More than 50 per cent of the translators were used in criminal courts in the UK, a third at immigration cases and the rest were paid for working in family courts.
Exclusif - Le Bureau de la traduction s'est engagé à déployer un outil de traduction automatique, mais des résultats obtenus avec cet outil par ICI Ottawa-Gatineau sont peu concluants et truffés d'erreurs.
« To decline our invitation » devient « diminuer notre invitation » et des expressions connues comme « it's raining cats and dogs » deviennent incompréhensibles : « c'est la pluie les chats et les chiens ».
Tous les fonctionnaires fédéraux seront invités à se servir de l'outil le premier avril, notamment pour s'envoyer des courriels.
Le malaise au sein de l'organisme est grand, selon un employé qui a parlé à visage couvert, par crainte de perdre son poste.
« C'est un outil qui n'est pas performant du tout et qui donne des traductions médiocres. » — Un employé, Bureau de la traduction ICI Ottawa-Gatineau a composé des courriels fictifs, une source les a fait traduire par cet outil. Ils en sont ressortis bourrés d'erreurs.
Photo : ICI Radio-Canada / Chantal Mainville La présidente-directrice générale du Bureau de la traduction, Donna Achimov, rappelle que les fonctionnaires pourront aider à perfectionner le logiciel.
« Si ça ne fonctionne pas du tout, les gens peuvent faire des plaintes et il y a des traducteurs professionnels qui regardent s'ils peuvent améliorer le processus », soutient la présidente-directrice générale.
Effet raté
Le Bureau de la traduction est l'organisme qui appuie le gouvernement fédéral pour traduire ses textes. L'outil de traduction automatique qu'il a créé a du moins la particularité de bien reconnaître les expressions courantes de la fonction publique.
« Le but pour cet outil est vraiment pour améliorer la compréhension et d'encourager les gens de travailler dans les deux langues officielles et c'est une façon pour aider la politesse au travail. » — Donna Achimov, présidente-directrice générale du Bureau de la traduction Cependant, pour le professeur de traduction à l'Université d'Ottawa Charles Leblanc, l'effet visé avec le nouvel outil est raté.
« Ça me dit qu'on ne tient pas la traduction au sérieux », explique le professeur.
« Les communications [...] en français vont se détériorer »
Un employé au Bureau de la traduction Photo : ICI Radio-Canada Les conditions d'utilisation précisent que cet outil doit servir à des communications non officielles. Mais la crainte, selon la source anonyme d'ICI Ottawa-Gatineau, c'est que les fonctionnaires l'utilisent à d'autres fins.
« Ça signifie que les communications au gouvernement en français vont se détériorer, et en anglais elles vont rester pareilles, parce que la majorité des traductions vont de l'anglais au français », raconte la source. « Donc à plus long terme, on peut craindre que des traducteurs perdent leur emploi. »
Le Bureau de la traduction assure que cet outil ne mènera pas à des compressions, mais l'Association canadienne des employés professionnels a d'autres inquiétudes.
« Le danger que je vois cependant c'est au niveau de la crédibilité du Bureau, face à ce que les fonctionnaires vont voir comme un produit qui devrait avoir une qualité du Bureau de la traduction », soutient la présidente de l'association, Emmanuelle Tremblay.
De son côté, le député libéral Greg Fergus, de la circonscription d'Hull-Aylmer, où se trouve ce bureau, souhaite que son gouvernement fasse marche arrière. « Le Parti libéral du Canada a développé la politique sur les langues officielles alors j'attends qu'on [s'occupe de] cette question-là comme il faut. »
Au gouvernement, on ne parle pas pour l'instant de reculer, mais rappelle que les ministres concernés ont eu un mandat clair, celui de mettre fin à la négligence de l'ancien gouvernement en matière de langues officielles.
Il y a de multiples raisons de créer ses propres sous-titres. Pour une traduction, une transcription (rendre une vidéo accessible aux sourds et malentendants) ou tout simplement pour rendre compréhensible une scène où le son ne serait pas de bonne qualité. Les logiciels de montage proposent des fonctionnalités d’incrustation de titres et sous-titres mais elles ne sont pas toujours intuitives, ce qui peut vous compliquer la tâche. Nous ne sommes pas tous des pros du montage mais pas d’inquiétude ! Il existe des logiciels gratuits pour créer ses sous-titres et les éditer sans trop de difficultés. Voici une brève sélection de programmes open-source pour réaliser ses propres sous-titres.
SUBTITLE WORKSHOP
Un problème de synchronisation dans des sous-titres est un phénomène assez frustrant. Qui n’a jamais été dégoûté de voir les dialogues sous-titrés de sa série préférée complètement décalés ? Un phénomène qui vous met en rogne, mais bon quand on est addict à une série, ça peut se comprendre. Avec Subtitle Workshop vous pouvez modifier les sous-titres qui posent problème en un rien de temps. Le logiciel intègre un correcteur orthographique et prend en charge plus de 50 formats de sous-titres.
AEGIS SUB
Ce programme est lui aussi gratuit mais il n’en est pas moins performant ! Il support de nombreux formats vidéos et sous-titres et offre la possibilité d’ajuster très finement la synchronisation du texte et de l’image. Pour ceux qui sont amenés à réaliser un lourd travail de traduction, le logiciel propose un assistant qui vous facilite la tâche surtout lorsque vous souhaiter corriger des approximations linguistiques ou des faux-sens.
JUBLER
Jubler est disponible sur Mac, Linux et Windows. Open-source, il dispose d’un correcteur orthographique et d’un outil de mise en forme facile à prendre en main. Contrairement aux deux premiers outils présentés, il n’est disponible qu’en anglais mais il supporte l’édition multilingue ce qui est plutôt pas mal lorsqu’on est amené à créer des sous-titres pour la traduction.
SUBTITLE EDIT
Ce logiciel porte très bien son nom. Avec Subtitle Edit, vous pouvez réaliser toutes les tâches de création, conversion, synchronisation et de traduction. Les outils de mise en forme sont complets (couleur, forme, police etc.). Vous pouvez même rajouter des effets pour créer vos propres karaokés en récupérant les paroles de votre chanson préférée par exemple. La synchronisation est ajustable jusqu’au millième de seconde, ce qui vous permettra de réaliser un sous-titrage proche de la perfection.
SUBLER
Terminons avec Subler, un logiciel Mac qui permet d’incruster directement ses sous-titres et pas seulement de créer un fichier sous-titre. Le programme n’est compatible qu’avec les vidéos MPEG-4 comme le MKV , le MOV ou le MP4. Là encore, l’accent est mis sur la synchronisation, il est donc très simple de corriger les décalages. Subler permet également de « muxer » (assembler) les format vidéo avec les audio, les chapitres et les sous-titres. Pour finir, sachez que vous pourrez exporter la vidéo finale dans un format compatible avec la dernière Apple TV.
Other languages have hundreds of words - including the German sitzfleisch, the ability to carry out boring tasks - associated with positive emotions but many can not be directly translated.
Download glossaries for various subjects, fields and languages. New ones are regularly added - sell or distribute your own glossaries too via Alexandria!
As the world becomes more global, so do the games we play. It's still very much a learning process, but companies are ready to find ways of winning new gamers.
La traduction du Missel romain était à l’ordre du jour de l’Assemblée plénière d’automne des évêques, en novembre 2015. Enjeux, démarche et étapes.
Via Charles Tiayon
Muslims respond to comments by David Cameron, who says Muslim women in some UK communities are segregated by their families and have poor English language skills.
The Microsoft Translator app for Android and iOS just got a neat new feature which now adds a more natural flow on translated conversations.
According to Microsoft, the latest update now enables the app to deliver translated conversations that are "more natural than ever," which sounds pretty exciting for a software of this kind.
Many of us have occasionally resorted to various translation software to figure out what something written in another language means. Many times we were left quite puzzled with a broken translation – knowing the translated words, but still trying to figure out the meaning of the text.
That's because some translation software is good for translating word for word, verbatim, but the nuances and linguistics, word typology, word order and other specifics of each language make it difficult to convey the same meaning automatically in another language. Consequently, we end up with translated words, but the overall text sounds like a poorly-written instructions manual for some weird gadget, written by a Chinese six-year-old who just learned his first English words. It really sounds far from natural.
It's still better, however, than having no clue what it's all about, and there's no doubt that hardware and software have come a long way and helped a great deal to break linguistic barriers.
Technology has made it easier and more convenient to communicate across languages and different parts of the world, and continuous improvements should make it even better.
Microsoft just announced a new conversation feature for both the iOS and Android versions of its Translator app, allowing users to communicate in a more natural way across languages by relying on their smartphone or smartwatch.
"The new conversation feature uses the same Microsoft Translator translation engine that powers Skype Translator, bringing our advanced machine learning know-how and speech recognition systems to assist you to converse in-person," Microsoft highlights. "The feature supports translation to and from Chinese Mandarin, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish."
The company said that it will add support for more languages in the future.
Microsoft further points out that having both a smartphone and a smartwatch enables the best results from Microsoft Translator.
Interested users can now download the Microsoft Translator app for Android or iOS, or enjoy the new conversation feature after the app update if they already have the app installed. The Microsoft Office Blog, meanwhile, offers more details on the Microsoft Translator natural translation for wearables.
Language especially in literature in Africa and the diaspora has been a point of heated discussion with reknown writers like Ngugi wa Thiongo and Chunia Achebe being in the middle of it. The Kwani Litfest 2015 explored this concept of language with the theme “Beyond the Map of English.”
The Kwani Litfest was established in 2006 as a way to bring together leading authors across Africa to explore a variety of discussions through the lens of the continent’s literature from the past, the present and to the future.
This year’s event provided a platform to explore language beyond the discussion of English, and to look at the issues that affect or influence writing in local languages. In a panel discussion on language and its changing relations to the African experience and writing on the continent, one thing was obvious, our writing still bears the colonial legacy.
“We existed more in reference to who we were made into; colonial subjects rather than who we promised ourselves to be or who we ought to have been. Ours was the language divested of authority,” Nuruddin Farah said in his keynote, Celebrating Differences.
Patrick Mudekereza from DRC highlighted that the colonial division of the continent led to the separation of villages into different countries.
“I live 30km north of Zambia, and we are French speakers, and when you cross the border, we have a feeling that the different towns were a big village that was divided,” he said adding that such divisions played an important art in artists writing and choice of language.
That writers would identify themselves as per their nationality instead of the language they speak.
“The challenge now is for us to try to reconnect these divided villages and languages. This is not taken as seriously as it should,” he adds.
This was also the sentiment from Caine Prize director Lizzy Attree, who decried the lack of translation centres as it limits the interaction of languages across the continent.
Talking of the connection between prizes and language, she said: “In a way, prizes in languages work as there are only very few ways for rewarding writers and encouraging them. I would love for there to be more African language prizes, because it is kind of ludicrous they do not exist, and even more ludicrous that there is no interaction between languages across the continent.”
This is one of the many reasons that the Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili prize was set up as they had seen a gap in the kind of content they received in other prizes like the Caine Prize.
“As much as Caine Prize accepts stories in translation, it does not cater for stories written in local languages. It has also been dominated by Anglophone countries like Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe. In a sense, there is a huge gap as we do not receive a lot of stories in translation, and we know for a fact that we miss out on so many things,” she added.
The Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize was launched in 2014 by Attree and Mukoma Wa Ngugi to promote reading and writing in African languages. The inaugural winners of the prize were celebrated and awarded at the Kwani Gala on Thursday December 3, 2015. The winners include Anna Samwel for Penzi la Damu, for the fiction prize, and Mohammed K Ghassani for N’na Kwetu for the poetry prize. Second and third prize went to Enock Maregesi for Kolonia Santita and Christopher Bundala Budebah for Kifaurongo for fiction and poetry respectively.
Away from prizes, the importance of local languages was emphasized by South African author Simphiwo Mahala, who highlighted the dilemma facing many writers and publishers in the continent. “There is the sentiment and political reasoning and practicality on the issue of language.”
For him, it took an elderly neighbour having her grandchildren reading his book, When A Man Cries, to her for him to actually start writing in his local language.
But the practicality of writing the book in IsiXhosa was very challenging to him that he could have written two English books in the same period.
In her keynote, Taiye Selasi, the author of Ghana Must Go, called for the acknowledgment of the varieties of English spoken in different parts of the world.
“The language I grew up speaking, thinking and dreaming in, and therefore the language that I write in is English. But it is not an English that belongs to England or foreign in anyway. It is an English that comes effortlessly and unmistakably out of my experience. It is mine.”
She spoke of the need to have literature in different languages and have this literature translated to be able to reach out to a larger audience.
“We need more Lusophone and Francophone literature, and literature written in indigenous African languages, and they need to be translated so that they can be read by global Anglophone audiences. That’s undeniable,” she added.
The same sentiments we shared by Ken Walibora, who was in conversation with Kimani Njogu on his writing in Kiswahili and the status of Kiswahili literature in Kenya.
“Hakuna haja ya kuweka mipaka katika lugha,’ he said referring to the freedom for people to select languages they need to write in and express themselves in. He also decried the complication of Kiswahili texts, saying many Kiswahili writers complicate the language for no reason at all.
Away from the discussion, Fokn Bois, Ghanaian duo were the headlining act for a concert to raise money for Binyavanga Wainaina’s medical fund. Binyavanga was diagnosed with a medical condition that affects his blood vessels to the brain making him susceptible to blockages and strokes.
According to Kwani Trust’s executive director, Angela Wacuka, Binyavanga is currently in India undergoing further treatment.
Farah’s Hidden in Plain Sight, a novel set in the wake of the death of a Kenyan UN worker in the wake of a terrorist attack in Mogadishu; Nikhil Singh’s Taty Went West, a story about an adolescent with super powers and has to navigate dangerous spaces to survive; and Kwani Trust’s journal Kwani 08, were launched during the festival.
Celebrated author Nuruddin Farah giving his keynote address at University of Nairobi
Author Taiye Selasi at Kenya National Theatre.
Prof Aldin Mutembei talking bout the future of Kiswahili writing in the region.
Learning a foreign language is more than just a boost to your CV or handy for travelling. It will make you smarter, more decisive and even better at English, says Anne Merritt.
ECQA Certified Terminology Manager - Basic is especially suited for professionals who work as Terminologists, Translators, Localisers and in Technical documentation. Also for freelances, in translation companies, in other commercial enterprises (engineers, ICT specialists, etc.), in universities, NGOs or the standardisation framework.
A new proposal from the ruling Popular Party could see Spain say adios to the practice of dubbing foreign programmes on television as a way of improving the nation's English proficiency.
Nine sure-fire ways for Spaniards to improve their English skills (06 Nov 15) Spanish primary school kids rank top of the class for learning English (24 Sep 15) PM unintentionally reveals struggle to learn English with list of clangers (14 Sep 15) Ten brilliant Spanish reinventions of everyday English words (04 Sep 15) Spaniards lag far behind their Scandinavian, German and Dutch cousins when it comes to English proficiency, but they could soon be shooting up the EU English league tables if one election proposal comes to fruition.
Seven reasons for Spain's newfound love of English
The conservative Popular Party (PP) led by Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy want a part of all television programming in Spain to be emitted in the original version, getting rid of dubbing and broadcasting with subtitles instead.
Spain's Education Minister, Íñigo Méndez de Vigo, unveiled the plan as part of the PP's electoral programme for education and culture in Burgos on Thursday.
The plan also includes measures to allow all Spanish children to receive schooling in Spanish. In some regions of Spain, public schools teach the majority of classes in regional languages, such as Catalan or Basque.
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has famously struggled with English, which has sometimes hindered his ability to join in the banter on foreign visits.
He had been working on his language skills, however, as a recent documentary revealed.
Spain's long tradition of dubbing films instead of subtitling them stems, in part, from its political history.
Under General Francisco Franco, all foreign - and even regional - languages were banned, which meant that international films shown in Spain were dubbed in Spanish rather than shown in their original languages with subtitles.
Dubbing Hollywood films into Spanish also meant that Spanish censors could remove whole swathes of storyline; in the film Mogambo, Spanish censors made Grace Kelly and Donald Sinden siblings to avoid explaining her adultery (he is really her husband).
But the tide is changing. Many Spanish cinemas now show films in V.O.S (versión original subtitulada - subtitled original version) and as younger generations improve their English, they increasingly want to watch films in the original language rather than dubbed in Spanish.
When you ask your iPhone's robotic personal assistant to define the word "bitch," you receive the following definitions:
1. a female dog, wolf, fox or otter. 2. (informal, derogatory) a spiteful or unpleasant woman. 3. (informal) a difficult or unpleasant situation or thing 4. (informal) a complaint.
This second definition is where things get a little, well, problematic. Under "a spiteful or unpleasant woman," you get a couple variations on the theme of bitch-as-sexist-insult. The first: "a person who is completely subservient to another."
The second: "(black slang) a woman."
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How Siri defines the word "bitch"Source: Mic Let's be clear: For Apple to imply that the usage of a misogynist epithet is related to skin color is — say it with me now — not OK.
The Huffington Post first discovered this "definition" on Thursday.
So where did it come from? Siri aggregates its answers from around the Internet, but it seems that Apple may be taking its definition of "bitch" from some version of the Oxford Dictionaries.
The Oxford Dictionaries defines the word "bitch" in the exact same way as Siri. There's just one difference: Oxford designates the "woman" definition as "offensive" — not "black slang."
Sir Michael Edwards explains the mandate and work that was originally entrusted to the Academie Française by Cardinal Richalieu in the 17th century, and ...
A l’occasion de la COP21 qui se tiendra du 30 novembre au 11 décembre à Paris, en présence de près de 150 chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement, l’Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) et la France vont promouvoir l’usage de la langue française dans les négociations internationales, selon un communiqué.
En tant que pays hôte de la négociation, la France a tenu à ce que le français ait toute sa place. Les règles des Nations unies le lui permettent. Ainsi, les plénières et les principales salles de négociations vont disposer d’un système d’interprétation dans toutes les langues officielles des Nations unies.
Pendant les réunions informelles, la France et l’OIF ont décidé de mettre en place un dispositif innovant d’interprétation et de traduction en français, à la disposition des délégations, en particulier celles représentant les Etats-membres de la Francophonie du Sud, a-t-on appris.
A travers ce dispositif, 9 interprètes (en simultanée et en consécutive) seront au service des délégations francophones pendant les douze jours de la conférence. Par ailleurs, la signalétique sur le site du Bourget, tout comme le site internet de la Conférence, sont intégralement en français et en anglais.
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Court translators speaking 226 languages are costing £60,000 a day