Birthday Post (No. 363)

I don't usually write about myself on this blog, but today calls for an exception. It's my birthday, my 87th. I'm statistically and medically lucky to be alive. Average male life expectancy in Spain, where I live, is 79.6 years; and though I'm not completely well, I'm in much better health than I was a year ago. Physically I attribute it to my parents' genes, my wife's vegetarian cuisine and some good Spanish cardiologists. Mentally it may have something to do with racking my brains about translation every day.

It so happens that I also have some other anniversaries to celebrate. It's just 50 years almost to the day that I first saw and worked with a computer. In a sense it was a rebirth. It happened in the summer of 1966. The computer was a new CDC 6400 at the Université de Montréal(see photo), where research on machine translation had recently started. It was a fast machine for its time, but it filled a space as large as a lecture hall though it was less powerful than my present-day laptop. Its input was on punched cards and its output on a line printer. No terminals.

Therefore it's just 50 years since I first became involved in machine translation and its concomitant corpus linguistics. We had received a corpus of English from Brown University on large spools of magnetic tape, and my first task was to scan a KWIC concordance of it for usage of English prepositions. But I didn't really know anything about computers, and a few months later I was humbled at a meeting of leading MT researchers in Ottawa. I scuttled back to Montreal to learn a little programming and Boolean logic.

And skipping a busy decade, it's 40 years since, as secretary of the 1976 COLING conference in Montreal, I was coopted to the International Committee on Computational Linguistics, of which I still am a member.

As well, in a different compartment of my career, conference interpreting, it's just 40 years since I interpreted for Lord Killanin (the IOC president) and Princess Anne of England as one of the team of interpreters at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. (For the princess it was at the equestrian events in Bromont, Quebec, and in my off time I saw Nadia Comaneci make her perfect score of 10 at the Montreal Forum)

And finally, for this post anyway, in another and more enduring compartment of my career, I was working 40 years ago with my assistant, Bianca Sherwood on the data for our joint paper Translating as an Innate Skill. I gave it the following year to the historic NATO Symposium on Language Interpretation and Communication held on San Giorgio Maggiori Island in Venice in the presence of such legendary luminaries as Jean Herbert, Wallace Lambert, Danica Seleskovitch, Patricia Longley, Barbara Moser and many more. I'd already given its forerunner, The Importance of Natural Translation, at the AILA World Congress in Stuttgart the previous year.

That's all for this post. More next year, I dare hope.

To all who helped me, my heartfelt thanks.

Image
A Control Data Corporation 6400 installation circa 1966. The central processing unit is in the background, the magnetic tape memory units are on the right. It's probably the card reader in the foreground.
Source: CERN.

362. NPIT3 and NPIT4

NPIT3 has passed into history. Alas, I was unable to attend, but echoes have reached me. I hear it was not an unmitigated success, because a sharp difference of approach arose between those who accept NPIT as a fact of life to be studied and taken advantage of, and those who consider it a bane to be cured with professional training and accreditation. More about this in later posts.

No arrangements have been made for publishing proceedings. It would be a great pity if the contributions (and the contributors?) were to vanish into oblivion, so for the record I've posted the programme of the conference on my Academia.edu page: click here or go to https://independent.academia.edu/BHARRIS. From it you can get an idea of which way the research is tending. Health care interpreting was well represented, but there were some notable gaps: for instance court interpreting and the translation of literary and scientific writings (see the recent post on this blog about Einstein's translator). It would be too limiting if NPIT were to be regarded only as a public service and community phenomenon.

The venue for NPIT4 in 2018 has already been announced. It's the Institute of Advanced Studies at Stellenbosch University (STIAS) in South Africa. We have to wait a little for the exact dates and the call for paper. The person in charge is Prof. Christine Anthonissen, Vice-Dean of Languages. Quite a change after three NPITs in Europe! Apart from the change of scenery and culture, it will hopefully encourage attendance from new regions and bring in more languages. Stellenbosch may sound a long way away for Europeans, but it's close to Cape Town, to which there are fairly reasonable air fares.

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Stellenbosch University.

La Traduzione naturale

One of the earliest papers about Natural Translation, The Importance of Natural Translation (1973), has just been translated into Italian. The translator is a Professional Expert Translator, Marilena Lucchini, a student at the Civica Scuola Interpreti e Traduttore in Milan. She did it as her thesis for the Diploma in Mediazione Linguistica, which I'm glad to say she was awarded cum laude. Congratulazioni! Furthermore it's an aligned translation with the English and Italian displayed side by side, sentence by sentence.

Now I know what it feels like to be the translated (can we say translatee?) instead of the translator. Honoured and grateful.

Marilena's thesis adviser was Prof. Bruno Osimo, the most prolific and far-reaching contemporary Italian writer on translation. Just look him up on Amazon. Where I write articles or blog posts, he writes whole books. It shows his discernment that he's the Italian translator of Alexander Ludskanov's book Human and Machine Translation. Ludskanov was the first translatologist to declare categorically that all bilinguals can translate.

You can find Marilena's translation on my academia.edu page, https://independent.academia.edu/BHARRIS, or click here. She is a founding partner in the Aqua Network: "Contact us and tell us how you want to change the world - we will find the right words for you." She is on Lnkedin.

For Bruno Osimo's translation of Ludskanov, enter osimo in the Search box on the right.

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Marilena Lucchini. Source: Linkedin

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.

Ekvall, Old Mac, Emotional Nuance and Whispering

If you look at the comments on this blog's post about Panmunjom (enter panmunjom in the Search box on the right) you will see there an exchange between me and Ron McKinney, aka Old Mack, who was actually at the Geneva conference in 1954 that ended the Vietnam War. An unexpected link with the past after 60 years! In those days Ron was a US Marine security guard. There he got to know Robert Ekvall, the Chinese/English military-cum-diplomatic interpreter for the American delegation. Later Ekvall published a classic autobiography about interpreting that is essential reading for the history of Professional Expert interpretation, not least because the Geneva conference was one of the last major international conferences that was conducted entirely in consecutive interpretation and whispering The book has long been out of print but now it's available free on the internet (see Reference). Ekvall remarked to Ron that it was important for the interpreter to render not only the meaning of the words of the source speech but also its "emotional nuance". Yes, that is one of the several not-so-obvious things that an Expert Interpreter should be capable of doing. Yet examiners at interpreter examinations are rarely asked, "Did the candidate render all the emotional nuance?" Ekvall was thinking of diplomatic interpreting, but it's also important in religious interpreting, theatre interpreting, even court interpreting, and so on.

On the subject of whispering, it's something else that is neglected in interpreter training, Ambassador Arthur H. Dean, who wrote the foreword to Ekvall's book, remarks:

"The system of not having simultaneous translation is not quite as time wasting as is often supposed. While the Chinese tirade went on, Colonel Ekvall used to whisper to me its general nature and purport so I could begin to write out my reply and pass it back to Colonel Ekvall and Lieutenant Campen, my Korean interpreter, so that they in turn could begin to put my reply into the Chinese and Korean languages."

Whispering is one of the most basic and most natural modes of interpreting, though it's not easy to do it well. For more about it, enter whispering in the Search box.


References
Colonel Robert B. Ekvall (US Army Retired) (1898-1983). Faithful Echo. New York:Twayne. 1960. Available free on the internet: click here or go to http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015012173095;view=1up;seq=8.

Ron McKinney. Old Mac's Tales. Blog. Click here or go to https://oldmackstales.wordpress.com/
It's good reading.

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The Geneva Conference in session. Source: US Army photograph.

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.

A Presidential Natural Translator: Malia Obama

When do you get to be interpreter for the president of the United States without any training or official examination? Answer: When you're the president's daughter.

"President Obama may be the leader of the free world, but he's relying on his daughter Malia as his personal interpreter during his historic trip fo Cuba. Malia was captured translating Spanish for her father on Sunday night in a photo that's since gone viral.

"'You know, her Spanish is much better than mine,' Obama said in an exclusive interview with ABC News' David Muir. 'And I'm hoping that she has a chance to get entirely fluent.'"

Malia is a few years older than George Thomas Staunton, who was the subject of the preceding post on this blog. She is 17. Nevertheless she is still in high school and therefore out of range of the American university translation programs. It's interesting that she can serve as interpreter though her Spanish isn't very fluent. Her father did opine, though, that "as a proud father I have to say that her Spanish is getting very good. It helps that she's smarter than I am." We aren't given a verbatim sample, but her father seems pleased; so we can conclude that her interpreting was 'fit for purpose'. In the photo, "the teenager appears to be confident and happy to be helping her father, as she put her high school Spanish education into use."

The purpose was informal conversational exchanges in "a visit with locals", not official negotiations. The definition of Natural Translation says that it takes place "in everyday circumstances." Admittedly interpreting for the president is hardly an everyday circumstance, but we can take the definition as referring here to the nature of ths discourse.

The Wikipedia article on the Obama family doesn't mention Malia's language education. Her father's bilingualism in Englsh and some African languages may have encouraged her. She did visit Oaxaca on a school trip last year. It may actually be an exaggeration to classify her as a Natural Translator, since she may have had translation instruction during her Spanish courses. But if it's an exaggeration, it's only a slight one.

Source
Rarely has an interpretation performance, natural or professional, received so much press mention. All the American news networks mentioned it.

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The President and Malia share a laugh as Malia translates Spanish to English for her dad at a restaurant on Old Havana. Photo by Pete Souza, chief White House phoographer.

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.

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.


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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?

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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.