A Young Interpreter In Another Era: George Thomas Staunton

The penultimate post on this blog was about the contemporary Young Interpreter movement among schoolchildren in England. Before them there was an ample literature about the child interpreters of immigrant families in the United States especially, called language brokers. And going back further, we have accounts of child interpreters as early as Jules Ronjat's groundbreaking book Le développement linguistique d'un enfant bilingue published in 1913. But earlier than that, nothing – or almost nothing. Finding a pre-1913 description of a child interpreter is like turning up a rare coin in an untilled field. There are two reasons for this scarcity. The first is one that affects all the history of interpreting: the fact that interpreting, unlike written translation, left no material trace of itself prior to modern recording technology. So we have no interpretation comparable with the Lady Elizabeth's sixteenth-century Le miroir de l'âme pécheresse for example (enter lady elizabeth in the Search box on the right). And the other is that translatologists, even if it was occurring under their noses, didn't think it was significant (and there are many like that even today).

Which is what makes the case of George Thomas Staunton so interesting for us.

George Thomas was the son of George Leonard Staunton (1737-1801). The latter was secretary to an English nobleman, Earl Macartney and he was an accomplished descriptive writer. He was both a physician and a lawyer, had travelled widely and was friendly with prominent literary and political figures of the time. Macartney was an experienced colonial administrator in the days when, as he himself said, Britain controlled "a vast empire on which the son never sets." By the late 18th century, that empire had been pushed eastward by the British East India Company till it confronted China. The prize was trade. Europeans had developed a taste for that country's export ware, including porcelain and tea. So the British sought better organised, more open trade relations with China. But the proud Chinese turned out to be a hard nut to crack. Several British embassies to the Chinese emperor had failed. Then in 1792 it was decided to have another try. Macartney was sent out as Ambassador Extraordinary. He sailed on several ships with a large delegation that included, naturally, his secretary. George Leonard was in effect Macartney's right-hand man. Far more unusual was that Staunton senior decided to take his son along with him to see the world. The younger Staunton's presence was covered by having him appointed as page to Macartney. The embassy reached its destination, the imperial court, the following year.

It seems extraordinary that for such an important embassy so little attention had been paid to the language barrier and the need for interpreters. It may have been because the East India Company, which had been pressured into paying for the expedition, had previously suffered a bad experience with one of its interpreters and was even openly hostile to training more. So Staunton brought along two Chinese Catholic student priests from the Collegium Sinicum (College of the Sacred Congregation for the Propogation of the Faith) in Naples, where Chinese was taught to missionaries; but they didn't know English. They were accustomed to interpreting Chinese and Latin. During the long ocean journey, George Thomas, who was good at languages, studied Chinese with them. Prior to trip, he had already started to learn Chinese in London.

The result was that when Macartney and his entourage finally had their audience with the Emperor Qianlong, only George Thomas was capable of conversing with him.

George Thomas Staunton was 12 years old. What an adventure for a young boy! It may be an exaggeration to say that he acted as Macartney's interpreter, though some sources say he knew Chinese well enough to do so. There was in fact a Chinese interpreter present, one of the Chinese students, but communication through him had to be relayed through Latin. George Thomas's conversation was brief. But the Emperor was charmed by the little foreign boy who could speak Chinese, and thereby the latter helped foster the friendly relationship that we always establish when we take the trouble to learn the language of our hosts. The Emperor showed his appreciation by a mark of special favour, a personal present.

Sources
Macartney Embassy. Wikipedia, 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macartney_Embassy

George Leonard Staunton. An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to China... Dorothy Sloan Rare Books, 2016. http://www.dsloan.com/Auctions/A17/lot_73.html

Seán Golden. From the Society of Jesus to the East India Company: a case study in the social history of translation. http://pagines.uab.cat/seangolden/sites/pagines.uab.cat.seangolden/files/SeanGoldenSocietyOfJesusEastIndiaCompany.pdf

Ruth A. Roland. Interpreters as Diplomats: A Diplomatic History of the Role of Interpreters in World Hstory. 1982, republished Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1999. See Staunton in the index.


Image
Macartney's first meeting with the Emperor Qianlong. George Thomas Staunton can be seen on the lower right. A sketch by the embassy's artist William Alexander. Source: British Library.


NPIT3, Winterthur (near Zurich), 5-7 May 2016
International forum for Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation, the latest paradigm in translation studies. http://www.zhaw.ch/linguistics/npit3.

What Makes an Expert Translator a Professional Translator?

Previously, on this blog and elsewhere, I have maintained that what distinguishes a Professional Translator from a Non-Professional Expert Translator is that the former is paid for translating (see the definitions obtained by entering essential definitions in the Search box on the right). I still believe that's the defining characteristic. Yet there are many Expert Translators whose productions are of as high a standard as those of the Professionals but who do them pro bono publico or for friends and colleagues, and so on, without charging. And on the other hand there are translators who work as Professionals and charge accordingly but they lack training or experience and are not so good. Caveat emptor!

The upcoming International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation makes me think again. Payment, whether by piecework or by salary. may still be the defining characteristic of the Professional, but there are also other important differences. Here are some of them. They aren't necessarily in order of importance.

1. The time constraint (see image). The Professional undertakes to produce a translation not only for a certain price but also by a certain deadline. There may well be a penalty for missing it. The Non-Professional cannot always take his or her time but can expect more flexibility and can hardly be penalised.

2. Speed. The would-be Professional who can't keep up a certain speed won't earn enough to make a living or may be unemployable. The question is often asked, what's the minimum speed or the optimum speed to demand of a translator, but it's too variable to be dealt with here.

3. Training. By the norm of other professions, a Professional Translator should have received training somehow from somebody, and be in possession of a piece of paper to prove it. That is, if you think of translating as a profession like law or medicine; but not if you regard it as something more creative like music. While many employers of translators do these days require a degree or diploma from applicants, a large segment of the translation 'industry' remains unregulated and untrained..

4. Technology. Obviously this applies to the parts of the world that are technologically advanced; but where today are there no computers? Today's Professionals are expected to know how to use word processors and term banks at least, and many job ads now call for mastery of more complex translator-aid software like machine translation systems, translation memories and translation project managers. Sign of the times: I've just received an announcement from University College London for this year's edition of their "very popular" Intensive Summer Course in Translation Technology, which you too can see at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/centras/professional-online-courses/summer-translation/translation-technology-summer-school.

5. Ethics. Professionals are expected to conform to certain standards and principles of conduct. They may be generally accepted but informal, or they may be codified into a Code of Ethics. Among other things, it may enjoin translators to turn away work for which they are not qualified or to refer the client to a better qualified colleague.(I recently received a circular from the professional association to which I belong, asking me to sign the updated version of its Code.) Non-professionals are not bound by them.

6. Versatiity. The non-professional Expert Translator is usually only expert in a particular subject or subject area. Take the case of Einstein's English translator, described on this blog a few posts ago. Would he have been capable of such a good translation in a different area such as biology? Anyway he never did publish any translations outside mathematical physics. But the Professional Translator cannot afford to be so picky and must adapt to market demand. I knew a professional Canadian government translator who was a qualified geologist and could rattle off 6,000 words a day in that area. Then the government decided it didn't need so many geology specialists and he was switched to pension legislation. His output slipped to 1,000 words a day and he hated it. But, as he said ruefully, it was pensions or unemployment.

In another dimension, that of the medium, today's Professional Translator may be called on to translate not only texts but also audiovisual captions and subtitles, dictionary entries, etc., whereas the Non-Professionals can turn down what they don't like. The number of 'professional updating' courses currently on offer for audiovisual translating is striking, whereas 20 years ago there were none.

The case of the geologist-translator illustrates an important component of translating. Translators need not only fluency in languages but also extra-linguistic background knowledge in the area dealt with by their texts. You can't translate well or quickly what you don't understand. Non-Professionals may decide it's not worth their while researching to acquire background knowledge they don't already have. The Professional Translator, on the contrary, must be prepared to do so and the ways of doing it should be part of their training. Fortunately the internet makes it much easier than it used to be.

7. Liability. In practice it's very rare for translators to be sued for errors and omissions. I only remember one case a long time ago concerning a maintenance manual translated by IBM. But it suits the insurance companies to advertise that translators could be sued and to sell professional liability insurance against it. In short, professional liability is a dubious characteristic of professional translators, yet some translation agencies ask for insurance.

Can you think of any other characteristics of the Professional Translator?

Image
Source: someecards, www.someecards.com


NPIT3, Winterthur (near Zurich), 5-7 May 2016
International forum for Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation, the latest paradigm in translation studies. http://www.zhaw.ch/linguistics/npit3.

Young Interpreters Again

I always await the latest Hampshire EMTAS bulletin eagerly. EMTAS, in case you don't know, runs a Young Interpreter Scheme (YI) that provides support to school pupils who are learning English as an Additional Language. Hampshire is a county in southern England, but the scheme has spread beyond it.

"It recognises the huge potential that exists within each school community for pupils of all ages to use their skills and knowledge to support new learners of English so that they feel safe and valued from the start. Young interpreters undergo specific training to prepare for this role and are selected on the basis of different personal qualities."

Most of them are bilingual, and there is an assumption that if they are bilingual they can translate. Note that YI does not replace the need for professional adult interpreters. Guidance is given on the situations where it is not appropriate to turn to YI.

YI and its indefatigable coordinator Astrid Dinneen have been given honourable mentions several times before on this blog. To find the posts, enter emtas in the Search box on the right.

The latest issue of the bulletin is as interesting as ever. Its lead article is not from the UK but from far away Jordan, where the International Community School (ICS) is the first to have set up the scheme outside the UK. What is most striking about it is the children's testimonials of motivation and satisfaction. For example:

"I am from Korea. I am proud of myself to be a Young Interpreter. I like to be an interpreter because some of the new students can be friends with me. One of the new kids that came to our school is my best friend now. It is a really good idea to have a Young Interpreter in a school because we can communicate well with the new children. We can know about them and whenever they need help we can help them. So the new kid whenever the teacher needs translation I will go and help him. So I like to be a Young Interpreter."

This is all very good. I do, however, have a couple of caveats.

1. The bulletin records successes and expansions; it doesn't tell us about setbacks or withdrawals. It seems unlikely that in such a large and varied body of children there aren't a few who find the interpreting task too difficult of frightening, and we would like to know why (personal reasons? institutional reasons?) and what can be done to help them.

2. A distinction must be made between effects that are specific to translating, such as (perhaps) increased verbal intelligence, and 'side effects' such as friendly relations with other children. The latter might be accomplished by everyday behaviour or being good at football.

But these are quibbles about a very praiseworthy initiative. The mystery, to me as a translatologist, is that no studies have been done either of YI as a movement or of individual young translators. There is a large and varied pool of subjects waiting for you eager beaver researchers.

Reference
Astrid Dinneen (ed.) Young Interpreters Newsletter, Issue 22, 26 January, 2016. http://ww3.hants.gov.uk/emtas


NPIT3, Winterthur (near Zurich), 5-7 May 2016
International forum for Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation, the latest paradigm in translation studies. http://www.zhaw.ch/linguistics/npit3.

Machine Translation Comes of Age in Canada

The law in Canada requires that all Federal Government documents written in one of the two official languages (English or French) be translated into the other one. That means millions of words of translation year in year out. For five decades the Government of Canada has been seeking ways to speed up the work and reduce its cost by using computers. I know because I worked on the National Research Council of Canada's first attempt at machine translation (MT) way back in 1966. There has been one outstanding success, the METEO system for translating weather bulletins, but it has very limited application.

Now the spread of MT software like Google Translate and Bing Translate and the improvement in their quality are obliging the Government of Canada Translation Bureau to take a leap forward or be made partly redundant. According to the Bureau's CEO, Donna Achimov (see photo), government employees log over a million uses of Google Translate each week. A proprietary MT system called Portage is scheduled to be made available to 350,000 Federal Government employees on April 1. A pilot version is being tested, not without criticism.

Of course the human translators are up in arms, worried ostensibly about the quality of the translations but in reality more about losing their jobs. The professional association to which I belong, the Association of Translators and Interpreters of Ontario (ATIO), has written to its members asking them to make their feelings known to the minister responsible. Here's how I have responded.

Machine translation (MT), for all its many imperfections, is here to stay. Rejecting it is like King Canute trying to hold back the tide. If public servants are not allowed to use the Translation Bureau's MT device they will simply turn to Google or Bing Translate, which are available for free. They are already doing so right now. Indeed one wonders why the Bureau is going to the expense of developing its own system when the ones just mentioned could be adopted and improved for less.

That said, there are real dangers in people using MT who do not understand its limitations and who are not themselves bilingual. You just have to try using the current systems to see their shortcomings - hence the complaints that have already been received. The state of Maharashtra in India has barred employees from using Google Translate in the wake of of an embarrassing Marathi mistranslation it caused them of a circular for imposing sedition charges (see References). So caveat emptor! ATIO should press for some precautions:

1. MT translations should always be headed by a notice, "To save time and expense, the following translation has been produced by computer and is not guaranteed against meaning errors or poor language. If you have any queries, complaints or suggestions, please contact Client Services of the Government of Canada Translation Bureau at [email address] or [phone]."

2. The official who commissions or produces the translation should accept responsibility for it by signing a docket to that effect and filing it

These precautions would IMHO make users think and have more effect than would opposition, Certainly more effect than protesting that some translators will lose their jobs (which is no doubt what the government would like). At least some of the displaced translators would find new work as consultants and correctors.

References
Marion Marking. Cats and dogs trigger machine translation row in Canada. Slator, 8 February 2016. http://slator.com/technology/cats-and-dogs-trigger-machine-translation-row-in-canada/

Faizal Malik. Maharashtra govt bars employees from using Google Translate. Hindustan Times, 14 December 2015. http://www.hindustantimes.com/mumbai/maharashtra-govt-bars-employees-from-using-google-translate/story-TGTXYC9OLulDK6TwDLvFXJ.html

Image
Donna Achimov, CEO of the Government of Canada Translation Bureau

Why Portage? Canadians think of it as a Canadian word, coined first in French from porter meaning to carry and then borrowed (with a slight change of pronunciation) into Canadian English. The fact is the word has been around in English for centuries, but it may be necessary to explain it for modern readers. In Canada it means the old practice of carrying canoes and their loads across a land barrier between two rivers or lakes. Hence it is a metaphor for overcoming the barrier between two languages.


NPIT3, Winterthur (near Zurich), 5-7 May 2016
International forum for Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation, the latest paradigm in translation studies. http://www.zhaw.ch/linguistics/npit3.

Fairy Tale Updates

1. Nutcracker

For the original post, enter nutcracker in the Search box on the right.

At Christmas time this blog used to carry histories of fairy stories that had been transformed, first by translation and then by adaptation, from their original languages and versions into a sometimes ignominious adaptation for the British Christmas stage as pantomimes. One of them was Nutcracker, which had however the good fortune to be turned from a story by the German Romantic author E T A Hoffman (published 1816) into a much loved ballet for children. A recent article by Sarah Ardizzone, an award-winning translator of French children's books, tells a very different but no less fortunate history of Nutcracker in French.

She begins by telling us, in effect, that Hoffman's story itself had an element of adaptation:

"We can trace accounts of wooden nutcrackers springing to life in the folk taes of Bohemia, Poland and Muscovy. It was on this folklore that ETA Hoffman drew… pitted against the bourgeois values of 19th-century Bavaria, which reshaped the tale."

Then she goes on to trace the French translation:

"With its toy soldiers and sugarplum fairy who come to life on Christmas Eve, The Nutcracker has come to sum up the magic of the festive season. But there is a darker history to the story, and the French writer Alexandre Dumas was just one of the storytellers who was entranced by it...
Dumas's wife, the actress (born Marguerite-Josephine Ferrand) is credited with translating [it] into French. Dumas himself then adapted it, introducing a framing device and restoring the tale to its original storytelling tradition. Our narrator is tethered to a chair in the boudoir of a French children's party and the society brats refuse to untether him until he has told them a gripping story. Enter Hoffman's Nutcracker, with exceptionally high stakes. It is as imperative for Dumas's narrator to hold his audience's attention as for Scheherazade.
"Dumas's version is famously more saccharine than Hoffman's lugubrious tale, and when Tchaikovsky was commissioned to compose the score for a libretto by Marius Petipa [the choreographer of the Imperial Russian Ballet], he was unhappy that Petipa had adapted it directly from Dumas."

The moral of this tale is that translations of literature are like children of their originals. They live in another culture and, like children, they may well grow up to be quite different from their parents and from one another.

References
Sarah Ardizzone. The story of The Nutcracker - in pictures. The Guardian, 24 December 2015. It's worth going to the original publication to see the illustrations. Click here. or go to
http://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2015/dec/24/the-story-of-the-nutcracker-in-pictures

Alexandre Dumas. L'histoire d'une casse-noisette. 1844.


2. Perrault

Two other stories whose metamorphoses have likewise been described on this blog are Charles Perrault's Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. To find them, enter perrault in the Search box. By magical coincidence, on the very day that I'm writing these lines (12 January 2016) the banner on the home page of Google is celebrating the 300th anniversary of Perrault's birth. Writers of his vintage never die.



NPIT3, Winterthur (near Zurich), 5-7 May 2016
International forum for Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation, the latest paradigm in translation studies. http://www.zhaw.ch/linguistics/npit3.

Happy New Year 2016

A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO MY FOLLOWERS AND ALL MY OTHER READERS!

2015 was bad for me, as you know if you've been following the blog through the year. I owe a lot of apologies to people I let down when illness struck. Now that I'm recovering, albeit very slowly, I'm hoping 2016 will be a catch-up year.

When I began looking at Natural Translation in the 70s, the idea that translating could be done without training or professional qualifications was anathema to my colleagues. Even by 2009, when I started this blog, the literature on untrained, intuitive translation was infinitesimal compared to the flood of writings about what I polemically called "the icing on the cake": that is to say, all the skilled literary, legal, religious, etc. translating and its practitioners. To my mind the turning point came when Rachele Antonini organised NPIT1, the First International Conference on Non-professional Interpreting and Translation, at Forli in 2012. That was recognition. Now we're coming up to NPIT3 this year. Non-professional translation is not the same as natural translation, but it's a step in that direction. As a distinguished reader has just written to me, "The work that started several years ago is paying off today."

Thank you everybody.



NPIT3, Winterthur (near Zurich), 5-7 May 2016
International forum for Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation, the latest paradigm in translation studies. http://www.zhaw.ch/linguistics/npit3.

Mathematical Translatology

This post is for people who are mathematically minded. If you're not one of them, then skip it.

In my early days in translatology (aka translation studies) I laboured in machine translation (MT). There I was fortunate enough to work for a while under a brilliant French computer scientist, Dr Alain Colmerauer. He had begun his career, like many French computer scientists, as a mathematician, and he'd become an expert in the hybrid field known as mathematical linguistics (ML). In particular he specialised at that time in a type of ML called transformational grammar (TG). There's an article on TG in Wikipedia. His application of TG to translation, called Q-Systems (there's an article on them too in Wikipedia), was an early example (1970) of mathematical translatology and remains one of the best ever.

You still need maths to work on the design of MT systems, but since the late 1980s the maths has changed radically and TG has been swept away by statistics. Still, from time to time I'm taken by a nostalgia for the old days of ML. And so I set to thinking recently about whether ML could be used to characterise not the translation of specific sentences or sentence structures – which is what we mostly used to do – but the whole of translation. This is what I came up with.

Let I1 be an idea or message, piece of information, emotional feeling, etc.
Let I2 be another idea or message, piece of information, emotional feeling, etc., that is the same as, similar to or different from I1.
Let L1 be a natural language.
Let L2 be another natural language.
Let E be the expression function by which any I is expressed in any L.
Let T be the relationship of translation.

Let ei be an expression (utterance, text, etc) that is a product of E: ei = E(La, Ix)
Let ej be another expression (utterance, text, etc) that is a product of E: ej = E(Lb, Iy)

If Ix = Iy and La = Lb, then we have a paraphrase and not a translation.
Otherwise:
If Ix = Iy, then ej is a precise translation of ei.
If Ix ≈ Iy, then ej is a paraphrastic translation of ei.

In either of the latter two cases, let's label the relationship as T(ei:ej).

The question of what constitutes precise and paraphrastic is too big to go into here. It leads to a whole literature on 'equivalence' in translation. For the moment it must remain a subjective evaluation.

So far so good and quite obvious, but let's go a little further.

Let us declare that the relationship T is ordered and reversible.
Then T(ei:ej) ≠ T(ej;ei) and Ta(ei:ej) => Tb(ej;ei).
The formula models a procedure that is widely used in certain fields of translation and is called back translation. It happens to be empirically testable using an MT system that operates in both directions. Why MT? Because that way we can be sure of the stability and objectivity of the translator's 'mind'.
Here's a test using Google Translate and translating between English and French.

Input 1: My mother has gone shopping and will not be back before lunch.
Output 1: Ma mère est allée faire du shopping et ne sera pas de retour avant le déjeuner.
Input 2: Ma mère est allée faire du shopping et ne sera pas de retour avant le déjeuner.
Output 2: My mother went shopping and will not be back before lunch.

The result is a paraphrastic back translation. (Went doesn't have exactly the same meaning as has gone, but the tense of the French verb est allée permits two possible translations into English.)

Let's now declare that the relationship T is transitive:
Ta(e1, e2) and Tb(e2, e3) => Tc(e1, e3).

Thus, according to Google Translate again, where L1 is English, L2 is French and L3 is German:

T1(My mother has gone shopping and will not be back before lunch, Ma mère est allée faire du shopping et ne sera pas de retour avant le déjeuner.)
and T2(Ma mère est allée faire du shopping et ne sera pas de retour avant le déjeuner, Meine Mutter ging einkaufen und nicht zurück vor dem Mittagessen sein.)
=>
T3(My mother has gone shopping and will not be back before lunch, Meine Mutter ging einkaufen und nicht zurück vor dem Mittagessen sein.)

That's another paraphrastic translation, but close enough to validate tbe formula. (The mistake in the German is Google's.) Incidentally this example models that if either T1 or T2 is paraphrastic (or both are), T3 will also be paraphrastic. This operation is all the more interesting because it models a common procedure which is usually called relay translation or relay interpretation and is in practice widely used, especially in literary translation and conference interpreting, where a work or speech is often translated through an intermediate language by a translator who doesn't know the source language. Surprisingly, though MT was used to test it here, it's not exploited in any of the MT systems I've tried.

Well that's enough for now. A complete description would require incorporating other factors such as pragmatics. Have fun over Christmas!

Image
Alain Colmerauer, Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur.

Reference
Alain Colmerauer. Les systèmes-Q ou un formalisme pour analyser et synthétiser les phrases sur ordinateur. Publication interne no 43. Université de Montréal, [Dép. d'informatique], September 1970. 45 p. "Ce travail a été subventionné par le Conseil National de la Recherche du Canada: ceci dans le cadre d'un octroi à titre personnel et dans le cadre du projet de Traduction Automatique de l'Université de Montréal."

Google Translate: the examples cited were obtained 24 December 2015.



NPIT3, Winterthur (near Zurich), 5-7 May 2016
International forum for Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation, the latest paradigm in translation studies. http://www.zhaw.ch/linguistics/npit3.