Archive for the ‘Localization’ Category

Public policies aiming to preserve a national language are most commonly associated with small nations, whether they be small nation-states (i.e., Iceland, Ireland, and Estonia) or minority nations within a larger nation-state (i.e., Quebecois French, Basque, Catalan, and countless indigenous languages). Nevertheless, now many larger countries are taking action to preserve their majority languages.

The most well-known case (and least surprising to anyone familiar with stereotypes of the French) is that of France, with the Toubon Law of 1994 which mandates the use of French in all government documents, commercial contracts, commercial communications and advertising. In 2006, Malaysia began fining those who mix English words into Malay – so-called Manglish – in advertising and Iran it was decreed that all adopted foreign words be replaced with Persian equivalents (with the exception of Arabic, since it is the language of the Koran).

This week I’ve read that the ruling Christian Democrats of Germany are trying to enshrine the German language in their federal constitution as the country’s official language in order to protect the national language. Again, the main concern is the increasing use of English words. According to a study by Hanover University, cited by the December 16th The Independent article, “23 of the 100 currently most-used words in German were in fact English”.

There must be many other examples, but will any of them successfully ward of the apparent forces of language change and anglicization? Only time will tell.

I first came across this sign a few months ago, but I feel it’s important to complement justinb’s post to emphasize that ANYONE interested in translation, especially those looking to run an agency, really soak in what happened here. For those of us who have no knowledge of Welsh, we brush it off and turn left (provided that we are not a heavy goods vehicle). However, a Welsh-speaking truck driver with no knowledge of English is pretty much stuck. The sign in Welsh reads, “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.” At least that’s what they tell me.

As professional translators and people interested in someday running our own agency, this tells us a few things:

First, have more than one person who understands the target language look at what is being sent along, especially if it is being used for publication in a place where many, many people can see it.

Second, if a translator you normally work with sends you a translation with no additional comment, confirm that it is a translation and not an automatic message or something that they otherwise sent without thinking.

Third, if you’re generally working with one specific language pair (here, Welsh-English), make sure that your emails are correctly in both, in case someone is looking to contact you from either end.

Last, learn from your mistakes or those of others…mistakes like these can only be prevented by thorough attention to detail from every party involved.

There are dozens and dozens of errors like this out there…don’t have me add yours to the list later…

Following up on my last blog, it is worth discussing another important cause of language change: technology. While technological innovation and dissemination have always influenced language change, some speculate that the scale of such influence today may lead to more rapid and significant changes than in the past due to the nature of contemporary technological innovation and dissemination.

Historically, technological advances tended to increase the social and economic phenomena to talk about thus requiring new words, new phrases or semantic expansion of old words and phrases as well as to increase contact between peoples and the consequent impacts of such contact (and domination). These types of changes are obviously still occurring today and doing so on a greater scale. The contemporary extinction of minority languages and expansion of dominant languages, especially English, are the most drastic and sensational of the latter type of changes, and new words/phrases such as “google” (transitive verb), “infomania”, “hypermiling”, and “password fatigue” are interesting examples of the former type (of which Webster’s New World Dictionary language monitoring program finds about 2,000 examples a month).

In addition to these types of language changes, however, there is another speculated, if not evidenced, change that seems entirely novel, which we might call the minimization, the simplification or the “dumbing down” of language. This process is the speculated consequence of a new generation of speakers who have developed their daily use of language significantly, if not predominantly, through chat rooms and text messaging rather than through books, lectures, radio and face-to-face conversations. It is to be seen of course just how serious this process might be and the labeling of it as “dumbing down” or “making more efficient” (i.e., linguistic economy) may be more of a matter of value judgment than description.

I hate to break the news to you, but I am officially declaring the language as beyond any point of hope in terms of understanding its systems, conventions, and rules. Wait…was I supposed to put that comma before the final item of the list? It depends on who you ask!

I was browsing through the updated version of the European Commission Directorate-General for Translation’s English Style Guide (PDF version available here) and was simply overwhelmed with how arbitrary so many things are, even when explained by a committee of experts. While this document is obviously essential for reference for anyone composing a work in English for use or publication within the European Union, it is still baffling in its choices. For example (I have not poured through the entire work, instead I simply clicked on different sections, so this list is far from thorough):

• The use of “-ize” vs. “-ise”. As someone who was raised with English in the United States tradition, where the “-ize” suffix is taught 100% of the time, I will personally never understand the British tradition of preferring “-ise” when the sound is a “z” and when the Greek roots where the words are derived from were formed with a “ζ” (zeta). Be that as it may, the Style Guide goes out of its way to say that there are generally 40 exceptions in British spelling where “-ize” is preferred, though it does not list any. Pick a horse and ride it, United Kingdom. I chose mine.
• Split infinitives. This is perhaps the most vexing aspect of English. There is no justifiable grammatical basis for it to be incorrect to split the infinitive, i.e. include an adverb between “to” and the infinitive, as in “to boldly go where no man has gone before”. Some claim that it comes from the fact that infinitives were never split in Latin and, therefore, they can’t be split in English. Seriously, that’s the only explanation I have ever heard (add more below if you know any…PLEASE!). Er, English is not derived from Latin so there is no need for any of their conventions to be similar, moreso when Latin infinitives were one word and, logically, cannot be split. The Style Guide shows deference to this practice by encouraging writers to avoid that practice. Why? What is the justification??? If you are a skilled writer, you can create sentences that are provocative and insightful by using a split infinitive when it would not be possible to have the same effect without it (the example above is a fantastic illustration). If you are a bad writer, you are going to mess a lot of things up so trying to avoid certain conventions will make little to no difference.
• Belgium. Stepping outside of strict English usage issues, but remaining within the scope of translation issues, is Annex 2 “Notes on Belgium”. Wow. Read that only if it is highly necessary. It lays out the various conventions concerning when to leave names in Dutch or French. Suffice it to say that I think we should treat that lovely little country like an Etch-a-Sketch, shake it up, and let them come up with clear and concise language guidelines so that we can work quickly without having to worry about which exact community we are working for and how angry they will be if we leave a word in the wrong language.
• Serial (”Oxford” or “Harvard”) comma. I purposely avoided it because there is no solution. And I will kick anyone in the shins who says they don’t think it should ever be used. My shoes are sharp, too.

While language change may occur at varying speeds and due to diverse and numerous causes, many changes have political roots or explanations. Much of language change, obviously, has come about from human migration and the use of a language by non-native speakers, with the influences of the phonetic, syntactic and morphological rules of the migrants native tongue (not to mention cultural contributions).  Migration, in turn, almost invariably has political roots.

The massive immigration of Irish to the United States, which has made innumerable contributions to English slang, has been attributed by historians to British colonization of Ireland and its land tenancy policies which perpetuated poverty and exacerbated the Great Famine of the mid-19th century. The massive immigration of Italians to Argentina, which made its linguistic mark in Argentine slang and intonation, can be partially explained by political turmoil on the Italian peninsula (and the immigration policies of Argentina).

Beyond the language changes brought about by migration, politics often engenders language change in more immediate ways by the public debates it incites regarding changing economic and social realities. For example, increasing environmental awareness and environmental policies (both public and private) in recent decades has led to a number of new words and phrases such as “tree-hugger”, “eco-friendly”, “carbon footprint”, “greenwashing”, “locavore”, “eco-terrorism” and “green collar jobs” and has expanded the use and meaning of other words and phrases such as “gas-guzzler”, “sustainability”, “organic”, “capture” and “hybrid”. Likewise, the liberation of women and the struggle for gender equality has also brought about some important language changes, especially the use of “his or her” or “he/she” instead of using masculine pronouns for gender neutral or gender inclusive subjects and the gender neutralization of profession words, such as “spokesperson”, “congressperson”, etc.

Impressively random and insignificant political phenomena may also lead to important language changes. This year’s U.S. presidential election, for example, saw “the common citizen” or “average Joe” suddenly replaced by “Joe the plumber” due to one of thousands of candidate-voter conversations.

The selections of “Word of the Year” is very illustrative of the most rapid politically rooted language changes, especially those lexicological changes such as the invention, semantic modification and popularization of words. The American Dialect Society, for example, has selected “9/11” (2001), “weapons of mass destruction” (2002), “red state/blue state/purple state” (2004), “subprime” (2007). This year, Merriam-Webster selected “bailout”.

Due to the universality of many political phenomena, many of these language changes can and have occurred in most languages and cause little problem for translation. However, some politically rooted language changes do cause difficulty for translation. For example, how do you translate “purple state” into a language spoken in a country with a unitarian multi-party political system? Food for thought…

In the specific case of translation, localization refers to how a language is adapted to a specific country or culture so that the target audience understands the text on a native level. Not only are the words themselves localized, accounting for spelling differences and disparities in word usage, but aspects such as date and number formats, currencies, measurement systems, phone numbers, images, etc. are also adapted to the target country or audience so that the text fits in perfectly with the culture.

Localization is a fundamental service for businesses looking to expand globally. Not only will these businesses need to have their material translated into several different languages, but they will also need to have their material localized if a product or service is to be used in a specific region. This is often times included in the translation process, although clients will need to specifically indicate that they are requesting this service as well as the flavor for the target language(s). For example, if a company in Spain wishes to translate their material for English-speaking markets, they will need to consider which flavor of English they will use. If their product or service will mainly be used within Europe, it is likely that they will use the U.K. flavor of English due to the number of these English speakers within the region.

One of the main advantages of this service is the personalized attention to your clients, as you are able to communicate with them in a language they understand.

If you are a company looking to expand your market internationally, you have most likely already considered using translation services to translate your business material, but have you really thought about which languages you would like your material to be translated into? Of course, this decision largely depends on your target market, location and products and services offered, however you may also want to translate your material so that it is accessible for speakers of some of the most common languages.

Take a look below; you may be surprised at the results!
According to Ethnologue, these are the most widely spoken languages around the world from the year 2000, listed by population of native speakers.

1.    Mandarin Chinese (836 million)
2.    Hindi (333 million)
3.    Spanish (332 million)
4.    English (322 million)
5.    Bengali (189 million)
6.    Arabic (186 million)
7.    Russian (170 million)
8.    Portuguese (170 million)
9.    Japanese (125 million)
10.    German (98 million)
11.    French (72 million)

The term Spanglish came into existence between 1965 and 1970 and refers to any expression in Spanish that borrows parts of English, especially as substitutions of Spanish words.

The most common fields that use and abuse Spanglish are areas related to technology, since most of the products introduced into the market are in English. These terms are commonly used by industry experts and when professionals from other languages need the translation of a text, they don’t want a translation that is so foreign to them for a concept in English that has become widely recognized. They prefer terms that are familiar over terms that are perhaps more correct in their own language.

This is how we have coined words such as resetear (reset), zipear (zip), formatear (format), tipear (type) and bacapear (backup), for example.

As translators, we are frequently horrified when reading text in Spanish that “sounds like English” precisely because they mirror the original in English. We find ourselves saying, “I would never translate like this”. However, the problem is that at times, some clients present us with a dilemma. We can either respect their wishes and use their preferred terminology even if it sounds like English, or translate and follow our own linguistic criteria, creating a text that is less literal but sounds more natural.

As a product of this balance between keeping the client happy and respecting linguistic rules, Spanglish has emerged on the translation market as a linguistic invention situated halfway between English and Spanish. While it has proven to be very useful for clients, reading Spanglish, however, becomes a nightmare for Spanish-speakers who try to conserve the beauty of such a rich romance language as is the Spanish language.

For many agencies and translation service providers, the process of translation for client delivery involves more steps than simply the translation. It typically requires both an edition and proofreading stage before the document is ready for delivery. However, as translation is the first step in this process, also known as TEP (translation-edition-proofreading), delivering a quality translation from the start is essential for the other steps to run smoothly.

For this post, we have put together some simple tips that will help the translator deliver a higher quality product and thus facilitate later revisions:

1. Before agreeing to a translation, be sure to revise the document first and make sure that you feel comfortable both with the subject matter and language flavor.

2. Also, make sure you are familiar with the file format or requested translation tools such as CAT tools.

3. While translating, use any reference material, style guides or translation glossaries sent to you so that your terminology and style are consistent with other documents for the same client.

4. While you are working, have dictionaries or other online resources specific to the topic you are translating at hand for easy reference.

5. Contact the project manager or client immediately if you foresee any problems with the document.

6. When finished translating, read over the document once more to make sure that the text makes sense and there are no errors.

7. You should always look at your translation as if it were the final product, and don’t count on editors or proofreaders to fix your mistakes.

8. Be sure to run a spelling and grammar check before delivery.

9. Check the translated document against the source for any missing text or formatting issues.

10. With your file delivery, be sure to include any notes or comments for the client or for the editors about the translation.

One of the helpful tools in the Trados program is the Clean Up function. This function removes all the hidden text and updates the translation memory so that it includes any changes you may have made to the document outside of the translation segments. Whether you are working directly with clients or with translation agencies, knowing how to clean up your file is a fundamental part of the translation process with Trados.

1. To begin, select the Clean Up option in the Tools menu:

2. Next, you need to select the file that you want to clean up by selecting “Add…”

3. Once the file is selected, you can create a log file which will enable you to keep a record of the clean-up process and view any errors that occurred during the process. Select a location for the log file and give it a name:

4. Now that your log file is created, you can select one of the four options for how your document will be cleaned up. The best option to use is Update TM so that any changes made are incorporated into the TM, regardless of whether or not the translation segment was open when you made them:

5. Now you can click on the Clean Up button to complete the process. Once the function has been executed, the window will look like this:

6. If there were any errors in the process, simply go to Log File - View and the .txt file will open, displaying any errors such as broken tags or corrupted segments. If there were no errors, the following message will appear at the end of the file: “Cleanup finished successfully without errors!”

7. As part of the clean-up process, the program will automatically generate a .csv file (same as the .txt log file) and backup file with the .BAK extension. This file is the bilingual file, i.e., it has both the original and target text and is simply a safety measure so that you don’t lose the bilingual file in the clean-up process.

Welcome to the official Trusted Translations blog! In this blog, you will find tips, advice, and all kinds of information both for translators and translation buyers regarding  localization services and business, education, entertainment, financial, government, legal, manufacturing, and technical translations, including user manuals and website translation, as written by translators, project managers, DTP specialists, localization and globalization experts, and all those involved in the exciting field of professional translation. We invite you to learn more about the many different facets of this field and keep informed of the latest news and updates about Trusted Translations.