Hiatus

I have to take a short break from blogging in order to finish off an article that’s long overdue.

For those of you who are involved in or interested in church interpreting, there’ll be a post some time next week with more about church interpreting in Africa.

Translating for the Fun of It

Back in the 1970s, when Bianca Sherwood and I first looked at the reports of translating done by young bilingual children (Natural Translators), one thing that struck us was that not all the translations were functional, in the sense of motivated by a need or desire to communicate information. We were rediscovering something that the famous pioneer of child language studies, Werner Leopold (see photo), had observed some years previously. Leopold was German, but he moved with his family to teach in the United States while his two daughters were still infants. He continued to speak German with his children although they soon picked up English in their new environment.

Like her sister, KL [the younger daughter] eventually realized that her father understood his children’s English, but she too continued to translate as part of a family game: “She treats it as a joke.”

To give the phenomenon a learned term, we called it ludic translation, i.e. translation as a game.

Ludic translation is not confined to children nor to Natural Translators. Native Translators and Expert Translators do it too. Here’s proof for Native Translators, i.e. people who have learned from their environment to translate to conventional standards without formal training. The examples in this instance are literary. Most literary translators start out as Native Translators, whose learning environment is the literature, including other people’s translations, that they avidly read. Today there are some university courses and workshops on literary translation, but only a few of the hundreds of practising literary translators have taken them.

A few days ago, a journalist wrote an article in The Guardian newspaper on the history of translation in English literature. He ended it by inviting readers to send in their own translations, which he then published. Not being a literary critic, I won’t comment on the quality of the submissions; but what first impressed me was the sheer quantity received within the next few days. The article drew 213 contributions to its ‘Comments’, most of which were actually translations. That’s a very large number for a literature blog. Furthermore, it’s generally considered that poetry is the most difficult genre of literary translation. People who can do it successfully, if they aren’t Experts, must be Advanced Native Translators. Nor did they go for the easy ones: Rilke and Baudelaire were favourites. “Translating is a bitch,” remarks one contributor. (St. Jerome put it more politely; he said it was a struggle.)

From which we may deduce that a lot of people like to translate for the pleasure of it. Why? For the challenge? Because, in the case of poetry, it’s a form or creative writing? Or, as in the case of Leopold’s daughter, as a game? Not that I think it’s anything peculiar to translation. Translating is a skill. Even when there’s no immediate need for our skills, we like to practice them and show our prowess.

Well, I can’t end without quoting one or two examples from this abundant anthology.

I.
The Cat
After (a very long way after) Baudelaire
Version by Jack Brae Curtingstall

Cat, see my heart flare;
reduce your claws to hint,
and let me meet your stare
of speckled flint.
My fingers trace the charts
of your spiralled fur,
as I drink in thoughts
not of you, but her:
my girlfriend's in my brain. Her look
(like yours, vicious queen),
cold, searching, grips me like a hook;
steely, gun-metalled, mean -
then her scent, deceptive, ish -
her body dark as liquorice.

Curtingstall is a poet. He says somewhere, “I read poetry every day.”

II.
From ‘graceandreacchi’
“Not so much a translation as a 'version' of an old favourite.”

Catullus – Carmen 85
odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and I love you. Why?
I don't know. But I feel it and
am crucified

Finally, I thank ‘smpugh’ for contributing this witty put-down from Ogden Nash:

He was once told by a lady at some event that she liked one of his books but preferred it in the French translation. "Yes", he murmured, "my work does tend to lose something in the original."

REFERENCES

Werner F. Leopold, 1896-1984. Speech Development of a Bilingual Child: A Linguist’s Record. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1939-1949. There was an AMS reprint. Out of print, but Amazon USA sometimes has a second-hand copy.

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. Digitised copy available free from translatology@yahoo.com.

Billy Mills. Poster poems: Translation (Books Blog). Guardian Unlimited, August 20, 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/aug/20/poster-poems-translation.

Photo: Kenji Hakuta

COLING Postscript

As foreseen (August 20 post), the venerable International Committee on Computational Linguistics (founded 1965) met in Beijing last week. It decided that the next COLING, the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, will be held in India, at Mumbai (Bombay) or Hyderabad, in the autumn of 2012. Enquiries to the Secretary of ICCL, Yorick Wilks, at ywilks@ihmc.us.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in machine translation, you can find a very full survey of current R&D at MT-survey
and the PowerPoint slides that go with it, at MT-slides (23 MB).


FOOTNOTE
Yorick Wilks was the man who opened my eyes to what machine translation meant. We were both attending an MT meeting in Ottawa in 1966(!) where I had to present an analysis I’d made of English phrasal verb structures. When I’d finished, somewhat self-satisfied, Yorick completely took the wind out of my sails by commenting loudly, “Well, Mr Harris, that was very interesting. But now, could you please tell us how you propose to put that on a computer?”

I immediately started looking for a computer programming course, one that I could understand.

Another Native Interpreter Helps Out in a Disaster Area

When I saw that interpreters were needed in the bayous (Alabama and Louisiana coastal wetlands), my first thought was, “Ah, for the Cajuns.” The bayous are home to the Cajuns (pronounced KAY-j'ns), a long-established French-speaking community expelled from Canada by the British in the 18th century. They’re bilingual in French and English, but they might need help with complicated documents.

Turns out, though, that the need isn’t for French, it’s for Vietnamese and Khmer. Hundreds of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees have settled in and around Bayou La Batre (see photo), where the climate suits them and they work in the fishing industry. They form a third of the local population.

They were happy until the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster ruined their livelihood, at least temporarily.

Then came the need to file for compensation.

Hundreds of non-English-speaking seafood industry workers endured an arduous claims process… because of what one volunteer group identified as a lack of translators.
When BP was running the claims process, many in the Bayou who speak Vietnamese or Khmer exclusively had trouble with the language barrier, according to the Boat People SOS organization, a nonprofit assisting those in local Southeast Asian communities collect claims.

And probably many of those who do speak some English would not know enough to navigate the procedure.

The trouble began as soon as BP launched the claims process, according to Grace M. Sciré, the group’s regional director.

The toll-free phone number to file a claim was only offered in English.

“They started to come in and say that we can’t file for a claim number because it’s in English, and we don’t understand what they’re asking us,” Sciré said. “We started making the calls for them.”

BP spokesman Ray Melick said that, through a contractor, the company hired a Vietnamese interpreter to work at the claims center in Bayou La Batre. BP also had translators who spoke Spanish, Khmer, Laotian and French, Melick said.

But at least one of the translators, Sciré said, only knew a few Vietnamese words. BP said their translators were hired through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“He could not carry a conversation,” said Vinh Tran, who is volunteering as a translator for Boat People SOS. “Listening might be another issue, but the responding part was not there.”

Tran helped provide translation for an oil spill-related panel discussion at Alma Bryant High School on Thursday and for a meeting... at the Bayou La Batre Community Center on Saturday.

Notice that Vin Tranh volunteered to act as an interpreter. Back to Native Interpreters. Native not Natural, because the competence of Natural Interpreters limits them to “everyday circumstances”, which these complicated affairs were not. Perhaps the interpreter criticised by Sciré was a Natural.

Johnny Nguyen, vice president of operations of SPS Inc., an accounting firm in Mobile helping with claims in Bayou La Batre, said the process was a struggle for those who speak English as well.

REFERENCES

Cajun. Wikipedia.

Bayou La Batre, Alabama. Wikipedia.

David Ferrara. Lack of translators makes oil spill claims process arduous for Southeast Asian immigrants. August 23, 2010. http://blog.al.com/live/2010/08/lack_of_translators_makes_oil.html.

Photo: Wikipedia

P.S. This post was delayed by atmospheric conditions in Valencia. On Friday, the temperature reached 44º, the highest ever recorded in the city. My netbook was overheating.

COLING 2010

This weekend, a majority of my fellow members of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL) will be gathering in Beijing for COLING 2010, the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics. COLING takes place every two years in a different part of the world. It’s to sponsor this prestigious conference that the ICCL exists.

The first COLING I attended was at Stockholm in 1969. The application of computational linguistics that drew me to it was machine translation (MT), then in its infancy. Today there are other major applications that compete with MT at COLING; information extraction is a hot topic. The size as well as the scope of COLING has increased with the years. When I was secretary of COLING 1976, which was held in Ottawa, we had about 100 papers submitted. (Incidentally, it was the first COLING at which the registrations were computerised and the poster produced by computer graphics.) This time there were an amazing 840 submissions!

The computational changes that have taken place in MT since 1969 have been twofold. On the one hand, innovations in its techniques: at first transformational grammar and more recently statistically based MT, in which large data bases are searched for previous translations of the same or very similar pieces of text. And on the other hand, the breathtaking advances of computers in general. In fact the use of the large databases needed for statistical MT (called translation memories) only became feasible with the advent of cheap,fast mass storage devices in the 1980s. At the time of the Stockholm COLING, we were still using large reels of magnetic tape for storage!

In addition, there's been a radical social change. In 1969 MT was envisaged as a professional product that would translate technical documentation or (in the case of Canada) government publications, for clients with funds to pay for it. That function remains operative, but to it has been added a new dimension: MT as a consumer product for DIY translation by anybody, universally available and free. With that comes an enormous increase in the volume of MT. Of course, in 1969 we couldn`t imagine the Internet and its impact.

Mind you, we all know that MT still has serious limitations; I’ve written about that before (March 24; April 2, 4, 6 and 14 posts). There was an case recently in Canada that serves as a lesson.

The RCMP, the national police, being an agency of the Federal Government, is obliged by law to produce all its news releases in both the official languages of the country, English and French. The RCMP in the far western province of British Columbia, where native French speakers number about 1.5% of the population but there are many Francophone tourists, decided to cut time and cost for itself and for the public by letting users have Google Translate do the work through a link on their website. Before long, however, there was a public protest by the French division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about the abysmal quality of the French that was being turned out. Fearing possible legal and political repercussions, the British Columbia RCMP soon backtracked and announced it would send its translations to the government’s human translators again – at a cost, so they said, of $3,000 a day.

This cautionary tale illustrates how naive ill-informed clients may be about MT and about translation in general, but that was so in 1969 too.


REFERENCES

COLING 2010. http://www.coling-2010.org.

Chad Skelton. B.C. RCMP removes Google French translator from website. Vancouver Sun, August 3, 2010, as well as numerous other press and media reports.

A Privileged Diplomatic Native Interpreter

Over at The Liaison Interpreter, which you can reach instantly through the Liaison Interpreting in Japan link on my side panel, there was a very striking action photo this week of Major Arthur Herbert Birse, CBE, born 1889, the Briton who was assigned to accompany Winston Churchill as interpreter at several of the latter’s meetings with Stalin. Birse was brought up in an English family in pre-Soviet Russia and was bilingual from childhood, but didn't train as an interpreter. In fact he was a banker by profession who happened to be called up as a British army officer in wartime. He tells a good story of a late-night drinking session between the two leaders.

The photo is perceptively analysed.

(Footnote: Out of nostalgia, I once tried to stay at the old hotel in Moscow — I forget the name — where Birse had been lodged, but I was turned away because I didn’t have an Intourist reservation.)

Crowdsourcing Coming to Terms with Death

A lot of news about translation comes out of China these days; and at the professional and academic levels, the journal Babel of the International Federation of Translators rarely lacks a Chinese contributor. “When China awakes, the world will tremble,” said Napoleon. This post relays a report from that awoken country.

I’ve run other posts about crowdsourcing for translation; the last was on December 19. The purpose of this one is to show that crowdsourcing is not limited to video games, software localisation or social networking. It can also tackle more intellectually difficult discourse.

Chen Xiaoran is finally beginning to understand the complexities of Death.
Not his own, but the philosophy course in Yale University's open program.
Chen, a Chinese college student, at first was baffled by the jeans and sneakers-clad professor who sat cross-legged on his desk for the lectures, which are posted on-line.
"I liked the relaxed style of the class," says Chen. "We don't see much of that on our campus."
It's a rare opportunity for China's Internet users to see how a Yale professor inspires his students to think, to question, and to argue.
But without subtitles, understanding would be difficult, if not impossible.
"I'd been longing to listen to Death for a long time and I tried for two classes, but couldn't understand due to my poor English comprehension," says Chen. "But now with Chinese subtitles, it's much easier."
The subtitles of Yale's on-line open courses are translated into Chinese by non-profit translation workshop Yye Ts, which is opening up courses of Ivy-league universities to ordinary Chinese.
Yye Ts was founded six years ago by a group of amateur translators, who started out translating foreign movies and TV series, but unlike other voluntary translation workshops in China, they moved into academia.
Liang Liang, the founder of Yye Ts, is a self-employed technician. He says he started the undertaking simply out of love of translation and the desire to introduce English-language films and TV shows to more Chinese.
His team of volunteers – mostly college and graduate students – all work with the same altruistic intentions, and the Yye Ts website generates enough advertising revenue to cover the overheads.
The academic translations began a month ago, the idea of a friend, and proved to be more difficult than anticipated.
"Subtitling college courses requires us to understand the specific academic field or we'll humiliate ourselves with the translation," he says.
"We select courses according to our translators' capacities and user demand. Once we decide to take on a new academic field, we recruit new translators accordingly," says Liang.
"We have to comply with historical facts and terminology. Some of the courses even require translators to know ancient Greek and Roman poems."
The translation of each course is a team effort. Four people each take 15 minutes of an hour-long class, but even then it can take each team member three days to complete.
The leader of the Death team, who goes by the nom-de-plume of Flying Phantom, says, "The most interesting part is discussion and rewording after the first drafts. We ask experts about what we're unsure of."
The workshop has so far subtitled 10 courses covering philosophy, finance and psychology, and the scripts are being downloaded 10,000 times each day.
Yye Ts has been divided into four teams: television, film, documentaries, and education.
Fang Si, supervisor of the education team, says her team is composed of 160 translators, mainly college and graduate students, with some doctoral students.
"We have very strict rules in taking on translators. Candidates have to pass two rounds of tests, which eliminate half of the applicants," says Fang.
The remaining translators are all majors in certain academic fields, and many have studied abroad.
Time-consuming as the work is, Fang Si is always enthusiastic. "By translating these courses, we can brush up our English skills and develop a better understanding of what we have learned."
The service has a growing number of appreciative followers
Rong Yujie, a graduate student of computer science, says access to first-class lectures in China is limited, but the online open courses allow him to expand his horizons.
Huang Qi, a senior manager of Shenzhen-based IT company Tencent Foundation, says, "I just want to learn English by watching these courses, and I think these are better materials than English TV shows or movies which contain too much slang."
Liang Liang plans for the group to take on more subtitles of open courses from world-class universities, and he predicts Yye Ts' rivals will be reading their future too in each new release.

The graph charts the rise in Yye Ts’s popularity in recent months.

Notice one unusual feature: the source is chosen in function of the translator and not vice vesa.


REFERENCES
Tian Ying and Liu Xin, assisted by Wei Wei, Tang Shuxin and Qu Peiran (Xinhua, Beijing). Coming to terms with Death and other big issues on the Internet. English.news.cn, July 16, 2010. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-07/16/c_
111962298.htm.
My emphasis - BH.

Graph: markosweb.co