Hiatus Extended...

because I've had a very bad bout of flu and I'm still under the effects of the flu itself and the medicines for it.

But there will be something posted these coming days about Medical Interpreting.

Church Interpreting in Nigeria

In a post on August 9, 2009, I told how I first become acquainted with church interpreting at a service on the campus of the University of Buea in Cameroon, West Africa. Since then, I’ve learned many things about how it’s done in other parts of the world, some of them from you readers (see References). Now an article just published in the latest edition of Babel, the research journal of the International Federation of Translators, brings me back to West Africa, and almost next door to Cameroon in South-West Nigeria.

To sum it up:

This work investigates and evaluates the… effectiveness of religious interpretation in Yoruba speaking areas of Nigeria. The study focused on only religious gatherings that make use simultaneously of English and Yoruba languages to communicate the message of God to the worshippers. The objective of the study is to… evaluate the quality of the output through a questionnaire distributed to members of the spiritual congregations. The level of professional competence in the interpreter will also be investigated.

The term professional in the quotation is inappropriate and betrays a prior bias as to norms, because, as the author states,

40 respondents [to the questionnaire] said that most interpreters… are selected from within the congregations where they worship. 43 out of 50 reveal that they are not paid for the job, perhaps because they are potential future preachers and regard the service as a training ground.

And further on,

Interpreters in spiritual gatherings in the Yoruba speaking lands of Nigeria are not trained interpreters. They know nothing about the rules guiding the profession. They are simply bilingual with a deep knowledge of the subject matter.

In other words, these are not Professional Interpreters. They are Native Interpreters who may or may not have reached the competence of Expert Interpreters by work experience. We are told nothing more about their backgrounds, not even their ages, level of education and years of experience.

As at my Cameroon initiation,

The interpretation [is] consecutive interpretation, where the interpreter is present in a room or in a church, close to the pastor ministering the word of God. For easy communication and to avoid confusion, the speaker often stops…, passing the floor to the interpreter for the reproduction… of what the pastor has just said.

In other words, short consecutive mode. We aren’t told whether they employ the interpreter mimicry that I observed in Cameroon, where the interpreter imitates the manner of speaking and even the gestures of the preacher. However, there’s a hint as to manner in one of the questions in the questionnaire: “Is the interpreter free to correct the preacher?”

The research instrument is reproduced in full. It’s an interesting client satisfaction and opinion questionnaire but it doesn’t interrogate the interpreters. Nevertheless, there are some interesting conclusions:

39 respondents [out of 50]… are satisfied with the quality of the interpretation from English to Yoruba… Respondents with a tertiary education carried the highest number of 37 to support that the output of the interpreter was satisfactory. On the other hand, only 24 of the respondents are satisfied with the interpretation from Yoruba to English… the interpretation is better from English to Yoruba for the simple fact that Yoruba is the interpreter’s mother tongue.

There is an additional difficulty because Yoruba is a tonal language and the tones carry nuances that are hard to render in English.

A journal assessor took me to task last year for proposing that divine inspiration is an element that should be recognised in studies of religious translation. So I was interested to read that respondents enjoined both pastors and interpreters to "seek for God's guidance" as well as to "master the subject matter and the languages."

The article begins:

Christianity and Islam… were adopted in Yoruba-speaking areas of Nigeria with the accompanying languages, English and Arabic. Today the two religions are well spread and cannot be disassociated from Yoruba culture.

Yet there is nothing further about Arabic or Islam. Muslims everywhere learn to say their prayers in Arabic, just as all Catholics used to pray in Latin; but there are other parts of religious services that may be in a local language, for instance the sermon, and there's a Yoruba translation of the Qur’an.

Despite how widespread church interpreting is in Africa, this is the first research article I’ve read that’s specifically about it, and the veteran editor of Babel, René Haeseryn, is to be thanked for publishing it even if it has shortcomings. It leaves me hungry for more.

Image: Calvary Roseville United Methodist Church, Ado Ekiti, Nigeria.

References
Adawuni Salawi (University of Ado-Ekiti). Evaluation of interpretation during congregational services and public religious retreats in south-west Nigeria. Babel, 56:2.129-138, 2010.

Qur’an. The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an. Translation in Yoruba. Medina: King Fahd Complex for Printing the Holy Qur’an, 2007. http://www.islamhouse.com/p/30467.

Previous posts on church interpreting: July 29, August 3, August 9, August 11, August 27, October 28, 2009; April 10, 2010

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.