Metaglossia: The Translation World

An updated database of online articles and posts

The Spanish company Daedalus has released a new version of Stilus, a tool for multilingual proofreading that applies semantic technologies and operates in the cloud to facilitate the task of spelling, grammar and style checking.

En un precioso artículo, “Taller del hechicero”, publicado en ABC, de Madrid, 10.11.2007, Jaime Siles decía que «el taller de un traductor se parece mucho al de un hechicero: no porque en aquel haya pócimas, líquidos exóticos y ungüentos, sino porque el texto traducido se metamorfosea en otro que sólo en parte mantiene las propiedades de su cuerpo, la arquitectura de sus huesos y músculos y la tersura de su piel. Telar de Penélope y fragua de Vulcano al mismo tiempo, el taller del traductor poeta es una fábrica de signos en la que nada es lo que ha sido y en la que todo está siendo lo que tampoco es. Este constante transformismo constituye el riesgo de la traducción, pero también su fiero desafío, porque el taxidermista de signos –que, en cierto modo, es el traductor– puede reproducir un gesto, una postura o un movimiento, pero nunca, nunca, la totalidad de posibilidades reunidas que todo texto poético es».

La pregunta sería: ¿Y qué sucede cuando Penélope y/o Vulcano no son “meros” traductores, sino, además, escritores con obra propia y notable?

Valgan esa cita y esta pregunta como introducción al hecho de que, a lo largo del tiempo, me fui ocupando de archivar en un fólder virtual todo lo que encontraba acerca de libros traducidos por autores muy nombrados de nuestro idioma, y a la chita callando resulta que me encuentro ahora con una cifra enorme y el encargo de hablar del tema, como ya les platiqué la semana pasada.

¿Pero por dónde empezar?

As an American and native English speaker, I nonetheless still make style or grammar mistakes in my writing. I can only imagine how confusing and difficult English must seem to those who grew up speaking a completely different language. I began thinking about this when one of my blog’s readers asked how they could improve their writing skills, and their difficulties with grammar and sentence structure were apparent.

Ordinarily, I suggest that people needing help with their writing skills read as much as possible and proofread their work aloud or have someone else with good skills look over their writing for them. Those things can help non-native speakers, but the tips below will give them a little additional help.

1. Write a blog.

Starting a blog and writing regularly can help you practice your skills, and if you have a grammar slip perhaps someone will gently point out a better way. This is a great way to hone your skills while interacting with your readers. Accept constructive criticism and make adjustments as needed.

2. Become a voracious reader.

You should read English language blogs, books, and newspapers frequently. Not only will you learn about many new topics, but also you will be reinforcing proper grammar and sentence structure. If you come across anything you do not understand, look it up right away, or make a note to check it out later. You might also consider keeping a journal of these words to consult on occasion.

3. Chat with English speakers.

Learning to think in English is an important step toward perfecting your skills, and by chatting online, you must quickly respond to questions asked of you.

4. Proofread and rewrite.

Keep your dictionary and thesaurus nearby and read your work aloud if possible. When you verbalize your words, you can sometimes pick out things that do not sound right and correct them.

5. Have someone check it out for you.

Alternatively, you can ask a native speaker with good grammar skills to read over your work and point out any difficulties or awkward passages so that you can correct them.

6. Accept criticism happily.

No one likes knowing they are doing something wrong, but in this instance, it is how you will grow as a writer. Thank people who point out problem areas and suggest better ways.

7. Watch movies and TV.

Watching television and movies is a great way to pick up idioms and common slang terms of the language.

8. Keep things simple.

No need to be completely obsessed with little nuances of the language, so keep things simple and straightforward.

9. Hire a freelance writer.

This might seem counterproductive, but it can help you to understand the language better, especially if you give them a rough draft in English and then read their finished product. If you really want to do it yourself, consider paying them instead to proofread and edit your writing, saving it in Word track changes format so that you can see what they corrected.

10. Write for content mills.

Writing sites like Textbroker and iWriter do not pay very well at all, but they do give you a ready platform for practicing your English writing skills while making a little money and learning a bit about SEO and article submission.

11. Talk to native English speakers.

Have conversations with friends and acquaintances, and watch them as they speak for mannerisms and patterns. Ask for help—you will be surprised that they are more than happy to give you the assistance you need.

12. Read writer’s guides.

Some classic writing books, like The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, can help you learn the important style and grammar rules that form the basis of the English language.

13. Translate things.

Find articles in your native tongue and manually translate it to English, allowing one of your native English-speaking friends to check it out and comment on it for you.

14. Be patient and persistent.

Do not give up, because the more you practice, the better your writing will be. Eventually, you will write so well that no one will have a clue that you ever had issues.

15. Use these resources.

This short list of resources can help improve your English. Some are useful as reference materials and others offer quizzes and user forums where you can practice your writing skills.

Thoughts on Editing
Editing is of course a big part of what we do as writers and translators. We all should edit our own work, including when we write e-mail (one reason I blog is to constantly work on my English and my own writing and editing skills).

Hemingway liked to refer to good writing as "architecture, not interior design". What he meant by that is that good writing tends to be more spare (plain) and simple, rather than ostentatious, cluttered and wordy. I like that metaphor and I agree with Hemingway on that (you should too, probably, unless you are Thomas Mann, or writing lyric poetry).

The whole point of your writing should be to get your point across minimalistically, or, with the least number of words and effort required on the part of your reader. Long sentences often can be confusing and misleading. Long words are generally not as good as short ones, in English.

Here are some tips I have found over the years as a writer, that I would like to pass along:

Let your writing sit for a while before you edit it. I am always amazed that when I read something I wrote after taking a jog or letting the text sit overnight, that I come to the text with fresh eyes. It is almost like I am editing something written by someone else.

If you are editing someone else's translated work, follow what Anthony Pym calls the notion of binary errors vs. non-binary errors. What does he mean ?
Binary errors are errors in which there are only two possible choices in translation, and the translator made the wrong choice (translating Löwe in German into anything other than lion in English [aka monosemic words]).
Non-binary errors are really not errors, because more than one choice was possible (aka polysemic words[). This is where style comes in. If you correct a non-binary error, you are imposing your own style on the translation, but it is not really an error.

Think structurally. What does that mean ?
Take longer sentences and break them up into shorter sentences.
Look to reduce (or add) any punctuation that should be changed (removing unnecessary commas will make your text flow a lot better, etc.).
Do the paragraphs follow the rule that one paragraph should equal one thought and also the details of that one thought ? If not, break the paragraphs up.
Make sure you use white space. I once took a technical writing class in San Francisco and the teacher taught us that "white space is good". Use a lot of it. Don't over-clutter your page. People like white space and they read text that has a lot of it (look at good advertising sometime). Notice the white space around my text in this blog post. Would my blog post be better if I took the white space out ? (no).

Don't let your ego get involved !
If you are editing: don't just edit to show how good you are, or (even worse) to make the writer look bad ("malicious editing").
If you are being edited: think of the editor as your ally, not your rival.

"El traductor literario tiene que ser un gran escritor"

El 29 de abril pasado, el escritor colombiano Héctor Abad Faciolince publicó la siguiente columna de opinión en El Espectador, de Bogotá. La reproducimos a continuación.

Traductores

Por necesarias que sean estas profesiones, no me gustaría reencarnar en enterrador, en verdugo, en carnicero. Otros oficios, en cambio, tienen una dignidad estética que los hace bellos: panadera, cocinero, carpintero . Me dedicaría a ellos sin chistar, si tuviera otra vida. Pero entre los oficios bellos que existen, quizás el más hermoso que hay sea el de traductor.

Si vous êtes un fidèle de ce blog, vous savez deux choses sur moi: je suis traductrice et blogueuse. Traductrice, c’est le métier que j’exerce depuis 4 ans maintenant. Blogueuse, c’est mon activité depuis, oh, longtemps déjà. Ma voisine millionnaire n’est pas mon premier blog, même si je parlais de sujets bien différents précédemment. Récemment, je vous ai annoncé le projet d’e-book de Ma voisine millionnaire, encore quelque chose à écrire!

Voilà donc le sujet du billet de la semaine, traduire, écrire et affronter l’angoisse de la page blanche!

Traduire:

J’aime mon métier. Chaque ouvrage que je traduis a un style différent, un public différent et c’est à chaque fois un défi différent. Il faut savoir comprendre les intentions de l’auteur et les conserver tout en adaptant le texte à un public francophone. Je l’ai déjà dit sur ce blog, on sous-estime souvent la tâche du traducteur et on oublie que le style est important et qu’il y a souvent un véritable travail d’adaptation. C’est donc un métier qui demande de la créativité et une certaine capacité à écrire. Seulement, il s’agit toujours de traduire et donc d’écrire à partir d’un texte existant. La part de créativité est limitée et personnellement, j’ai ressenti le besoin d’écrire pour moi, d’où ce blog.

Bloguer:

Quel que soit le sujet de mon blog, le but a toujours été le même: stimuler ma créativité, produire des textes originaux et dire ce que j’avais à dire (ben oui quand même!). C’est donc avec un grand plaisir que j’ai créé ce blog avec pour objectif d’informer les autres indépendants et ceux qui aspirent à le devenir. J’ai été très inspirée et prolifique au début puis j’ai été obligée de me rendre à l’évidence: quand je suis absorbée dans un projet, j’ai beaucoup de mal à être créative pour le blog. J’ai beau parler avec d’autres indépendants, assister à des formations, me rendre aux Cafés du traducteur, même si plein de sujets me viennent en tête, rien ne sort de mon clavier. Manque d’inspiration? Oui et non. Panne de clavier? Probablement. Il m’est encore difficile d’expliquer ce qui se passe mais j’ai l’impression que quand je suis occupée à temps plein par une traduction, elle « pompe » toute ma créativité. Embêtant pour une traductrice-blogueuse! D’autant plus que la situation est problématique, car j’aimerais avoir encore plus de projets, tout en développant ce blog et en rédigeant ce fameux e-book. Que faire?

Top-notch translators must be excellent writers in their target (usually native) language
Of course, this is just one of the many, many skills that a linguist must possess. Excellent comment of the source language(s) should be a given. The same goes for professionalism, communication skills, business sense, and countless other abilities are the basis of a successful translator. You guessed it, multi-tasking maketh the freelancer!

However, in this post, I'm taking a closer look at ways to work on target language writing skills. Here are some suggestions:...

Writing Skills in Translation
Good writing and editing can make all the difference in a translation, turning a word-for-word rendering into real English that sings, argues, or informs to greatest-possible effect. What can translators do to polish these skills? In the opening interview, veteran translator and editor Lynne Riggs will answer questions about how writing and editing skills increase the quality of Japanese to English translations, how she works, how "real translation" is presented to and negotiated with clients, collaboration, and other professional situations, giving practical tips and showing examples.
The second part of the meeting will be a practical demonstration of editing and writing skills, for which participants are invited to submit short translations to be edited by Riggs in advance and used as the basis of discussion. All submissions will be kept anonymous. Translations (non-technical/general content is preferred) should be submitted together with the source text, which should be no longer than 400 characters in length. Submissions should be in MS Word or plain text files. If too many submissions are received Riggs will choose those that illustrate a range of issues. Send submissions to tac@jat.org by August 25th.

Contextual Thesaurus FAQ
Q: What is this?
A: This is a prototype Contextual Thesaurus developed by Microsoft Research. Actually, it’s quite a bit more than that: it’s an English-to-English machine translation system that employs the same architecture that the Microsoft Translator uses when translating different languages. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale paraphrasing system anywhere.

Q: What do you mean “Contextual Thesaurus”?
A: An ordinary thesaurus provides synonyms and near synonyms, usually only for single words, often without offering much information about when to use these terms. Try looking up the word “break” in a conventional thesaurus. Then look up “businesses are asking for tax breaks” in the Contextual Thesaurus. You will see the difference.

Q: How do I use it?
A: Type a short phrase into the input box. Then click the Submit button (the arrowhead in an orange circle) or hit the Enter key on your keyboard. The system accepts only one sentence at a time. Some suggestions:

· Limit your input to 4-8 words. The system is capable of generating paraphrases much longer than that, but results will usually be more varied and interesting if you type in fewer words rather than more. Even two or three words will sometimes be enough to retrieve a useful set of equivalents.

· Formal language works better than colloquial language. Because our training data consists mostly of documents in the business, government, or technology domains, the system performs better on input related to these domains than it does on song lyrics or first-person blog posts.

· Click one of the paraphrases to highlight the path through the graph taken by that sentence.

· If you click on a word in the graph, the top-ranked paraphrase containing that term will be highlighted.

· If you click the check mark beside a paraphrase, the text will be moved into the input box in order to be paraphrased. This way you can round trip your paraphrases to see more alternatives.

Q: When I type [favorite phrase] it doesn’t show me [favorite paraphrase]. Why don’t you have this obvious pair?
A: Our English-English translation model is learned from large amounts of text found on the web. The system may not find some perfectly good expressions that don’t occur often enough in our data for them to surface. On the other hand, because we are using real data that reflects real usage, you probably won’t see too many out-of-date expressions of the kind that you would find in a conventional thesaurus.

Q: It makes a lot of grammatical errors.
A: Yes it does. The system has no knowledge of grammar, and the kinds of errors it produces are typical of machine translation systems. It doesn’t do well on pronouns and function words, and tense and number often suffer badly. As we improve our algorithms, over time we expect grammatical quality to get better. In the meanwhile, non-native speakers of English might wish to use the system with caution.

Q: When I type in a long sentence, everything in the output seems pretty much similar. Why is this?
A: This is because of the way the algorithm selects what it thinks are the best options. Shorter phrases (4-8 words) generally produce results that are more varied.

Q: The first few suggestions seem OK, but there is a pile of real junk in there.
A: What you are seeing is the ranked output of the algorithm. Most translation systems don’t show users what is happening under the hood. In general, the best suggestions will be found towards the top of the list. But there may still be gems to be found even among the lower ranked items.

Q: I’ve found an offensive result. Why does this happen? And who can I tell about it?
A: We do try to filter out the most obviously offensive terms. However, because much of our data has been scraped off the web, inappropriate material may occasionally slip through. In addition, the system can sometimes create inappropriate juxtapositions even when the input is innocuous. If you do find something inappropriate or offensive, please report it via the Feedback link, giving both the input and output so that we can address the issue.

Q: What is this good for?
A: We expect that the system will prove useful in many applications that need to recognize or generate semantically similar words and phrases. The following are just a few examples, in no special order: writing assistance, document simplification, document style adaptation, in-house style enforcement, grading of essays and short answers, language learning, plagiarism detection, steganography, document fingerprinting, summarizing and abstracting, question answering, conversational agents, interaction with game characters, search and information extraction and retrieval, search engine optimization, and command and control. (Contrary to rumor, we have not yet trained it to wash the dishes.)

Q: Is there an API?
A: We are preparing to make this available as an API, using this page to collect thoughts and feedback.
Q: If I paste a really large block of text three or four times into the input box, it hangs my browser.
A: Don’t do that.

Writing Skills in Translation
Good writing and editing can make all the difference in a translation, turning a word-for-word rendering into real English that sings, argues, or informs to greatest-possible effect. What can translators do to polish these skills? In the opening interview, veteran translator and editor Lynne Riggs will answer questions about how writing and editing skills increase the quality of Japanese to English translations, how she works, how "real translation" is presented to and negotiated with clients, collaboration, and other professional situations, giving practical tips and showing examples.
The second part of the meeting will be a practical demonstration of editing and writing skills, for which participants are invited to submit short translations to be edited by Riggs in advance and used as the basis of discussion. All submissions will be kept anonymous. Translations (non-technical/general content is preferred) should be submitted together with the source text, which should be no longer than 400 characters in length. Submissions should be in MS Word or plain text files. If too many submissions are received Riggs will choose those that illustrate a range of issues. Send submissions to tac@jat.org by August 25th.

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.
(Ernest Hemingway, "The Art of Fiction," The Paris Review Interview, 1956)

    An exceptional faculty will be on hand Sept. 13-16 as the Surprise Valley Writers’ Conference enters its sixth year of offering workshops in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and translation, according to a news release.

Can you speak multiple languages? Does that mean you are qualified to be both a translator and interpreter?

Style guides are underappreciated by most of us I suspect. By me as well. And yet many of us encounter problems, misunderstandings or confusion with clients over matters of formatting, spelling conventions, punctuation, etc.

Once in a while some fairly advanced client presents me with a style guide for English documentation in their company or their client's operation. While these are seldom perfect, they are very helpful, and they provide an important point of orientation for work and a basis for "negotiation" if improvements are needed.

The old saying tells us that translators are privileged readers.

La Facultad de Traducción y Documentación ha acogido este jueves una nueva lectura del ciclo 'Como lo Oyes. Lecturas literarias', con entrada libre. Fue una edición especial porque sonaron doce voces, las de la mayoría de los participantes en las lecturas celebradas hasta ahora. Entre ellos se encontraban autores como Fabio de la Flor o Ben Clark, y traductores como David González-Iglesias o Neila García. Todos son jóvenes talentos vinculados a la Universidad de Salamanca.

Brian and I studied in the same University and later one I moved to Russia to study Russian history and culture. Meanwhile Brian has written his first book and asked me to help him with the translations.

Expertise in Translation and Post-editing: Research and Application
The Center for Research and Innovation in Translation and Translation
Technology (www.cbs.dk/crit3) invites researchers and practitioners to
submit and abstract to the workshop:

Expertise in Translation and Post-editing: Research and Application
Copenhagen Business School, August 17 and 18, 2012

Abstract submission June 1, 2012

Et ce ne sont pas des babillages...

Qui connaît le traducteur de Oui-Oui ? Ou encore celui de Super-Charlie, l'album jeunesse de Camilla Läckberg ? Grand silence dans la salle... Et pourtant, sans lui, votre bout de chou ne pourrait vraiment pas lire son album jeunesse, à moins qu'il soit doté d'une sensibilité précoce aux langues étrangères. La journée panorama de la littérature pour la jeunesse, organisée par la SGDL, la Charte et l'Association des Traducteurs Littéraires de France (ATLF), a réservé une table ronde à ces travailleurs de l'ombre.

When applying for a job in a French-speaking country, your résumé needs to be in French, which is more than a matter of translation.

The El Paso Museum of History is pleased to present Monica Gomez in a special hands-on writing workshop entitled What Do YOU Think It Means?on Saturday, May 12, 2012 beginning at 2 p.m.

Cheverus School 8th-grader Julia Hall won her division of the 2012 Will McDonough Writing Contest and was honored in an awards ceremony at TD Garden.