What Native Translators can Teach the Experts

Under its able editor, Miranda Moore, the bi-monthly magazine The Linguist is always full of lively and informative articles for the Professional and Expert translators, language teachers and other linguists who form its readership. As a by-product, it occasionally has content too that concerns non-professional Native or Natural Translation and hence this blog. One such is the article The right way to sub? by Adriana Tortoriello in the current issue.

Sub here – in case you don't know – is short for subtitling. Adriana is herself a professional subtitler and also a lecturer in audiovisual translation at Imperial College, London, one of the numerous universities that offer courses in the speciality these days. Part of the article is an update on technological advances in the industry. There is also some advice on how to get into it.

The rest of the article – the part that concerns us – is about fansubbing.

Fansubbing has featured in several posts on this blog; in fact in one of the very earliest, back in February 2009:

"A fansub is a fan-produced, translated, subtitled version of a video programme. Fansubs are a tradition that began with the creation of the first Japanese anime clubs back in the 1980s. With the advent of cheap computer software and the availability on Internet of free subbing equipment, they really took off in the mid 1990s.
"It would be no exaggeration to state that fansubs are nowadays the most important manifestation of fan translation, having turned into a mass social phenomenon on Internet, as proved by the vast virtual community."

To find the posts, enter fansubbing in the Search box on the right.

There was a whole session at the Forli conference (see References) on Non-professional Translation on Screen, and it included fansubbers .

What is strikingly new, though, about Adriana's article is her suggestion that, whereas the usual progression is for Native Translators to learn from the Experts, in this case professional subtitlers may have something to learn from fansubbers.

"Fansubs differ from traditional subtitles in a number of ways – most, if not all, resulting from the fact that, not being constrained by the demands of the industry, fansubbers are more free to experiment with content and format.
"Considering the number of years commercial subtitling has been around, innovations are conspicuous by their absence.
"Traditionally, subtitles were meant to be discreet... Fansubbers are bold, and happy to do away with the invisibility of subtitles. They flaunt their identity.
"They place subtitles all over the screen and use a variety of orthotypographic means to convey additional features [and] allow them to incorporate paralinguistic features. And last but, in my view, definitely not least, their use of glosses to explain cultural references allows them to produce subtitles that are more foreignising than traditional ones, giving greater access to the culture of the original programme."

She concludes,

" I believe that the innovations brought about by technology and by fansubbing might come together in contributing to the creation of a new subtitling modality."

The lessons of all this are that

1. Native Translators (and a fortiori Natural Translators) may be less aware or less respectful of the norms followed by Expert, and especially Professional Expert, Translators.
2. Consequently they may be more creative and innovative.
3. The impact of their innovations may end up in the Natives influencing the Experts rather than vice versa.

 References

 Adriana Tortoriello. The right way to sub? The Linguist, vol. 51, no. 4, August-September 2012, pp. 8-9. The online edition of The Linguist can be accessed here through the website of its publisher, The Chartered Institute of Linguists. This issue will be available online from 17 August.

  

Jorge Díaz Cintas and Pablo Muñoz Sánchez, Fansubs: audiovisual translation in an amateur environment’, Journal of Specialised Translation, no. 6, July 2006.

 Delia Chiaro (chair). Non-professional translation on screen. Book of Abstracts, 1st International Conference on Non-Professional Interpretation and Translation, Forli, May 2012, p. 16 and following. The document is here.

Image
A fansub. Source: Fansub Review, accessible here.

Olympic Language Brokering

"The teamwork continues even after the German gymnasts leave the floor.

"Several English-speaking reporters wanted to talk to Oksana Chusovitina, who is competing in her sixth Olympics at 37 – unheard of for a female gymnast. There was just one problem, Chusovitina, who is originally from Uzbekistan, doesn't speak English, and there were no [official] translators available.

"A TV researcher who speaks Russian initially offered to help, only to realise he was needed for something else on the other side of the room. Elisabeth Seitz, her 18-year-old German team-mate, then leaned over and said, 'If you need translating, I can try to help.' She did better than that, translating about five minutes of questions for Chusovitina."

This is a clear example of Adult Language Brokering. The two gymnasts belong to the same community of athletes. But how did Chusovitina know German?

"She moved to Germany in 2002, so her son, Alisher, could be treated there for leukaemia and has lived there ever since."

Reference
Gymnast almost lost in translation. Irish Independent, 27 July 2012. The original article is here.

Images
Oxana Chusovitna. Minkus Images.
Elisabeth Seitz. Joern Pollex/Bongarts/Getty Images.

Marking Positively: How to Score Natural Translations

This post is addressed particularly to researchers, but it's relevant too for teachers of translation. Note that Natural Translation (NT) is used here as a cover term for both Natural Translation and Native Translation.

At the Forli conference in May (enter forli in the Search box), I noticed that some people are still using the old subtractive scoring method to rate NT.

What is the subtractive method? It means starting from 100 points and knocking off a point, or several points, for each mistake of any kind; typically a point or two for minor errors of content or expression and up to five points for major ones. The 'pass mark' is usually expressed as a positive percentage, but it's really a 'failure score'. That's how students' written translations are marked, and likewise the examinations of the professional associations like the Canadian one to which I belong. It can also be used for interpretations, especially if they're transcribed.

Two objections can be raised. The first is a didactic one: that the approach is negative and therefore discouraging. True, mathematically speaking, -30% of mistakes is equivalent to +70% correct, but the psychological effect is different. Anyway, it's not so important as the second objection, which is that the approach reinforces 'nit-picking' by the markers, because small details are allowed to affect the score significantly. I still squirm at a sequence in an old film about an interpretation exercise for European Commission interpreters (see References) in which a student is berated in front of the other students for his translation of a single word.

When evaluating NT, we need to take the opposite approach. Although mistakes are of great interest insofar as they reveal the limitations and the 'pathology' of NT, in NT research our primary interest should be in what subjects can translate and not in what they can't. A score of only 40% because of numerous distortions and omissions would probably entail failure for an Expert or Professional translator or a translation school student; but for a Natural Translator it represents a non-negligible translating ability and we should focus on it and analyse what that 40% consists of.

How can we build a positive scoring method?

In the 1990s I became involved in the design of tests for candidates who wanted to work as community interpreters for public services in Ontario, Canada. These became known as the CILISAT tests and are still in use. The Government of Ontario funded the necessary research. The candidates were almost always Native Interpreters, because the pay was too low to attract Professional Experts and because the languages were not taught in Canada. We decided we needed a test instrument that would be better suited to Native, i.e. untrained, Interpreters than those used by the translation schools and in the profession. So we turned to a method called propositional analysis. It's used by psychologists among others, and in fact I'd been introduced to it by the late David Gerver, who was one of the pioneer researchers on interpreters and was also a clinical psychologist. The form of it we used it can be described this way:

"To analyze the text, propositional analysis – a description of the text in terms of its semantic content – is used. The units of analysis are propositions, or units of meaning containing one verbal element plus one or more nouns. The corresponding units are then selected on the basis of meaning rather than structure."

In practice this meant that we broke down the scripts for the interpretation tests into simple, single-clause sentences representing propositions and then awarded points according to whether the meaning of each proposition as a whole was conveyed in translation: zero points for an omission or a meaning contrary to that of the proposition; 1 point for a meaning conveyed but not clearly or not completely; 2 points for a complete and true rendering. There was a weighting that distinguished between important and unimportant propositions. This scale was solely for meaning. Other factors, for example correct language, were scored separately and globally, not proposition by proposition.

For example, the statement, "At around 6 o'clock I saw a blue sports car waiting on the other side of the road," might be broken down into:

The time was approximately 6 pm

I saw a car.

The car was blue.

The car was a sports car.

The car was waiting.

The car was on the other side of the road.

A paraphrase like, "I seed a sport car stopping at the kerb of our street before supper" would score 7 points for informational meaning before being weighted for importance. (Work it out! 1+2+0+2+1+1.)  The maximum possible points varied with each script. Small language mistakes like "seed" were relegated to a separate evaluation.

References
Guadalupe Barrera Valdes and Manuel Rosalinda Cardenas. Constructing matching tests in two languages: the application of propositional analysis. NABE: The Journal for the National Association for Bilingual Education, vol. 9 no. 1, pp. 3-19. 1984. There’s an abstract here.

Roda P. Roberts. Interpreter assessment tools for different settings. In R. P. Roberts et al. (eds.), The Critical Link 2: Interpreters in the Community, Amsterdam, Benjamins, 1999. Most of it is here.

David Gerver. A psychological approach to simultaneous interpretation'. Meta, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 119-128, 1975. "A slightly altered version of a paper presented at the 18th International Congress of Applied Psychology in Montreal in July 1974". The text is here.

André Delvaux (director). Les Interprètes. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities. c1975. 16 mm film. c15 mins.

Image
"The Government of Ontario funded the necessary research."

Olympic Memories

At 9 o'clock tonight local time, the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games begins in London. Already at 10:30 this morning, Jacques Rogge, President of the IOC, was addressing the world press. His speech will have been interpreted into several languages.

Forgive me if, on this historic occasion, I indulge in some personal memories.

The first Olympics I saw were the 1948 ones in London. In fact I was living and going to school within walking distance of their main venue, the old Empire Stadium in the London suburb of Wembley. They were especially exciting because they were the first after WW2. I didn't see much of them; we didn't have TV. But I was present to see the great Fanny Blankers-Koen win one of her four golds. Amazingly, it's on YouTube: click here. By that time I was already a conscious Native Translator from years of language courses at school and one year at university, but I had no idea that Expert Translation even existed as a profession, and there were as yet no schools of translation in the UK.

The second time was the 1976 Montreal Games. Very different. I was living further away from the venue, in Ottawa, but 200 km is almost next door by Canadian standards. By then I was a Professional Expert Conference Interpreter. I did a four-week stint at the Games, which included a week of preparation since it was 'money no object' for the Montreal organisers under legendary Mayor Jean Drapeau. My most vivid memory is of the evening at the Montreal Forum when little Nadia Comaneci scored her perfect 10, the first Olympics gymnast ever to do so. (It too is here on YouTube.) The reason I got in, and even had a front-row standing position, was that the organisers had forgotten to order proper identity tags for us interpreters. No doubt we were their least concern. So at the last minute they decided to issue us press tags, and those got us in everywhere.

I have other stories about those games, but they concern Professional Interpreters and so this blog isn’t the place. Instead, I want to draw attention to the army of other interpreters at the Games, the Native Liaison Interpreters. Unlike the conference interpreters huddled away in their booths, they wear smart uniforms and are to be seen walking around everywhere at all such international events. Some are temporarily professionals, some are volunteers. But they aren’t engaged as interpreters and they aren’t recognised as such. They’re called hostesses and hosts or guides, etc. Of course they have a lot of other duties besides interpreting, but many of them have to be bilingual, including the professional London Blue Badge Guides, and it’s not sufficiently appreciated that impromptu translating and interpreting are part of the job. It's taken for granted.

So with all those Liaison Interpreters around, why are Conference Interpreters needed? For one thing for the press conferences like Jacques Rogge's this morning and which follow each event. But few people realise how much conference work goes on behind the scenes before the Games even open. It’s an opportunity for the world governing bodies of each sport to get together. I had said to our chief that I knew about soccer, which in those days few Canadians played, so I was assigned to a week of meetings of FIFA, as well as to a tense meeting of the IOC over Taiwan‘s participation as “China“. I was on the relief team that was hastily formed and called in around 7 am to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel when the IOC meeting had gone on all night and worn out the regular team.

When somebody at Forli asked me what was the most interesting interpretation job I'd ever had, I didn't hestitate. I regard the Montreal Olympics as the high point of my professional interpreting career. I'm sure the London Olympics will be the high point for many younger interpreters, Expert and Native.

References
Fanny Blankers-Koen. Wikipedia. Click here.

The Guild of Registered Tourist Guides, London. Click here.
.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Taiwan controversy at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. CBC Digital Archives. Click here.

European Directive on Court Interpreting

At the beginning of this month I went to a conference on court interpreting at the Jaume I University in Castellón de la Plana (Castelló in Valencian), which is on the coast one hour north of Valencia. I went because the people organising it at Castellón have been very kind to me, and because many court interpreters in Spain and elsewhere are Advanced Native Translators, not Experts. Furthermore, even if they're paid, many of the Native ones are only occasional Professionals. I ought to have known that at a university meeting there would be little presence or discussion of non-experts or non-professionals, but I did learn some interesting things.

There were two ‘hot topics’. One was the tussle going on in the UK since the recent privatisation of court interpreting services and the government’s determination to put it all in the hands of a single commercial agency. It’s a professional matter and so beyond the scope of this blog, but one consequence is that Expert Interpretation in the British courts has receded for the moment in favour of untrained and untested interpreters. Click here if you want to know more.

The other was the impact in Spain of the European Union Directive on court interpreting (see Reference). It's as remarkable for what it doesn't say as for what it does. We were told that the gaps are due to the fact that EU directives must be approved by all the Member States and so they represent a lowest common denominator.

A good example is training. The Directive is progressive in that it requires Member States to

"request those responsible for the training of judges, prosecutors and judicial staff involved in criminal proceedings to pay special attention to the particularities of communicating with the assistance of an interpreter."

This is something that is indeed necessary. In some jurisdictions, lawyers even regard interpreters as an interference rather than a help, because they blunt the cut and thrust of cross-examination. On the other hand, nothing is said about the training for the interpreters themselves. Is it because the delegates couldn't agree about what kind of training is suitable, or who should provide it, or how to pay for it? The people at the Castellón meeting seemed to take it for granted that in Spain the universities should be recognised as the providers. However, that's not realistic. The universities are ill-equipped to provide the training at the level and in the numbers needed. Valid candidates for training don't necessarily meet university admission conditions and are in urgent situations where what they need is a 'crash course'. In Canada, the most successful court interpreter programme, the one at Vancouver Community College, is given outside the universities at the community college level.

A related consideration is pay. What's the point of getting training for a highly responsible job if the pay is miserly compared with what conference interpreters and lawyers earn? Several Castellón participants mentioned it, and it's a problem in Canada too (see References). Yet the Directive has not a word to say about it.

It's 'motherhood' to say that all court interpreters ought be trained Experts. Justice demands it, and also expediency. If a mistrial is declared because of faulty interpreting, there are serious costs and delays. The Directive goes some way to offering a recourse for bad translation:

"Suspected or accused persons have the possibility to complain that the quality of the translation is not sufficient to safeguard the fairness of the proceedings."

But it only mentions it in connection with written translations; and "complain" falls far short of the "grounds for an appeal" that's available, for example, in Canada.

So the reality is that court interpretation will continue to be provided by Native Interpreters for a long time yet, because

* Administrations won't or can't pay what Expert Interpreters would cost. (The Spanish government is all too obviously in no position to incur any additional administrative expenditure at present.)

* Without attractive remuneration, there's no incentive to get training.

* In any case, training facilities are completely inadequate.

* Even if all the above were taken care of, it would be virtually impossible, in this era of population shifts, to keep up with new demands for 'exotic' languages. The whole community interpreting movement in Canada started with the arrival of the Vietnamese boat people and their language in the 1970s, and there was another crisis two decades later when a sizable community of Somali language speakers came on the scene. In Spain, it's been the several Eastern European languages that weren't taught here.

Nevertheless, it's to the credit of the Directive that it does offer one innovative avenue of hope. This is its encouragement of remote interpreting using videoconferencing:

"When using videoconferencing for the purpose of remote interpretation, the competent authorities should be able to rely on the tools that are being developed in the context of European e-Justice (e.g. information on courts with videoconferencing equipment or manuals)."

The implication is that the courts will accept videoconference interpreting as legally valid. It would make it possible to supply interpreters from a small pool of Experts to widely dispersed courtrooms. It requires investment in electronic equipment and research (or trial and error) to determine the best set-ups, but the internet provides a network infrastructure that can be used for other purposes besides interpreting.

References
Directive 2010/64/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 October 2010 on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings. Click here for the text.

Presente y futuro de la traducción y la interpretación ante los tribunales en Europa. VIII Jornadas de Traducción Jurídica, Universitat Jaume I, Departament de Traducció i Comunicació, Castelló de la Plana, 2-4 July 2012. The programme is here.

Mike Sadava. Misinterpretation: crisis in Canadian court interpreting. The Lawyers Weekly, 2010. Click here for the article.

My myGengo Experiments (2)

This is the second myGengo experiment. The first was reported in the previous post.

In the second experiment, still disguised electronically, I took myGengo's recruitment test. There's no fee for it. I submitted translations of two short texts from Spanish to English. I deliberately didn't spend much time on them, because it was the Standard (low-paid) rank that interested me. It wasn't the correct way to set up the experiment; I ought to have taken more time and sought translations by a real Native Translator. But here, for what it's worth, is the result.

The verdict took a long time coming: five weeks. I contented myself in the meantime with thinking that at least they were taking care over it! Ultimately, to my relief, it was accepted. But what was most interesting was the comment that came with the evaluation from the myGengo staff:

"You did a very good job of coming up with phrasing that sounds fluid and natural to convey the same meaning in English. You are still a bit close to the text but the word choice was quite good. Remember to just cut out words that are not necessary in English, as Spanish tends to use a lot more words."

A bit close to the text? Quite likely. Most of the professional work I've done recently has been of legal documents, and for those – as one client instructed me categorically – "your translations must be as literal as possible." Translators form habits and can fall into a rut. The last sentence too, about cutting out words, is sound advice – I used to give it to my students – and it convinced me that the writer was experienced and serious.

I'd like at this point to be able to say that you get what you pay for at myGengo and that the public will soon learn when it's appropriate to use it and when they should pay more. It's true for some knowledgeable users, individual or corporate; but it's also true that the general public is still woefully ignorant about translation and unable to judge it at Expert level. An indication of this comes from the now widespread misuse of machine translation. For example, I recently heard of a Spanish lawyer who used Google Translate to produce the English version of an international insurance policy. Very dangerous. Yet there is no legal disclaimer on the Google Translate site, whereas some Professional Translators limit their liability on their invoices and a few even carry professional liability insurance (see the article referenced below).

There's already a field in which crowdsourcing of translating is impacting on Professional Translators. It's the subtitling and fansubbing by "ces passionnés qui traduisent des séries pour que les nuls en anglais puissent en profiter [the enthusiasts who translate TV series for the benefit of people with no English at all]." A recent article (see References) is quite vitriolic about them, or rather about the industry that exploits them.

References
Liability insurance for translators. Translation Journal, January 16, 2007. The text is here.

Nora Bouazzouni. Internet a-t-il tué le sous-titrage pro des séries? [Has the internet killed professional subtitling for series?]. In French. Francetvinfo, June 17, 2012. Click here.

My myGengo Experiments (1)

Last year there was a post on this blog about a translation agency called myGengo. To find it, enter mygengo in the Search Box on the right. MyGengo's peculiarity is that it openly offers paid translation work to bilinguals who aren't trained or experienced translators – in other words, who are Native Translators. For this it pays the translators very low rates and charges customers accordingly. The translations are of a kind which it calls "simple human translation". It sees as its competitors not Professional Expert Translators but the machine translation services that are available on the web for free.

"Before myGengo, you could only get free, easy, but awful machine translation or expensive, slow, human service. We provide good quality human translation as simply as using machine translation - for very low cost."

It's true that myGengo also offers more difficult translation work at substantially higher rates, but so do hundreds of other translation agencies. Its real niche is the "simple human translation." Things like personal messages and emails, perhaps. Indeed I think it may be a strategic marketing error for them to offer the more advanced level. They should stick to exploiting their niche. Trying to recruit both Native and Expert Translators leads to confusion and misunderstanding.

This misunderstanding, I believe, lies behind the two complaints that were sent as Comments on my blog post. One of them goes like this:

"myGengo makes the translation industry a tougher jungle for the truly professional and skilled translators who find themselves put into face-to-face competition with unprofessional spare-time jobbers with little experience... As a professional translator I would never be willing to work for myGengo under such conditions."

The other expresses anger at the way the writer was graded by myGengo as admissible to their Native but not their Expert level despite her nine years of Korean<>English professional experience.

So both complainants are Professional and no doubt Expert Translators. I certainly wasn't recommending that Professional Expert Translators should apply for work to myGengo. As said above, there are hundreds of other agencies that offer their level of work. In fact it wasn't my purpose to endorse myGengo at all; I was asking a general question. Will this kind of service lead to a two-tier market? Because I do believe there's a need for it.

Anyway, perturbed by these criticisms, I decided to conduct my own experiment. In fact, two experiments.

In order to do so anonymously and avoid favoured treatment, I adopted a new name and email address. Under this disguise, I first submitted two short texts for translation from Spanish to English as a paying customer. One of them was an email from a colleague, the other a telephone company advertisement. They were communications I'd actually received, with small redactions. They totalled about 300 words. The translations came back fast: in a bare four hours. I don't have space to reproduce both of them, but here, for the benefit of those of you who know Spanish, is the email.

Original
Hola Kiko:
Tal y como te dije por teléfono, creemos que eres la persona más adecuada para revisar un artículo que vamos a enviar a una revista. El artículo lo hemos elaborado entre tres personas y creemos que, en algunos apartados, se puede notar la diferencia en la redacción. Además de revisar, nos gustaría que corrigieras lo que creas oportuno y que nos des tu opinión, por favor. Yo estaré "localizable" hasta el día 29, aunque el próximo lunes y martes no voy a estar.
Si tuvieras algún problema con el formato, dímelo y te lo envío con el formato compatible para word 97-2003
Muchas gracias por acceder a realizar esta tarea; ya se que el enero no es la mejor fecha para pedírtelo.
Un abrazo muy fuerte para los dos.

Translation
Dear Kiko:
Just as I said on the phone, we think you're the right person to revise an article we're going to submit to a magazine. Three people have worked on the article and we think there are parts where stylistic differences are obvious. In addition to revising, we'd like you to make any appropriate corrections and give us your opinion. I'll be available until the 29th, but I'll be out next Monday and Tuesday.
If there are any problems with the format, let me know and I will send you a copy compatible with Word 97-2003.
Thank you very much for agreeing to do this for me, since I know January isn't the best time to ask you.
Best wishes to both of you.

I judged it to be very satisfactory. The meaning is clear and accurate; the language is native English, avoiding 'false friends' (for instance, by using work on for elaborar). There's only one minor word that needed correction and it arose from an ambiguity: the Spanish term revista can mean either magazine or learned journal, and here the context suggests the latter. The bill for the two translations was $16, or about $0.053 per word, and it was payable by Visa. The price seems to me reasonable for the difficulty of the work and the time it needed. I wasn't told and didn't ask about the translator.

Here, for purpose of comparison, is the same email translated by Google Translate. Google detected automatically that the source language was Spanish. The translation was instant, anyway too fast for me to measure.

Hi Kiko: As I said on the phone, we think you're the best person to review a paper that we will send a magazine. The article we have developed three people and we believe that in some sections, you can tell the difference in wording. In addition to checking, we would like corrigieras what you think appropriate and give us your opinion, please. I will be "traceable" to the 29th, but next Monday and Tuesday I will not be. If you had a problem with the format, let me know and I'll send in the format compatible with Word 97-2003 Thank you very much for agreeing to perform this task, and is that January is not the best time to ask. A big hug for you both.

Not bad! And Google Translate is free. The deficiencies in the English are obvious; nevertheless, the translation is understandable enough to convey the essential information. Note the opening and closing salutations: Hi, more familiar than Dear, and A big hug, much warmer than myGengo's Best wishes, both thereby closer to the Spanish in register and culture – but take your choice. Curious, though, that Google was completely stymied by a simple point of grammar like the conjugation of corregir.

To be continued with the second experiment.

Footnote
Corrigieras illustrates a major limitation of MT systems like Google Translate, which work by statistical analyses of existing human translations – although statistical MT is very successful in other ways. Corrigieras is in a lesser-used, though by no means unused, subjunctive tense; and presumably there weren’t enough examples of it in the Google database for the statistical method to be applicable.

Reference
The myGengo website is here. It's developed considerably since the experiments were conducted earlier this year.