Metaglossia: The Translation World

LAHORE 

The well-known writer Intizar Hussain, after being nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize, has made it to the list of nine short listed writers.

The announcement for the winner of the prize is to be made on May 22. The Booker Prize is awarded to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language. The winner of the £60,000 prize can also choose a translator of their work to receive a £15,000 award of their own Pakistan’s Intizar Hussain has brought much pride to the Pakistani community by writing novels translated from Urdu into English, including Naya Ghar and Basti. The finalists were announced the other day at the Jaipur Literary Festival in India and the winner is to be announced in London on May 22. This is a time of pride for the Urdu Speaking and Pakistani community and we truly hope Intizar wins the final prize as well.

The list of the short-listed included: U R Ananthamurthy (India), Aharon Appelfeld (Israel), Lydia Davis (USA), Intizar Husain (Pakistan), Yan Lianke (China), Marie NDiaye (France), Josip Novakovich (Canada), Marilynne Robinson (USA), Vladimir Sorokin (Russia) and Peter Stamm (Switzerland). There are no submissions allowed; the Man Booker International Prize is chosen solely at the discretion of the judges. For the earlier prizes there had been three judges this year for the first time. They are five (Christopher Ricks, Elif Batuman, Aminatta Forna, Yiyun Li and Tim Parks). It is this, says the prize administrator Fiammetta Rocco, which accounts for the surprising list of finalists. “Now that we have five judges,” she says, “we have been able to read in far greater depth than ever before.” Each of the judges has their own area of geographical expertise which allowed for a more comprehensive overview of contemporary world literature. “Fiction is now available in all sorts of forms and in translation in more countries,” notes Rocco, “this list recognises that and is the fruit of the judges’ collective reading.”

This week saw the launch of a new feature for paid networks that we’re very excited about: Message Translation. Thanks to the power of Microsoft Translator, translating Yammer conversations into your native language is now possible with the click of a button. When a coworker posts a message in a language other than your own, you will be able to translate that message right from the Yammer thread.

The move, a first for a South African university, has sparked controversy among students and academics but has been hailed by education bodies.

The Council on Higher Education, an independent statutory body responsible for advising Minister of Higher Education and Training Blade Nzimande, said the university's plan was ''a step in the right direction".

The Inter-institutional Centre for Language Development and Assessment, a partnership of four multilingual universities - Pretoria, Stellenbosch, North West and Free State - said the move would not set a precedent for other varsities.

''Universities are autonomous. But I think one positive aspect of this plan is that it highlights the need for multilingualism in all universities,'' said the centre's chief executive, Professor Albert Weideman.

Current professional standards dictate that computer-aided translation (CAT) tools play a significant role in the work of any translator looking to market themselves profitably in this technological age. Or, as Frank Austermühl puts it in Electronic tools for translators: ‘translation, as a by-product of the information age and globalisation, has become a computer-based activity’.

Familiarity with certain software packages is very often a prerequisite when being considered for a translation project and a mastery of these tools is preferred by many potential clients. This takes a significant investment of time (and sometimes money) on the part of the translator and it is important to consider the impact of certain tools on your working routine before making an investment.

Despite the increased demand for technology within many areas of the field, the prevailing attitude towards CAT tools – and machine translation (MT) in particular – is one of scepticism; the void between translation theory and practice mentioned in my previous post on translation theory somewhat mirrors the link between translation practice and MT as working translators often disassociate themselves from advances in technology, incorrectly fearing that their livelihood risks obsoletion due to advancements in MT. Austermühl allays this fear by making the point that ‘since MT systems neglect the communicative, cultural and encyclopedic dimensions of translation, it is questionable whether they really provide ‘translation’ at all’ and, in fact, it is precisely the input of working translators that is needed for CAT tools to be able to augment their usefulness to the working translator, as attested by Shreve’s belief that ‘CAT systems should be designed on the basis of empirical studies of the translators task’.

In a review on Today’s Author, writer and sometimes editor Tony Noland reminded me of copyediting software I was going to check out. I’m not sure when I first encountered it (likely when the latest edition was released in July of 2012), but I remember thinking that the name alone was brazen enough to piqued my curiosity.

Editor, by Serenity Software, was originally developed for students and is probably most useful for inexperienced writers. Between them, developers Elaine and John Thiesmeyer have studied English, linguistics, and computer science, and have taught university-level English, linguistics, and writing. Compared to claims and descriptions I’ve seen from many other makers of grammar-checking and editing software, their approach is well-informed and reassuring (as befits a company with serenity in its name). From the homepage:

Editor does not base its suggestions on dubious statistical norms. It does not impose discredited Zombie Rules or offer haphazard lists of homonyms and synonyms as writing enhancements. It is not a click-to-fix editing program; in most cases, Editor points out problems and raises questions rather than imposing answers. Writers do the editing and remain the judges of what they want to say.

In other words, the writer who uses Editor is really the editor. But that’s as it should be.

How can children reach their full potential, when their early education is taught in a language that they are both uncomfortable and unfamiliar with? In countries with diverse linguistic communities this is the harsh reality for many children growing up as part of a minority group. In Africa, the problem is rendered especially tricky by the prevalence of foreign and colonial languages in education, and governments’ unwillingness to experiment with replacing them. While UNESCO’s Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) treads the tricky path towards political change, other institutions are attempting to bolster African languages in other ways: Professor Prah and the CASAS Harmonization and Standardization of African Languages Project, for example, are determining lists of mutually-intelligible African dialects and languages (of which more here), while elsewhere, speech synthesis technology is being developed, aiming to equalise education for linguistic minorities.

By Matthew Labrooy

In Africa there are countless children in rural areas with little or no access to early-learning material and to whom the advantages of a mother-tongue education are unavailable, even though all the evidence suggests that when children from ethnic communities are offered the opportunity to learn in their mother tongue they have increased success in formal education and engage better with learning materials. UNESCO has been advocating the use of African languages in education since 1953, when a landmark report stressing the importance of educating children in their mother tongue was published, exhorting African governments to move away from the use of colonial languages in governance and instruction.

60 years on from The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education, UIL still faces an uphill struggle. While little has changed politically, the weight of the evidence has piled up, as more and more research demonstrates, according to a 2010 UIL Report, “the negative consequences of these policies: low-quality education and the marginalisation of the continent,” leading to what Professor Prah calls the “creeping amnesia of collective memory”.  The report, Why and how Africa should invest in African languages and multilingual education, identifies several sectors where change must occur: the problem of delivering multilingual, mother-tongue education lies on the intersection of deeper political, cultural and developmental  issues which must each undergo a transformation before educational reform can be put in progress.

The importance of ICTs in multilingualism is also recognised by the report, and by UNESCO generally, who have started an initiative to make Multilingualism in Cyberspace a reality. Even profit-driven companies have started to recognise benefits to embracing African languages: “International companies such as Microsoft have discovered that investing in African languages is beneficial because they want to reach the estimated 100 million Kiswahili speakers residing in six African countries.” Wikipedia has also launched services in several African languages, including Malagasy, Yoruba, Tswana and Chichewa – though the number of articles in these languages is highly variable, ranging between the 100s and 10000s.

Un Funámbulo entre metáforas. Mantener el equilibrio en traducción literaria” es el título del libro de Natalia Arregui y Louis Jolicoeur, publicado por la Editorial Universidad de Granada (eug), que será presentado en una acto en el que intervendrán Ángela Collados, decana de la Facultad de Traducción e Interpretación de la UGR; M.ª Isabel Cabrera, directora de la Editorial Universidad de Granada (eug); José María Pérez, profesor de la UGR; y los autores del volumen.

Tendrá lugar en el Salón de Grados de la Facultad de Traducción e Interpretación (Edificio Buensuceso), el jueves, 16 de mayo de 2013, a las 13 horas.

Actividad

Reciprocal teaching is a research based method of improving reading comprehension that is being used throughout many classrooms in Portage Township Schools. It was often used as an learning method for struggling readers, but has since been shown to be effective for all students. Some of these strategies can actually be adapted for use at home.

Reciprocal teaching is a discussion technique that incorporates four main reading strategies: predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. These strategies (along with a few others) have long been known to be used by good readers to comprehend text.

We as adults use these same strategies in our own reading. For example, when you read an article, whether in print or online, you might skim the text and predict what it will be about. As you read, you alternate between clarifying ideas/words, asking questions or wondering. You summarize throughout your reading and predict what will come next. We do this naturally and automatically; with reciprocal teaching, we give a name to the strategies as we use them, making it more concrete for our students.

Predicting involves previewing the text to anticipate what may happen next. Readers use information from the text, illustrations, and their prior knowledge to make logical predictions before and during reading. With fiction, students use those clues to make predictions about the setting, characters, problems, and key events that may appear in the text. When working with nonfiction text, students use the text headings, illustrations, maps, captions and tables to predict what they will learn.

Questioning would involve using phrases such as “I wonder (why, how, what, where, who)…” Good readers ask questions throughout the reading process. Students who know they will be expected to think of a question about the text prior to reading will then read with a heightened awareness of the main ideas. During reciprocal teaching, students are asked to “be the teacher” as they create questions for one another

Students sometimes have difficulty understanding unclear sentences, passages, chapters, or difficult words. Clarifying helps students monitor their own comprehension, and learn how to apply “fix-up” strategies. Clarifying would sound like this: “I didn’t understand the part (or word, page, paragraph) where… so I …(reread, read on to look for clues, thought about what I know, talked to a friend).

Summarizing is complex, requiring students to pull together several skills and strategies: recalling the text, determining the important events, and arranging them in order. Retelling is an important beginning step, which is easier for our younger students. Summarizing sounds like this: “This is about…” or “I now think…”

Topics in Language Resources for Translation and Localisation (Benjamins Translation Library) book download Elia Yuste Rodrigo Download Topics in Language Resources for Translation and Localisation (Benjamins Translation Library) Topics in...

As anyone who’s attended my “pet hates” English corner will know, I’m not a fan of dubbed TV and films. As an example of a pet hate it works well – it’s accepted by society at large, but annoys me on an almost visceral level, and I’m eager to recruit others to the cause. The reasons I give are:

1. When lip-movements and speech don’t match the film will always look ridiculous, especially when the languages have different speeds.
2. A film is a piece of art and replacing the voices of the actors is an insult to everyone involved
3. The translation will always be mangled in order to match lip movements
4. Countries that use subtitles for English-language TV have a better standard of spoken English than countries that dub everything.

The last point here is a nice final flourish for a classroom full of people who are trying to improve their proficiency in the language, but to be perfectly honest it’s nothing more than a guess, based mainly on the experience of meeting Scandinavians with untutored near-native English, but also on travel to France and Italy where (despite the huge amount of tourists there) I’ve found the opposite.

Last year the international English-training school EF produced a study called the “English Proficiency Index” – a survey which “benchmarks English proficiency across 54 countries using a sample of just under 2 million people.” (The full report can be downloaded from the website here) Looking through the figures, I thought it would be a good chance to see whether my hunch was correct. Would countries which dubbed TV have worse English, or would my idea turn out to be based on a couple of outliers?

En traducción, nos encontramos a menudo con esta palabra, sobre todo si se trata de traducción médica o científica, pero también en otros ámbitos. ¿Se utiliza siempre de manera adecuada? ¿Es correc...

mphal, May 18 2013 : To commemorate completion of seven years of official recognition of Meetei Mayek, the first ever Anglo-Manipuri dictionary in Meitei Mayek published by MEELAL was released by Education Minister Moirangthem Okendra in a function at Jina Hall, North AOC here today.

Speaking at the occasion, Secretary General of MEELAL P Thakaba said that the day is observed especially to commemorate the official recognition of Meitei Mayek by State government in 2005 .

The script has been taught in all schools in the State since 2005 and soon students would appear Manipuri language paper in matriculation examination in Meitei Mayek, he noted.

Thakaba further said that the State government has given the official recognition through relentless efforts of the volunteers of MEELAL.

The day, on which MEELAL signed MoU with State government for inducting the Meitei Mayek script in schools, has been written in golden letters in the annals of Manipur, he added.

A new feature rolled out at Google I/O could put the company's ear in your office.

At the Google I/O conference, the company rolled out "OK, Google," which is a universal version of the Siri-style of conversational interaction. But instead of being solely on the phone, it will also work on your desktop via Chrome. Immediately after seeing this product, I feared for my privacy.

My concerns were allayed by the people at Google who explained the reasonable mechanism, but I still have problems. Let me explain.

The product is a voice recognition system and a computer voice response situation combined with a search engine.

It works like this:

You are in front of your computer and you say, "OK, Google." This brings up a flashing mic icon into which you ask the computer a question such as, "Where is the nearest Chinese restaurant?" The computer then says, "The nearest Chinese restaurant is two blocks away at this address." It then brings up a search page with the restaurant and alternatives.

The first thing I thought of was that Google must be listening in at all times waiting for you to say, "OK, Google." So I investigated because I do not need an ear in the room listening to everything I say.

La cita nacida hace ocho años en Castrillo crece hasta formar toda una red europea.

«Hemos hecho de Castrillo de los Polvazares una marca de calidad en el panorama intelectual europeo y hemos implantado en León una institución cultural, sin coste fijo alguno, de amplia proyección internacional que ya desearía cualquier otra región, y no sólo en España».

Esta reflexión resume perfectamente lo que ha llegado a ser el Encuentro de Traductores y Escritores de Castrillo de los Polvazares, una iniciativa surgida en el año 2006 de la mano de Javier Gómez-Montero, catedrático en la universidad alemana de Kiel y oriundo de la villa maragata, y que este mes de julio crece con la llegada, de nuevo, de numerosos expertos a la comarca pero también con la puesta en marcha de un curso universitario, a todo lo cual acudirán, entre otros, el poeta leonés y premio Cervantes Antonio Gamoneda, asiduo de la cita, y el conocido escritor gallego Manuel Rivas.