Metaglossia: The Translation World

As I read Robert Zaretsky’s recent post, “What’s at Stake with Grade Inflation,” in which he notes how poorly his history students write, I couldn’t help but recall a confrontation I had several years ago with a business professor at the college where I was teaching at the time.

I was walking across campus one bright, sunny day (this was in Florida, where almost all the days are bright and sunny), when I saw this colleague coming toward me on the hedge-lined concrete walkway. He and I had enjoyed a cordial relationship over the years, occasionally stopping to chat about children and vacations and such when we ran into each other on campus, so I smiled as he approached and prepared to greet him.

Then I noticed he wasn’t smiling.

In fact, he looked downright angry. And as he got closer, I could see that he was indeed livid. Before I could ask what was wrong, he stopped directly in front of me, blocking my path, and launched into an expletive-laced, five-minute tirade on how terribly his students wrote. In his view, that sorry state of affairs was entirely the fault of the English department, of which I was merely unfortunate enough to be the immediate embodiment.

Duty Station

NEW YORK

Posting Period

20 May 2013-19 July 2013

Job Opening number

13-LAN-DGACM-27279-R-NEW YORK (L)

United Nations Core Values: Integrity, Professionalism, Respect for Diversity

Organizational Setting and Reporting

This position is located in the Terminology and Reference Section (TRS) of the Editorial, Terminology and Reference Service (ETRS) of the Documentation Division of the Department for General Assembly and Conference Management. The incumbent reports to the Chief of the Section.

Responsibilities

Within delegated authority, the Terminologist will be responsible for the following duties (These duties are generic and may not be carried out by all terminologists):

Monitors documentation and other materials and identify changes, developments, linguistic inconsistencies and variations in different areas of terminology used in the United Nations.

Develops new terminology for use where none exists in the target language.

Carries out linguistic research and prepare terminological bulletins and glossaries, technical vocabularies and related language tools.

Counsels and assists language staff and briefs them on the procedures and practices of the Section, terminology work and a broad range of technical subjects as required.

Establishes terminology standards

Contributes terms and titles, along with definitions and notes, in English and/or in the assigned language to the terminology database and is responsible for the relevance and accuracy of this data.

Proposes solutions to terminology issues raised by staff members and conducts documentary research and consultations to this end.

Answers terminology queries from other departments of the Secretariat, specialized agencies, governmental and non-governmental agencies and other outside bodies.

Keeps abreast of developments in machine-assisted translation and terminology

Google Now's new Reminders feature is pretty darn awesome, but readerGmapper14 found a great, lesser-known feature: you can add reminders right from Google search results.

 

You probably already know that certain searches will come up with "cards" on Google, like searching for a movie, a holiday, or other query. Well, if your search comes up with something associated with a date—like the release date of a movie—, you should now see a new option to "Remind Me on Google Now." Click this, and it'll add a reminder to your phone and tablet for you.

Le ministre de l'Education nationale Vincent Peillon s'est dit aujourd'hui sur France 2 "favorable" à un renforcement de l'enseignement des langues régionales, relevant qu'un amendement sénatorial à sa loi sur l'école avait été déposé en ce sens. 

"J'y suis favorable. C'est d'ailleurs toujours la gauche qui a fait progresser les langues régionales", a déclaré le ministre au moment où le Sénat entame aujourd'hui l'examen de son projet de loi après l'Assemblée en mars. 

Un capitaine de police s’est amusé à répertorier dans un abécédaire les expressions employées le plus fréquemment par les forces de l’ordre. Son titre : « Parlez-vous keuf ? ».

Keuf, poulet, flic, schmitt… Le policier peut être surnommé de différentes façons selon les régions et l’humeur de chacun. Mais savez-vous ce que signifie « beurrer le marmot » ou « aller à la poule » ? Un capitaine de police a créé un abécédaire du jargon policier. Intitulé Parlez-vous keuf ?, ledictionnaire est en vente depuis le 15 mai aux éditions Vuibert.

Taghreedat, the largest Arabic crowd-sourcing initiative in the Middle East and North Africa, has announced a partnership with Coursera, the world’s leading Massive Open Online Course provider, to translate major international university courses across multiple disciplines for Arab students worldwide, for free.

Leading global universities, including Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Georgia, Duke, Northwestern, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Edinburgh, are offering a number of their courses for free on Coursera in English. With this partnership, some of the world’s top university courses will be accessible for free for all Arabic-speaking users.

Starting May 19, Taghreedat’s 9,000 translators, writers and editors in 37 countries worldwide will have a chance to translate two university courses, marking the official start of the collaboration with Coursera. Stanford University’s Math Think and Duke University’s Behavioral Economics will be the first two courses to be localized, with plans for more courses to follow.

A group of Taghreedat translation language moderators will be managing project quality in the following weeks to ensure the courses are localized accurately and are accent-free.

“This is a major milestone for Taghreedat, especially that we are looking at diversifying our localization project portfolio and focusing on Open Educational Resources as a strategic area that we are engaging our crowd-sourcing community in,” said Taghreedat co-founders Mina Takla and Sami Mubarak.

Rawalpindi The Department of Communication and Media Studies of Fatima Jinnah Women University (FJWU) organised a seminar on ‘Effective presentation skills for radio and t ...

Alumnos de segundo curso de Medicina de la Universidad CEU Cardenal Herrera de Castellón han desarrollado un diccionario de genética, que recoge 42 casos clínicos con las enfermedades genéticas más frecuentes.

Chennai, May 20 — Tamil actor Dhanush, who has begun dubbing for his upcoming Hindi debut "Raanjhanaa", says he finds the experience tough but wishes to give his best to satisfy his audiences.
"Dubbing for Raanjhanaa.

OGDEN — There was quiet chatter at Zucca Trattoria earlier this week as more than 20 T.H. Bell Junior High School English students were rewarded...

Reading comprehension is a key factor in English and Language Arts curricula from elementary school to the university level. This aspect of academia measures the reader's level of understanding of a text. The main topics in reading comprehension include understanding meaning, drawing connections, summarizing, building vocabulary and increasing reading rate.

Understanding Meaning

Understanding the meaning of a text means figuring out what the passage is trying to tell you. This includes determining what is important in a passage by identifying ideas, actions, themes or lessons that are more important than others. Sometimes meaning is implied, rather than explicitly stated. To infer meaning, students must use textual clues and background knowledge to draw conclusions, make predictions and interpret meaning. One strategy to increase students' comprehension of meaning is to read actively, taking notes, asking questions and looking up unfamiliar words. They can also use the title, subheadings and background information to help in the overall comprehension of meaning.

Drawing Connections

Drawing connections in reading comprehension means identifying relationships between two or more things in order to deepen the student's comprehension of the material. This includes relating elements in the text to real life and to the reader's personal experiences and perspectives. For example, readers can ask themselves whether the text reminds them of other texts or films. They can reflect on how their own background specifically contributes to their understanding of the content. Drawing correlations like these enhances the overall meaning of the text by illuminating shared or contrasting aspects.

Summarizing and Synthesizing

An important skill in reading comprehension is being able to retell a story, essay or article in just a few sentences without looking at the original text. Summarizing includes being able to distinguish between major and minor points in a text and determining which details are crucial to the overall meaning and which are supplementary. Synthesizing, or pulling together parts to form a whole and coherent meaning is also a crucial aspect of reading comprehension. For example, with a short story, the reader can examine the characters, conflicts, symbols and figurative language to gather main idea or central theme.

Building Vocabulary

Building vocabulary is critical to language arts at all levels. In reading comprehension, students use contextual analysis to understand new terms. In cases when the context does not clearly define the unknown word, students should list, define and practice using new vocabulary words. Over time, familiarizing students with new words allows them to avoid getting stuck when they are confronted with those words again. Building vocabulary also gives students a more precise understanding of the material's meaning.

Increase Reading Rate

In order to increase reading rate, students must improve their attention and concentration while reading. A key strategy for improving reading rate is to practice reading with and without a time constraint.

The address field in Mozilla Firefox's Navigation Bar enables you to search for keywords, similar to its dedicated search field. Both search options rely on Google by default, but the search provider could have been changed by another user or add-on. Although the search field is easily changed back by selecting "Google" from the drop-down menu, the address field requires a behind-the-scenes tweak.

What is a translation memory? A translation memory or TM as it is often referred to, is a bilingual file that contains text in one language, as well as the translation of said text. The text is stored in the form of segments. In general, segments are pieces of text that can be divided by a comma, a period, a colon or a semicolon. This, depending on how it is determined when the TM is set up. We can consider that asegment is therefore something similar to a phrase. Segments are created by translation tools and in general, as the resource advances with the translation file, the tool makes up the memory automatically.

What are TM’s for? One of the most important aspects of working with a translation memory is so that we can divide one document amongst various translators and as such, still manage to achieve consistency. At Trusted Translations, for example, we create a memory for each client. This is how we assure that clients’ documents have consistent vocabulary, and thus adding to the quality of our deliveries. Additionally, some clients provide us with their own TM’s, which include specific translationsassigned to specific segments. Clients in turn ask that all documents to be translated respect the TM by applying the terminology found within.

 

Highlights from ELIA Munich ND My view of a conference is usually determined by the quality of the sessions related to MT and translation automation, or sometimes other sessions  that may trigger new thoughts on innovation and business process evolution. The ELIA conferences I have attended, stand out for me because I think they have better content in general than most, and one actually learns new things. To me it is clear that business translation is evolving beyond a focus on software and documentation localization (“the SDL mindset”) and I look for content that recognizes and addresses these emerging issues and market imperatives.
 
One of the most interesting sessions and perhaps the only one by a translation buyer was entitled “How Cloud TMSs are Changing the Relationship Between a Translation Buyer and LSPs” by Elina Lagoudaki of Turner Broadcasting. She described how cloud-based technology is used to manage a growing stream of digital media localization projects. Turner is a good example of a translation customer who has many small jobs (micro translation), often involving social media content and usually also closely  linked to dynamic web content that needs to go out in 15 languages. Elina presented her very organized and structured process to identify, administer and supervise translation projects and also provide final quality feedback to translators on an ongoing basis. Some things that she pointed out about her process included:
A preference for a SaaS or Cloud-based TMS solution (WordBee in her case) over inflexible, costly, arcane and management-heavy onsite solutionsThe need for a management dashboard that allowed high level and job-specific status monitoringA translation management environment that allows and facilitates collaboration between translatorsA translation management environment that allows and facilitates online review and content sign-offA translation management environment that allows and facilitates ongoing feedback to translatorsA translation management environment that allows and facilitates that enabled terminology and TM collection and centralizationA translation management environment that allows and facilitates that facilitates vendor comparison and selection

Developments in Language Technologies Open Up New Opportunities for Companies

If you want to convince someone that machine translation (MT) is a technology best left well alone, you will find countless examples online to prove your point — just browse through one of the many websites dedicated to collecting content that has truly been "lost in translation" when processed by a machine translation engine. Using MT to translate snippets of text without any context is a sure-fire way to produce an inaccurate and, admittedly, often hilarious result. However, in reality, this type of fragmented content only accounts for a tiny fraction of the information that business customers submit for translation.

The world's expectations of machine translation technology are another factor contributing to its somewhat undeserved poor reputation; perhaps we simply set the bar too high. Consider, for example, this quote from Dr. Thomas Goppel, then a member of state parliament and State Secretary of the Bavarian State Ministry of Sciences and the Arts, at the Machine Translation Summit II on August 16, 1989 in Munich: "When politicians see progress being made in the field of machine translation, they expect that they will have almost instant access to translated German versions of the massive collection of data and written records held by the European Union."

 

Un abécédaire recense les expressions employées par la police et leur traduction en bon français. Le saucisson et les morilles prennent une autre saveur...

Chaque corps de métier à son argot. Les bouchers ont inventé le Louchebem qui faisait florès aux Halles. Depuis, d'autres sabirs ont connu leur heure de gloire, devenant presque une langue à part entière. L'un des plus savoureux est celui employé par la maréchaussée. Autrement dit, les flics, les keufs, les condés. Il est en perpétuelle évolution, et croît à chaque progrès technique, fait divers ou sous la plume imaginative des auteurs de polars. San Antonio et Michel Audiard ont puissamment et abondamment contribué à enrichir cette langue. Restait à en faire le dictionnaire. C'est chose faites grâce au capitaine de police Gilles Braun, 51 ans. Il publie Parlez-vous keuf ? (éditions Vuibert), un abécédaire précieux et amusant. 

Si vous avez l'habitude de ralentir sur l'autoroute pour regarder un accident, ne vous étonnez pas si un CRS vous traite tout haut de "cref" en riant sous casque. Sachez que le CRS vous a traité de "con qui regarde en face". Un "sigle utilisé", selon l'auteur, "pour désigner" un automobiliste qui, afin de satisfaire sa curiosité, a l'habitude de "créer des bouchons inutiles voire un sur-accident" en regardant l'événement "survenu en sens inverse".

 

The Art of Delegation Why is it so hard for some business people to delegate? Is it because they are control freaks or is it that they don't have the necessary skills in order to know how to prioritize their time and their tasks?

La Universitat de València (UV) ha formalizado el contrato de rehabilitación de la Facultad de Filología, Traducción y Comunicación con la mercantil Rover Alcisa por un importe total de 3.462.678,37 euros, según publica el Diari Oficial de la...

There is a proverb in Timbuktu, the legendary medieval city in Mali's desert, that says: "The ink of a scholar is more precious than the blood of a martyr."

What Ahmed Baba, the 16th-century intellectual who said it, would make of recent developments is hard to imagine. At the multimillion-dollar Timbuktu institute bearing his name, fragments of ancient texts litter the corridors. The charred remains of not just scholarly ink, but the antique leather-bound covers that protected them against the harsh desert elements are blown by the hot Saharan wind.

Una novedosa iniciativa de un profesor colombiano generó un diccionario que muestra cómo ven los pequeños al mundo adulto

As a professional resume writer, I often get questions from friends and family members about the finer points of crafting the perfect document. While many