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/11/02/%E2%80%98i-haven%E2%80%99t-killed-them%E2%80%99-sobbed-mother-accused-of-murdering-her-three-teenage-daughters/.

Image
Mohammad Shafia on June 30, 2009, at the Kingston Police Sation. The interpreter is out of sight on the right. Source: full comment.national post.com.

Loud and Bold

2011-10-30T06:42:00.000-07:00

This is an off-topic post for lovers of poetry. Today, 31 October, is the birthday of English Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821). The post also concerns an English translator, George Chapman (1559-1634), and his translation of Homer.

“Chapman's Iliad and Odyssey are great English epic poems, but they are also two of the liveliest and readable translations of Homer. Chapman's freshness makes the everyday world of nature and the craftsman as vivid as the battlefield and Mount Olympus. His poetry is driven by the excitement of the Renaissance discovery of classical civilisation as at once vital and distant, and is enriched by the perspectives of humanist thought.”

Chapman might not have been a great Greek scholar, but he had one major advantage at the outset: Elizabethan English, the same that contributed to the overwhelming success of the KJV. It was this as much as “the Renaissance discovery of classical civilisation” that enabled him to “speak out loud and bold.”

What follows is, I think, the finest literary tribute in English to a translator. The story goes that

“Chapman's vigorous and earthy paraphrase was put before Keats by Charles Cowden Clarke, a friend from his days as a pupil at a boarding school, in 1816. They sat up together till daylight to read it: ‘Keats shouting with delight as some passage of especial energy struck his imagination.’ At ten o'clock the next morning, Mr. Clarke found the sonnet on his breakfast-table.”

Here it is.

On Looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breath its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with his eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

And Chapman? Here's a brief sample:

…and Phœbus heard him pray
And, vext at heart, downe from the tops of steepe heaven stoopt: his bow,
And quiver coverd round, his hands did on his shoulders throw,
And of the angrie deitie the arrowes as he mov’d
Ratl’d about him. Like the night he rang’d the host and rov’d
(Athwart the fleete set) terribly; with his hard-loosing hand
His silver bow twang’d, and his shafts did first the Mules command,
And swift hounds; then the Greekes themselves his deadly arrows shot.
The fires of death went never out. . . .

References
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_First_Looking_into_Chapman%27s_Homer.

Homer. Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homere, Prince of Poets. Translated according to the Greeke, in judgement of his best Commentaries by George Chapman, Gent[leman]. London: John Windet, 1598. 135 pp., 4º. This isn’t the complete Chapman translation, which didn’t appear until about 1610, but it’s the earliest edition. The copy in the British Library in London bears the autograph of another famous Elizabethan, Ben Jonson, an indication of the attention its publication aroused.

Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad and the Odyssey. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions. 2000. Available through Amazon from $5.

Image
John Keats, by William Hilton (died 1839). National Portrait Gallery, London.

My First Time as Telephone Interpreter

2011-10-27T11:09:00.000-07:00

I’ve long been qualified as an Expert Conference Interpreter; and after a year of medical and social services interpreting for a man suffering from dementia and for his wife, I might perhaps qualify as an Expert Community Interpreter. The latter has been volunteer, non-professional work; there are other British residents in Spain who do it out of sympathy for their aged or obtuse compatriots who don't learn the language of the country. I’ve also done a little remote interpreting for TV. But until last week, I’d never done telephone interpreting (TI), although it’s now probably the most rapidly expanding mode of professional interpreting. Just look at the ads for it on the internet.

TI was pioneered by the Department of Immigration in Australia 40 years ago – yes, around 1972 – fostered by the explosion of immigrant languages and by the need to cover long distances on that continent. It reached North America, and at the same time a commercial market, a decade later in the form of AT&T’s Language Line, which is still going strong, and from there to Europe and beyond. Its pros and cons are well known in professional circles.

PROS
- Logistics. It’s no longer necessary to transport the interpreters to where the speakers are. Indeed, with three-way phones it’s not even necessary for the participants in the conversation to be in the same place as one another. If the purpose is in any case to translate a telephone conversation, then the interpreter just plugs in.
- Economy. There are consequently substantial savings in both cost and time.
- Pay as you go. The logistics make it unnecessary to book an interpreter for an hourly or daily period.
- Equipment. It needs minimal equipment, and of a kind that all the telephone companies can supply. It should, however, be of good quality.
- Logistics again. It makes it possible to provide interpreting in remote places or in unusual languages for which it couldn’t be supplied otherwise.
- Almost instant availability around the clock if it’s well organized, and therefore very useful for hospitals, the police, airports, etc., instead of calling out an interpreter in the middle of the night.
- For the interpreters, they can accept work from almost anywhere in the world.

CONS
- It’s subject to the quality and vagaries of the telephone equipment and network, especially when using mobile phones.
- The interpreter can’t see the body language of the other participants.
- The interpreter can’t use body language either, for instance to halt the flow of speech by raising a hand.
- The interpreter can’t see any visual displays accompanying what is being said.
- Likewise the interpreter can’t see any documents that are being referred to, nor do any sight translation from them.

Most of the CONS will be overcome or mitigated in time as Skype type visual hookups improve in quality and reliability.

Anyway, don’t take it all from me. See for example the practical advice in the InSync document listed below.

My own initiation came last week when the Cullera dementia tragedy come to crisis point again and I couldn’t get down there physically from 30 km away in Valencia. For the background to this story, enter cullera in the Search box on the right. This time the interpreting wasn’t medical, but for a home visit by a social services caseworker in Cullera to the wife of the sick man. At the suggestion of the caseworker, we decided to try a mobile phone setup. Very primitive: no three-way telephony, just a single mobile phone passed from one participant to another and me on the house phone at home. Somewhat to my surprise, it worked.

The CON that caused me real trouble was the last in the list above: inability to share documents. There were some very important ones in Spanish that the caseworker had to get the wife, who speaks not a word of Spanish, to sign. He was anxious that she understand what she was signing for, and so was I. (In the event, on one crucial point she didn’t agree.) To interpret them verbatim in consecutive would have taken too long, and even then we doubted she would understand the administrative jargon. So we improvised the following procedure:

1. The caseworker gave a brief explanation in Spanish of what each document was about, and this I translated to the wife.
2. To make sure, I had the wife tell me what she had understood.
3. I translated the wife’s version to the caseworker for verification – a form of back translation – and when necessary we went through a similar correction cycle.

I repeat, it worked. At minimal cost and to the satisfaction of all concerned. What’s more, we’ve done it again since then.

However, I did have one important advantage that needs emphasising: I was already very familiar with the case. What lay people don’t realize is that, as one veteran interpreter put it, “Half the success in interpretation comes from knowing their languages, but the other half comes from knowing what they’re talking about.”

Terms
Remote or distance interpreting means the interpreter is situated at a distance, sometimes a great distance, from the speakers and they communicate with one another electronically in real time. Telephone interpreting is one form of it, and training is now offered.

Back translation: translating a translation back into the original language.

References
Utilizing Telephone Interpreters. Sandy, UT: InSync Interpreters. http://www.insyncinterpreters.com/previous/docs/Using_Telephone_Interpreters.pdf.

New! Videoconference and Remote Interpreting in Criminal Proceedings. An AVIDICUS e-book. Edited by Sabine Braun and Judith L. Taylor. Guildford: University of Surrey, 2011. 270 pp.

Image: “Dr. Danielle Ofri relies on telephone interpreters daily.” – wnyc.org

The Academic Non-Event of the Year

2011-10-20T04:10:00.000-07:00

Week in and week out, a very useful service provided by Denise Nevo of the Canadian Association of Translation Studies brings me an average of three notices of conferences and seminars about translation somewhere in the world. Multiply by 52 and that’s a lot of meetings each year. Most of them don’t interest me much because they’re not related to the topics of this blog, but I dutifully glance through them all. By this time, almost all the notices for 2011 should have arrived, because it takes time to organise a conference and we’re fast approaching 2012. No doubt Denise has missed a few – she depends on people feeding her the information – but I can get a pretty good idea by now of what’s been going on this year in the translation studies corner of academia.

To my growing consternation, there’s been no announcement, in what I call ‘mainline’ translation studies, of any conference to mark one of the most important events of 2011, namely the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Version of the Bible (KJV). And this in a field whose contemporary gurus lay heavy emphasis on the cultural aspects and influences of translation. As I’ve insisted a number of times, religious translations have had more influence on human cultures than literary ones and the influence continues. So I was getting pretty despondent until my ever-supportive friend Ann Corsellis sent me a summary of the King James Bible Symposium held at Gresham College, in London, on September 26. An appropriate venue, since Gresham College itself is over 400 years old and situated very close to where the KJV was revised and put together at Stationers’ Hall in 1611. The Company of Sationers was the mediaeval guild, originally of manuscript booksellers, that craftesmen and tradesmen in the nascent printing industry joined.

“It has to be said that the King James Bible when it appeared in 1611 was far from perfect. Demand was so strong that printers worked in teams to produce folios that were then bound together, sometimes even in the wrong order. There were also some notorious misprints, of which the most celebrated appears in the Wicked Bible, where the word not is omitted from the Seventh Commandment, thereby making adultery compulsory. The other error which cheers up members of the Stationers’ Company (who were heavily involved in the original production) comes in Psalm 119, which reads “Printers have persecuted me without a cause”, which should of course read princes.

Thank you Gresham College. However, one symposium in a whole year isn’t much. Am I exaggerating? In fact there have been many scattered lectures and exhibitions, but no major conference.

It must be said, though, that the occasion has been better served by publishers. Well in advance, back in November 2009, I posted a review of Adam Nicolson’s book Power and Glory, which was another much appreciated present from Ann Corsellis. In another post, I concluded that

“the KJV was the work of Expert Translators, whose initiation as Native Translators had begun as soon as they went to school and whose subsequent training was long and of the highest quality.”

With one or two exceptions, they were all clergymen or philologists, not professional translators. To read these posts, enter kjv in the Search box on the right.

Probably the most popular of the celebratory books has been Begat, by well-known linguist David Crystal, in which he traces the KJV origin of hundreds of expressions that have made their way into common English: land of the living, wolf in sheep's clothing, Am I my brother’s keeper?, letter of the law, the writing on the wall, etc. – 257 of them.

Which brings us to the popular press. There the level of interest has been in surprising contrast. Dozens of short articles and reports, generally of good quality, repetitive but each reaching out to a different audience somewhere in the world. The latest I’ve seen was in the Huffington Post of October 10:

“There has been a great deal of activity thus far in 2011 commemorating the occasion, including at least six books and 12 columns or blogs in the Huffington Post. This commentary is one more, aimed at exploring what it was about the King James Bible to account for its enduring influence.”

Seems to me the academics have missed an opportunity for yet another international conference.

References
Tim Connell, et al. The Language of the King James Bible: A symposium to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible. Gresham College at Mercer’s Hall, 26 September 26, 2011. http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-language-of-the-king-james-bible.

Gresham College, founded 1597. http://www.gresham.ac.uk/. Gresham College is London’s oldest institution of higher education and has provided free public lectures within the City of London for over 400 years. There’s a fascinating ongoing collection of transcripts and videos on its website.

Adam Nicolson. Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible. London, 2003. 281 p.; many colour illustrations. Available in paperback.

The Holy Bible Conteyning the Old Testament and the New: Newly translated out of the Originall Tongues: & with the former Translations diligently compared and reuised by His Majesties speciall Commandement /Appointed to be read in Churches. London, 1611. The full text is on several internet sites.

John Bois (1561-1644). Translating for King James: being a true copy of the only notes made by a translator of King James's Bible, the Authorized version, as the Final Committee of Review revised the translation of Romans through Revelation at Stationers' Hall in London in 1610-1611 / Taken by John Bois ... these notes were for three centuries lost, and only now are come to light, through a copy made by the hand of William Fulman. Translated and edited by Ward Allen. Vanderbilt University Press, 1969. With facsimile reproductions.

The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers. http://www.stationers.org.

David Crystal. Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Roy M. Pitkin. The King James Bible: 400 and going strong. Huffington Post, October 10, 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roy-m-pitkin/the-king-james-bible-400-_b_993243.html.

Image: Guide-for-London.com

El Nou d’Octubre and More Unrecognized Translators

2011-10-09T01:17:00.000-07:00

The years slip by. Once again it’s the Ninth of October, the National Festival of Valencians, anniversary of the bloodless capitulation by the last Muslim ruler of Valencia to King James I of Aragon – Christian of course – in 1238. A much restored mediaeval stone cross at the end of the main street of the village where I live marks roughly where his rearguard halted while he entered the city.

Last year on this blog at this date, I told about the Jewish translators who assisted James and his henchmen in the 1238 negotiations and subsequent administration: to find the post, enter octubre in the Search box on the right. This year, something more contemporary.

Valencia today is a major Mediterranean port and tourist attraction. From the terrace of our flat we have spied all summer two or three large cruise ships a week tying up in the port for 24 hours at a time. Some of them are so enormous above the waterline, like floating blocks of flats, it’s a wonder they don’t capsize (see photo). Each carries literally thousands of passengers. It disgorges them into the city for fast sightseeing and shopping, and I doubt most of them even taste an authentic paella. But few of these lightning visitors speak Spanish, and knowledge of English – let alone Italian, German, etc. – is very limited in Valencia. So they need interpreters. Only they’re not called interpreters. They’re called guides or hostesses. We’re back again to unrecognized translators, not counted in the statistics of the translation industry. I’m reminded of my own early days as a travel agency courier in Spain under the Franco regime. That's how I first came to Valencia in 1953, before the Great Flood (La Riada) of 1957 led to major changes in the city's landscape. It was a period that now seems almost as remote to young Valencians as that of James I of Aragon.

Image: Cruise ship, probably Italian, as seen from our terrace.

The Romanian: More Unrecognized Translation

2011-10-04T10:37:00.000-07:00

In a post way back in March 2010, I remarked that “a tremendous amount of translating and interpreting goes on unrecognized because it’s given another name or it constitutes just one part, whether explicit or implicit, of another job or function.” (To find the post, enter unrecognized in the Search box on the right.) I was reminded of it by the very end of the post previous to this one. Although mainly about interpreting between Japanese and English for the deaf, it finished:

“Interestingly, a hearing man in the meeting was taking notes so he was asked for a copy of his notes for clarification. He replied it would be of no benefit, because he had written the notes in his native language, Romanian.”

Clearly it involved translating, and it satisfied the requirement for translatology that there be an observable source input and an observable output. However, there are no readers of this kind of translation other than the translator, and so it goes unrecognized. Judging from my own experience taking notes of lectures and at meetings, it must in fact be quite commonplace. But I can see no way of telling precisely how much of it there is. And what to call it? I thought of closed-loop translating but there should be something better. Suggestions welcome.

One activity that produces considerable quantities of it is consecutive interpreting. Consecutive interpreters use notes as a memory aid, and they have a choice between taking their notes in the speaker’s language or in the target language, as well as in non-language symbols. Student interpreters often ask which is better. My inclination is to reply, “In whichever language you find easier,” because, as an experienced teacher, Wilhelm Weber, wrote:“It does not matter in which language the notes are taken, since notes are only symbols that contain a message.” In other words, the notes are not in the language form in which the interpreters deliver the message to their audience but only an intermediate stage. In the note-taking there is not only translating, there is adaptation in the form of compression. The translating may take place either before or after the note-taking, in the phase of compression or of decompression. Indeed the notes may well be a mixture of translated and untranslated elements, something that is not allowed by the current norm of Expert Translation. The closed-loop translators, translating only for themselves, have more latitude.

Consecutive interpretation notes are by no means the only product of translation combined with adaptation by compression. (The ability to condense and summarise information is another marvel of human information processing with its own questions about how people learn to do it, but that’s another story.) Everyone knows there are translators and interpreters at the United Nations in New York and Geneva, but few people are aware that there’s also a career of Summary and Précis Writer.

“At the United Nations, a summary refers to a condensed version of a written text; a précis refers to a condensed version of a spoken text. Generally, summaries and précis are about one-third the length of the original text. The writer must therefore be able to identify the major ideas in a text and then rephrase them in his/her own words.”

In 2009, for instance, a UN competitive examination was held specifically for Spanish-language Translators/Précis Writers. Applicants were required to

“Have a perfect command of Spanish and an excellent knowledge of English and one of the other official languages of the United Nations (Arabic, Chinese, French or Russian)….
Hold at least a three-year first-level degree or an equivalent qualification from a university or institution of equivalent status in which Spanish is the language of instruction or hold a university degree from a recognized school of translation.”

It’s definitely work at the Expert level. It’s not unrecognized, but it’s little known.

References
Andrew Owen. Not Hearers Only: A Practical Ministry for Deaf People in the Local Church. London UK and Oberlin OH: Wakeman, 2007. 135 pages, paperback. UK £9.95.

Wilhelm K. Weber. Training Translators and Conference Interpreters. Orlando: Harcourt for Center for Applied Linguistics and ERIC Clearinghouse on Language and Linguistics, 1984. 70 p.

Summary and précis writing. Course Code: E4W5/1. United Nations Language and Communications Programme, OHRM. www.un.org/Depts/OHRM./COURSE/SummaryPrecisWriting.

United Nations / Nations Unies. Notice: 2009 competitive examination for Spanish-language translators/précis writers. http://www.un.org/Depts/OHRM/examin/exam.htm.

A very complex interpreting situation

2011-09-22T11:30:00.000-07:00

In a post on June 11 with the title The Other Visual Language Interpreters, I described a very complex situation that arose when sign language interpreters and voice interpreters were both in action at the same meeting. Here’s the description of another such event which was perhaps even more complex. It comes from a book by Andrew Owen (see References). Andrew is a Communication Support Worker, supporting Deaf students in secondary schools, colleges and Universities in London UK. He’s is the founder and Vice Chair of the Association of Communication Support Workers. He believes in practical solutions to fit situations irrespective of professional dogmas – or mantras as he calls them.

“An interesting event happened at a church meeting for deaf people in England. A group of Japanese Deaf people was visiting (Japanese sign language is completely different to British Sign Language). A Deaf Japanese pastor was asked to address the meeting. His son was there, a Japanese sign language interpreter, who knew little spoken English. There was another pastor in their party, a hearing man who knew both spoken English and Japanese. The interaction was as follows: when the Japanese Deaf pastor signed, the Japanese interpreter voiced into spoken Japanese; the hearing pastor then interpreted into spoken English; a British interpreter then signed into BSL for the British Deaf people. The story doesn’t end there, because unfortunately some hearing people at the back of the meeting could not hear the spoken English interpretation, so a lady sitting with them who knew BSL voiced over (chuchotage) from the BSL interpretation for their benefit. Also at the meeting was a Deaf man from Ghana. He didn’t understand BSL, so a member of the church (a Deaf man) interpreted from BSL into ASL, the sign language of Ghana. Interestingly, a hearing man in the meeting was taking notes so he was asked for a copy of his notes for clarification. He replied it would be of no benefit, because he had written the notes in his native language, Romanian.”

There’s an important difference between the setup that I witnessed and the one Andrew describes. In my case, all the interpreters were Professional Experts. Whereas at the Japanese-English event there seems to have been a mixture. The Japanese sign language interpreter was no doubt an Expert, and likewise the English to BSL interpreter. The hearing pastor who interpreted from spoken Japanese to spoken English, and the lady at the back of the meeting who shadowed the English interpretation from the BSL interpretation, were probably not. The BSL to Ghanaian ASL was probably not an Expert either. Work it out! The non-Experts were probably Advanced Native Interpreters who happened to be members of the church. I’ll come back some other time to the Romanian.

Term
Chuchotage. A borrowing from French. Used by Expert Interpreters to mean whispering, which is also used as a synonym for it. The interpreter sits or stands next to or right behind the listener or listeners and ’whispers’ the interpretation to them. The interpreting mode may be simultaneous or short consecutive. In practice the ‘whispering’ may be true whispering or may mean speaking sotto voce.
Pros: It needs no equipment and is a natural process, though it requires experience or training to do it well. Unfortunately it’s largely ignored in interpretation courses in spite of its usefulness.
Cons: (a) It must be done quietly enough not to disturb the other people present who don’t want it, and (b) This limits its audience to a maximum of about four persons and an optimum of one.

References
Andrew Owen. Not Hearers Only: A Practical Ministry for Deaf People in the Local Church. London UK and Oberlin OH: Wakeman, 2007. 135 pages, paperback. UK £9.95.

Wikipedia Motivations

2011-09-12T01:19:00.000-07:00

Over at Blogging about translation and localization, Julie McDonald Dolmaya has concluded her series of posts about crowdsourced translators who have translated for Wikipedia. Most of them are Advanced Native Translators, who declare explicitly that they’ve had no training in translating.

Her final post deals with motivations. These turn out to be complex, and often multiple even in the same person.

“Some saw it as an opportunity to disseminate information about certain language, cultural or religious groups (e.g. Guatemalans, Sri Lankans) to people within or outside these communities; others wanted to give back to communities or organizations they believed in (for instance, by helping other Wikipedians, by giving free/open-source software a wider audience).”

She divides the motivations into two categories, intrinsic (done not for a reward but rather for enjoyment or due to a sense of obligation to the community) or extrinsic (done for a direct or indirect reward).

“But intrinsic reasons seem most prominent. This is undoubtedly why, when respondents were asked to select just one reason for participating in a crowdsourced translation initiative, 47% chose ‘To make information available to language speakers‘, 21% said they found the project intellectually stimulating, and 16% wanted to support the organization that launched the initiative.”

This reinforces what has often been said on this blog, namely that a major part of the translating done in the world, even when it requires expertise, is not done for remuneration, i.e. professionally. And furthermore that a great deal of it is done for personal enjoyment.

I won’t try to summarise more because Julie herself is bringing out an article in The Translator. But The Translator is a conventional academic journal, so we’ll have to wait until next year for the article to appear.

References
There’s a link to Blogging about translation and localization on the right of this page.

For the journal The Translator, go to https://www.stjerome.co.uk/tsa/journal/1/

Some Reminiscences of Eugene Nida

2011-09-04T05:27:00.000-07:00

Coming so soon after the death of Peter Newmark (see August 5 post), it's all the more saddening to read that another Grand Old Man of translation studies, Eugene Nida, has passed away too. He was 96. Such was his fame that there were even obituaries of him this week in The Wall Street Journal and The Telegraph! For another obituary, go to the Stine article listed below under References. All the obits highlight that for over 50 years he was the leader of translation activities at the American Bible Society.

He belonged to the great 20th-century tradition of American ethnological and structural linguists, having earned a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1943. This became allied to great effect with his motivation as a Baptist minister to get people throughout the world to read and understand the Bible. This aim of understandability led him to formulate one of the most famous definitions of translation:

"Translating consists in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source-language message, first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style."

It’s very simple, but it reflects well the dominant expert translation norm of our times (except in the opinion of some literary translators who object to the subordination of style to meaning). Behind it is the concept that Nida himself called dynamic equivalence (DE):

"In contrast with formal-oriented translations [i.e. those that stick close to the form of the original wording] others are oriented towards dynamic equivalence. In such a translation the focus of attention is directed, not so much toward the source message, as toward the receptor response. A DE translation may be described as one concerning which a bilingual and bicultural person can justifiably say, `That is just the way we would say it.' It is important to realize, however, that a DE is not merely another message which is more or less similar to that of the source. It is a translation, and as such must clearly reflect the meaning and intent of the source."

The last quotation is taken from his magnum opus, Toward a Science of Translation, published in 1964. In a recent article (see References), I acknowledged how Toward a Science influenced the coining of the terms traductologie in French and translatology in English in the early 1970s. It’s one of the few books I freighted with me from Canada to Spain, not least for its 55-page bibliography. From the 1960s through the 1980s, there was hardly a thesis on translation that didn't cite it. And of course the book itself was translated. I wrote to Nida from the Middle East to tip him off him that an unauthorised Arabic translation had appeared in Iraq (see References).

The practical realisation of his ideal came in the form of the Good News Bible of 1976.

In addition to his writings, he was a magnetic lecturer who knew how to hold his audience by explaining his ideas to them in crisp English they could all understand and by apt examples. Physically, the word that springs to my mind to describe him is sprightly. As a result, he was in demand as a speaker all over the world until an advanced age. I saw and heard him on numerous occasions, and the last time was at a surprising location: Yarmouk University. Yarmouk University is at Irbid in the north of Jordan, close to the border with Syria. Out of the way, but it had a translation programme. That was in the spring of 1992. ‘Saw and heard him’ in a manner of speaking: actually he didn’t come in person but sent a video of his talk. Looking back through my notes, I see that by coincidence one of the things he said is particularly relevant to the post that immediately precedes this one and its title ‘A Gift for Consecutive’. He told the story of a North American Indian interpreter who had once interpreted a whole lecture of his non-stop and without taking any notes. All 45 minutes of it. It might seem incredible were it not that we have other well-documented accounts of feats like that. Was it because the interpreter had ’the gift’ or was it because he or she came from a culture with a strong tradition of oral messaging and story-telling?

Nevertheless, I only had direct dealings with him on one occasion. It must have been around 1980, soon after my first publications about Natural Translation. He was always open-minded and eclectic – Toward a Science has a chapter on machine translation – and on the lookout for new ideas. So he invited me to give a talk in a symposium he was organising at an American university. I recall with shame that in my enthusiasm I committed the sin of going on speaking well beyond the time allotted to me. But he didn’t interrupt me or reproach me. He was a very courteous person.

One of the bees in my bonnet is that contemporary mainstream translation studies don’t attach enough importance to religious translation. Through Nida, religious translation made a great contribution to modern translation theory.

References
Eugene Nida. Toward a Science of Translating, with special reference to principles and procedures involved in Bible translation. Leiden: Brill, 1964. 331 p. Second-hand copies from $25 through Amazon USA.

Eugene Nida. Arabic version of Toward a Science of Translation translated by Najjâr in the series 'alkutub almutarjamah (Translated Books). Baghdad: Ministry of Publishing Press, 1975.

Good News Bible: Today’s English Version. Translated by the staffs of the American Bible Society and the United Bible Societies. New York: American Bible Society, 1976. It was preceded by Good News for Modern Man: The New Testament in Today's English Version, American Bible Society, 1966.

Stephen Miller. Spreading the Word in hundreds of tongues. Wall Street Journal, August 30, 2011.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904332804576538880439997202.html.

The Reverend Eugene Nida. The Telegraph, September 3, 2011.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/8736036/The-Reverend-Eugene-Nida.html.

Philip C. Stine. Eugene Nida dies. United Bible Societies, August 25, 2011.
http://www.unitedbiblesocieties.org/news/794-eugene-nida-dies/.

Brian Harris. Origins and conceptual analysis of the term traductologie/translatology. Babel, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 15-31, 2011.

Image: Eugene A. Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship. The portraits accompanying the newspaper obits are more glamorous, but this is more like how I remember him.

A Gift for Consecutive

2011-08-28T02:37:00.000-07:00

Consecutive interpreting is of two types. The kind done by Expert Conference Interpreters is the long or full kind. In this, speakers go on for several minutes without stopping and the interpreters have to translate it all afterwards. Except for a few interpreters who have phenomenal memories, they take notes.

Some people have a natural gift for it. We used to hold an annual schools visit day at the University of Ottawa, when the School of Translation and Interpretation would try to give high school students a taste of what our work was like. One of the highlights was when we sat them in the interpretation lab and put them through them an exercise in simultaneous and consecutive. One year, a 15-year-old girl with no training or experience amazed me by giving a perfect consecutive rendition of an uninterrupted three-minute speech, a test usually performed by advanced students of the School.

Now Lionel Dersot has something interesting to say about consecutive interpreting ability. For the full account, go to his blog via the Liaison Interpreter in Japan link on the right of this page.

Here’s the source passage:

"If 100% of the population would eat fish at least once per week as recommended, there would be a need for an additional 148,380 tons of finished products, that is about twice as much in terms of raw catches."

And Lionel’s commentary (with my emphasis):

“With this kind of mathematics like a formula pattern of speech where the subject and vocabulary are not a major barrier for interpreting, only the logical minded students showed strong mastery. Real strong. I was stunned by the rendering and weaving in action (the concentration, some with eyes almost closed) of speech you don't usually deliver around the coffee machine. They were translating into Japanese, their A [first] language. None of them are professional interpreters, nor do they aim at it. Some are requested from time to time to deliver interpretation - consecutive - at work. The logical, strong analytical mind has an edge in such situations.”

Incidentally, the post in question contains a neat example of the kind of notes that consecutive interpreters take and the usefulness of Chinese characters for them if you happen to know Chinese or Japanese.

Incidentally too, Lionel elsewhere refers to “the majority of untrained interpreters who practice on the planet without the credentials,” and says, “I am one of them and feel closer to a terp in a theater of war than to an AIIC member.” Well yes, so long as you understand that he rates at very least as an Advanced Native Interpreter. However, long professional experience constitutes on-the-job training and there’s no doubt he’s actually an Expert Interpreter.

Term
AIIC: International Association of Conference Interpreters. The acronym derives from its French name, Association Internationale de Interprètes de Conférence, because the organisation was founded in Paris in 1953 and the founders were French speakers.

Reference
Lionel Dersot. The logical mind. The Liaison Interpreter blog, August 23, 2011.

Wikipedia's Native Translators

2011-08-22T08:03:00.000-07:00

In my July 2 post, I called attention to a survey that was being done by Julie McDonough Dolmaya (see photo) of York University in Toronto. It concerns translators who participate in crowdsourcing projects. More particularly, she profiles 76 translation contributors to Wikipedia. What follows is just an extract focusing on what's of particular interest for this blog here. For the full picture, which she hasn’t finished painting yet, and for important information like her sampling method, go to her blog, which you can reach quickly via the Blogging about translation and localization link on the right of this page.

First some points about Wikipedia:
¶ A great deal of Wikipedia, especially in languages other than English, has been produced by translating. In general the translations are good as regards both content and language, indeed so good that sometimes it’s hard to tell which version of an article was the original. Even without exact figures, it’s certain that Wikipedia contains, semi-obscured, a vast corpus of technical translations, and therefore studies of those translations and of the translators who did them will be important for translation studies.
¶ All of Wikipedia has been written by crowdsourcing since before the term even came into use. (If you care to go back into history, you might also say that the first edition of the great Oxford English Dictionary a century ago and before computers existed was compiled partly by crowdsourcing, but that’s another story.)
¶ Its discourse is at a level that requires an advanced education. It lies well beyond the ‘everyday circumstances’ that’s part of the definition of the Natural Translation Hypothesis.
¶ Furthermore, each article requires expert knowledge of its subject field and of the accompanying terminology.
¶ In addition, Wikipedia users are very critical readers, as you can see from the discussions that accompany the articles. If translations are inadequate, one would expect readers to criticise them. Conversely, if they’re not criticised… In either case, it’s an aspect that calls for investigation.
¶ The language of Wikipedia writings, at any rate in the languages I can read, is formal, even academic, as befits the long tradition of encyclopaedias.
¶ Wikipedia doesn’t pay its contributors.

What then do we learn from Julie’s research?

¶ “When respondents were asked about translation-related training, most (51 respondents or 68%) responded that they had no formal training in translation.”
¶ Of the other 32%, most had taken anything from “a few courses” to a full degree or certificate at a university or college, and a small minority (about 8) replied, “I received training in translation at my workplace.” We may – with some generosity in the case of those who just “took some translation courses” – class them as Expert Translators.
¶ “52 of the 76 respondents (68.4%) had never worked as translators (i.e. they had never been paid to produce translations). Only 11 respondents (or about 14%) were currently working as translators on a full- or part-time basis, while 13 (or about 17%) had worked as translators in the past but were not doing so now.” Let’s lump them all together as Professional Translators and assume – again with some generosity, especially towards the part-timers – that they’re all Experts. Furthermore, as Wikipedia doesn’t pay for translations, it’s as Expert Translators and not as Professional Translators that they’re contributing to it.
¶ “Only two respondents were members of a professional association of translators.” Experts, of course. Probably they overlap with the set that had received formal or workplace training; but not necessarily, because some associations accept members without such training. Anyway, the number is tiny.

So what can we conclude? Subject to a few caveats which Julie mentions herself, the following. That given the nature of Wikipedia texts (which rules out Natural Translators), and Julie’s figures, over two thirds of Wikipedia translators are Advanced Native Translators.

Thank you, Julie, for a pioneering initiative.

Terms
Advanced Native Translator, Natural Translator, Expert Translator, Professional Translator: for definitions of these terms and the relationship between them, enter definitions in the Search box on the right and then select the post of November 12, 2010 from the results.

References
Julie McDonough Dolmaya. Wikipedia survey I (respondent profiles). Blogging about Translation and Localization, May 30, 2011.

Julie McDonough Dolmaya. Wikipedia survey II (types of participation). Blogging about translation and localization, June 12, 2011.

Image: JoSTrans

Translation in Language Teaching

2011-08-16T12:32:00.000-07:00

A book that’s making waves in language teaching circles is Guy Cook’s Translation in Language Teaching. Making waves? Well, last year it won the Ben Warren Prize, which is a prized awarded annually by the Ben Warren-International House Trust to an author or authors of an outstanding work in the field of language teacher education.

It’s a sign of the times. The so-called grammar-translation (GT) method was dominant in schools for centuries until World War II, when it was displaced by various applications of the ‘direct method’ (pattern drills, audiovisual learning, etc.) Cook deals with this in his historical introduction, though I don’t agree with him that the influence of private for-profit language schools such as Berlitz was determinant. I myself learnt four languages by GT and then lived through the changeover forcibly as a TESOL teacher in the 1960s. The reasoning behind the change was that (a) we learn our first languages from their use in context and not by studying grammar as such nor by translating, and (b) translating causes interference. These are valid arguments up to a point, and Cook doesn’t recommend returning to the nineteenth century. But now the realisation is dawning that translation can’t be shut out. Teachers who are teaching by the ‘direct method’ slip into using it anyway. Often it’s by far the quickest means for conveying to a student the meaning or the use of a new item in the second language. Then there’s the psychological fact that whatever the method, students are constantly translating to themselves in their own minds. Furthermore – and this is something that’s not emphasised enough – second language learning is hard work and so it needs motivation, and one strong motive for learning another language is in order to be able to translate speech and documents for oneself and for other people. The accent today is on language learning for communication, and translation is needed more and more for communication.

So translation never did die out in language teaching, but it did suffer great opprobrium. And now it seems the pendulum has started to swing. Cook’s conclusion:

“A great deal remains to be done before TILT (Translation in Language Teaching] can be rehabilitated and developed in the way that it deserves. The insidious association of TILT with dull and authoritarian Grammar Translation, combined with the insinuation that Grammar Translation had nothing good in it at all, has lodged itself so deeply in the collective consciousness of the language-teaching profession, that it is difficult to prise it out at all, and it has hardly moved for a hundred years. The result has been an arid period in the use and development of TILT, and serious detriment to language teaching as a whole.”

With all that, the most important statement in the book from our point of view is this: that translating is not only a specialist professional skill but “a major component of bilingual communicative competence.”

Bilingualism specialists please note.

References
Guy Cook. Translation in Language Teaching: an Argument for Reassessment. Oxford University Press, 2010. 202 p. Paperback £29.

Jonathan Marks. Review of Cook’s book in The Linguist, June/July 2011, p. 28.

For another proponent of translation in language teaching, Richard Vaughan, see the post about him on this blog by entering Vaughan in the Search box on the right.

Image: OUP.

Peter Newmark: Footnote

2011-08-11T10:57:00.000-07:00

The last post recommended Peter Newmark’s article The Curse of Dogma in Translation Theory highly and gave a reference for it, but the original was published back in 1991 so it may be hard to find. Now I’ve added a reference to the more recent online reprint, but it’s very expensive to view unless you can access it through a library. So it occurs to me that I should give you at least a taste of his thinking and his style.

The article in question makes a critical tour of the schools of theory that were fashionable among academics at the time and indeed still are. I mentioned that when I last met Peter we were listening to a conference paper by a speaker who was saying that translation not merely involves culture transfer, it is culture transfer. So here’s what Peter had to say about that, the third in his round-up of theories.

“3. Translation is basically cultural substitution, or culture switching. This notion ignores the universal features of life and their correspondences in languages, as well as elements of culture that are shared in experience or through communication across boundaries. Cultures exist, but they are not the whole truth. The cultural component of language, which is prominent in forms of address, in phaticisms, in standard metaphors, is being exaggerated by linguists and translation theorists at a time when it is in fact declining, when a great world ideology is collapsing…

A dogmatic adherence to the `equivalent effect' principle [that a translation should have the same effect on the reader as the original had on its readers]… leads implicitly to the idea that translation is essentially culture substitution... Caricaturing the position, national games , dishes, drinks,recreations, fashions (say slimness or fatness) would be regarded as equivalent or intertranslatable, if they aroused equivalent emotions. Hence Shakespeare's summer's day becomes Arabic oasis or palm tree, which is nonsense. The fact is that the translator only rarely uses cultural equivalents, which are always inaccurate. More commonly, she takes advantage of cultural overlap (a rose is a rose in many cultures and languages, including some where roses are only heard or read about), or she introduces (transfers) and glosses the source language cultural word, or she adjusts communication by using the expanding, intertranslatable universal language of science and technology, which is mainly non-cultural, of international organizations (the European Commission as a promoter of literal translation).

The force of simple words like matador, which means `killer' [as well as ‘bullfighter’] is nullified when they are transferred into another language. Transferring a word often has an anodyne or obscurantist effect, where literal translation shows up the stark truth.”

On other hand, he was not dogmatic himself. He was well aware that some degree of cultural adjustment is desirable when translating to Expert standards. For example:

“[The Leipzig translation professor] Neubert notes that German academic papers differ from their English counterparts in their greater degree of degressiveness (their notorious excursuses). He does not make the recommendation which I would prefer, that is to reduce if not eliminate the digressiveness. To take another example, most German and English medical papers are superbly structured, so there should be little textual interference in translating say from the Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift into the British Medical Journal or vice versa, but many French medical papers have to be restructured at the sentence, paragraph and even text level when translated.”

You don’t have to agree, but my point is – as I said last time – that he kept his feet on the ground of translation practice.

In Memoriam Peter Newmark

2011-08-05T05:55:00.000-07:00

Peter Newmark has died.

He was a Grand Old Man of British translation studies and a very nice, helpful person. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of professional translators like me read his bi-monthly column in The Linguist religiously. There will be many tributes to him, and a memorial meeting is to be held in the autumn at Guildford, in the south of England, where he lived and – in recent years – taught. There will also be many personal reminiscences from his colleagues, friends and students.

In fact one such anecdotal tribute was published recently by a Spanish former student whom he had counselled, José Manuel Mora Fandos. He describes how Newmark’s Paragraphs on Translation delivered him from "the theoreticians who had never themselves translated anything." What José Manuel liked in Newmark’s writings about theory was what I liked. He kept his feet on the ground of translation practice and wrote in the British tradition of clear language. His attitude was well summed up in the title of one his articles: The Curse of Dogma in Translation Studies. I smile at the image of him towards the end of José Manuel’s article where he goes off to his university class by bicycle. He must have been in his eighties.

I got to know Peter in person when he spent a period as a guest lecturer in Ottawa in 1983. He did me two services around that time: he persuaded me to switch to using the excellent Collins English Dictionary, which was new then, and he introduced me to the research of Hans Krings. Krings was a pioneer in the use of the ‘think aloud’ technique in translation research. At that time his work was only available in German, in which Peter was fluent but not me.

However, the last time I met Peter in person was at a translation conference in London in December 1991, and there he did me a service of another kind that was to have far-reaching consequences for me. We were sitting together listening, as I remember, to a speaker who was of the school that says translation is a transfer between cultures rather than between languages. Peter had told me just beforehand that he thought translatology was too pompous a term for what we do in translation studies – an opinion he was to change but only much later. Afterwards, I told him that I was on a committee to select a new director for the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa. I also said that we weren’t making much progress because we couldn’t agree on a candidate we liked. Then he remarked, “Well, you have done it before” – I’d been director from 1975 to 1979 – “and you were successful. Why don’t you do it again yourself?” So I went home and thought about his assessment, which carried weight, and I did in fact offer myself as director and got the job. And that’s how I ended up my career at the University of Ottawa, thanks to Peter’s encouragement.

References
José Manuel Mora Fandos. Una anécdota personal con el maestro de traductores Peter Newmark. Globedia, 25 May 2011. http://uy.globedia.com/anecdota-maestro-traductores-peter-newmark

Peter Newmark. Paragraphs on Translation. Clevedon and Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, c1993. 176 p. Paperback edition available from Amazon UK.

Peter Newmark. The curse of dogma in translation studies. Lebende Sprachen, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 105-108, 1991. PDF copy available online at
http://www.reference-global.com/toc/les/36/3.

For his change of heart about translatology, see
Peter Newmark. Translation now - 60. The Linguist (Chartered Institute of Linguists, London), vol. 48, no. 6, p. 27, 2009.

Collins Dictionary of the English Language. Edited by Patrick Hanks, Thomas Hill Long, and Laurance Urdang. London and Glasgow: Collins, 1979. 1690 p. There have been several later editions.

Hans P. Krings. Was in den Köpfen von Übersetzern vorgeht: eine empirische Untersuchung zur Struktur des Übersetzungsprozesses an fortgeschrittenen Franzözischlernern (What goes on inside the translator’s head….). 1986. 570 p. Unfortunately it’s out of print and there’s no English translation. However, there’s another book by Krings with think-aloud data which is available:
Repairing Texts: Empirical Investigation of Machine Translation Post-Editing Processes. Translated from German by Geoffrey S. Koby. Kent State University Press, 2001. 635 p.

Image
http://eunahchoi.egloos.com

Sailors as Ad Hoc Linguists

2011-07-30T14:48:00.000-07:00

After the last three posts about ‘terps’, I thought I would move away from warfare. But not quite yet. However, this time it’s a very different context and about a different arm of the Defense establishment, the US Navy.

The technological bent of modern warfare has led to a need for highly educated officers. Often they're encouraged to go back to university and study for higher degrees. As a by-product of this upgrading, they produce interesting research material. For example, the very first thesis I ever came across about machine translation was by a Canadian Armed Forces officer, André Gouin. It was an evaluation of an early version of the now familiar SYSTRAN (www.systranet.com), and that was in 1970.

Forty years later comes a thesis by an American naval officer that highlights the potential value of Natural and Native Translators among US Navy personnel. Not that the author, Michael F. D’Angelo, uses those terms. Instead he speaks of “Sailors who possess the native foreign language skills and cultural background,” as well, of course, as English. The Navy needs many ‘linguists’ and for various functions. There’s a good historical section where D’Angelo traces them back to diplomatic interpretation in the late 19th century for missions such as Commodore Perry’s, which opened up Japan to the West. The function, however, with which the thesis is mostly concerned is the modern one of Cryptologic Technician Interpretive (CTI). Basically the CTI is a cryptologist who works on breaking the codes of foreign navies and decoding their intercepted communications. It’s a role that first became crucial even before Pearl Harbour in connection with Japanese. CTIs are expected to translate – that’s the Interpretive in their title – and must therefore know the languages of the encoded messages. They are trained for two years, first in the Defense Language Institute at Monterey, California, and then in one of the Navy’s several Language Centers of Excellence. The intensive training turns out Professional Experts, and as such they pass beyond the scope of this blog.

But there’s a problem. Because of their foreign language proficiency, CTIs are frequently and increasingly called on to “perform foreign language duties outside of their core intelligence analyst competencies, such as translator or interpreter,” One way to meet the demand might be to increase the number of CTIs. But that would be wasteful and in the end unsatisfactory for two reasons:

a) the length and expense of the CTIs’ training, and

b) the Top Secret security clearance that CTIs must hold. (We saw in the July 18 post how this requirement affected the recruitment of Army interpreters for Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Meanwhile, D’Angelo argues, there’s a large untapped resource of Sailors without the security clearance who don’t need language training because they’re native speakers of a foreign language and who furthermore possess the cultural background that goes with it. Something about the extent of the resource is known from a 2005 Navy self-assessment survey (see References). For the rest,

“This thesis investigates how to optimize resident naval foreign language and cultural diversity and proposes alternative recruitment, training, employment, and retention methods. It recommends that the Navy develop a Translator/Interpreter rating for those ineligible for security clearances, reinstitute the Warrant Officer-1 rank, and pay ad hoc linguists.”

Ad hoc linguists – ah, there’s another term for non-Expert but useful interpreters and translators.

References
Lt. Michael F. D’Angelo (United States Navy Reserve). Options for Meeting U.S. Navy Foreign Language and Cultural Expertise Requirements in the Post 9/11 Security Environment. MSc dissertation, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey CA, 2009. 137p. http://edocs.nps.edu/npspubs/scholarly/theses/2009/Jun/09Jun_D_Angelo.pdf.
D’Angelo is himself a Farsi CTI.

Capt. André R. Gouin (Canadian Armed Forces). French to English Machine Translation System Based Upon Digital Computer Software Programs (SYSTRAN). MSc dissertation, School of Engineering, AirForce Institute of Technology, United States Air Force, 1970. 53 p.

One-Time Self-Assessment of Foreign Language Skills. NAVADMIN 275/05, October 18, 2005. http://www.npc.navy.mil/NR/rdonlyres/0956E9A9-EE10-450A-9D27-0FC681262442/0/NAV05275.txt

Image
Evening Colors at the Defense Language Institute, Presidio of Monterey, Monterey CA, 1984.

The Go-Betweens (conclusion)

2011-07-25T03:14:00.000-07:00

For the earlier instalments of this summary, see the two previous posts.

The middle part of Michael Griffin's chapter is devoted to another kind of interpreter: fixers. Fixers are local liaison interpreters working for journalists and other media people.

“The journalist’s ‘fixer’ was a facilitator of a different order. Like the military interpreter, he (they were all men) translated local history, personal reputation, cultural difference and situational dynamics – as well as words – into a language their employers could understand, weighing what was said for ingots of truth and shades of deceit. How he formulated those words was more sophisticated than the Q&A of military interviews or the instant translation of commands. Fixers reached beyond the restrictions of an officer’s enquiry about security, for example, to search for the angles, coincidences, character defects or human tragedies that would interest their own employer, the reporter, who − after all − was only a more specialised kind of translator, working in print or image, for an expectant, paying audience.”

Many fixers are a prime examples of Professional Translators who start out as Natural or Native Interpreters, and who quickly become advanced Native Interpreters by experience if they’re to survive, but who do not have any training or professional credentials. In fact they are even less likely to receive training than the military terps. They are native speakers of the local languages, but their second language speech, almost always English, need not be very correct, because in any case what they say will be filtered and polished professionally by their employers.

“Javed Yazamy – ‘Jojo’ to his Canadian clients – was a teenager janitor at a US Special Forces compound in 2001, who was hired as a terp when the Americans heard his refugee-camp English. He spent the next two years pursuing bin Ladin through the eastern mountains with his new friends. After the fall of the Taliban, TV networks offered him work as a fixer.”

What the fixers do need above all is contacts.

“The fixer was under constant pressure from his clients and their need for ever closer contact with actors who, while likely to spare the contractor, would nonchalantly annihilate his translator.”

On the other hand, there are fixers who are already Native Translators from their education and their background in other media activities.

“Many fixers had previously worked in aid, acquiring skills in journalism, logistics or IT and – the most crucial skill of all – social ease with westerners. Sultan Munadi, a fixer-turned-journalist for the New York Times since 2002, had begun as a press officer for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Panjshir Valley during the Taliban era and was working on a master’s degree at the time of his death.”

There have already been several posts on this blog about fixers. To find them, enter fixers in the Search box on the right. The last part of the chapter, however, introduces something that was new to me, a type of military-sponsored communication that we might call military cultural interpretation. It flourished under the impulse of two outstanding figures. One was General David Petraeus, the American commander in Afghanistan until a few days ago, who himself had graduated in sociology. The other was Montgomery McFate, an American woman who had won a scholarship to study anthropology at Berkeley. Having pondered, ‘How do I make anthropology relevant to the military?’ she

“won a fellowship in the Office of Naval Research in 2004 where she was asked by the 4th Infantry Division for advice on interpreting Iraqis’ cultural behaviour in the Sunni Triangle.”

The Americans were waking up to the realisation that they must win hearts as well as firefights and that they must seek to understand both their enemies and their allies.

“In 2006, McFate contributed 50 pages of analysis on the use of ‘cultural knowledge’ and ‘intelligence preparation of the battlefield’ to FM 3-24, the first manual on counter-insurgency (COIN) to be published in 20 years. As commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas from 2005, General David Petraeus had overseen the manual’s composition and publication in December 2006, before taking command of US forces in Iraq“

McFate’s ideas on ‘armed social science‘, along with those of an Australian army officer, David Kilcullen, who also had a doctorate in anthropology, blossomed into the Human Terrain System (HTS), which was composed, in the field, of Human Terrain Teams. For a while it absorbed a great deal of funding and resources starting in Iraq, where Petraeus said, “‘The HTTs have evolved into important elements in our operations .” Nevertheless, HTS was regarded with suspicion not only by some of the military but also by the American Anthropological Association.

The question I ask myself is how the HTS input could be gathered without yet another kind of liaison interpreter, the native informants used by virtually all anthropologists working in the field away from home. But that’s another story.

There’s a great deal more, and many moving personal histories, in Michael Griffin’s chapter than I’ve room to summarise. I have to move on. We must just hope his book finds a publisher soon. I thank him for letting me quote from it.

Source
Michael Griffin. The go-betweens. In The Broken Road: America's War in Afghanistan, forthcoming.
Michael’s email address is michaelgriffin9@googlemail.com

Image
Ajmal Naqshbandi, a still from Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi, a prizewinning documentary film by Ian Olds, 2009. See http://www.fixerdoc.com/.
Naqshbandi was killed by Taliban while he was working as fixer for an Italian journalist.

The Go-Betweens (continued)

2011-07-18T05:04:00.000-07:00

The many reports and descriptions of the terps and the dangers they run are scattered through innumerable newspaper articles, memoirs, etc., even films and TV documentaries. The merit of Michael Griffin’s painstaking research is that he brings a large amount of it together in a single chapter, and so gives us a more overall picture. There are many insights.

First the sheer numbers, the expenditure they entailed and the abuses that it led to. One of the American contractors (see below), Ohio-based Mission Essential Personnel (MEP),

“was awarded a $414 million contract to supply 1,691 translators and interpreters over five years…. One terp posted that MEP earned a $200,000 bonus for every translator sent, even if they only served a month.”
”Since 1999, the US Department of Defense had outsourced its linguistic needs to BTG in a $4.5 billion, five-year contract that San Diego-based Titan Systems Corporation inherited when it purchased the company two tears later. When Titan lost the contract after an overcharging scandal in 2004, it went to L-3 Communications, which had acquired Titan in 2005.”

It would be no exaggeration to say that for the first time, interpreting and translation had become a commodity, to be bundled, exploited and passed around in the commercial world along with any other goods the military would buy. (For more on Titan, enter Titan in the Search box on the right.)

There was also deception:

“‘Oh no, no, no,’ one MEP recruiter told an Afghan-American. ‘You’re not a soldier. Not at all. You’re not on the battlefield.’ The candidate was told he would only translate for US officers in schools, mosques and hospitals, and could refuse any assignment he didn’t like.”

And the reality?

“In Iraq, where statistics were more comprehensive, terps were 10 times more likely to be killed than US troops and 200 had been murdered by 2006... By September 2008, 24 MEP translators had been killed and 56 injured in a single year.”

It was obviously out of the question to maintain high standards at any price in the face of such pressing needs, potential profits and shortened life expectancy.

“Said Cpl. William Woodall from Dallas. ‘Instead of looking for quality, the companies are just pushing bodies out here and, once they’re out of the door, it’s not their problem anymore.’”

In addition to the language requirements, there was a less obvious constraint. This was the need to “pass the necessary security checks if they were to handle the CIA’s intelligence documents.” As a result, the outsource contractors like Titan “focused on recruiting Afghans with US citizenship” rather than locals. But the Afghan language mainly required was Pashtu and “there were only 7,700 native speakers of Pashtu in the United States, according to the 2000 census, and few came forward.” That’s why there are so many stories like that of “Torpekay ‘Peggy’ Farhamg, a Las Vegas croupier and security guard, [who] spent three years at FOB Kalgash, translating Taliban websites and receiving local visitors.” It‘s even said that ”many recruits passed the language test by paying a native Pashtu-speaker to take it for them on the phone.”

Meanwhile,

“A re-evaluation of the field value of the terp began in 2008, triggered by military officers via their anonymous blogs. These posts recounted their authors’ personal reliance on interpreters, as mentors and comrades on the field of battle, and were a way of repaying a debt of honour. ‘Your interpreter is way more important than your weapon,’ said Cory Shultz, a major embedded with ANA forces in Paktika, since a good interpreter gave him command over hundreds of soldiers. ‘Those units with the strongest interpreters were, by and large, the ones most able to meet their mission goals,’ wrote Rick. They were ‘essential, courageous and under-appreciated’; ‘my eyes and ears on the street’; ‘he saved my life more than once’.”

Military interpreters are liaison interpreters, and like all good liaison interpreters they contribute more than language proficiency. But in addition they need great courage.

The untrained Natural Interpreters often became hardened Native and even Expert Interpreters with time and experience. Nevertheless, they felt that their contribution was going unappreciated:

“‘Unfortunately Americans never care about their interpreters,’ wrote Dvid, who received night letters threatening his life, ‘and that is why they lost all the good interpreters … now they are left with those low-quality interpreters who don’t know anything about their jobs."

The latter part of Michael Griffin’s chapter is taken up with two other kinds of interpreting. I’ll deal with them next time.

To be concluded.

Source
Michael Griffin. The go-betweens. In The Broken Road: America's War in Afghanistan, forthcoming. All the qotations above are from this source.

Image
Reaping the Whirlwind, cover of Michael Griffin's earlier book about Afghanistan.

The Go-Betweens

2011-07-11T02:58:00.000-07:00

Back in 2009, this blog carried several posts about the military interpreters in Afghanistan and Iraq and the risks, often fatal, that they ran. To find the posts, enter Afghanistan, Iraq and fixer in the Search box to the right. If I haven’t done more of them, it’s because the kidnappings and deaths have become depressingly routine. Only last week, El País newspaper carried a report about a Spanish air force officer who sold the press a video of an attack in which two Spanish soldiers were killed along with their interpreter.

One recent result of the earlier posts is that Michael Griffin, already author of a thoroughly researched book about the wars in Afghanistan (see References), has generously sent me an advance chapter of another book he’s writing, and that chapter’s specifically about the interpreters.

“At every interface between civilian and foreigner in any overseas war, success is determined by the fallible but indispensable software supplied by the interpreter – a ‘terp’ in US military slang. Consider the countless messages transmitted back and forth daily – sometimes under fire, always in situations of extreme vigilance – between ordinary Afghans and the 125,000 NATO forces and private contractors deployed in September 2009; then add in the translations required by the diplomatic, development, media, security and logistics communities, to name just a few of those who rely on timely and accurate interpretation of the facts on the ground. One swiftly appreciates the enormous burden placed on the derisorily-named terp for success in any of their endeavours.”

Well said! He goes on to distinguish between the different types of terps. There are the

“terps working as liaison interpreters (LTs) i.e. ‘establishing communication links with other people’. First, there are the LTs hired by journalists and known as fixers. They organise interviews, accommodation, transport, security, and sources of fuel, electricity and satellite feeds; they gauge the tensions in specific villages or valleys; and provide constant up-dates on the shifting sensitivities and murderous nuances in real-time meetings with military and local leaders. Fixers are professional, but untrained, interpreters.”

In other words, they’re Native Interpreters.

“Facilitating interpreters do the same job at conferences and business meetings, though at much less risk; they are ‘real’ professional interpreters.”

Presumably they’ve had some training.

Then there are the terps employed by the military and intelligence organisations.

“Military or intelligence terps, by contrast, are divided into two distinct sub-groups: ‘hyphenated’ Afghans with residence in the United States – unprofessional but fluent in the local languages and in English; and ‘native’ Afghans, hired locally and sometimes illiterate, but who are gifted with the ability to ingest and mimic the tongues of foreigners.”

The illiterate ones are perhaps close to being Natural Interpreters. There were many of them in the ‘first wave’ of recruits in 2001:

“The terps who rode with [the American] Special Forces in the north, clambered the slopes of Tora Bora, and persuaded tribal leaders in Kandahar and Uruzgan to rise against the Taliban were battle-scarred veterans with a little English… There are many examples of ‘first-wave’ terps deceiving their foreign allies into calling in airstrikes on private rivals, allegedly for being ‘Taliban’, or to break in their enemies’ doors. First-wave translators in 2001 were paid according to the number of intelligence tips they could provide.”

Then,

“A second generation of terps appeared after the arrival in Kandahar of 1,200 US Marines, a battalion of the 101st Airborne Division and the 10th Mountain 1-27 Infantry between November and January 2002, and the consolidation of the ISAF contingent in Kabul around the same time. Competition between the military and aid sector for competent interpreters and translators was averted by the return of hundreds of English-speaking, Afghan graduates from Peshawar and other Pakistani cities where they had worked for NGOs unable to function under the Taliban’s restrictions. The flood of international agencies into Kabul after the overthrow of the movement rescued them from joblessness with open arms. Demand quickly outstripped supply, however, as USAID, the EU and other internationals laid out plans to rebuild Afghanistan’s highways, power and telecommunications, and their sub-contractors sought interpreters for their own sub-contractors: Turkish, Indian and Chinese road builders, US, British and South African security providers, and so on.
In Coalition eyes, the requirements were simple: native Dari, Pashtu or, preferably, both; functioning English, no known Taliban affiliation and the ability to catch on fast.
Aside from the returnees – whose skills had been honed by exposure to US slang from the videos and music banned under the Taliban – the main pools of talent were the run-down education system and private schools of English, business studies and computing. But only cosmopolitan Pashtu living in Kabul tended to have both languages.”

To be continued.

References
Miguel González. La juez envía a prisión al militar del Ejército del Aire acusado de filtrar un vídeo sobre Afganistán (Prison for the air force officer accused of leaking a video about Afghanistan). El País, Madrid, 6 July, 2011.

Michael Griffin. Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan. London: Pluto Press, 2001. 272 p. Available from Amazon.

Michael Griffin. The go-betweens. In The Broken Road: America's War in Afghanistan, forthcoming. (The emphasis is mine.)

Image
SSgt Northrup and LT Smith with their terp. Kilo 2nd Platoon Deployment Photos, 2010. http://www.mcbh.usmc.mil/3mar/3dbn/Kilo_16Aug10_2P/pages/SSgt%20Northrup,%20terp,%20LT%20Smith.htm

Footnote to Fansubbers vs. Copyighters

2011-07-10T05:07:00.000-07:00

A long Comment on the previous post takes me to task for not referencing the URL of Jemmainternational, the site from which I took the photo and the example of translation. So here it is: http://www.jemmainternational.org.
Don’t confuse it with http://www.jemmainternational.com, which is something quite different.
Then there’s also Jenny and Emma International, which I did reference. “Confused yet?” asks Amidola, the commenter. Well yes, I’m befuddled.

Nevertheless, the correction makes me aware that I grossly understated the range of languages that the programme is translated into:

“I forget how many languages and people translate for Jenny and Emma International, but they had 22 languages, or something along those lines. We (Jemmainternational) have about 10 languages(including Indonesian, Greek and Japanese), last time I counted. Full eps [episodes] are done in four. (Since they're only up for a week, and most translate from the English, it's a time issue, mostly.) And we are completely independent from each other, which means, completely different groups of translators and translations, just imagine the amount of people behind this!… Sadly, the channel canceled the show, because of its lack [of faith?] in real-life TV.”

The Comment ends with another telling correction: “Translating Teen Speak is not as fun and easy as it maybe sounds.”

Thank you Amidola.

Fansubbers vs. Copyrighters

2011-07-02T01:53:00.000-07:00

Julie McDonough Dolmaya, of Toronto's York University, sends me an amusing but cautionary tale about fansubbers and the pitfalls of copyright. Fansubbers, in case you don't know, are

“people who painstakingly do their own translations and subtitles on programs they love, and then put them up on the Web on places like YouTube.”

As it's unpaid, most of them are Native Translators who’ve presumably learnt their skill from watching previous examples, although this is something that needs more research. (For other posts about them, enter fansubbing in the Search box on the right).

So,

“What happens when you bring together the internet, a niche international fan base, and an obscure German soap opera… Hand aufs Herz (Hand on Heart)? Quite possibly, the future of television. It sounds harmless and probably good for publicity, right? Well, the broadcasters aren’t always so keen.”

The programme may not be a leading one in Germany, but it has a large international lesbian following. You can see why from the picture above and the following translated dialogue sample:

“First I was afraid but now I THINK: we will survive!
Because we’re talking about a revolution!

Hand aufs Herz, even if you seem to be a million miles away at the moment, there ain’t no mountain high enough and you’re in my sweet dreams - just the way you are - you are so beautiful, my genie in a bottle, my kiss from a rose.

No matter if I were a boy or a son of a preacherman, no matter if you want me to get the party started in English or fight for you in German: Nur mit dir macht fernsehen Spaß und wir werden keinen Zentimeter zurückweichen.” (The last sentence is left untranslated.)

There’s also subtitling in Italian as well as in Chinese, both traditional and simplified – though as someone comments, the dialogue is so simple that the double Chinese orthography is hardly necessary.

The complication in this case is that the fansubbers didn’t translate entire episodes. They selected just those portions that most interest a niche lesbian audience and packaged them together on their own website, ignoring other characters in the drama. The Jenny and Emma storyline was really intended to be only a secondary one. “Essentially they’re creating their own show out of an existing one,” and called it Jemma. Then the Herz auf Hand creators struck back. They invoked copyright and forced YouTube to remove all the Jemma clips. Of course bootleg copies abounded on other sites and blogs, but they too were forced off within hours, as was that of one poster who plaintively declared, “I own nothing. This is for non-profit. No copyright infringement intended.”

Finally, however, the outcry was so loud that the originating TV station, SAT1, caved in:

“SAT1 came up with an unprecedented plan: They set up a place on their official website where Jemma fans could watch every Jemma scene from the very beginning. And not just German fans — SAT1 decided not to geoblock the Jemma clips. Viewers from around the world are welcome to watch all Jemma scenes, and the last five full episodes.
When SAT1 launched the test phase of their viewing plan, fan sites got back to business. Jemma International set up a website offering translations for Jemma clips and for whole episodes. And Jenny and Emma International utilized the GreenFish Subtitle Player. You just load their translations into the program, and a semi-transparent subtitle window plays over the official Hand aufs Herz clips.”

The first moral of the story is obvious: fansubbers ought to check the copyright of the material they translate and make sure they have permission before they re-broadcast it. The second is that the fansubbing movement has become a rising tide that’s impossible to hold back, and that it especially benefits groups which might not appear attractive to commercial sponsors.

Julie McDonough Dolmaya’s own blog is at present showing some interesting preliminary data about the translators for Wikipedia. Go to the Blogging about translation and localization button in the list to the right.

References
The Art and Commerce of Fan Love. Spark 151, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation podcast, 2011. http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2011/06/spark-151-june-12-15-2011/.

Hand aufs Herz. Wikipedia, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_aufs_Herz.

Jenny and Emma International. http://jennyandemma1.blogspot.com/.
It gives German source clips and multilingual subtitles.

Heather Hogan. Glee, Hand aufs Herz fans demand more from lesbian TV storylines and get it. AfterEllen, “the pop culture site that plays for your team”, 2011.
http://www.afterellen.com/tv/glee-hand-aufs-herz-fans-demand-more-from-lesbian-tv-storylines-and-get-it.

Image: Photo from Lili-Fee.

Nevada Language Brokering 2

2011-06-25T16:21:00.000-07:00

Continued from June 19.

“The Nuñez family is only one of more than 16,000 families in the Washoe County School District that speak Spanish at home. Each Spanish-speaking household has students who possibly translate for their parents. Schools provide some translation services, but children frequently end up translating instead.
Sixty percent of Hug High School students, where Katherine attends, are Hispanic. Despite the availability of translators at the school, each student’s situation is unique. Adult translators who are unaware of individual circumstances may lose just as much information as a student who picks and chooses what to tell his or her parents.
This impacts many schools because not all teachers speak Spanish. Therefore, the need for translators grows as the language is spoken more in Washoe County. Staff who speak Spanish might be asked to drop what they are doing to translate for a teacher or parent. Children are also signed out of school to attend appointments and act as translators for their parents.”

Here’s the situation in another family.

“Eleven-year-old Araceli Marquez knows she is expected to translate when her mother or father attends parent-teacher conferences at school, but that doesn’t mean she enjoys it. She is a fifth grader at Glenn Duncan Elementary School and has been translating for her parents since she can remember.
‘I guess it’s OK,’ Araceli said. ‘I don’t like it, but I don’t really hate it. I just prefer to say it straightforward.’
Araceli, like many other children who translate for their parents, said the meaning and feeling of certain phrases gets lost in the translation.
‘Sometimes what you want to say gets changed,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t happen too often, but it does happen. I try my best to change it so that it’s the same.’
Araceli began learning English when she was 4 years old. She picked up phrases from her older brothers and learned to read and write English at school. Even though Spanish was her first language, she prefers to speak English because she can communicate with greater ease and a broader vocabulary. But to communicate with her parents, she must speak Spanish.
One challenge Araceli faces when translating is not knowing enough Spanish vocabulary to communicate phrases or words that she understands in English.
‘Sometimes my teacher makes us use big words in sentences, and I can’t explain those words to my mom,’ she said. ‘I’d rather talk in English.’

Some Conclusions
1. Despite the availability of some adult interpreters, the use of children is very widespread in Reno public schools. The children are invaluable. As one parent says,

“There is almost always a person or child who can translate. We just ask them to interpret for us…If it is something simple then we can take care of it, like giving information, but often we will look for someone to translate. When our kids go to conferences with us, they will translate.”

2. The adult interpreters too aren’t necessarily Expert or Professional. For instance teachers are pulled out of class to interpret.

3. The child interpreters experience some difficulties translating; they especially mention vocabulary gaps. (But what translator doesn’t experience problems with vocabulary gaps?)

4. Despite the difficulties, apparently none of the children is incapable of interpreting at all or refuses to interpret.

5. That doesn’t mean they always like interpreting. The children interviewed would rather be able to conduct all communication in English.

6. They start interpreting at latest when they go to elementary school; that is, at around six years old.

7. Their remarks about what is ‘lost in translation’ show that their metalinguistic awareness of COMAL (Comparison of Meaning Across Languages) is well developed. COMAL is the very important ability of bilinguals to compare a translation with its original for similarity of meaning.

Rachel Breithaupt's report is very informative. For more, follow the link below.

References
Rachel Breithaupt. Lost in translation: Northern Nevadans learn to cope with language problems, sometimes even between parents and children. news review.com, June 9, 2011.
http://www.newsreview.com/reno/lost-in-translation/content?oid=2265774.

For more about COMAL, enter comal in the Search box on the right.

Fukushima Terps

2011-06-23T01:33:00.000-07:00

There are foreign technicians involved in the work at Fukushima. They need interpreters. Last Saturday on his blog, under the heading Fukushima terps, Lionel Dersot gave a graphic account of the frightening dangers and difficulties besetting the latter. Here I’ll just note a few points that are of interest for this blog.

1. “They are mostly interpreters because they happen to speak two languages.” In other words, they’ve been recruited from among bilinguals who aren’t ordinarily Professional Interpreters.

2. They haven’t been briefed in advance.

“Most of them are learning on the spot, and sweating with that uneasiness that is a powerful depressing factor that you simply don't understand for a while what they are all talking about, starting with the people speaking your mother language…although I know that local technicians understand and are helpful… to raise the level of understanding of the confused terp devoid of an engineering diploma…
I know the argument of ‘no time’ which is true, but there is enough time for a one hour briefing. I know the puzzled look back meaning: ‘But you speak the language don't you?’, to which the urge to shout back a ‘It's the context stupid, the language comes next!’ bursts inside."

The need for interpreters to know and understand what’s being talked about is one of the factors least understood by lay people.

3. “They are all male, not for religious and social reasons… in a massively female profession.” An interesting topic, but too big to go into it here. And it mainly concerns Professional Interpreters.

Anyway, read the post in full. You can get to it via the Liaison Interpreting in Japan link on the right.

Some Frictions in Language Brokering

2011-06-19T01:15:00.000-07:00

From Reno, Nevada, comes a sensitive account that gives a realistic insight into language use by a family that depends on language brokering. The following sets the scene:

“Fifteen-year-old Katherine Nuñez sat on the old-fashioned sofa in the living room of her family’s tidy house. A painting of the Virgin Guadalupe faced the door, welcoming all newcomers into the casa. An El Salvador emblem was nailed into the pared just above the mantel, which was decorated with treasures and trinkets from the family’s native country.”

Katherine was three years old and spoke only Spanish when she came to the USA with her family. She began learning English when she started kindergarten at age five. Her mother, Josefina, still speaks only Spanish.

“The pair communicates in Spanish, which often proves difficult because Katherine prefers speaking in English. Katherine is unable to articulate some thoughts in her first language because English has been the dominant language in her life. 'It gets me aggravated, because if she spoke English, and if she had learned since we got here, I think her relationship with me would have been way better,' Katherine said…

Besides the typical problems parents and their teens encounter, the Nuñez family experiences additional challenges because of language barriers. 'Many things get lost in translation,' Katherine said. Katherine is a sophomore at Hug High School and often experiences translation problems. She speaks both Spanish and English with ease but feels that an idea’s meaning is frequently not communicated correctly in translation.

Josefina attends many parent-teacher conferences so they can work out missing homework and class-participation issues. Most of Katherine’s teachers don’t speak Spanish. Every time Josefina goes to the school to talk to Katherine’s teachers, someone has to translate. What might have been a minor problem regularly turns into a major complication and misunderstanding among Katherine, her teachers and her mother. When using a translator, Katherine feels she is being underrepresented and at times put down.

Two major differences between Spanish and English that Katherine mentioned are tone of voice and atmosphere. One of the most difficult differences between the languages for Katherine to deal with is sarcasm. She said that sarcasm comes out differently in English than when translated into Spanish. She enjoys being sarcastic and feels it is something she can’t do in Spanish. She said sarcasm frequently causes miscommunications when translating because her mother doesn’t always know what to believe.

Although some schools provide translators, Katherine said she prefers to translate because she can communicate the proper message. Translators are not aware of the individual circumstances or situations involved with the students, she said. That’s why the message at school gets lost.”

However, there’s another side to it.

“Many schools have translators available for parents who don’t speak English. Eddie Lopez, a parent involvement facilitator at Grace Warner Elementary in Reno, has a different view of translation than Katherine. Part of his job is to translate for parents at the school. He said that when kids translate, teachers run the risk of the kids selecting what they want to recount, resulting in withheld information. ‘We’ve come to find out that a lot of kids won’t fully translate so they need somebody that actually translates what they are saying,’ Lopez said. But often it’s not the child’s fault for not being able to translate correctly. Sometimes he or she might not have enough vocabulary to translate exactly what was first said.

Like any child learning how to speak, Katherine had trouble with vocabulary when she was younger. This was one of her biggest struggles when translating for her parents and speaking English at school and Spanish at home. ‘I’ve been translating since I was little,’ she said. ‘It’s a lot of pressure, actually, because I remember sometimes I couldn’t find the right words to translate, and my dad would get really frustrated. So would my mom. They would tell me that I needed to learn more because I wasn’t at the level I was supposed to be. … I was too young to translate, and they would get aggravated and make me learn more words,’ Katherine said."

As for Josefina,

"although she hasn’t learned English yet, she still recognizes that speaking another language is a great opportunity and blessing:
'It’s a great benefit, one who has two tongues,' she said [in Spanish]. 'To speak one language and translate for another is very good.'"

To be continued.

Reference
Rachel Breithaupt. Lost in translation: Northern Nevadans learn to cope with language problems, sometimes even between parents and children. news review.com, June 9, 2011.
http://www.newsreview.com/reno/lost-in-translation/content?oid=2265774.

Phrase
Lost in translation. This is a phrase that’s been around for a long time. But Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film of that name suddenly made it fashionable. Since then, hardly a day goes by without it turning up in the title of some article or newspaper report, to the point where it’s become ‘the mother of clichés’. Google now finds 51 million citations for it!

Image: Some of the Nuñez family. Katherine is on the left. Photo by Amy Beck.

The Other Visual Language Interpreters

2011-06-11T13:02:00.000-07:00

In my post of May 2, I hinted that I’d describe some other kinds of Visual Language (VL) Interpreters that I’ve worked with besides the Sign Language ones.

But first a correction. Oliver Pouliot, an Expert VL Interpreter in London, England, writes to tell me that I was quite wrong to say most Sign Language interpreters are children of deaf parents. (I might have added, or siblings of a deaf brother or sister.) He goes on:

”This is in fact not true - most sign language interpreters are second language learners of the language. Although the profession began with us, it has continued and grown mainly via people who have encountered sign language later in their lives. I am not aware of any official statistics, but of our group, I am the only native signer.”

Well, it’s true my experience with VL interpreters goes back to the 1980s, so no doubt I’m out of date. Indeed, in the United States there seems to be a certain resentment felt by interpreters who are the children of deaf adults (CODAs), because some of them have formed an association called Interpreters with Deaf Parents (IDP) and their members deplore

“the lack of respect IDP's feel… in regards to our wealth of knowledge of the language and culture, and the lack of appropriate settings for codas to learn the interpreting process.”

Anyway, in view of the correction, I’ll put what follows in the past tense.

I used to interpret sometimes at meetings of the Canadian Coordinating Council on Deafness (CCCD). The participants were a mixture of deaf and hearing people. I was hired as a Voice Interpreter (see the May 2 post): my job was to translate between French and English, the two official languages in Canada. Beforehand, I had expected to be working alongside Sign Language Interpreters, and I was aware that there were two sign languages used in the country: American Sign Language (ASL) in the English community and Quebec Sign Language (LSQ) in the French one. They aren’t mutually intelligible. What I didn’t realise was that a large proportion of the hard of hearing population did not know either sign language, indeed some of them were resistant to learning them. It’s hard to determine just what proportion of the hard of hearing are signers and I don‘t have figures for Canada. The figures for the USA, for example, are very unreliable: see the Ross E. Mitchell reference below. On the other hand, there’s an official estimate for Scotland: 57,000 people with severe to profound deafness, 6,000 whose first or preferred language is British Sign Language, i.e. just over 10%. Clearly the non-signers are as important as the signers.

So how was communication maintained with the non-signers? For them, two other kinds of ‘interpreting’ were made available:

1. Oral Interpreting. Contrary to what you might think from the name, it doesn’t use the voice. Oral interpreters cater for lip readers. They repeat silently what the speaker is saying, but with well-articulated, even exaggerated, lip movements; and they place themselves where their clients can see them clearly. It might be said that it’s not really interpreting but shadowing, because there’s no change of language. Never mind; they’re called interpreters.

2. Note-taking. In this mode, a hearing person takes notes of what's being said and the notes are displayed to the hard of hearing audience. At the CCCD, the note-takers wrote on overhead projector transparencies and there were two screens, one for French notes and the other for English.

This by no means exhausted the possibilities. There were forms of communication that I did not see, for example Tactile (touch) Interpreting, made famous by Helen Keller and her teacher-interpreter Anne Mansfield Sullivan. Nevertheless, there was enough to make the interpretation set-up extremely complex. Suppose somebody made a statement in LSQ. It would go through the following stages:

1. The LSQ was translated into spoken French by a Sign Language Interpreter.
2. The spoken French was shadowed by a Francophone Oral Interpreter and summarised by a French Note-Taker.
3. Simultaneously with 2, a Voice Interpreter translated the spoken French into spoken English.
4. An ASL Interpreter translated the output from the Voice Interpreter into ASL for the English signers.
5. Simultaneously with 4, an English Oral Interpreter shadowed the Voice Interpreter and another Note-Taker summarised again.

In theory, it should have been possible to translate directly from LSQ to ASL, but there were only very few interpreters who knew both; so most of the time we had to make do with the relay method in which the Voice Interpreter acted as a pivot. By some miracle, it worked. Of course, the CCCD could count on Expert Interpreters.

Image
In this drawing of an Oral Interpreter at work, the interpreter sits facing a deaf person and shadows what’s being said by the people at the table behind. Source: The Itinerant Connection, http://www.theitinerantconnection.com/american_sign_language.htm.

References
The group Oliver Pouliot refers to is involved in the European Master in Sign Language Interpreting (EUMASLI), http://eumasli.eu/.

Interpreters with Deaf Parents. http://idp-rid.org.

Ross E. Mitchell, et al. How many people use ASL in the United States? Why estimates need updating. Sign Language Studies, Volume 6, Number 3, 2006.

Statistics. Scottish Council on Deafness. http://www.scod.org.uk/Statistics-i-152.html.

Helen Keller Biography. American Foundation for the Blind. http://www.afb.org/section.asp?SectionID=1&TopicID=129.

Lost and Found

2011-06-09T09:29:00.000-07:00

A post last week said the Followers panel had disappeared from this page. Thanks to a contributor to the Blogger Help Forum, I’ve got it back. The solution may be of help to other people too. It was to update my browser from Internet Explorer 7 to IE 8.

Glad to see you again.

A New Study of Language Brokering

2011-06-07T07:48:00.000-07:00

Publications about Language Brokering (LB) have been sparse of late, but here’s one. The author, Jennifer Kam (see photo), is new to me. It begins with a neat definition (the emphasis is mine):

“Language brokering is the communication process where individuals with no formal training (often children of immigrant families) linguistically mediate for two or more parties (usually adult family members and individuals from mainstream culture).”

The article is a good illustration of how LB research focuses on the sociological and psychological aspects of the activity rather than on the translating itself. The study examined the direct and indirect effects of language brokering on mental health and ‘risky’ behaviours among 684 Mexican-heritage youths from schools in Phoenix, Arizona. ‘Risky behaviours’ includes smoking and drinking alcohol. For more, see Reference below.

Reference
Jennifer A. Kam (School of Communication, Ohio State University). The Effects of Language Brokering Frequency and Feelings on Mexican-Heritage Youth's Mental Health and Risky Behaviors. Journal of Communication, Volume 61, Issue 3, pages 455–475, June 2011. Abstract at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01552.x/abstract.

Terms
Using linguistically mediate instead of translate is itself indicative of the social and psychological slant.

Journal of Communication thoughtfully provides translations of its abstracts in several languages, and this enables us to establish the following equivalences for language brokering.

German: Sprachvermittlung – actually a much older term than language brokering, but it often happens that old terms are given new uses.
French: médiation linguistique
Spanish: mediación del lenguaje
There’s also Chinese and Korean.

Image: Ohio State University.

Update on the Shafia Murder Case

2011-06-02T02:48:00.000-07:00

Long-time readers who followed my posts about the Shafia family murder hearings in the spring of 2010 (to find them, enter shafia in the Search box) may perhaps be wondering what’s happened to the case since then.

Well, there was another preliminary hearing at Kingston, Ontario, last autumn. By then, there had clearly been concern to improve the working conditions for the court interpreters, something which I criticised last year. Better booths had been installed for the simultaneous interpretation, and they were better situated:

“Two translation booths, each capable of holding two interpreters, were erected on a large raised platform to the left of the judge. Tens of thousands of dollars worth of infra-red transmitters and receivers are in place, allowing everyone in the courtroom to listen to the simultaneous interpretation on wireless headsets."

Nonetheless, the start of the hearing was again troubled by interpretation woes; this time, not the fault of the interpreters but of the electronic equipment, so that recourse was eventually had to the traditional mode of in-court consecutive interpreting:

“A French-speaking Montreal police officer was the first witness. As she began testifying, it was soon obvious the French interpreter wasn't able to operate the equipment to ensure that English translations were transmitted properly. A technician rushed to the booth to help him, but after several failed attempts to sort out the problem, Lacelle [one of the prosecutors] suggested a low-tech solution. 'Your honour, I wonder if it might be more efficient to adopt the approach we had before,' she said. With that, the interpreter left the booth and stood next to the witness. He translated English and French by listening to the people on both sides of him.”

Which goes to show that SI equipment should always be tested immediately before the start of a session either by a technician or by the interpreters themselves. Even five minutes is long enough for it to develop a bug.

Anyway, a trial date was set for this spring. However, one of the accused decided to change his lawyer at the last moment, and the new lawyer asked the judge for more time to prepare. As a result, the trial has been postponed until, provisionally, October 11. Meanwhile the accused languish in prison.

They aren’t the only ones. In January, in Toronto, a judge of the Supreme Court of the same province, Ontario, refused the Crown's (i.e., the prosecution's) request to order separate trials for two men jointly accused of conspiracy to murder, because a qualified Arabic interpreter couldn't be found for one of them. As a result, the trial, originally set to begin in January 2011, won't start until January 2012. “The prosecution has had more than a year to find an interpreter,” the judge said. "A qualified Arabic interpreter should have been identified and arranged." But there’s only one accredited Arabic court interpreter for all Ontario and he’s not available for long trials.

The crisis in Ontario court interpreting has arisen because the province’s justice administration is running scared of a mistrial being declared due to poor interpreting. They've already had a bad experience. So now they insist on accreditation by means of a stiff examination. But they haven’t prepared the ground, as they should have done years ago, by getting together with the community colleges and the universities to sponsor adequate training programmes and by giving scholarships to promising candidates.

References
Rob Tripp. Translation woes snarl start of murder case. Edmonton Sun, October 5, 2010. http://www.edmontonsun.com/news/ottawa/2010/10/05/15595836.html.
Rob Tripp is the crime reporter who’s been reporting the Shafia proceedings from the beginning, and who, in the course of them, has developed an awareness of the interpretation component. The three languages involved are English, French, and Dari (an Afghan dialect of Persian).

Patrick F. D. McCann. Canal mass murder trial delayed by surprise firing of lawyer. McCann & Lyttle, February 21, 2011. http://mccannandlyttle.com/newspaper_articles/canal-mass-murder-trial-delayed-by-surprise-firing-of-lawyer/.

Arabic interpreter shortage delays trial for a year. Empowerlingua, January 26, 2011. http://blog.empowerlingua.co.uk/index.asp?post=145.

The Shafia case has attained such notoriety that it already has its page in Wikipedia. There are also some posts on YouTube that are shocking for their presumption of guilt and their eagerness to assume it was an honour killing.

Image: An Expert Court Interpreter ‘listening to the people on both sides of her’ and taking notes. From www. Flckr.com, http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2729/4203086115_5c317b5478.jpg.

The Babel Paradoxes

2011-05-30T08:17:00.000-07:00

This year’s volume of Babel, the venerable research journal of the International Federation of Translators, starts off with an intriguing and learned article by Caroline Disler of Toronto about the Babel legend. The best-known version by far is the one in the Old Testament. In case you don’t remember it exactly or don’t have a Bible to hand, here’s Caroline’s quotation of it.
Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’
The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the LORD said, ‘Look, they are one people, and they have one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing they propose to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’
So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because the Lord confused the language of all the earth… (Genesis II:9)
As Caroline comments, “It is a brief uncomplicated tale, surprisingly short for the widespread influence it has had in Western culture.”

Nevertheless, it leads to several paradoxes. The first concerns the familiar English geographical name Babel.

“The Hebrew ’original’ bavel occurs over 200 times in the Hebrew Bible. With very rare exception, all the other occurrences of bavel in most English Bibles is rendered by ‘Babylon’, awe-inspiring capital of long-time enemies of the ancient Hebrews… In short, the customary English equivalent for the Hebrew bavel is ‘Babylon’. stemming from the Greek Babylon. That the English translators chose not to follow this convention only in Genesis II:9 remains a mystery.”

Actually not only the English translators but translators into other languages as well. Whatever it was made the translators do that, to me the effect is clear. By using a ‘fictitious’ name and avoiding the name of a real city, they kept the story in the realm of allegory instead of history.

Another surprise is the extent of other ancient versions of the story. One of them is the following.

“The biblical story… was not created ex nihilo. A number of earlier traditions that were committed to writing well before Babel have in all likelihood informed our narrative. Despite widespread debate, most scholars ascribe the date of composition of Genesis to the first half of the first millennium BCE… The Sumerian epic of Enmarkar and the Lord of Aratta describes the conflicts between Enmarkar, legendary king of the ancient city of Uruk (see image), and the unnamed ruler of Aratta. Although the available tablets date from around 2000 BCE, the epic itself was most likely composed centuries earlier… the extant tablets include a passage that bears startling similarities to some themes in the Babel narrative.”

Here’s an extract:

Man had no rival…
The whole universe, the people in unison,
To Enlis in one tongue they spoke…
Enki, the lord of wisdom, the leader of the gods,
Changed the speech in their mouths,
Set up contention into it,
Into the speech of man that until then had been one.

There’s also an Egyptian version in which the god Thoth is addressed as the one “who made different the tongue of one country from another.” Caroline comments, “It is intriguing to observe that divine agency in the differentiation of language appears both in Mesopotamia and in Egypt long before the biblical story of Babel was composed.”

After so much that’s of interest, where I nevertheless part company with Caroline is when she says that

“…we ourselves, as translators, must be prone to a certain disquieting hubris in order to ‘reverse God’s act’ – or, if one prefers, in order to claim to understand the meaning of a source message so well that we presume to [re?)produce it in another language.”

Where’s the hubris? To pursue the allegory, it was that same Lord who both fractured the single language at Babel and who endowed Man with the faculty of translating between the pieces. He did so along with the ability of each individual to learn and use more than one language. If He did it before Babel or concurrently, than He must have known that the ‘confusion’ He was introducing could only slow down communication by its inconvenience, not prevent it. If he did it after Babel, perhaps He relented. Either way, Man did not “reverse God’s act”, God did. For translating was not devised by Man – and here I step outside the allegory for a moment – it evolved along with multilingualism, and the ground was prepared perhaps even earlier in the form of a more general human or pre-human multifunctioning – the ability of an individual to do anything in more ways than one and to convert between them.

Nevertheless, Caroline provides us with another apt quotation that perhaps explains hubris, though it also leads to another paradox. She cites a translator known as ‘the grandson of Sirach’ who “sometime after 132 BCE” translated the biblical Book of Ecclesiasticus from Hebrew to Greek, and who apologised as follows for the shortcomings:

“You are invited… to be indulgent in cases where, despite our diligent labour in translating, we may seem to have rendered some phrases imperfectly. For what was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly the same sense when translated into another language. Not only this book,… the rest of the books differ not a little when read in the original.”

Yet that didn’t prevent the grandson of Sirach from doing his translation and thinking it worth ‘publishing.’ And there’s the paradox in all translation: it’s never perfect, yet we still do it and use it. The solution to the paradox, as with many paradoxes, is a matter of semantics. The term translation is often used in a way that confuses usable translation with perfect translation and leads – as the French linguist Georges Mounin concluded long ago – to the paradoxical assertion that ‘translation is impossible’ when it’s being done all the time around us. There’s an Arabic proverb that runs al-’ismah lillâhi wahdah, which means ’Perfection belongs to God alone’; so He bestowed on Man translation as we know it with all its imperfections, and told Man to go forth and communicate.

References
Caroline Disler. Before Babel: in memoriam Daniel Simeoni and Brian Peckham. Babel 57:1, 1-14.

Babel is published for the International Federation of Translators by John Benjamins, www.benjamins.com.

The Bible quotation is from the New Revised Standard Version. Although the NRSV was published in 1989 and in the United States, it can be seen that its English is pretty archaic and full of translationese.

Samuel Noah Kramer. The ‘Babel of Tongues’: a Sumerian version. Journal of the American Oriental Society 88(1968):1.108-11.

Georges Mounin. Les problèmes théoriques de la traduction. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.

Image: http://www.minacious.org

Old Translators Never Die...

2011-05-24T07:23:00.000-07:00

...they simply fade away.

There are many mentions in this blog of how young humans can be when they start to translate, but how old can they get before they lose the power? There's only been one post that suggests an answer to the latter question, the one about the Spanish lady in her seventies who spontaneously interpreted for another guest at a dinner. (To find it, enter "age limit" with the quotation marks in the Search box on the right.)

When I was in my fifties, I met a Professional Translator in Toronto who was in his eighties and still working. I expressed surprise that he'd gone on for so long. He replied, "One of the good things about translation is that you can go on doing it to an advanced age."

I've known one or two conference interpreters who were still working in their seventies, but none who was older. However, that's not necessarily an indication for written translation, because interpreting is much more high speed; and furthermore it's of the nature of a performing art with the stress that playing to a public imposes. Both the professional associations I belong to have a category for 'retired' or 'senior' members, but that doesn't tell us how many of them have stopped translating entirely. In any case, the limit for Professional Translators may not be the same as for Natural and Native Translators.

One piece of data I am sure of, though. This week I'll be 82 myself. I long ago gave up conference interpreting, but I still do some community interpreting and I translate. I have to thank many people for helping me get so far, but first of all my parents, for bequeathing me their genes and arranging for me to be born under the sign Gemini, which is an ideal sign for translators. I once read in a horoscope book that the ideal careers for Geminis included interpreter and international telephone operator, and I've been both. Of course my parents also did a lot of other things for me.

This week I'll again be interpreting for the Englishman who's stricken with dementia in a Spanish coastal resort. (For the earlier posts about him, enter Cullera in the Search box on the right). But not medical interpreting. This time I'll be a Community Native Interpreter between his wife and the local social services.

This week I'll still be translating and certifying documents for Spanish doctors who are going to work or study in Canada. This is because the Canadian medical authorities won't accept translations done by a Spanish official translator; they have to be done by a Canadian one. It's tit for tat really, because the Spanish authorities and courts will only accept translations by a Spanish sworn interpreter. This widespread international non-recognition is something the International Federation of Translators should campaign against. However, it's a turf conflict that only affects Professional Translators, so no more about it here.

Changes in Bilingualism and Translating: Japan vs. the UK

2011-05-16T03:05:00.000-07:00

Over at The Liaison Interpreter, Lionel Dersot reports as a Professional Expert Interpreter on a recent development concerning interpreters and 'facilitators' in Japanese industries.

"There are so many employees able to very well function in-house as liaison interpreters that once you get a foot inside, you understand the potential market is even thinner than your previous hypothesis. A new generation of internationally raised children of international couples have brought perfectly fluent employees who at various echelons can work without interpreting, or can help as interpreters on the spot. The few examples I see are probably of the natural interpreter types."

I would say, rather, that by this time they're probably Native Interpreters who've learnt what's required of them by seeing other interpreters at work in their industries. There's nothing new about in-house interpreters in large Japanese organisations. The first Professional Japanese Interpreter I ever met, Sen Nishiyama, 30 years ago, worked for Sony. However, Lionel is talking about "a new generation," and traces its advent back to an increase in bilingualism due to "internationally raised children of international couples." The Natural Translation Hypothesis (NTH) predicts 'the more bilingual children, the more Natural Translators'; and a corollary is that the more Natural Translators there are, the larger the pool from which exposure to more advanced translating activities can develop Native Translators. Unlike Expert Translators, whose training should make them versatile, the full translating competence of Native Translators is likely to be restricted to their own field of activity, in this case Japanese corporations. Thus, Lionel says,

"They may lack something, being insiders and part of the inner ecosystem of the corporation. They are part of the inner drama which is the unique view of the world projected from the inside by each entity. Each entity creates its own world view that shuns the possibility that there are other, viable world views."

So an increase in the bilingual population leads to an increase in the number of Native Translators, and from these the trainee Expert Interpreters can be recruited, provided the necessary training resources – courses, mentors, placements – are available. It follows that in countries where adequate training is offered, the availability of Expert Interpreters is indirectly symptomatic of the state of bilingualism.

Now let's turn the argument around and look at an area where bilingualism is decreasing. As an ardent reader of The Linguist, I see constant complaints about the decline of foreign languages in British secondary schools and universities since they ceased to be compulsory for the school leaving certificate (GCSEs). This doesn't necessarily signal an overall reduction in the number of bilinguals in the country especially since there are many members of immigrant families who speak, and speak fluently, the languages of their countries of origin as well as English. But most of the immigrant languages, from Punjabi to Jamaican, are not among those required for working in international organisations and businesses, and they are not the ones traditionally taught in UK schools.

Now then, NTH would predict negatively that 'fewer bilinguals mean fewer Natural Translators, and consequently fewer Native Translators and a smaller pool from which to train Expert Translators.' And that seems to be what's happening in the UK. Amanda Page, writing about the shortage of English literary translators, says,

"The decline in the study of languages at secondary school, coupled with the closing of many university language departments, is also having a profound effect on the profession. In the space of just 40 years, first Latin, and then many modern languages, began to be dropped from state schools. The longstanding university entrance requirement of a basic classical and a modern language ended when O-levels were replaced by GCSEs, and the situation got dramatically worse when the Government ended compulsory language learning at Key Stage 4 [in the secondary school syllabus]."

In the case of literary translators, the decline is doubly serious because the traditional secondary school language courses included a large dose of foreign literature:

"Removing literature as a necessary component of... language courses... is surely counter-intelligent... the literary translator needs a cultural understanding of the text."

I've always found it ironic that, while German bombs were raining down horror on London during the Blitz in World War II, we grammar school pupils in a London suburb were still being made to read snippets of German literature from the Minnesingers to Stefan George and Thomas Mann. But I've never regretted it, nor the French and Latin literature we tasted.

The effect just described is not, however, being felt only in the stratosphere of literature. At a more down-to-earth and better paying level, the European Commission in Brussels is now experiencing a shortage of native English Expert Translators, who are needed to maintain the standard of English required for its official publications. Rosie Morfey explains,

"The translation services are finding it difficult to recruit to recruit sufficient numbers of skilled linguists working into English. With falling numbers studying modern languages at British universities... or limiting themselves to one foreign language, there are fewer and fewer people who can offer the required range of language skills."

To sum it up, here's a derived hypothesis from NTH: more bilinguals mean more translators at all levels, and conversely more translators are symptomatic of more bilinguals. Vice versa, fewer bilinguals, etc...

Photo: "Momoko Gill, a young, Japanese-British woman who was finishing high school in Santa Barbara, California. She told me she was born in England and spent her first five years there, then ten years in Japan, before three in Santa Barbara. She grew up speaking both English and Japanese. Her eloquent articulation of interest, plus persistence, made her my eventual choice. She had no interpreting experience, but she was a serious jazz drummer and basketball player and I thought those backgrounds were good for this line of work." — Sam Stephenson. The “line of work” was conducting interviews for research on a famous photo-journalist.

References
Lionel Dersot. Liquefaction. The Liaison Interpreter, May 6, 2011.
http://japaninterpreter.blogspot.com/.

Amanda Hopkinson, Changing the page. The Linguist, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 8-9, 2010.

Rosie Morfey. Scouting for talent. The Linguist, vol. 49, no. 1, p. 24, 2010. Incidentally, Rosie herself translates at the European Commission from French, Swedish, Danish, German, Estonian and Hungarian into English.

The Linguist is the bi-monthly magazine of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, www.iol.org.uk.

Sam Stephenson. Q&A with Momoko Gill. Jazz Loft Project Blog, May 2011. http://www.jazzloftproject.org/blog/guest-bloggers/qa-with-momoko-gill.

Zubeyda, Deaf Culture and Advocacy

2011-05-06T01:39:00.000-07:00

This is a continuation of the preceding post.
A Term note has been added to the first version of the present post.

A constant theme in Zubeyda Melikyan's description of her life and work is the cultural aspect. Indeed, she starts off with a classic Sapir-Whorf or 'linguistic relativity' declaration (see References):

"My mother’s first words to me were in sign language. I have perceived the world through this language."

She goes on:

"Don’t pity me, I am a representative of a different social-cultural minority."

All her life, Zubeyda was trying to understand who she was and says she got the answers to her questions at the age of 40, in 2000, when she started participating in seminars organized by the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) held in Finland.

"I understood that I am a small cell of a 70 million society. We have our language, our culture, and our history.... My unique feature is that I am a kind of a bridge between two cultures – those who can hear and those who cannot."

She explains that deaf people are divided into several groups within their society:

"The first group is represented by deaf parents with deaf children. Here the culture and language of deaf people is preserved.

The second group is deaf children with hearing parents. These are people with low awareness level – children are treated as if they were ill. There is a huge parent-child gap and lack of understanding. [Of course, she's talking about Armenia.]

The third group is made up of deaf parents and their hearing children. I represent that third group. But we – the children of deaf parents – are always ready for an assault; we are used to being constantly misunderstood by society. We, all translators who have deaf parents, are doing our best to protect the deaf."

Thus deaf people feel that they not only have a different language, they belong to a different culture from hearing people. Of course they share much in common with the culture of the hearing society around them, because they live in the same environment. However, it's splitting hairs to argue over whether theirs is a culture or a sub-culture. The point is that they perceive themselves as having a different culture. And this perception is not confined to Armenia.

In the 1980s, I was president of an association of professional translators and interpreters in Canada, and like the other similar associations in the country, we belonged to a national umbrella organisation, the Canadian Translators and Interpreters Council (as it was called then). At that time, however, the visual language interpreters had recently (in 1979) formed their own national organisation, the Association of Visual Language Interpreters of Canada (AVLIC). So I approached some of its members with the idea that AVLIC might integrate into the national council. I was rebuffed with the comment that it would never happen, because AVLIC served the deaf and the deaf belonged to a different culture. And it never has happened.

Therefore Expert Visual Language Interpreters need a knowledge of and empathy with the local deaf culture. Most of them are drawn from the deaf community itself; but there's a small minority who've learnt Sign Language as a second language through courses, and they have to mix with and become accepted by their deaf clients.

To be concluded.

Term
The culture difference shows even in the usage of the term interpreter. For hearing people, it normally means a translator who speaks the translation. Consequently, if the interpreter doesn't do that we have to add a qualifier, such as in sign-language interpreter or visual language interpreter. But for the hard of hearing, the tables are turned. For them, an interpreter is a visual language interpreter, and then it's for us speaking interpreters that a qualifier is needed. My Canadian colleagues used to refer to us as the voice interpreters.

References
Gayane Mkrtchyan. Zubeyda: Helping others 'hear with eyes'. ArmeniaNow, 24 April 2011.
http://armenianow.com/features/2913/sign_language_translator_armenia_zubeyda_melikyan. The quotations above are from this article. The emphasis is mine.

Linguistic relativity. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-whorf.

Deaf culture. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture

Association of Visual Language Interpreters of Canada. AVLIC. http://www.avlic.ca/

Sign Language Interpreting from Natural to Expert

2011-05-02T12:26:00.000-07:00

Visual language interpreters (see Terms below) haven't been adequately represented on this blog. They've only been mentioned very occasionally, for example in connection with church interpreting. Perhaps it's because I've had little contact with them myself. I did work with some of them at conferences in Canada, but that was long ago; and I don't have any contact with the deaf community in Spain, though I see Spanish, Catalan and Valencian Sign Language interpreters on TV. So this post is intended to make partial amends. It's drawn from a report that has come unexpectedly from Armenia, and hence it involves Armenian Sign Language (see Terms below). It begins:

" 'I am Zubeyda. My parents are deaf. I was born and brought up in a family where my mother’s first words to me were in sign language. I have perceived the world through this language,' says specialist in sign language translation Zubeyda Melikyan, 53 years old, who was Armenia’s first TV sign language interpreter (see photo)."

Zubeyda was born and brought up in Gyumri, a provincial town. She had a hard childhood because of people's attitude to the deaf there, and for many years she was ashamed of her parents. But it doesn't seem to have hindered her language development.

"'In fact, I have been doing sign language translation since I was two,' Zubeyda says."

This is the Natural Translation stage. Two may seem very young, but we should bear in mind that

a) She doesn't say precisely when. Two years exactly? Two years and nine months? At that age, a few months make a big difference.

b) She doesn't say what she was translating. At age 2, most children are still talking at the level of 'single word sentences'. We know from the literature that other children have been observed doing that kind of translation at that age.

A little later on (age not stated), circumstances made her a Language Broker. We can deduce it because she tells how she used to accompany her mother to market, so she must have helped her mother by interpreting.

Furthermore, we can deduce that at latest once she went to school she became to some degree tri-lingual. This because, in her time, Armenia was part of the Soviet Union and therefore Russian was compulsory in all schools.

She must have had a good secondary school education, because she went on to graduate from the local Teacher Training College. By that time, her education would certainly have made of her a Native Translator. From there she became Professional:

"I wanted to continue my education, but deaf people immediately took me to work as their translator."

Thus, she developed into an Expert Translator:

"Zubeyda was the first public sign language translator in Armenia. She appeared on the air of H1 (Armenian Public Television), A1Plus, H2 TV channels. In 1990 Zubeyda started working at the educational center for children with hearing impairment as a tutor, and from 2000 as a teacher of sign language. She has published books for deaf children to study sign language, and they are now used in the educational center."

Among her many activities, she has done church interpreting.

"Zubeyda says the Lord’s Prayer in sign language. She has also translated a holy mass. Clergyman of Holy Trinity Church in Yerevan Ter Yesayi Artenyan supported her to write the dictionary of religious sign language."

To be continued.

Terms
Visual language interpreter. A cover term that's needed because there are several other forms of communication between deaf and hearing people besides sign language, the best known being lip-reading, and there are interpreters for all of them. More perhaps some other time.

Armenian Sign Language. There's a popular misconception that Sign Language for the deaf is the same everywhere. Far from it: almost every country has its own, and sometimes even internal regions do. Armenian Sign Language is the indigenous sign language of Armenia. It's not related to the sign languages of Europe; it's what linguists call an isolate.

Natural, Native, Expert and Professional Translator. For definitions of these terms within a developmental model, see the post of November 12, 2010, which you can find quickly by entering "essential definitions" (with the quotation marks) in the Search box on the right

References
Gayane Mkrtchyan. Zubeyda: Helping others 'hear with eyes'. ArmeniaNow, 24 April 2011.
http://armenianow.com/features/29131/
sign_language_translator_armenia_zubeyda_melikyan.

Armenian Sign Language. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Sign_Language.

On very young interpreters, see Brian Harris and Bianca Sherwood, Translating as an innate skill, in D. Gerver and W. H. Sinaiko (eds.), Language Interpretation and Communication, Oxford and New York, Plenum, 1978, pp. 155-170. The book is out of print, but a digitised copy of the paper is available free from translatology@yahoo.com.

On church interpreting, see the previous posts by entering "church interpreters" (with the quotation marks) in the Search box on the right.

Image: Photo by Nazik Armenakyan for ArmeniaNow.

Alexia Sloane

2011-04-24T08:20:00.001-07:00

Tolken, of the blog In My Words (see sidebar), led me to Alexia's story.

Alexia is a 10-year-old English girl who lives with her family in Cambridge, UK. What has made her life special is that she went blind at the age of two. Courageous and undaunted, she has pressed ahead with her education, and one of her talents is for languages.

Her story has been widely reported in the press and by the BBC since she won an award as a Young Achiever. Because she has long wanted to be an interpreter, she chose as her prize a trip to Brussels, where she was allowed to shadow a European Commission interpreter for a day and even do a few minutes of interpreting herself. For more details of the trip, see References below for the website that her family maintains for her. I just want to add a few remarks from the viewpoint of this blog.

* All the reports give prominence to the fact that Alexia has passed the GCSE in French and Spanish with high marks. The GCSE is a secondary school finishing examination in England, so it means she has achieved at age 10 what is considered an achievement for most adolescents at age 16.

The academic achievement might lead one to think that she learnt French and Spanish at school, but there's more to it. Her mother is a native speaker of French and Spanish, and she informs us: "I am very lucky because my Mum is half French and half Spanish and she has spoken to me all my life in these two languages." She doesn't say whether she speaks back to her mother in those languages, but I think we have enough to declare Alexia an early trilingual. (The general term bilingual obscures the fact that many children know more languages than two.)

* We don't have actual video or transcripts of Alexia's interpreting, but it's clear she's well beyond the stage of Natural Translation and must be classed as a Native Translator. Her knowledge of what interpreting is shows she already has metalinguistic awareness of translation. Her father remarks that she was stuck for some of the vocabulary in the actual interpreting she did in Brussels, but she was listening to discourse of a level that is usually fed to Expert Interpreters and she didn't have time to prepare for it.

* It's difficult to tell what Alexia's level of self-expression is from her blog, because the writing of the posts is attributed to her elder brother or her father even when the first person is used. However, we have videos, and there she expresses herself very clearly for a child of her age. She writes poetry. There's no doubt about her general cognitive ability.

* Among her linguistic abilities, Alexia knows Braille fluently. "For me, the alphabet I read and write with is a golden light of success," she says. Last year, she won the Onkyo International Braille writing competition, and she has also won a national Braille Music award

Whether Braille is itself a 'language' or is a code for relaying languages (like Morse Code, for instance) is debatable, because skilled Braille readers use Grade 2 Braille, which speeds up reading by incorporating many contractions, and these have to be learnt.

"As with most human linguistic activities, Grade 2 Braille embodies a complex system of customs, styles, and practices. The Library of Congress's Instruction Manual for Braille Transcribing runs to nearly 200 pages."

.Anyway it's tactile, so it requires a different sensory perception. English - Braille - Grade 2 Braille: yet another form of bilingualism.
.
* Alexia likes music. She plays the piano and the recorder and sings in choirs, another of her accomplishments. She's not only a Native Translator, she's a Native or Expert Musician. Music is yet another quasi-universal natural ability that becomes specialised and socialised into diverse 'languages' in different community cultures. Is there any connection or correlation between musical ability and interpreting ability? Pure speculation, but worth looking into.

* A person's microphone voice never sounds quite like that person's voice heard directly. From videos of her, we can tell that Alexia has a very clear microphone voice and impeccable Standard British English pronunciation. The former is an advantage for any conference interpreter, while the latter is a desirable attribute for a working professionally in Europe.

* Can a blind person work and succeed as a Professional Conference Interpreter? In fact Alexia met two blind interpreters in Brussels. There is (or was) a blind interpreter in the Canadian parliament, and although I never worked with him I heard about him from colleagues. They told me he could indeed function in that context, but he needed assistance. It wasn't because of his translating ability, but because of something that few outsiders know about conference interpreting. Much of the input doesn't come only by listening to the speakers but from written documents that the interpreters have in front of them. More about this some other time, but in brief the interpreters have to listen, translate and read at the same time, using two input channels. At the extreme, the interpreters may even be provided with a previously prepared translation to read from, yet they still have to listen to the speakers in order to synchronise with them. It's called sight interpretation (by analogy with sight translation – see Terms below). In addition, there's the matter of all the background documentation that interpreters should skim through in preparation for a meeting.

Anyway, Alexia's motto is "Anything's possible," so if she wants to be an interpreter she will be.

Terms
Shadowing: repeating what a speaker (or, in Alexia's case, an interpreter) is saying without translating it. An excellent exercise for improving second-language pronunciation and intonation.

Sight translation: translating a written text orally. So it's a hybrid of written translation and interpreting. Faster and more economical than writing the translation. It's more widespread than people realise, much of it in the form of dictated translation, in which a Professional Translator dictates into a recorder for transcription by a secretary or, nowadays, into a computer equipped with speech recognition software.

References
Alexia Sloane. Blog. http://alexiasloane.wordpress.com/. It has links to other material about her.

Braille. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille.

Fansubbing Song Lyric Translations

2011-04-14T06:01:00.001-07:00

It was Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva of the University of Edinburgh, an authority on music and translation, who first aroused my awareness of fans translating popular song lyrics. She asked me if I had any information about it; to see the posts, enter sebnem in the Search box to the right. That was back in 2009, and I had nothing to offer her. Since then, however, translation crowdsourcing has expanded greatly and has become a significant method of translating for the public, along with professional translation, machine translation, etc.

So the other day, I came across just the kind of thing Şebnem was looking for. It's the web platform Lyrics Translate. It offers "42,849 lyrics translations in 63 languages". (There are some surprises among the languages, like Scots.) It has sections for "Request new lyrics translation" and "Translation help needed." In this last it issues an invitation: "Become a translator, help others, get respect and gratitude." So this is not for professionals per se: the reward is kudos, not money. Obviously it's fansubbing, and all bilinguals are welcome to try.

Taking a quick look at some of the products, my impression is that these are translations that give the meaning of the original words and hence are helps to understanding, not adaptations that would fit the music and be singable. Two different purposes. Here's a sample. It's from Edith Piaf's Padam Padam.

Cet air qui m'obsède jour et nuit
Cet air n'est pas né d'aujourd'hui
Il vient d'aussi loin que je viens
Traîné par cent mille musiciens

This tune which haunts me day and night
This tune wasn't written today
It comes from as far away as I come
Trawled around by a hundred thousand musicians

Apart from the lyrics themselves, this website offers something that's particularly valuable for research, namely a brief 'Profile' of many of the translators. Some of them actually are Professional Translators – taking time off to do translate something more amusing than their daily fare, I suppose. For example, 'melaron90', who's in her second year as a Linguist in the United States Marine Corps, whose native language is English, who's fluent in Russian and Spanish and has also studied Arabic, German, Italian and Japanese.

The Profiles have a classification into several levels. However, the levels seem to be based on the number of translations submitted, not their quality or the qualifications of the translators. The highest category – and by implication, I assume, the most experienced – is Translation Deity. After that, in descending order, come Senior Translator, Translator, Junior Translator and Novice.

I'm particularly interested in the category Junior Translator, which seems to be used often for translation students. For example, 'Chantrisse' from Northern Spain, whose real name is Silvia Sánchez López and who's a translation student at the provincial town of Soria, where there's a university school of translators that I happen to have visited. Translation school students form a transitional category of translators, more savvy than Native but not yet Expert.

The provenance of the translators is as wide as their backgrounds. To take a random couple of examples, there's 'jumpiol', real name Omar Pinto, a Senior Translator who's a software engineer in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Northwest Mexico and is fluent in Spanish, French, Italian and Russian. Or ‘rakiuzo’, real name Hüseyin Avni Dağlı, a Translation Deity, who translates from Russian to his native Turkish.

They may be 'hobby translations', but for some it's a serious hobby. 'Birdman', who did the Padam Padam translation above, has posted translations of 20 songs and that's typical. Yet it's nothing compared with 'Lady_A' from Bucharest, whose main occupation is financial specialist and who's done 580 translations. So it’s not surprising that her category is Translation Deity.

There seems to be a great deal of data to be mined in the Profiles by a researcher who has the time to do it.

References
Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva (ed.). Translation and Music. Special issue of The Translator, vol. 14, no. 2, 2008.

Lyrics Translate. http://www.lyricstranslate.com.

Silvia Sánchez López. Chantrisse!... she says I began to sing long before I could talk.... http://chantrisse.blogspot.com.

Image: Photo of Edith Piaf from Lyrics Translate.

Term
Hobby translation. This is a manifestation of something I've called attention to several times on this blog, namely translating just for the pleasure of doing so (enter pleasure in the Search box). In the case of child Natural Translators, we called it ludic translation. However, it's worth a term of its own, and this one can be used for adults and Experts.

High School Translators

2011-04-09T04:27:00.000-07:00

From the American Midwest comes an encouraging story of 'real world' translating done by Native Translator high school students. The school is Hudson High School at Hudson, Ohio (see photo). It dates from 1885. It teaches grades 9 to 12 and it teaches Spanish.

A group of the fourth-year Spanish students are applying what they have learned in order to help a good cause. They translate letters sent from foster children in Zaragoza, El Salvador.

In the spring and fall, the COAR Peace Mission in Wickliffe, Ohio, receives about 700 letters from foster care children at the COAR Children's Village in El Salvador, according to Mary Stevenson, executive director of the Mission. "The letters are written in Spanish and must be translated before we can send them on to the sponsors," Stevenson explained. "Sponsors are located throughout the U.S., Canada, Australia, Ireland and England."

Stevenson has translators from about 12 schools in Ohio. Hudson is just one of them.
"Hudson students regularly complete 100 letters, fast and accurately," Stevenson said. "That is not easy when you consider many of our foster children are very young and make spelling and grammar mistakes."

"The children of COAR write about games, school activities and holidays, which forces the HHS students to dig deep for cultural information and vocabulary," she said. "I also know that if we get caught short, if 50 or 100 letters come to us late in the season, it is Hudson we go to first to help us out of the jam. They always come through. If it weren't for the high school translators, I'm not sure we could run this program so well."

Students find the work both educational and fun, according to David Nelson, a Hudson junior. "It is a fun activity for our Spanish 4 class but it also makes you feel good knowing that you are helping people," David said. "I also enjoy translating the letters because it gives me a real life scenario where I get to use the Spanish I have learned over the past four years."

Translating the letters in class is sometimes difficult, but always rewarding, according to junior Sara Crane. Helping also leaves the students with a good feeling, knowing the children "sincerely appreciate our help," said junior Megan Bisbee. "Our help makes it possible for the sponsors to communicate with the children they support," she said.

According to Dr Rebecca Wiehe, another HHS Spanish teacher, "They really love it. Through the project, the students get to read real Spanish instead of 'textbook Spanish'."

"Students also learn that translation is not just looking up words, it is about meaning," said Martha Pero, HHS Spanish teacher and world language department head. "They spend time making the sentences sound correct in English instead of giving the literal meaning,"

This last remark confirms that a minimal amount of translation instruction is given and that these are Native Translators, though I would dispute that Natural Translators translate word for word and not for meaning.

"The students also learn about the culture of the children, many of whom are without parents or family," Pero added. "The grades and grade levels are much different than ours. They learn that the Catholic influence is prevalent in their writing. There are many references to God."

There are a number of admirable things about this project. The teachers at HHS are to be congratulated for having confidence in their students' translating ability and for hitting on texts that match it both as regards their level of Spanish and their knowledge of the world. The students benefit by extending their knowledge in both respects. Furthermore, they enjoy translating because working for the NGO not only helps a good cause, it provides that essential ingredient of language learning: motivation.

References
Tim Troglen. Gained in translation: students translate letters from El Salvador. Hudsonhubtimes.com, April 3, 2011. http://www.hudsonhubtimes.com/news/article/5009182.

Hudson High School (Hudson, Ohio). Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_High_School_(Hudson,_Ohio).

COAR Peace Mission. http://coarpeacemission.org.

Speak in Spanish, Think in English

2011-04-03T12:14:00.000-07:00

I'm used to researchers on bilingualism wearing blinkers and ignoring translation. Even so, when I saw the title of a new book, Bilingual Youth: Spanish in English-speaking Societies, and what's more edited by two Americans, I had hope that it would at least mention the well-documented phenomenon of language brokering, which, in the United States, typically takes place between Spanish-speaking children and adolescents and the English-speaking society surrounding their immigrant families. (For more about it on this blog, enter brokering in the Search box at the top of the right-hand column.)

Not so. Neither translation nor language brokering figures in the quite thorough index. Even Guadalupe Valdés (see photo), who has elsewhere edited a book on language brokering (see References), and whose family casebook study of bilingual language acquisition in the present volume makes a very interesting story, doesn't mention them.

Disappointing, to say the least.

On the other hand, Valdés reproduces some of her raw data in the form of transcriptions of conversations between her (I) and one of her subjects, Marisa (M), a latina American child who was about 10 years old. There I found the following nugget:

I: eres tú eres bilingüe, te sientes tú que eres bilingüe?
M: no completamente.
I: no completamente, qué sería ser completamente bilingüe?
M: ah no... sí hablo en español pero no pienso en español, pienso en inglés.
I: ah::
M: y si podiera pensar en español e inglés, podía ser bilingüe.

[Are you bilingual? Do you feel you're bilingual?
Not completely.
Not completely. What would it be like to be completely bilingual?
I do speak in Spanish, but I don't think in Spanish. I think in English.
Ah!
And if only I could think in Spanish, I could be bilingual.]

What does it mean, to speak in one language but to think in another? I can conceive of two primary explanations. The first is to compose the message in language A, silently and to oneself, and then translate it to language B for utterance. A common process that usually causes some 'interference'. The second is to speak in language B but to think in a way that is typical of members of the speech community of language A. Probably Marisa meant the latter. It's not what is usually meant by translation, but a reader's letter in the current issue of The Linguist calls it cultural translation and gives amusing examples (see References).

There are also possible combinations and amalgams of the two processes, linguistic and cultural. Linguists have long discussed whether our languages affect the way we perceive the world, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis of linguistic relativity.

In any case, 10-year-old Marisa's interesting definition of complete bilingualism exhibits a high degree of metalinguistic awareness.

References
Kim Potowski and Jason Rothman (eds.) Bilingual Youth: Spanish in English-Speaking Societies. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2010. Benjamins has generously made most of it available through Google Books at http://books.google.com.

Guadalupe Valdés. Ethnolinguistic identity: the challenge of maintaining Spanish-English bilingualism in American schools. In the above Potowski and Rothman book, pp. 113-148.

Guadalupe Valdés (ed.). Expanding Definitions of Giftedness: The Case of Young Interpreters from Immigrant Communities. Mahwah NJ: Laurence Erlbaum. 2003.

Michael Mould. En route to cultural translation. The Linguist (CIOL, London), April/May 2011, p.26.

Linguistic relativity. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_Hypothesis,

Term
Metalinguistic awareness: conscious awareness of language processes, especially the ones going on in our own minds.

Image: stanford.edu

Footnotes for UK Followers

2011-04-02T07:12:00.001-07:00

Note-Taking
Re my recent post about note-taking by Advanced Native and Expert Interpreters...

The Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL), in London, runs one-day courses for "interpreters and those interested in interpreting."

The course this month, April, will be an Introduction to Note-taking for Public Service Interpreters. For more information, email training@iol.org.uk or phone 0207-940-3169.

Is Crowd Sourcing Awakening Academia?
As Followers should be aware from earlier posts, crowd sourcing is changing the seascape of Advanced Native translation. Now the rising tide is even lapping against the walls of academic translation studies and one of its bastions, the University of Manchester. Well, almost. On Saturday 21 May, from midday to 2.30 pm, Dr Luis Pérez-Gonzáles, Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at said university, will give a talk that "will focus on amateur translation" (his term for it – fair enough.) It has the very academic-sounding title Emerging Forms of Mediation and Intervention in the Audiovisual Marketplace.

However, the talk won't be at the university itself but to the North West Society of the CIOL and at the Manchester Youth Hostel Association (YHA) building. "Contact the Society for further details."

Incidentally, have you noticed how many academic writers in English on translation studies have Spanish names these days? TS is a hot subject in Spanish universities, a bandwagon for the old Depatments of Philology.

Reference
The Linguist, London: CIOL, April/May 2011

Memory and Note-Taking (continued)

2011-03-27T12:09:00.000-07:00

Natural Interpreters don't take notes. Indeed many of them, being young children, can't write or read yet. This limits the chunks of speech they can translate at a time to a sentence or two. At least as a rule; in a later post I'll mention an intriguing exception.

Native Interpreters may know to take notes and how to do it. If they know how, it's because they carry the skill over from some other educational or work activity.

The first time I had to do long consecutive, it was for an after-dinner speech of thanks at a banquet and I hadn't been trained for it nor even forewarned. Nonetheless, I didn't trust my memory and I took the precaution of finding a blank page in the programme and borrowing a pen from another guest. Why did I know to take notes and how did I know how to do it? Undoubtedly from years of taking notes in class and at lectures, and from recording proceedings in order to write the minutes of meetings. Thus I knew to pick out the key ideas in the message and to record them in a mixture of ordinary longhand and abbreviations – a by-product of education that has proven useful to me on several occasions. But I lost a lot of the detail – it was a ten-minute speech and the programme page wouldn't have held more than I wrote – and so I had to fill in with what Expert Interpreters call winging it. Still, since the speech was just polite rhetoric, I got by.

For Expert Interpreters, it's a more highly developed skill, and it's taught as a subject in 'classic' interpreter training programmes. First, students are told not to try to record in shorthand. Taking shorthand fast enough – up to 150 words a minute – and furthermore reading it back fluently, is a trained skill in itself. Instead they are taught to use a 'concept notation' of graphic symbols, 'speedwriting' and spacing, in which a given concept is always represented by the same symbol or abbreviation whatever wording has been used to express it. The layout of the notes on the page is also meaningful. With the classic training goes a classic manual from the days when consecutive was the standard mode of conference interpreting: it's the one by Rozan (see References). Nobody I worked with used Rozan exactly as is, but students can extract from it and substitute whatever symbols of their own they feel comfortable with. What's essential is the principle of noting concepts and not words. Nor need the notes be complete; they're only a prop and a stimulus for the memory, and it may be that the interpreters themselves can't reconstitute the speech after a lapse of time. There's a famous research thesis by Seleskovitch based on conference interpreters' recall from their notes (see References).

For expert notetaking, it's important that the notepad be of the type used by reporters and shorthand secretaries, easily held in one hand or perched on one knee, with pages that can be flipped over quickly, and that it have a hard back.

Finally, there's one additional skill that's often overlooked in the training programmes. It's the ability to take notes and translate from them standing up and 'on the trot' instead of sitting comfortably in a classroom or a booth.

References
Jean-François Rozan. Note-taking in Consecutive Interpreting. Krakow: Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies, 2005. Translated by Andrew Gillies from the French La prise de notes en interprétation consécutive, 1956. There are other systems, and there's a whole literature on this topic.

Danica Seleskovitch. Langage, langues et mémoire; étude de la prise de notes en interprétation consécutive. Paris: Minard, 1975. For more on the author, enter Seleskovitch in the Search box at the top of the right-hand column.

Term
Winging it. In interpreter's jargon, it means filling in for something that wasn't heard or wasn't understood, or that the interpreter has forgotten or simply can't translate. To be successful, i.e., to go undetected, it must be something that the speaker might have said. More about it some other time.

Image: Interpreter Training Resources, "the only dedicated site for students of conference interpreting". http://interpreters.free.fr/.

Bible Translator Killed in Jerusalem

2011-03-26T02:04:00.000-07:00

You may have seen that the Englishwoman, Mary Gardner (see photo), who was killed in the Jerusalem bus bomb blast this week, was a Bible translator. She was a humble working member of the Wycliffe Bible Translators network, one of the biggest translation organisations in the world. For more about them in previous posts, enter Wycliffe in the Search box at the head of the right-hand column.

It was a tragic case of being in the wrong place, for she was far from her usual habitat, Togo in West Africa. There she had translated the New Testament into the local Ifé language.

She hadn't gone to Jerusalem just to visit the Holy Land, though a firsthand acquaintance with Palestine is certainly useful background material for a Bible translator. Bible translators need to be Expert Translators. The Wycliffe translators usually arrive on the job as Native Translators who are well acquainted with the model of religious translation that the Bible provides in English but have some gaps in their training to fill in. In Mary's case, she'd gone to Jerusalem, like St Jerome many centuries earlier, to learn Hebrew in preparation for translating the Old Testament.

Requiescat in pace.

References
Conal Urquhart and Caroline Davies. Jerusalem bomb victim was British bible translator studying Hebrew. Guardian Unlimited, March 24, 2011.

Image: Wycliffe Bible Translators.

Memory and Note-Taking

2011-03-22T03:15:00.001-07:00

The annual Valencian Falles festival (in Spanish, Fallas) ended at Saturday midnight in its traditional apotheosis of fire, fireworks and thunderclaps. The biggest thunderclaps had roared all week like artillery barrages. It's a peculiarity of the Valencians that they're brought up to take childish delight in loud noise. The minority who can't take it flee the city for the week. But now calm is restored and it's possible to think again.

On March 7, I posted about how important good ambient and working conditions are for effective interpreting. Unforeseen, the March 17 post relayed Lionel Dersot's experience interpreting at Sendai under very poor conditions. One remark of Lionel's in particular struck a professional chord:

“There is no note, no note taking, in windy, at times snowing environment, forget everything about note taking.”

Expert Interpreters will have immediately recognised the significance of that.

All interpreting requires short-term memory in order for the interpreter to keep in mind what the speaker has just said. For simultaneous interpreting, which is never really quite simultaneous, it's a matter of up to three seconds. Short consecutive interpreting needs longer, depending on the span of the ‘chunks’ into which the original is segmented. Long (or full) consecutive may require a much longer memory span, commonly three to five minutes but up to half an hour or more in extreme cases.

Individuals vary greatly as to the memory retention they’re capable of. There are tales of legendary interpreter prodigies like the Kaminker brothers, who were interpreters at the League of Nations and later the United Nations and the Council of Europe:

“The end of the era of the consecutive system in the United Nations had its glorious moment. The noted Latin-American statesman and orator, Señor Fernando Belaúnde of Peru made at the General Assembly a long political speech in Spanish which was translated into French by one of the famous brothers [Georges and André] Kaminker. M. Kaminker reproduced every significant phrase, every telling pause, every emotional tone and even every dramatic gesture, and, having used no notes at all, sat down amid a thunder of applause."

Indeed André Kaminker had eidetic (photographic) memory. He was undoubtedly helped by the fact that long consecutive was the standard method used in conference interpreting in his time, and so his generation got a lot of practice at it (see Image below).

Interpreters who are mere ordinary mortals, however, need help to remember speech accurately for more than a few seconds, which is the 'natural' span. That help takes the form of the notes they take as they listen. They may even need notes for short consecutive, especially for details like names and numbers. I’ve several times witnessed Native Court Interpreters come a cropper over names, times, etc., because they hadn’t learnt to take notes. Interpretation school programmes usually include a module, sometimes a whole course, on note-taking; and students are taught to bring a suitable notepad with them to their assignments. Taking away consecutive interpreters’ notes is like kicking out a crutch from under them: they stumble. But it can happen, as we have seen, so the Expert Interpreter ought to cultivate memory and never rely entirely on note-taking. As Lionel puts it: ”But there is mind note taking for sure. How to take notes with fingers, a future book.”

To be continued.

References
Falles. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falles.

Jesús Baigorri-Jalón. Interpreters at the United Nations: a History. Translated from Spanish by Ann Barr. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad, 2004. See pp. 46 ff. for a biography of André Kaminker. Available on Google Books.

The description of André Kaminker’s feat at the United Nations comes from Lord Gore-Booth’s introduction to Satow's Guide to Diplomatic Practice, 5th edn., London, Longman, 1979.

Image: André Kaminker at work in Paris in 1949. He's the man in the light suit at the far right of the table listening intently to the speaker in the middle. Photo by Nat Farbman for Time, Inc.

Interpreting at Sendai

2011-03-17T06:05:00.000-07:00

For more on the Japan disaster through an interpreter who knows the country and its culture intimately, go fast to today's post on Lionel Dersot's blog The Liaison Interpreter. It's an illuminating and corrective first-hand description of interpreting performed by an Expert and by probably Native Interpreters (one of them a lawyer) on the spot in Sendai. It's in English, and there's a direct link to it at Liaison Interpreting in Japan in the column to the right.

I refrain from posting an image of flattened Sendai. Alas, you’ve probably seen enough of them.

In Memoriam Wallace Lambert

2011-03-17T05:27:00.000-07:00

Today and tomorrow, March 17-18, a symposium is being held in Montreal to commemorate the work of Wallace Lambert. The programme is available at acpi.ca/documents/5077_AEC_programme_an_V5.pdf.

He was the McGill University psychology professor whose research helped to dispel the fear, predominant in Canada at the time, that early bilingual education would slow down children's linguistic and other cognitive development. He and his colleagues showed quite the contrary. That made him early on receptive to the idea that children could translate.

A brief tribute to him was posted on this blog shortly after his death in 2009. You can retrieve it by entering Lambert in the Search box to the right.

Blogging from Japan

2011-03-14T04:27:00.000-07:00

I was thinking of something for this blog when the news of the Japanese earthquake started to come in and absorbed all. The news – a lot of it in translation of course: Japanese TV feeds and press conferences with text in Japanese and English voiceovers (we were watching CNN). Then the tsunami – a Japanese word (literally harbour wave) that has been adopted into English. And now the nuclear 'incidents'.

Like those of many other translation blogophiles, my thoughts turned to Lionel Dersot, our 'window on Japan' and author of the blog Liaison Interpreter (there's a link to it in the right-hand column). That blog gives little information beyond reassuring us that he's alive and ready for work despite the fact that

"all work has vanished or is about to thin out in the atmosphere like a deadly cloud. The only possible work so far is to accompany foreign TV crews. They want to go North. They are scrambling to find 'language helpers'. Some dare ask for interpreters."

However, he also posts a blog in French, Tokyo: Journal de résidence au Japon, which is more descriptive (the English translation is mine):

"The shock was fluid. I was at the post office in south Mita, having left some clients just five minutes earlier. The second shock, which came when I was on Hibiya Avenue itself, was no less scary, like being on a moving pavement. Many people were looking in great alarm towards the glassy Sumitomo building [see photo], which was twisting and reflecting another building that was doing the same thing. Buildings that reflect are nightmares."

Tokyo, nevertheless, has thankfully emerged unscathed:

"Outside the hardest-hit regions, Japan is funtioning or will soon be functioning again... The sound of the delivery boy pushing the morning newspaper through the letter box is a sign that services are normal."

Meanwhile, the members of a professional network, Freelance France Japon, are offering their services on a voluntary basis for people who are experiencing communication problems.

Thank you, Lionel, for keeping us posted.

References
Lionel Dersot. The Liaison Interpreter. http://japaninterpreter.blogspot.com/.

Lionel Dersot. Tokyo: journal de résidence au Japon. http://tokyo.blog.lemonde.

Image: scmp.com

The Importance of Performance Conditions

2011-03-07T09:46:00.000-08:00

The International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) runs a well-maintained website, but its content is produced by and addressed to Expert Interpreters, so it's usually outside the scope of this blog. However, there’s a report currently posted there that has an implication for all interpreting.

Successful communication depends primarily, of course, on the ability of the interpreters. Nevertheless, it also depends heavily on the conditions under which the interpreting is done. In the case of consecutive and sign language interpreting, for example, the interpreters must be placed where they can hear and see the speakers clearly and where the audience can hear and see them, otherwise it's a waste of time and talent. For simultaneous interpretation, the audio equipment must be of top quality.

If conditions are poor, the effect will be at the very least more stress on the interpreters, and inconvenience for the listeners. In posts about the Shafia hearing in Canada last year [you can find them by entering shafia in the Search box at top right], I quoted a crime reporter's description: "A sound-deadening booth that was dubbed the garden shed by lawyers was erected near the prisoner's box..." In other words, a temporary booth of a kind that is 'sound-deadening' but not soundproof; so that the interpreter's voice can be heard by people nearby, which is distracting for them. At the extreme, the conditions may render interpreting impossible.

The report I'm quoting now is of a far more VHP (Very High Profile) trial, with the presence of foreign as well as domestic press. Indeed the crime that gave rise to it was so high profile that its repercussions brought down the Spanish government.

"On 11th March 2004, bombs which had been placed on commuter trains in Madrid exploded during the morning rush hour, killing 191 and wounding over 1500 people in what was one of the worst terrorist attacks ever to be perpetrated in Europe. The attacks were attributed to Islamic extremists, arrests were made and the trial took place from February to June 2007. Given that many of the 29 defendants and some of the 650 witnesses were native speakers of Arabic and Berber with a limited or no command of Spanish, interpreting was required throughout the proceedings."

Due care was taken in selecting and preparing the interpreters:

"A top Foreign Affairs Ministry interpreter was commissioned to put together the interpreting team... The interpreting team was prepared months beforehand and utmost care was taken to ensure that the interpreters working at this high profile mega-trial were experienced, trained, professional conference interpreters with knowledge of the different dialectal variations of Arabic and Berber spoken by the defendants and witnesses."

In this last respect, those responsible had done better than at the Shafia hearing, where insufficient attention was paid to the difference between dialects of Farsi.

Conference interpreters were called on in Madrid instead of regular court interpreters because court interpretation in Spain (as elsewhere) is normally done in consecutive mode, whereas on this occasion a decision had been taken to use simultaneous interpreting, to which conference interpreters are accustomed.

But there's the rub. The interpreters were used to simultaneous interpreting; not, however, the court administration, who were ignorant of the technical conditions needed for it. Chaos ensued.

"From the first day, problems became evident. Although great financial investment had been made in equipment for simultaneous interpreting, headphones had only been purchased for the non-Spanish speaking defendants, enabling them to follow the interpreting into Arabic. The interpretation of their testimony into Spanish for the court was broadcast through loudspeakers in the courtroom. The disadvantage of this system was that the interpreters not only heard the voice of the defendants and witnesses that they had to translate, but they also heard their own interpretation through the loudspeakers in the courtroom which was picked up by defendants’/witnesses’ microphone and fed back into their headphones.
Obviously such a system is totally inadequate and extremely off-putting for the interpreters, making their already difficult task almost impossible. One may wonder why indeed they carried on and did not stop the proceedings until the sound problems had been resolved. This possibility was indeed discussed but ruled out at the time, given the tremendous expectation surrounding the trial, particularly on the first day of the hearings. There was an atmosphere of great tension as all public attention in Spain and indeed in many other countries was focused on this trial, with the presence of more than 400 journalists from all over the world, live television coverage and webcast, the presence of victims and their families and over 50 lawyers. The interpreters decided to carry on, adapting their technique by lengthening the time lag between what they heard in Arabic and their rendering in Spanish, which meant that they were not, strictly speaking, interpreting in the simultaneous mode.
By the afternoon, tension was running high and the presiding judge began to make critical comments about the interpreters: 'The interpreters are not having a very good afternoon'… 'I want simultaneous interpreting, not successive [sic] interpreting'. He finally suspended the hearing, demanding to see the interpreters immediately in his office. These scenes were broadcast live on Spanish television and gave interpreting a very visible profile from day one of the trial, although, unfortunately for our profession, the judge’s disparaging comments and unjustified criticism of their performance did not portray the interpreters’ work in a very favourable light.
Like the judge, the general public is not familiar with the technical requirements for simultaneous interpreting and was unaware of the extremely difficult working conditions the interpreters had found themselves in. These sound problems were partially solved as a result of the meeting between the interpreters and the judge, and the latter subsequently apologized for his comments and grew to greatly appreciate the work done by the interpreters. This evolution, however, was unbeknown to the general public and the media, whose opinion remained coloured by the public comments made on that first day in court. It is interesting to note that AIIC was among the professional organizations and colleagues who publicly spoke out in defence of the interpreters in the media."

Poor conditions had not rendered interpretation completely impossible, but had come very close to it. In this instance, the interpreters were Expert Interpreters and the context was VHP. In true Natural Translation, the conditions may be uncontrollable because the translation occurs spontaneously. However, in all the more sophisticated forms of interpreting, the principle of providing adequate conditions cannot be ignored without penalty. I hear there's a new European Union code of court interpretation in the works. Hopefully it'll have a section on technical and working conditions.

Reference
Anne Martin and Juan Miguel Ortega Herráez. Nuremberg in Madrid: The Role of Interpreting in the Madrid Train Bomb Trial. AIIC, Winter 2011. http://www.aiic.net/ViewPage.cfm/article2629.htm.

Photo: tomdiaz.wordpress.com

The Grey Market

2011-03-02T16:01:00.001-08:00

In my last post I said I'd write something about the grey market in conference interpreting (CI), because it attracts and provides work for Native Interpreters. Let's start at the beginning.

I began in CI in Canada in 1970. By that time , almost all of it was being done in simultaneous interpreting (SI). I'd had some experience at consecutive interpreting and I'd heard some SI, but I'd never done it. Nevertheless, I approached a reputable translation agency in Montreal and asked them to give me a chance. They put me in an SI booth and played me a 15-minute tape as a test. It was such an ordeal that I still remember what the speech was about. They knew at once that I was inexperienced – I was 'jerky', as they put it – but they happened to need an interpreter so badly that they gave me an assignment. It was really not a job for a beginner: a three-day university conference on the History of Music. Fortunately I had a week to prepare.

At the conference, I fell in with a highly qualified and experienced Expert Interpreter. Her principal qualification was that she had been admitted as a Member to the Geneva-based International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC for short, from its name in French). She was a Senior Interpreter who organised teams, and a talent spotter. I must have acquitted myself quite well, because she straight away offered me more work. I continued to work with her and for her for nearly 20 years. (I retired from CI in 1989 because of ill health.)

Now I come to the commercial side of it. The Montreal agency paid me 80 Canadian dollars a day, knowing that with my lack of experience I would be happy to earn it (remember those were 1970 dollars); the AIIC lady offered me three times that rate, the same rate as she offered to all the members of her teams. (It was AIIC policy that all the members of a team be paid the same.)

Thus, at the very start, I experienced two freelance CI markets. One was the upscale Expert Interpreter market. I call it the AIIC market, because in those days AIIC fixed the rates for it and was capable of blackballing interpreters who didn't respect them. It was a price maintenance practice that has since been made illegal in Canada and the European Union by competition legislation, though there continue to be other factors that keep the rates high. The other was a market that admitted unqualified and less experienced interpreters and paid them roughly half the AIIC rate: the grey market, as the AIIC interpreters called it. Nevertheless, having worked in both, I can say that there were some very competent interpreters on the grey market, and if they weren't at least minimally capable they didn't last long. They included many part-timers; and even Expert Interpreters when they couldn't find enough work at their own level.

In my view the grey market was bound to exist because of the high cost of Expert Interpreters and because there was at times a shortage of them. When I retired in 1989, the Expert Interpreters were already charging $600 a day. Furthermore, the AIIC working guidelines required two, and in Canada even three, interpreters for each team (each booth, in professional jargon), with a booth for each language involved. Work it out for a meeting with, say, three languages. And that's not counting the cost of the equipment and technicians needed for SI. Large meetings, governments and rich organisations could bear it; however, there were many small, cash-strapped organisations that couldn't although they needed interpreters. NGOs, student bodies and neighbourhood associations were good examples. I phrase all this in the past tense because I've long since retired, but I've no reason to think the picture has changed much.

So the grey market flourished. There was one grey market agency in Montreal, founded by a trade union official, which was so successful in the 1980s that its owners sold out after a few years and retired to Chile. I readily confess I occasionally worked for them for $250 a day, and so did some of my students on my recommendation. It was a good way for students to get on-the-job practice and gain confidence in what was reputed to be a difficult market to break into.

References
International Association of Conference Interpreters. http://www.aiic.net/.

Brian Harris. The need for several standards of conference interpretation. (Paper to the 1st International Congress on the Assessment of Quality in Conference Interpreting, Almuñecar, Spain, April 2001). In Ángela Collados Aís et al. (eds.), La evaluación de la calidad en interpretación: docencia y profesión, Granada, Comares, 2003, vol.2, pp.3-16.

myGengo: Towards a bi-level market?

2011-02-27T08:22:00.001-08:00

Followers of this blog will be aware that crowdsourcing is making an impact in the translation world (for the previous posts about it, enter crowdsourcing in the Search box on the right). It also gets a mention in the current Wikipedia article on Translation. In case it's not already clear to you, the term, which is a portmanteau word put together from crowd and outsourcing, means:

"taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an 'open call' to a large group of people (the crowd) asking for contributions."

Until recently, translation crowdsourcing was organised on a voluntary, unpaid basis: NGOs appealing for help, for example. Now here comes myGengo, which aims to turn it commercial for the profit of translators and the benefit of consumers. "Join the revolution!" it proclaims. So let’s take a closer look before we‘re swept away.

1. All bilinguals are invited to join in, irrespective of prior qualifications. “If you're bilingual and you're online, you could qualify as a myGengo translator. It's free, simple and quick to take our tests.” Well yes, there’s a test. “Your test will be reviewed within 30 days by a Senior Translator who is native in the language.” 30 days? That’s something they need to improve. But myGengo isn’t without standards.

2. Here’s the most interesting part. Successful applicants are divided into two categories:

(A) “Our Pro level for professional [and presumably Expert] translators” – a traditional category.

(B) “Our Standard level for bilinguals” – a non-traditional category. “It's perfect work for you, if you are bilingual, with a good written style in your native language and fluency in your second language.”

3. The workload is also divided according to the two categories:

(A) Pro level: “These jobs are more complex and important; usually translations for public use where accuracy is key.”

(B) Standard level: “These jobs are translations of simple or non-critical texts, like blog posts, articles to read, simple menus and internal business documents.” Clearly this level is intended for Native Translators.

4. There’s another interesting wrinkle to the Standard level: “It's also great if you are training to be a translator.” This is a clear and open invitation to the hundreds of translation school students who would like nothing better than to find a work placement that pays while they study. Bear in mind that there are about 500 undergraduate and postgraduate translation programmes around the globe.

5. The rates of pay are likewise differentiated: Pro level US$ 0.08 per word, Standard level US$ 0.03 per word. myGengo loads a couple of cents per word on top of that in its prices to consumers, which is reasonable for what is, in effect, a commercial translation agency. The Pro rate of pay will attract professionals in some countries and under some circumstances; the Standard rate is in uncharted territory.

A bi-level translation market – bi-level in respect of qualifications and of remuneration – isn't entirely novel. There's long been such a market in conference interpreting (CI). However, the lower level of the CI market was talked about disparagingly and in hushed voices as the so-called grey market – I'll write more about it in another post. This is the first time I've encountered an openly promoted and advertised bi-level market. It'll be very interesting to watch whether myGengo succeeds.

References
myGengo. Website, 2011.

Crowdsourcing. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing.

Translation. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation.

Conference at Forlì, 2012

2011-02-18T08:54:00.000-08:00

Great news! At last a meeting about the topics dealt with on this blog.

First International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation,
17-19 May 2012 at Forlì, Italy (see map)

Presented by the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators (SSLMIT) and the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in Translation, Languages and Cultures (SITLeC) of the University of Bologna at Forlì.

Keynote Speakers

Nigel Hall, Manchester Metropolitan University, a leading British authority on language brokering

Brian Harris, Universidad de Valladolid, author of this blog

Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Univerity of California at Los Angeles, a leading American researcher on language brokering

Gideon Toury, Tel Aviv University, a leading academic innovator of translation theory

Website for further information: click here on FORLÌ

Congratulations to Rachele Antonini of the University of Bologna for taking this iniative. I look forward to meeting as many of you at Forlì as possible.

Footnote: If any of you practitioners are thinking of attending the 1st ProZ.com Europe International conference, notice that it starts in Rome on May 21, just after the above conference.
See http://www.proz.com/conference/205?page=schedule.

EGYPT

2011-02-17T05:10:00.000-08:00

All eyes have been on Egypt for the past days. For me there's an element of déjà vu in what's been happening. I was a naive young student in Cairo in 1950, when revolt against an earlier regime was brewing and was starting to boil over into street riots. In those days the demons were the regime of King Farouk and his perceived puppet-masters the British, who were still in occupation of the Suez Canal zone. But the underlying reasons for the unrest were the familiar ones: poverty, unemployment, corruption. The Muslim Brotherhood was already a movement to be reckoned with. Then too, the head of state was ousted (actually in 1952), and then as now the army took over. But all that's another story. Let's get back to translation.

Meedan (Arabic for town square, or meeting place in this context) is a well-organized website that describes itself as "an Arabic-English forum using Machine Translation with expert corrections." However, it also uses direct human translation and crowdsourcing. Quite a hybrid. The members of its panel of regular translators don't give much information about themselves; nevertheless, it's clear that behind the pseudonyms some of them at least are Advanced Native or even Expert Translators. There's Deena, for instance, an "Egyptian Arabic native-speaking trilingual translator"; Keyworth77, "American, native English speaker, and freelance Arabic-English translator"; Wesam, "an Egyptian translator/editor, who loves to translate!!"; Yaserhk, "a TEFL PhD candidate"; Amalnah, "Palestinian translator and writer"; Snoopy, who "graduated in Dec '09 with an MA in Applied Translation Studies"; and Hiba, who declares, "I dream of a wonderful world where people talk together across the language, culture and geography barriers to promote mutual understanding. I aspire to contribute to the realisation of this dream by employing my translation and communication skills on Meedan."

It's crowdsourcing that enables Meedan to turn out very fast translations of current material from unconventional sources. Here's an example.

"Meedan team member Ahmed Ragab took the time to write this piece below and then read it aloud over a phone line. We recorded it and sent off a tweet asking for volunteer translators. Dina elHusseiny emailed me a few seconds later and within three hours had generated a wonderful translation of Ahmed's piece. Here is that piece:
As soon as we broke the thick security barriers at the entrances and exits of Meedan Tahrir [literally, 'Liberation Square'] we dispersed around the square. Recognizing what we had done, we stretched our arms in the air and breathed in the smell of freedom. We started examining each other's faces, exchanging smiles of confidence and looks of satisfaction at what we have accomplished. We decided to continue. In a spontaneous manner, chants started flooding from minds that have recalled recent images of the events in Tunisia, in unison we called: "The people want to overthrow this government...

And so it goes on for another couple of pages. It intrigued me who Dina elHusseiny might be, since she's not listed among the panel of translators. I think I've found her. Unless I'm much mistaken, she's an Egyptian corporate lawyer, with an address in New York according to Linkedin. She was educated at the School of Law of Cairo University and holds an LL.M. degree from the University of California at Los Angeles, which would explain her high level of bilingualism and hence her translating ability.

Footnote
Cairo has a famous school of translators, Kulliyat Al-Alsun (Faculty of Languages). As an institution for training Professional Expert Translators, it's strictly speaking beyond the scope of this blog; but it has a connection with the revolution of 1952. It was originally founded in 1835 by a pioneer technical translator and educator, Sheikh Rifa'a al-Tahtawi. He'd been trained as a translator in Paris, an indirect beneficiary of Napoleon's 1798 invasion of Egypt. Later he ran foul of the regime of the time, he was banished to Sudan and his school remained closed for most of the ensuing century. Then came 1952, and army officer Gamal Abdel Nasser rose to power. In 1957, Nasser's minister of education re-established Kulliyat Al-Alsun as a dependency of the new Ain Shams University. When I visited it in 1980, it was housed rather shabbily in an old school building in the Zaitoun district; nevertheless, it had a large student body and taught many languages. Since then it's been moved to the main Ain Shams campus.

References
Meedan. htttp://www.meedan.net.

Dina elHusseiny. http://twitter.com/dinaelhusseiny, http://eg.linkedin.com/in/dinaelhusseiny

Faculty of Al-Alsun. http://alsun.shams.edu.eg/.

Rifa'a el-Tahtawi. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifa'a_el-Tahtawi.

Image
This photo really needs no explanation. It comes from a post on Urblog.

Slovenia 1945: Jerzé Jancar

2011-02-12T12:14:00.000-08:00

This post is a continuation of the two previous ones, which should be read first.

The other Slovenian Native Interpreter with a medical background was Jerzé Jancar. By the time of World War II he was already an outstanding medical student.

"During the summer, I travelled a lot, learning about people and life; I cycled along the Dalmatian Coast and in late summer I used to climb, as well as participating in athletics and winter sports. Unfortunately, when I matriculated and started medicine in Ljubljana, the War began in the spring of 1941, and we were occupied by the Italians. They let us study for about two years, and then the university was closed. Unfortunately, I was taken to a concentration camp in Gonars [in Italy] in 1942, and when Italy collapsed in 1943, the Germans occupied us. Once again, we were working with the Underground, helping in hospitals and treating people who had been involved in fighting against the Nazis, the Communists, and the Fascists."

When the German front in Yugoslavia collapsed in 1945, the communist Partisans moved in on Ljubljana. Jerzé found himself on the wrong side and fled with his fiancée through the mountains to Viktring, in southern Austria.

Viktring, famous for its Cistercian monastery, is just north of the Karawanken mountain chain separating Austria from Slovenia. In a large open field that the British had assigned to them, the Slovenian refugees were gathered in a huge camp. There Jerzé joined up with someone his own age, John Corsellis, the English Quaker who, though he was only 22, already had considerable experience in helping to run refugee camps.

Corsellis describes how he met Jozé Jancar:

"When I arrived at Viktring and asked Major Barre [the Canadian in charge of the camp] how I could best help, he referred me to Dr Meršol [see previous post] and he suggested hygiene. He said I would need an interpreter and he had just the right man, a medical student two years older than me who had organisational experience and while interned in the Italian concentration camp at Gonars had learnt the language; and that was how I got to know Jozé Jancar... A little taller than I was, just as thin and with striking red hair, he continued to interpret for me after we had finished hygiene and moved on to education."

Jerzé later recounted his own memories of Viktring:

"Meršol said, 'Look, let's hope he'll be able to do something. He seems young and energetic'. He was expecting someone with more authority, a major or something, for six thousand people, and was a bit sceptical, and then he realised when we started to march around - and, my God, you were walking fast! And really it was a great success because Meršol was often saying, 'It's unbelievable how much you two did.'"

Later Jozé moved from Viktring to Graz, where he played a key role in the opening of a camp for university students and continued to interpret. Then, with the help of John Corsellis, he managed to cross the Dolomites illegally to Padua, and continue his studies there in Italian.

After that, his already tumultuous life took another surprising turn. In 1948 he went to England with his wife and there he became at first a nurse for the mentally handicapped. In 1956 he was obtained a post as junior medical officer at Stoke Park Hospital, a famous hospital in Bristol for people with learning difficulties, where he was appointed consultant psychiatrist in 1961. He won the Burden Research Gold Medal and Prize for research in mental handicap in 1971. By the end of his career, he was Dr Jozé Jancar, MB, Bch, BAO, DPM, FRCPsych, Hon FRCPsych, "one of the greatest figures in the field of the care of those with learning disability." He died in 2000. The photograph at the head of this post shows him in later life.

When he was interviewed at Bristol in 1992 (see References), he was asked, "How do you think your wartime experiences affected you?" His reply:

"They taught me a lot about psychiatry, particularly in the concentration camp, when men's masks dropped, and you see each man as he really is. There were both University professors and road sweepers who were most helpful and real people; while others, without their masks, weren't really the people we had been seeing before."

References
John Corsellis. Slovenian Phoenix. Privately circulated as a .pdf document, 2009. http://repository.forcedmigration.org/show_metadata.jsp?pid=fmo:5356.

John Corsellis and Marcus Ferrar. Slovenia 1945: Memories of Death and Survival After World War II. London, I B Taurus, 2005. http://slovenia1945.org/. There are Slovene and Italian translations.

Hugh Freeman. In conversation with Jozé Jancar. Psychiatric Bulletin 17:323-330, 1993. http://pb.rcpsych.org/cgi/reprint/17/6/323.pdf.

Image: Psychiatric Bulletin.

Slovenia 1945: Valentin Meršol

2011-02-02T10:53:00.000-08:00

This post is a continuation of the previous one, which should be read first.

The refugees recognised as their authority the Slovenian National Council. As soon as the refugees' advance guard made contact with the British Army on the Austrian side of the frontier, the Council sent a delegation to treat with them.

"Dr. Meršol was with us at the hunting lodge [where some refugees had taken shelter] and some domobranci came to fetch him by order of the Slovenian National Council because they needed a good interpreter for a meeting with the English. With him went our fellow lodger, Father Odilo.
"Dr. Valentin Meršol [was the] son of a railway level-crossing keeper, he had attended as the first Rockefeller fellow from Slovenia the prestigious Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore and acquired there fluent English. He was a specialist in infectious diseases and one of Yugoslavia's leading doctors. Short and unimpressive in appearance [see photo], balding, with a round face and rimless glasses, he spoke precisely and dealt with British officialdom with infinite patience and a tentative smile... Father Odilo Hajnsek was a well-known Franciscan friar who also spoke English.
"The representatives of the Slovenian National Council, with Dr. Meršol as interpreter, went to Klagenfurt and asked to see Field Marshal Alexander [the British commander-in-chief] or the general in command locally to explain to him that the domobranci had indeed fought in self-defence against the communist partisans, but never against the British or Americans. They didn't get beyond a staff captain but were also received by the head of the Department for Displaced Persons and Prisoners of War, Allied Military Government, Carinthia, Major William Johnson, as Dr. Meršol recorded:
"We told him a great number of Slovenian civilians and military had fled to Carinthia, because of communists and the atrocities committed by them during the war, and in their name we were asking to be put under the British protection and given food and shelter and the means to survive. Major Johnson told us the military were of no concern of his, but Military Government would gladly receive the civilian refugees and help them."

So once again a fluent bilingual was drawn fortuitously into the double role of interpreter and of advocate for one side in the encounter.The Slovenian negotiators, helped by Dr. Meršol and others, including John Corsellis, eventually succeeded in saving most of the civilians by keeping them under British protection, but not the domobranci. The latter, who had been disarmed by the British, were delivered up to their fate at the hands of the partisans.

Meanwhile Valentin Meršol's medical training in infectious diseases proved invaluable for establishing and maintaining hygiene in the refugee camps. Which brings us to another interpreter...

To be continued.

Reference
John Corsellis, Slovenian Phoenix. See previous post.

Image: Front cover from Moder Janko, Valentin Meršol in slovenski veliki teden, Celjska Mohorjeva Družba, 2005.

Footnote
Among the concentration camp prisoners who built the Ljubelj (aka Loibl) tunnel, through which many of the refugees scrambled into Austria, there happened to be a group of French deportees. The experiences of one of them were told in a memorable book in French, Le Tunnel, by André Lacaze (Julliard, 1978). For readers' impressions of it, see http://www.amazon.fr/tunnel-Andre-Lacaze/dp/B0000DXTHB. There's also an English translation: The Tunnel at Loibl Pass, translated by Julian Evans and Anne Gray, Hamish Hamilton, 1980.

Slovenia 1945

2011-01-25T09:56:00.001-08:00

In 1945, at the end of World War II, in the corner of the Balkans adjacent to Northern Italy which is called Slovenia, there was a massacre. It went little noticed in a world that was reeling from the revelation of worse massacres. Sixty years later, however, the British government expressed regret for the part played in it by the British Army. But the British didn't do the killing. It was Slovenes killing Slovenes. The massacre remained a taboo topic in the country itself until the late 1970s and early 1980s, when dissident intellectuals brought it to light along with other massacres. The shameful memory of the incident still haunts and divides Slovenian society; there's a very good discussion of this aftermath in a TV programme that's available on the Internet (see References). Here in brief is the background to it.

At the time of World War II and for many years after it, Slovenia formed part of Yugoslavia. In 1941, the whole country was invaded and overrun by the Axis powers: Germany, Italy and Hungary. Very soon, resistance movements started up. However, these movements were violently opposed not only to the occupiers but also to one another. On the one hand were the Partisans, communists led by Josip Broz Tito and remotely controlled by the Soviet Union. On the other side were the Chetniks and other guerillas representing the conservative wing in Yugoslav society: loyal to their exiled King and to their respective religions.

"Chetniks and Partisans seldom co-operated, and might shoot each other up; neither had much use for Italians or Germans, except for periods of local understanding at times of crisis."

In Slovenia, however, there was an anti-communist militia that was aided and abetted by the Germans as an ally against the Partisans and so was despised by the latter as German collaborators. This militia was called the Domobranci (Home Guard).

When war ended in May 1945 Tito's partisans controlled most of Yugoslavia, while the British Army started to occupy southern Austria. The anti-communists in Slovenia had hoped that the British would advance into their country and shield them, but they didn't. Ljubljana, the main Slovenian city, was a sharply divided community.

"Many await enthusiastically their liberation by Marshal Tito's partisans, but others are appalled at the prospect of life under a permanent communist tyranny, after four years of Italian and German oppression. Those who openly opposed communism prepare to leave."

Salvation, they thought, lay in fleeing to the British-occupied zone just over the Austrian frontier. Only one route was still open from Ljubljana to Austria. It led northwards over the Alps through the Ljubelj (aka Loibl) Pass. There were two alternatives for negotiating the pass: either march the steep road over the top (elevation 1,367 m) or stumble through a 1,500 m long road tunnel that the Germans had pierced with slave labour but had not had time to finish. Both were dangerous, and the Germans themselves were using the tunnel in their flight from the Balkans as well as controlling access to the summit road.

"So the road is now open, but not the way through the tunnel or over Ljubelj. Young SS men with loaded guns are standing around the mouth of the tunnel and only letting their own troops through... around eight in the evening our convoy of carts is ready to move. Our men look at the SS guards threateningly and approach them nearer and nearer. Some domobranci arrive, take in the situation, take their guns from their shoulders and make ready to fire. The Germans see the seriousness of their situation and the officer in charge orders the civilians to be let through. The convoy starts to move, escorted by domobranci. The road winds steeply uphill in serpentine bends of varying severity. The horses whinny, the carts groan, all the men push the carts to help the beasts which have difficulty climbing the hill."

Despite the hazards, most of the thousands of refugees made it into Austria. In the books Slovenian Phoenix and Slovenia 1945, survivors of the flight tell tales of wartime cruelty, of reviving their battered community in refugee camps for displaced persons, of their emigration overseas (mainly to Argentina) and of building successful new lives through self-help and strong cultural identity. The books are vivid because they draw on eyewitness memories, and in particular on two diaries. One was written by a 38-year old social insurance clerk named Franc Pernisek who fled with his wife and two small children. I've quoted from him above. The other diarist was a 22-year-old Englishman, John Corsellis, who was attached to the British Red Cross and working at the main refugee reception camp in Austria. It's John, still lively in his eighties, who first made me aware of the whole episode and sent me most of the information I've used here. From the stories in these books, some intriguing for historians, many harrowing, I pick out a couple that are especially relevant for this blog.

To be continued.

References
John Corsellis. Slovenian Phoenix. Privately circulated as a .pdf document, 2009. http://repository.forcedmigration.org/show_metadata.jsp?pid=fmo:5356.

John Corsellis and Marcus Ferrar. Slovenia 1945: Memories of Death and Survival After World War II. London, I B Taurus, 2005. http://slovenia1945.org/. There are Slovene and Italian translations.

Interview with John Corsellis and Marcus Ferrar. Slovene State Television, 2006. http://www.marcusferrar.org/videos.html.

Slovenia. Wikipedia, 2011.

Image
The image is from the jacket of the Italian translation of the Corsellis-Ferrar book by Eva Sirok, edited by Mauro Pascolat, 2008. I find the stark black-and-white photo more appropriate than the sepia-toned one on the English edition.

Translating the Tengyur

2011-01-16T06:39:00.001-08:00

Some people may think that because I push for recognising the importance of religious translation I must be religious myself. I'm not. But in trying to observe the whole range of translating activities objectively, I see that religious translation is still a major segment of it, as it's always been.

Not just Bible translation. It's true that missionary translating by the evangelical wing of the American Protestant churches is in a febrile state; a subculture with its own organisations, training schools, manuals, financing and media of communication. But not only Protestants. Vernacular translations from Latin of the Roman Catholic Missal (prayer book) have been a hot topic around the globe – and in some quarters a hot potato – ever since the Vatican II Council.

And not just Christianity. I've mentioned before (on September 15, 2010) the work of the King Fahd Complex for Printing the Holy Qur’an, at Medina, Saudi Arabia. There's traditionally been prejudice among Muslims against translating the Qur'an because they consider its Arabic text to be verbatim what the archangel Gabriel dictated to Mohammed on behalf of Allah. But they too have discovered that religions cannot proselytise and expand without translations, so they call them 'meanings' instead.

Here's a news item about yet another long tradition.

Dharamshala: His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama... will address Tuesday (11 January) the ongoing conference on the translation of one of the Tibet's most precious treasure of [commentaries on] the Buddha's teachings known as Tengyur [Transmitted Word] at the Central University of Tibetan Studies (CUTS) in Sarnath.
The four-day Tengyur Translation Conference: In the Tradition of the 17 Pandits of Nalanda, which began on 8 January, is being jointly organised by CUTS and the American Institute of Buddhist Studies at Columbia University.
The conference is aimed at focusing on issues pertaining in particular to the translation of the Tibetan Tengyur not only into English, but also Sanskrit, Hindi, Chinese and other languages, according to the organisers.
The conference is part of the long-term project initiated by the American Institute of Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and Tibet House US of translating the Tengyur into English and other modern languages, and to publish the many works in a collection called The Treasury of the Buddhist Sciences. The project received the support of His Holiness the Dalai Lama for its historic initiative to support, create, and publish authoritative English translations, studies, and editions of the entire Tibetan Tengyur and its associated literature.
The works of the foremost Indian scholars of Nalanda tradition are presently preserved in the collection of their writings known as Tengyur in Tibetan translation. It took teams of Indian masters and great Tibetan translators over four centuries [between the 11th and 14th centuries] to accomplish the historic task of translating them into Tibetan. Most of these books were later lost in their Sanskrit originals, and relatively few were translated into Chinese. The Tengyur is truly one of the Tibet's most precious treasures, a mine of understanding that Tibetans have preserved in Tibet for the benefit of the whole world.
The Buddhist culture that flourished in Tibet can rightly be seen to derive from the pure tradition of Nalanda, which comprises the most complete presentation of the Buddhist teachings. Foremost Indian scholars of Nalanda Monastic University such as Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, Aryaasanga, Dharmakirti, Candrakirti and Shantideva wrote the scriptures that we Tibetan Buddhists study and practise.
When translated into Tibetan, these works in turn inspired Tibet's own enlightenment renaissance. Accordingly, the Buddhist teachings in these Tengyur texts are deemed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and many other great Tibetan masters to be of the highest value, the organisers said in a statement.
Expressing his support to the American Institute of Buddhist Studies' Tengyur translation project in 2007, His Holiness the Dalai Lama had said: "At the present time, when there is a great emphasis on scientific and technological progress, it is extremely important that those of us who follow the Buddha should rely on a sound understanding of his teaching, for which the great works of the renowned Nalanda scholars provide an indispensable basis.
... It surely will require the intelligent and creative efforts of generations of translators from every tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, in the spirit of the scholars of Nalanda, although we may hope that using computers may help complete the work more quickly.
Participants from different countries like the US, Canada, Germany, France, Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Russia, Taiwan, Japan and Nepal are taking part in the conference.

Well, if that doesn't convince you...

References
Fr. Antony Ronald Serrão. The English Translation of the Missale Romanum-2002. Bellevision.com, Mangalore, January 8, 2011. http://www.bellevision.com/index.php?action=topnews&type=1318.
An extensive account of the history of the post-Vatican II Missal and its translation into English, including controversies.

Tibetan Leader to Address Tengyur Translation Conference. The Tibet Post International, January 10, 2011, http://www.thetibetpost.com/en/news/exile/1363-tibetan-leader-to-address-tengyur-translation-conference

Tibetan Buddhism. ReligionFacts. http://www.religionfacts.com/buddhism/sects/tibetan.htmhttp://www.religionfacts.com/buddhism/sects/tibetan.htm.

Image
Buddha with the Six Ornaments and Two Supreme Ones. Source: Tengyur, in Wikipedia, 2009.

1611-2011

2011-01-13T04:18:00.000-08:00

2011, in case you haven't noticed, marks 400 years since publication of the most influential of all English translations of the Bible. This is of course the King James Version (KJV), aka the Authorised Version (AV). I already ran two posts on the KJV and its translators, inspired by Adam Nicolson's book Power and Glory. That was back in 2009 (November 27 and December 2). I concluded that the 50 clergymen who made up the revision teams were Expert or Advanced Native Translators but not Professionals, though some of them had their living expenses subsidised in the form of church appointments.

Since then, several other celebratory books have been published, including one by David Crystal in which he traces the KJV origin of hundreds of expressions that made their way into common English. And to think that there are still university departments of English Literature that don't include the KJV in their syllabuses, reading lists or libraries!

In the past few days, the excitement has spread to the press, with articles in The New York Times, The Independent, The Boston Globe, The Scotsman, etc., and as far afield as The Mormon Times and the Grand Junction Sentinel. They all praise the good influence that its style has had on English. They also give short histories of why and how it was made at the behest of King James I of England; and many emphasise that it was less an original translation than an amalgam and revision of existing ones, particularly the one made by William Tyndale nearly a century earlier. As much as 75% of it has been attributed to Tyndale. Here's a fragment from Tyndale:

"Whill he thus thought behold ye angell of ye Lorde appered vnto him in a dreame saynge: Ioseph ye sonne of David feare not to take vnto ye Mary thy wyfe. For that which is coceaved in her is of the holy goost."

and here's the same fragment in the KJV:

"But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost."

In another medium, Ann Corsellis has led me to a series of BBC Radio 4 radio programmes made with all the usual BBC excellence. It's composed of commentaries and readings. The initial reading from Genesis by Samuel West is thrillingly impressive, and it has a good introduction by historian Simon Schama. Catch it while you can: only three days left (see References).

Bible translating could be, and can still be, a dangerous pursuit. Tyndale was hounded out of England and executed by strangulation for his Protestant presumptuousness, and in Spain the dreaded Inquisition proscribed Bible translating for two centuries. Now comes bad news from Nigeria.

"Wycliffe Bible Translators reports that the translator/coordinator of the Tarok translation project in Nigeria was kidnapped in Jos on December 16... roughly 70 percent of the Tarok people are Christians. The New Testament and the Jesus film are already available in their language.
However, Tarok believers are eager for more background material. The Old Testament can provide a foundation to better understand Christ's teachings in their New Testament. A team was formed, and the project got underway.
Excitement grew as people began to understand how much their culture would benefit from both an oral and a written form of the Bible... The kidnapping is a crushing blow for the team. Please pray for the coordinator's safe release... Pray, too, for his family and for the Tarok translation team. As a result of this incident, the team was forced to cancel a translation-checking session scheduled for this month."

To be continued.

References
The Holy Bible Conteyning the Old Testament and the New: Newly translated out of the Originall Tongues: & with the former Translations diligently compared and reuised by His Majesties speciall Commandement. Appointed to be read in Churches. London: Robert Barker, Printer to the Kings most excellent Maiestie, 1611.
The image above is of the title page.

Adam Nicolson. Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible. London, 2003. 281 p.; many colour illustrations. Available in paperback.

David Crystal. Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Rachel Sauer. Translation leaves 400-year mark on faith, culture and language. The Daily Sentinel newspaper (Grand Junction, USA), January 10, 2011.
http://www.gjsentinel.com/lifestyle/articles/translation_leaves_400year_mar

William Tyndale. In Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale.

The text of Tyndale's New Testament, 1526 edition, can be read on the site of the StudyLight organisation, http://www.studylight.org/, which is a fantastic tool for comparing English Bible versions.

King James Bible at 400. BBC Radio 4, 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/

Bible translator kidnapped. Mission Network News, January 10, 2011. http://www.mnnonline.org/article/15199.

Tales of Graces and JLPT

2011-01-08T03:46:00.001-08:00

Thursday was the feast of Epiphany, aka Twelfth Night in England and Reyes (Kings) here in Spain. Yesterday there were piles of boxes that had been salvaged from presents beside the rubbish containers in the street. (By tradition, presents are given on Reyes and not at Christmas.) Among them I noticed a good number of pakagings from video games and others from the technology for playing them. We've learnt that our friends' children don't ask the Three Kings for toys, books and board games any more; they want interactive video games. Localised in Spanish of course.

Tales is a series of Japanese video games that's been going on since 1995. So far 12 have been released but the manufacturer has only localised nine of them for the American market, because of "the amount of dialog and the extensive voice acting in recent games." That doesn't satisfy the most ardent fans, especially as the latest release, Tales of Graces, is said to be the best in the series. So the fans have set up a Tales of Graces Fan Translation project with the aim of eventually producing an English patch for the game themselves.

"The translation team consists of five translators who have done the bulk of the translation, as well as about 10 others who help to contribute from time to time... for many of the translators, this is their first time working on a project like this. They are volunteering their time because of their passion for the game, and a desire to allow everyone to be able to experience and enjoy it."

Apparently there was a bad experience in the past with translating one of these games. This time the team is taking due care.

"Much of the initial translation is already done. However, everything still needs to go through a translation verification to ensure accuracy. They don’t want any, 'All your base are belong to us' situations."

It's a big project:

"The team estimates there are 90,000 lines to be translated... Basically, that’s any time text is on the screen, and a line can range from a single word to an entire paragraph."

So they're looking for more volunteer translators, but not just any bilinguals: JLPT level 3 required and level 2 greatly preferred.

Which brings us to JLPT.

JLPT stands for Japanese Language Proficiency Test. It's an officially sponsored exam designed to evaluate the Japanese of non-native speakers.

"The JLPT was first held in 1984 in response to growing demand for standardized Japanese language certification... In 2004, the JLPT was offered in 40 countries, including Japan. The number of candidates continued to rise to 559,056 in 2008, while the percentage of candidates certified has fallen below 36%."

There are five levels, with N1 being the highest level and N5 the easiest. Therefore, the video game translation team is asking for high-middle to high level, but not the highest.

However, what's most interesting from our point of view is that JLPT is not a translation test. It tests various components of language proficiency (reading, listening, grammar, vocabulary) but not translating. Hence there is an implied assumption that second-language proficiency, together with close acquaintance with the source content – since the call is to fans – is a good predictor of translation 'proficiency' into the first language without further training. Anyway for want of a better correlate.

Another assumption – by no means new – is that, given the required language proficiency, background knowledge, a checking procedure and plenty of time, the translation of such a game can be done by untrained Native Translators to the satisfaction of highly critical users. As more projects like the Tales of Graces one are launched, more bilingual fans are discovering that they too can translate and can render a service to their gaming compatriots by doing so. What the instigators and coordinators of such projects need is a realistic Guide to Managing Inexperienced Translators.

References
Brandon Fenty. Tales of Grace English translation coming this year. Ripten Video Game Blog, January 2, 2011.
http://www.ripten.com/2011/01/02/tales-of-graces-us-patch-coming-bfenty9842/#comments.

Japanese Language Proficiency Test. In Wikipedia. December 2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Language_Proficiency_Test.

Image: Game Rant

2011

2011-01-01T02:52:00.000-08:00

A Very Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year to Everyone, and especially to my 78 supportive Followers.

So 2010 is gone, not just another year but another decade. Incredible!

The translation event from which I gained most insight in 2010 was my own experience, and that of my wife, as non-professional, non-expert, medical Native Interpreter-Advocates for the case of dementia at Cullera. To find the posts about that, enter cullera in the Search box in the right-hand column. I say "Interpreter-Advocates" because it's been impossible to separate the interpreting function from the role of interceders with doctors and social services for the stricken Englishman and his wife. And the work continues. Next Friday we'll both be at the hospital when the man is examined by a Spanish-speaking neurologist. Both of us, because though I speak better Spanish than my wife, she's the more persistent advocate.

Meanwhile I still translate and certify – but this professionally – official documents for Spanish doctors who are going for specialist internships in Canada. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario is very demanding: they once sent back a translation of mine because of an ambiguity. But I can understand that they have to protect their clientele and themselves from incompetence and even fraud.

Rest assured that in 2011 this blog will continue to proclaim, as it did on January 1, 2010, that:

Irrespective of language, place, time, type, training, age, circumstances and language proficiency; insofar as bilingualism is universal, so too

************* TRANSLATING IS UNIVERSAL *************

Image: shutterstock.com

Cinderella: Conclusions

2010-12-30T11:16:00.001-08:00

This is the continuation of the previous two posts.

Perrault ended each of his Tales with a moral in verse. I can't emulate him, but I'd like to draw some conclusions from what has happened both to the Tales and to the 1001 Nights. There are stages that they went through in their passage from their original cultures to the British theatre, and they seem to me typical of what may happen in the translation of literature.

Discovery. Somebody has first to discover that the original work is worth translating. It may be a translator, a critic or a publisher. Antoine Galland discovered the Nights not only for Europeans, but even for Arabs, by whom they weren't highly regarded. Gregory Rabassa not only translated Latin American literature, he introduced Gabriel García Márquez to English-speaking readers. It helps if an author wins a Nobel Prize. No major English-language publisher was interested in Neguib Mahfouz until he did so.

Translation. The translation may be by a Professional Expert Translator or by an Advanced Native Translator. Robert Samber, the translator of Cinderella, was a Professional Expert who could equally translate fairy stories and mild pornography to order. Whereas Galland was primarily an orientalist and archaeologist, not a translator.

The translation may be direct between the two languages, as occurred with Perrault's Tales; or indirect via a third language, as happened with the first English translations of the Nights, which were made from Galland's French version. Indirect translation is common when the original is in a little-known language. The existence of a direct translation doesn't necessarily preclude an indirect one. By the 20th century there were a number of direct translations of the Nights from Arabic, yet that didn't prevent Edward Powys Mathers' indirect translation from the French of J. C. Mardrus becoming popular in the 1920s.

There are also the re-translations, that is to say new translations produced because of changes in language changes, literary taste, social mores, etc.; or even for mundane reasons like acquiring a version that can be copyrighted.

Diffusion in the new language. This requires publication and a publisher. Sometimes the translator has to go hunting for a publisher, but there are some imprints that specialise in translations: the American house founded by Alfred A. Knopf is a famous example.

The market receptiveness for translations varies greatly between countries and cultures. You just have to take a look at the bookshops in Spain, where over half of popular new publications are translations, and compare them with bookshops in Britain or America.

The critics have a certain influence, but they are notoriously superficial in their judgements on translations, commonly compressing them into a line or two.

Nativisation. This is my shorthand for 'incorporation into the literary canon of the receptor language and culture'. From this stage onwards, many readers don't even realise that the work was once a foreign product. This is certainly true of the Perrault Tales and the Nights. To my mind, the turning point for the Nights came when it exchanged its original title for one expressing a thoroughly English viewpoint: The Arabian Nights Entertainment. Titles and tales like Red Riding Hood and Puss in Boots, even Cinderella, are thought to be traditional English ones.

Adaptation. The translations of both the Nights and the Perrault Tales have been adapted endlessly for different readerships, both adult and child, and selections made from them. Indeed there are far more adaptations of them than there are complete and unmodified editions.

Inter-media adaptation. The medium is changed from book to theatre or film or even – in the case of Cinderella – ballet. That's how we got to pantomime. The summit these days for fairy tales (reached by both Cinderella and Aladdin) is to be adapted and marketed by Disney.

Imitation. Works that borrow the 'theme', the story outline, characters or style, etc. but are essentially and avowedly new productions. Some see the Cinderella theme in Pride and Prejudice:

A virtuous daughter, favoured by her father, succeeds despite foolish sisters and foolish mother. She marries the worthy D’Arcy to live on his tasteful estate, with psyche restored and fulfilled.

There are dozens of Cinderella imitations, old and new, cited in Russell A. Peck's Cinderella Bibliography (see References).

Maybe that's not all, but it goes far enough to end 2010.

References
The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night. Thus rendered into English from the literal and complete French translation of Dr J. C. Mardrus by E. Powys Mathers. London: Casanova Society, 1923. 16 vols. Available through Amazon UK.
"Literal and complete" because Mardrus and hence Powys Mathers 'debowdlerised' the Nights, which are quite bawdy in places in the original.

Alfred A. Knopf is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. http:\\knopfdoubleday.com.

Cinderella. Story adapted from Perrault by Bill Peet et al. USA: Walt Disney Productions, 1950. Animated film.

Aladdin. Screenplay by Ron Clements et al. USA: Walt Disney Productions, 1992. Animated film.

Russell A. Peck. Modern Fiction. In Cinderella Bibliography.
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cinder/cin6.htm.

Cinderella (continued)

2010-12-24T03:00:00.001-08:00

This is the continuation of yesterday's post.

And so Cinderella reached the British stage. The following is taken, with a few additions, from a website called The Magic of Pantomime, which is a mine of information about the history of the genre.

It was in 1820 that the first real pantomime version of 'Cinderella' opened at Covent Garden in the heart of London. Entitled 'Harlequin and Cinderella, or the little glass slipper' it featured the famous clown Joseph Grimaldi as the Baron's wife in the panto tradition of men playing female roles. That year, in a Perrault importation by way of another country and another culture, Rossini's opera 'La Cenerentola' had premiered in London, introducing the characters of the Baron and the Prince's servant, Dandini.

The character of Buttons emerged from page boys, who were nicknamed 'Buttons' from the close-sewn rows of buttons on their uniforms. The character first appeared in 1860, given the Italian name of 'Buttoni', and underwent many changes of name from Chips, Alfonso, and Pedro, before settling down as the Baron's trusty servant, Buttons.

The 1860 production at the Strand Theatre, also in London, developed the characters of the Ugly Sisters. As in Rossini's opera, the first character names for them were Clorinda and Thisbe, and their names have constantly changed to accommodate the fashions of passing times. Other names include Buttercup and Daisy, Euthanasia and Asphyxia, Alexia and Krystle, right up to the Spice Girls – Posh and Scary.

During the 19th Century, over 90 productions of 'Cinderella' were staged. Then as now, was recognised that it attracts larger audiences than any other. In 1958 the Rogers and Hammerstein 'Cinderella' was staged at the London Coliseum as a pantomime with Yana as Cinderella, Tommy Steele as Buttons, Jimmy Edwards as the Baron, and Kenneth Williams and Ted Durante as the Ugly Sisters. Household names to British people of my generation.

Popular trends have dictated that the Prince, usually called Prince Charming and his valet, Dandini, were played originally by women, but in recent times more by men. Among the famous female Princes have been Dorothy Ward, Evelyn Laye and Pat Kirkwood.

"This most peculiarly British art form is alive and kicking because it speaks to our inner child," writes a journalist in The Guardian. So does Perrault.

References
Nigel Ellacott. Cinderella. www.its-behind-you.com: the Magic of Pantomime. http://www.its-behind-you.com/cinders.html.

Lyn Gardner. We're still behind you! Why we'll never grow too old for pantomimes. The Guardian newspaper, electronic edition. December 23, 2010.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2010/dec/23/pantomime-season-christmas-theatre.

Image
Poster for pantomime Cinderella at The Wimbledon Theatre, London, 1924.

And with that...

To one and all, whatever your language(s),

A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS!

FELICES FESTES!

Christmas Diversion: Cinderella

2010-12-22T01:22:00.001-08:00

Christmas is here again. I've been preparing for it.

Last year, I celebrated it in my own way by telling the story of how a collection of popular tales in Arabic, The Thousand and One Nights, became over the centuries, by way of translation, nativisation, selection and adaptation of several kinds, one of the most popular and robust of British Christmas entertainments, the theatrical pantomime Aladdin. To find those posts, just type 'aladdin' into the Search box in the right-hand column. Each pantomime production is a unique adaptation, because although the story line and characters are preserved, changes are made to fit it to the players, who are often famous stars making 'guest appearances'. Pantomimes have survived by adapting to changing times and tastes.

This year I've taken another look at the pantomime scene, and guess what I've found – more translation.

First, though, a footnote to Aladdin. Fellow Canadian Pamela Anderson (ex-Baywatch, ex-Playboy), who last year starred in a production in the London suburb of Wimbledon, is appearing this year at the Liverpool Empire in the north of England. Again she doesn't play the title role but the character of the Genie of the Lamp. Perhaps she would be too unbelievable in the male role of Aladdin even for pantomime, although the character is often played by a woman.

Yet popular though it is, Aladdin is not the most often staged of the pantomimes. That honour belongs to another fairy tale, Cinderella. And not only Cinderella but also several other favourites – Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots – all have a lineage in English that goes back to one French author and his English translator at the turn of the 18th century. The author was Charles Perrault.

Both the 1001 Nights and Perrault's stories are drawn from folk tales, but there the similarity ends. Whereas the Nights were a loose compilation of a vast number of tales, varying from manuscript to manuscript and augmented by oral tradition in Galland's translation, Perrault's book is made up of just ten stories. Whereas the authorship of the Nights remains a matter of conjecture and was certainly dispersed in both place and time, Perrault was a well-known literary figure in 17th-century France, a member of the Académie Française. Last but not least, there were plenty of French translators in London and so Perrault could be translated directly; whereas the Nights came from a little-known language and therefore via an indirect translation.

In 1695, when he was 67, Perrault lost his post in Paris as a royal secretary. He decided to retire and dedicate himself to his writing and his children. One outcome, today by far the most famous, was Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé (Tales from Olden Times), better known as Les Contes de ma Mère l'Oie (Mother Goose's Stories – see References). Its publication made him suddenly widely known beyond his own circles and all over Europe. It marked the beginnings of a new literary genre, the fairy tale, thus paving the way for the success of the Nights.

Perrault's book reached the English reading public in 1729, though many in Britain had probably read it already in French. It did so in the form of a translation by Robert Samber (1682-1745), probably for a bookseller. Strangely, no copy of the first edition has survived; not even the British Library has one. We know of it only from a newspaper: an advertisement in the Monthly Chronicle that year announced a translation "by Mr Samber, printed for J. Pote." "Mr Samber" was presumably Robert Samber of New Inn, London.

The choice of translator was important. It's true he did at least some of his work as a professional translator for booksellers – the booksellers ànd printers were the publishers of that time – but he was no 'Grub Street hack'. In 1721, Roger Greaves had paid him to translate La Motte's Fables Nouvelles (1719) as One Hundred New Court Fables, which was a good preparation for translating Perrault. He gained some notoriety in 1724 when he translated Venus in the Cloister, or the Nun in her Smock for the printer Edmund Curl (or Curll), who was promptly prosecuted for publishing pornography. However, the book itself describes the translator as "a man of honour". He was a very active freemason, an author, and as a translator he was prolific. He wrote several volumes of poetry and also translated and wrote scholarly treatises, including a Treatise on the Plague, in which he gives instructions for preventing the disease. In short, he was, by virtue of his experience, an Expert Translator. His translation of Perrault is still available (see References).

Samber's translation won wide popularity, as is shown by the fact that there was a seventh edition published in 1795, for J. Rivington, a bookseller, of Pearl Street, New York. It was followed by innumerable retellings and adaptations, mostly of individual stories. To cite just one of them:

Cinderilla, or, The little glass slipper: designed for the entertainment of all good little misses, ornamented with engravings. Albany NY: Printed by E. and E. Hosford, 1811,

which already follows another tradition, that of Perrault as an inspirer of book illustrators.

Until – as was almost inevitable in England and America in those days – Perrault's tales made their way to the stage.

To be continued.

Terms
Pantomime, abbreviated colloquially to panto: a British theatrical entertainment involving music, topical jokes and slapstick comedy, usually produced around Christmas time.

Genie: a spirit imprisoned within a bottle or an oil lamp and capable granting any wish when summoned. It came into English as a borrowing of the French génie, which was itself a blend of the existing word génie (genius) with the meaning of a similar-sounding Arabic word, jinnî.

Cinderella (aka Cinderilla as a text but not as a pantomime): from French Cendrillon, derived from cendre (ash). Italian Cenerentola.

References
Simon Hattenstone. Pamela Anderson. The Guardian newspaper electronic edition, December 18, 2010.

'Perrault d’Armancourt, son of Charles Perrault'. Histoires ou contes du temps passé. Avec des moralitez. Par le fils de Monsieur Perreault de l’Académie françoise. Purportedly published in Amsterdam, 1698, but the title bears the word “Suivant la copie à Paris” (According to the Paris text). 175 p. In fact written by Charles Perrault himself but put under his son's name because he was uncertain of the reception such a childish book would have from his fellow Academicians. It had an engraved frontispiece bearing the title Contes de ma mère loye (Mother Goose's Stories), and from it derives the title by which it is better known.

Charles Perrault. The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. Translated by Robert Samber and revised by J. E. Mansion. Introduction by Thomas Bodkin. Illustrated by Harry Clarke. London: Harrap, 1922. Reproduced as a Project Gutenberg eBook,
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29021/29021-h/29021-h.htm.
This is the Samber translation revised by the lexicographer Jean Edmond Mansion, editor of the great Harrap's Standard French and English Dictionary. I've quoted from Bodkin's introduction.

'Widow's Son'. Brother Eugenius Philalethes sendeth greeting. The Burning Taper, May 31, 2007. http://burningtaper.blogspot.com/2007/05/brother-eugenius-philalethes-sendeth.html.
Eugenius Philalethes was a pen name of Robert Samber.

Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th edition.

Image: Cinderella, by the English book illustrator Arthur Rackham (1867-1939).

Translation in TESOL

2010-12-15T11:19:00.000-08:00

Richard Vaughan, whose surname Spaniards commonly mispronounce as Voh-ggen, is the most popular English teacher in Spain. An expatriate American in Madrid who found a niche teaching English to corporate employees, he has come a long way and now has his own dedicated all-day television channel, Aprende Inglés TV. That’s all it does: teach English to Spaniards, and there’s a big demand for it. Undoubtedly a large factor in his success is his easy-going personality and mellifluous voice, which charms both his screen students and the viewers. English without tears in a one-on-one conversational setting. His method is to introduce new knowledge – mostly vocabulary and phrases – into the conversation naturally and with just a minimum of explanation. He has competent assistants, but none of them can match him.

Vaughan is a man after my own heart and way of thinking, because he believes in the use of translation in foreign language teaching. Besides his TV programmes, he’s published a book with a typically upbeat title: Si quieres, puedes (You Can If You Want To). It has something very unusual for a book about language teaching: not one but two chapters on the use and usefulness of translating.

Mind you, he makes a clear distinction between child and adult learning, and his students are all adults. He adopts the common hypothesis of a loss of mental ‘plasticity’ around the age of 12. Before then, language learning is instinctive and effortless; afterwards, it requires effort and you have to work at it. He emphasises hard work. He illustrates by the case of his own children, who became early bilinguals in English and Spanish without having to be taught, but who had as much difficulty as anybody else learning other languages later on.

The chapter on La traducción inversa (translation into one's second language) opens with his experience teaching a small class of recalcitrant Spanish engineers. He couldn't get them to do homework until he gave them a short list of useful Spanish sentences to translate into English. Then they all did it.

I discovered, thanks to my five engineers, men as rough-hewn as a limestone quarry, that the challenge of translating into one's second language is a powerful stimulus for inducing Spaniards to work at their English.

And he went on to compile and publish with great success three Translation Booklets, each containing 1,500 phrases.

He's very critical of the modern dogma that use of the first language should be banned from second language teaching. Indeed he positively rails at those he calls "the modern gurus of teaching."

Adults cannot accept a second language without some support from their first language... By puberty, human beings already have their brains, mouths and motor processes formed around their mother tongue.

In the short chapter on traducción directa (first-language translation) he recommends translating very literally from English into Spanish so as to point up the differences between the two languages and be more aware of the specificities of the English.

My own belief in the value of translation when learning a language comes not so much from teaching as from my own experience. I've always used translating and learning the translations by heart as one method among others for extending my knowledge and mastery of the other language. For Spanish, my favourite source book is one called Street Spanish, because it contains such a wealth of colloquial expressions. These are encapsulated in dialogues with the Spanish and the English on facing pages. I read the Spanish utterances and the corresponding English ones over and over until I can translate by heart from the English into Spanish. In other words, the English becomes a cue for my Spanish production. Then I seize opportunities to use the Spanish expressions in conversation. This is a vital step; it's by use that what start as a translation becomes incorporated into my direct Spanish production.

However, I've never gone so far as a Hungarian polyglot I once knew. He'd been brought up in a pious home where there were Bible readings every evening, so that he came to know long passages of the Bible by heart. To learn a new language, he would turn to the Bible in that language, read the passages corresponding to those he knew and mentally translate them into Hungarian as he went along.

References
Aprende Inglés TV. http://www.aprendeingles.com. 2010.

Richard Vaughan. Si quieres, puedes: los consejos de Richard Vaughan para aprender inglés. 3rd edition. Madrid: Libroslibres, 2008. 254 p. 24 pounds from Amazon UK.

David Burke. Street Spanish: the Best of Spanish Slang. New York: Wiley, 1997. $12 from Amazon USA. Good, but use with care. It's an American production and many of the expressions aren't current in Spain.

TV Presenter-Interpreters

2010-12-06T03:20:00.000-08:00

There’s a very popular TV programme in Spain called Más Allá de la Vida (Beyond Life). In it, an apparently gifted British medium, Anne Germain, transmits messages to members of the studio audience from their dead relatives and friends. The presenter is Jordi González (see photo). I don’t like him in the other programme he presents regularly (La Noria) because there he seems strained; but in Más allá de la vida I have to admit he too is gifted. You see, Anne Germain doesn’t speak Spanish, and of course her audience wouldn’t be able to follow her in English. Everything she says to the recipients of her messages therefore has to be interpreted. But there’s no interpreter – that’s to say, no Expert Interpreter. Jordi González does it all. I’d never have guessed from La Noria that he knew a word of English, but in this programme he does a very creditable, near-expert job in his auxiliary role; and he keeps it up through 90 minutes of short consecutive interpreting without taking notes, while at the same time carrying out his other functions as presenter such as introducing and interviewing the members of the audience who are selected. Quite a performance. He‘s not the only presenter who does occasional interpreting – the veteran Michel Drucker on French TV for instance – but I haven‘t seen another do it so sustainedly. Prime-time presenters like González and Drucker are certainly Professional Experts, but not Professional Expert Interpreters. It‘s another example of what I’ve previously (March 3 post) called unrecognised translators.

Jordi has also presented programmes in Catalan. Since he was born in Barcelona, we can presume he was an early bilingual in Catalan and Spanish. However, the official biography on his website doesn’t tell us how or when he learnt English. Or maybe he didn't. Maybe it's all a put-up job: see the Cavanilles reference below. But if it's not a genuine interpretation – and I'm inclined to believe that the interpreting at least is genuine – then it's a very good imitation of one.

Reference
Más Allá de la Vida currently appears on Sunday evenings on the Telecinco channel.

Jordi Gonzalez’s own website is at http://jordigonzalezweb.blogspot.com/.

Javier Cavanilles. Desde el más allá (más o menos): una médium de opereta [From the Beyond (more or less): a medium fit for a musical comedy]. El Mundo newspaper, electronic edition, August 13, 2010. http://www.elmundo.es/blogs/elmundo/desde_el_mas_alla/2010/08/13/una-medium-de-opereta.html.
A scathing demolition of the medium and the programme.

Photo: territoriotele.blogspot.com

Juvenes Translatores

2010-11-23T10:02:00.000-08:00

Each year, the European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) organises a translation contest for secondary schools throughout the European Union. It’s called Juvenes Translatores, which, in case you’re wondering, is Modern Latin for Young Person Translators. The 2010 edition has been taking place this week. For the winners, their ’remuneration’ is that they get invited to an awards ceremony in Brussels.

The contesting students have to be 17 years old, which is somewhat elitist since so many youngsters leave school at 16. Any school can apply, but it’s clear from the ones I recognise on this year’s list, that’s to say the UK ones, that they’re mostly institutions of the grammar school type, where, I suppose, traditional language teaching is still strong even in today’s linguistically lazy Britain. A total of more than 1,600 schools applied this year to take part (13% up on last year) and each school can put forward five contestants – so quite a cohort.

The aim of the contest is “to promote language learning and translation” in the hope that it “promotes young peoples’ thirst to learn foreign languages.“ It’s gratifying to see language learning and translation linked together.

The rules state that “there is no compulsory minimum level of formal language studies.” However, it’s made clear that the competition is addressed to Advanced Native Translators – not explicitly, but that’s how I would categorise them because it’s certain that though they haven’t been trained as translators and so aren’t Experts, they’ve had a good deal of contact with translation in their language courses. Furthermore, they’re allowed to use dictionaries (paper ones, no computers), and dictionaries are a sign of translator sophistication.

Here’s a sample of the kind of text that contestants have to translate:

Travel broadens the mind, they say. Despite the old adage that you’re never too old to learn, never is this truer than when the travellers are young, and never, in this increasingly globalised world, has mobility been more important. Back in 1987, when it inaugurated the Erasmus programme, the European Commission was ahead of the game. Erasmus has since given over 2 million European university students and thousands of lecturers the opportunity to study and teach abroad in more than thirty countries.

The texts are about 450 words long and the time allowed is two hours; so there’s little time for reflection and revision.

Another telling detail: “The contest has proved hugely popular.” Of the schools that take part, 99% apply to participate again. Even if we put some of the enthusiasm down to inter-school competitive spirit, it still means, as I’ve said elsewhere (September 4), that for many bilinguals translating is like a game and is not necessarily motivated by communication imperatives.

Reference
DGT, European Commission. Juvenes Traductores. http://ec.europa.eu/translatores.

News on the contest as well as pictures and information from previous rounds are available on Facebook, and you can also follow Juvenes Translatores on Twitter. What more could you ask for?

Some Economics of Religious Translation

2010-11-19T01:34:00.000-08:00

I’ve previously insisted on the importance of religious translating (including interpreting) and lamented that it’s given short shrift in mainstream translation studies other than historical ones. My arguments have been the amount of activity that it generates for Expert and Advanced Native Translators, and its profound cultural influence. Now comes news of another aspect, more mundane but still impressive.

Wycliffe Bible Translators is a leading worldwide organisation in its field with HQ in Florida (see photo). It was founded in 1942 by William Cameron Townsend, a missionary to the Cakchiquel Indians of Guatemala. Now it’s campaigning to translate the Bible into all the two thousand or so languages in the world that don’t have it yet. To that end, they’ve already raised $250 million in donations, including one of $50 million from a single benefactor. And that’s not all. It’s only one quarter of their target of one billion dollars. I’m betting that over time they’ll get it too.

Think of how many translators that’ll subsidise. What effect will they have on the two thousand languages, many of which don’t have a writing system yet? What effect will the translated Bible have on the receiving cultures? A speaker at an International Translation Day meeting a few weeks ago in Toronto, Maya Chacaby, whose language is Anishanaabemowin (aka Ojibwe), said that for small communities like hers, translation was the only way to save a language threated with annihilation in a country dominated by English and French. For which reason, she often works as a translator "without any remuneration."

References
Christian Today, http://www.christiantoday.com, November 18, 2010.

Marika Kemeny. Glendon's International Translation Day examines quality translation for a variety of voices. InformATIO (Ottawa), 39:3.5-6.

The Wycliffe website is at www.wycliffe.org.

Photo: Wycliffe

Dragomans and Alphabets

2010-11-16T00:23:00.000-08:00

When, for a couple of years, I was a history student at university in London, my tutor was Bernard Lewis. He was encouraging and very helpful to me. I didn’t realise at the time how privileged I was, because it happened in the days before he was brain-drained to the USA (Princeton) and became a well-known public guru of Islamic and Middle East history and affairs. At that period he was on a lower academic rung as a young Lecturer; however, he was already a multilingual authority on the history of the Ottoman (or Turkish) Empire, the Muslim regime that ruled most of the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans for nearly five centuries until 1918. So when, in 2004, Professor Lewis brought out a book with the title From Babel to Dragomans, I knew at once who the dragomans were that he was referring to.

Those dragomans were the official translator-interpreters (there was no distinction between the two functions) of the Ottoman administration at various levels. The most prominent of them were for a long time Constantinople Greeks.

They were also the official translator-interpreters in the embassies and consulates of the Western powers that wanted to negotiate with the Turks or do business with them. The dragomans of the Westerners might be recruited locally or they might be their own nationals specially trained. The best-organised Western corps of dragomans was that of the French. Under Colbert, a school was established in Paris specially for training dragomans from childhood onwards. Among the other powers were the British, who, like the French, maintained their dragomans until the First World War (see References below).

Since the dragomans were Professional Experts, they’re beyond the scope of this blog. However, Lewis tells an anecdote that does have some relevance here.

One of our earliest accounts of a diplomatic communication in the Middle Ages comes from an Arabic chronicler called Awhadi. He tells us that a European queen, Bertha the daughter of Lothar, queen of Franja [Frankland] and its dependencies, sent a gift and a letter to the Abbasid Caliph al-Muktafi in the year 293 of the Hijra (906 CE). With them was a further message, not included in the letter, but addressed directly to the Caliph. The letter, says the Arab historian, was written on white silk ‘in a writing resembling the Greek writing but straighter’ (presumably this was Latin writing: the queen from Italy would obviously have used the Latin script).
How did they read this message in Latin? Who would there have been in tenth-century Baghdad that could read a letter in Latin? Awhadi tells us: they searched for someone to translate the letter, and in the clothing store they found a Frankish slave who was able ‘to read the writing of that people’. He was brought into the Caliph’s presence, where he translated the letter from Latin writing into Greek writing. Then they brought the famous scientific translator Ishaq ibn Hunain and he translated it from Greek into Arabic.

You’ll expect me to remark, I’m sure, that even the famous Professional Translator couldn’t proceed without the prior contribution of a humble bilingual slave in a clothing store. But there’s more to it.

First there's the apparent confusion between writing and language, as in “he translated the letter from Latin writing into Greek writing.” Of course the slave didn’t just transliterate the Latin letters into Greek ones, which wouldn’t have helped Ishaq much; he translated the message into the Greek language. It may be just an artefact of English translation, since the Arabic word kitâbah – I presume it’s that; Lewis doesn’t give the Arabic – can mean either a writing system, a script, or a piece of writing, a text. On the other hand, the identification of script with language would be understandable in the circumstances, since Latin, Greek and Arabic each uses a different alphabet that is characteristic of it.

What is certain, however, is that the slave and Ishaq each had to know two of those alphabets; and the slave, living in Arab Baghdad, must have known all three. What I’m getting at is that to be fully bilingual in a literate society, it’s not enough to be able to pronounce two languages; you have to be able to read and write their scripts. You have to be biliterate in that sense. Writing systems have become essential gateways.

Term
Dragoman: Note the plural dragomans; not dragomen, which is seen sometimes but is etymologically incorrect. It’s a very old and widespread synonym of interpreter. Lewis traces its history back to Assyrian ragamu, meaning to speak. It entered English by way of Old French, Italian, Byzantine Greek dragoumanos, Arabic turjmân, Aramaic, etc. The meaning Arabic or Turkish speaking local tourist guide came in with modern tourism in the 19th century.

References
Bernard Lewis. From Babel to Dragomans. In From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East, New York, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 18-32.

Sir Andrew Ryan, KBE, CMG., 1876-1949. The Last of the Dragomans. London: Bles, 1951. Ryan, who was what the title of his book says, rose from dragoman at Constantinople to ambassador to one of the Balkan countries. Difficult to find, but Amazon has books about another British dragoman, Gerald Fitzmaurice, and Johannes Kolmodin, the last dragoman of the Swedish embassy. Fitzmaurice’s title was Chief Dragoman, so there were others under him. We know, for example, that Ryan started as Second Dragoman.

Glen M. Cooper. Ishāq ibn Hunayn. In Thomas Hockey et al. (eds.), The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, New York, Springer, 2007, p. 578. http://islamsci.mcgill.ca/RASI/BEA/Ishaq_ibn_Hunayn_BEA.htm.

David Diringer, et al. The Alphabet: a Key to the History of Mankind. Several editions. Available from Amazon. The classic work on the subject.

Image: 'Dragoman', from the website of Dr. Hans-Peter Laqueur, http://www.hplqr.de/

From Natural to Expert Translator, With Essential Definitions

2010-11-12T02:57:00.000-08:00

This blog constantly bandies about terms like Natural Translator and Native Translator; and although there’s a side panel telling readers how to find definitions of them, it requires going back a long way. So I’ll take a pause and try to make them clearer. To that end, here's a diagram showing their relative positions in the development of translation ability and skills.

The terms mean what I want them to mean, which may well be different from the way other people use them. Especially the term Professional Translator, which professional translators themselves and people close to them such as translation teachers – including myself back in the 1970s – conflate with Expert Translator. To me now, Professional Translator means someone who does translating as a livelihood, whether full time or part time. The reality is that many professional translators are not well trained or qualified, even though you have a right to expect them to be if you’re paying them well (but not if you’re underpaying them). And on the other hand, there are many people who can translate as well as the Experts but who don’t do it as a profession. They’re common among academics; colleagues have occasionally taken time from their own work to translate an article for me. When Samuel Moore, a lawyer by profession, translated the Communist Manifesto into English for Marx and Engels – surely a challenge with them looking over his shoulder – he did so out of friendship and conviction. (See post of May 2, 2010.)

At first I only distinguished between Natural Translators and Professional Translators, but that was too crude. Now I reserve Natural Translators for bilinguals who’ve had no training, instruction or specific guidance at all in translating and so they do it intuitively and spontaneously. Since bilinguals usually come while still young under the influence of other people translating or are exposed to examples of translation, the best time to catch pure Natural Translators for study is in their early childhood. Once they go to school, it’s difficult to sift out the influences. However, they may be older.

The next level, Native Translators, is that of bilinguals who have in fact been exposed to and influenced by examples: examples of other people translating and examples of translations done by other people. Here too I’ve realised that the categorisation is too crude. There’s a large gap between what a school-age child absorbs and what, say, a literary translator has learnt by years of reading that includes translations. Therefore it’s necessary to distinguish between Beginner Native Translator and Advanced Native Translator.

Language Broker is a term that wasn’t coined by translation specialists but by educationists and sociologists. Language brokers are typically young Native Translators, sometimes Natural Translators, who interpret in a particular social context: that of immigrant communities whose members need to communicate with the host community. The term is new; my own first encounters with the phenomenon came in the 1970s before the term existed. I don’t like the use of broker as if it entailed negotiating a deal – intermediary would be better, as in the German Sprachmittler – but it’s here to stay.

Coming shortly to this blog: A mediaeval tale of alphabets.

Military Interpreters – Postscript

2010-11-07T01:51:00.000-07:00

Having written in my post yesterday about the treatment of military interpreters and the chaos in Iraq, I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised by a headline in this morning’s electronic edition of The Guardian newspaper:
Army's Iraqi interpreters face hardship after fleeing to UK.

Read all about it at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/07/iraqi-interpreter-refugees-jobless-Britain.

Still, they’re lucky to have got out alive from that hapless country.

Bilingualism and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal - Conclusions

2010-11-06T09:31:00.000-07:00

Photo: ‘IMTFE official interpreter’ from Wikimedia Commons. Note the IBM branding on his headset, and that he's taking notes for consecutive interpretation. The man next to him is likely a Monitor, and the non-Japanese to the right is perhaps an Arbitrator. (See previous posts.)

Though the Tokyo Trials took place long ago, we can still learn some things from Watanabe’s account of the most important one.

1. Even for important occasions that call for Professional Expert interpreting, it’s possible in extremis to make use of well-educated Native Translators instead. The latter will learn on the job:

Interpretation was inadequate in the earlier phase of the Trial (around May and June of 1946), sometimes giving only a summary of the exchange. Over time, interpreters’ and monitors’ work and cooperation improved, providing an adequate teamwork performance by March 1947.

However, it’s essential to provide a ‘safety net’ in the form of Expert Monitoring, and corrections must be admitted when the monitors spot mistakes. There was one monitor to every three interpreters at Tokyo, and the monitors did much more than just check the interpretation.

The monitor supported the interpreter – for example taking notes for them of details such as dates, periods, etc.

and so on.

To sum up then, it appears that Native Translators can be used in place of Expert Interpreters subject to three requirements: monitoring, teamwork and time to learn.

2. The pool from which the Expert Monitors were drawn in Tokyo was formed of Military Interpreters. Military interpretation has yet to be accorded its due importance in the history, training and treatment of interpreters – and in translation studies, though it’s been around at least since the time of the Ancient Egyptians. The organisation of military interpreting in recent times has been notoriously ad hoc; and in Iraq and Afghanistan it’s been chaotic, with the American military offloading its recruitment needs to private contractors. The Americans did start to train interpreters for Japanese just before Pearl Harbour, but it was too little and too late. The British were caught even worse off guard - but that’s another story. However, the skills of many Expert Military Interpreters were ultimately forged in the fire of the Pacific battles.

Perhaps, though, the most interesting lesson we can learn in this instance about Military Interpreters is that their role doesn’t end when the war does. Armistices must be negotiated, and after that there are other negotiations that are undertaken by the generals of the opposing forces. The generals naturally turn to the interpreters closest to them. Then there may be tribunals, as we have seen, and a period of occupation by the army of the victorious power as happened in Japan.

Reference
Tomie Watanabe. Interpretation at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal: an overview and Tojo’s cross-examination. TTR (Montreal), 22:1.57-91, 2010.

Bilingualism and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal - 2

2010-11-04T02:53:00.001-07:00

Continued from the previous post.
That the interpreters for the Trials weren't up to the level of Expert or Professional Translators doesn’t mean they had no acquaintance with translation. Some of them were officials from the Foreign Ministry, one at least was a journalist, one a university student. They were therefore presumably at some level of Native Translator.

Nevertheless, the American organisers of the interpreting were faced with two problems:

* Their interpreters were untrained and inexperienced
* As the interpreters had to be recruited in Japan, they might be suspected of bias in favour of the accused.

They therefore put in place a system of checks:

Monitors from officials of the Allied Powers would be relied upon to check and correct the interpretation.

Here bilingualism enters the picture again, but from a different direction. There were four monitors.

All four were Kibei Nisei, second generation residents of the US who were born in US but raised and educated in Japan, and then returned to the US before the outbreak of WWII. They were bilingual (English and Japanese) and were expected to be well versed in Japanese culture. During WWII, they worked for ATIS (the Allied Powers’ Translation and Interpretation Section). They were involved in intelligence activities such as tapping lines of communication, code breaking, prisoner interrogation, information collection from diaries, memos and other materials seized from Japanese soldiers killed during the war. They had gathered sufficient knowledge about WWII to perform to perform their tasks at the Tokyo Trial.

They were therefore Professional Expert translators by 1945, with much of the background knowledge required.

One such Japanese American was Steve Shizuma Yamamoto, who went on to have a long and successful career in the American Army (see photo). He had acquired his experience as an interrogator, having conducted no fewer than 3,000 interrogations in New Guinea. He isn’t mentioned by Watanabe, perhaps because he didn’t take part in the first trial.

In spite of the time it took, the method of interpreting was consecutive interpretation; not simultaneous, which was still very novel. The task of the monitors was facilitated by the use of consecutive. Actually, the same model of IBM simultaneous interpretation equipment as was used at Nuremberg was installed at Tokyo, but it wasn’t used in the same way. Watanabe doesn’t explain why not, but we can surmise some of the reasons:

* The absence of an organiser in Tokyo with the clout that Léon Dostert wielded at Nuremberg as personal interpreter to Eisenhower.
* There was no time to train the inexperienced interpreters for simultaneous, and in any case there were no trainers in Japan.
* Something that was told me many years later by a Japanese interpreter, Sen Nishiyama, who had begun his career in that era: the Japanese believed that English-Japanese simultaneous would be impossible because of the wide difference in sentence structure between the two languages. They were wrong. Under American pressure during the Occupation, simultaneous was in fact introduced into Japan in the 1950s.

Above the monitors was yet another tier, the Language Arbitration Board. Its members were unilingual English. Their task was to decide on any dispute or difficulty that could not be settled by the monitors. They were concerned mainly with terminology.

Once the interpretation of a disputed word was resolved by the Board, the arbitrated translation had to be used for the rest of the trial.

Some of the difficulties arose from cultural differences. There were moments when even Tojo intervened to try to clarify.

It is undeniable that [in some instances] Tojo’s rapid understanding and response, as well as his adamant assertion of translation errors, led to language arbitration… It must be added that the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal recognized the importance of cultural gaps.

The last part of Watanabe’s article is devoted to examples of interventions by interpreters and monitors, of arbitration, and particularly to the dispute over the translation of the Japanese word taian: did it mean reply to a proposal or counter-proposal? A lot depended on that single word.

Though the Tribunal has been criticised as unjust and even some of the judges issued obiter dicta at the time questioning its procedures, standards of evidence and vengeful ‘show trial’ nature, this criticism has not been directed at the interpretation. On the contrary,

There were no significant translation errors, because whenever erroneous or inappropriate interpretation was rendered by an interpreter, the monitor pressed a buzzer, lit a red light and corrected the interpretation.

In Watanabe`s opinion,

The monitors carried out their painstaking work within their capacity to secure the Japanese accused’s right to a fair trial.

To be concluded.

References
Tomie Watanabe. Interpretation at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal: an overview and Tojo’s cross-examination. TTR (Montreal), 22:1.57-91, 2010.

Sen Nishiyama. Translation and interpretation in Japan. Meta (Montreal), 28:1.95-110, 1983.

Photo
http://www.warofourfathers.com/war/new_guinea_yamamoto015.html.
A magnificent Karsh-quality portrait. A pity they don’t name the photographer.