Brand New Day

It's been almost 6 years since my last post here. A lot has happened: a 2-week training on a tall ship; a new job; a half marathon; a promotion; taking up a new language (Duolingo streak 1311 days and counting); a second home that was going to become a primary residence; a pandemic (that's still ongoing); a leave of absence to help care for an ailing parent in Taiwan (in the middle of the pandemic); a series of wildfires that destroyed that second home; a mad dash to find trees and government assistance after the wildfires; a long journey to seek insurance reimbursements; an effort to start (re)building the future home. And yet, I am thankful that my husband and I are in relatively good health and have each other.

Those all sound like good excuses for slacking in writing, but the main reason actually has to do with the role I'm in these days. As the Vendor Manager of a prominent LSP in the US, I don't want my words to be taken as representative of LanguageLine or vice versa. I know that some vendors wishing to work with LanguageLine actually try to connect via this blog, and that's not really what this venue is for.

A lot has changed in the translation and localization industry in the past 6 years. Machine Translation isn't the laughing stock that it used to be, thanks to innovations in technologies. Depending on what the need for translation is, sometimes MT outputs are actually enough for comprehension purposes. Human translation still has its place (and won't be replaced by MT any time soon - yet), but we now also have "human in the loop" to help bridge the gap and get translations done faster.

The pandemic didn't slow things down. It accelerated the growth of this industry, in fact. Translators are used to working from home, therefore being in lockdown does not necessarily mean having no work. The need to get the latest information out to the public also contributes to this invigorating growth. Translators in general are still paid peanuts, but at least they're getting lots and lots of peanuts.

Distance learning and online meetings make the need to transcribe/translate recorded content go up exponentially. And then Zoom announced its acquisition of Kites, so they can start providing multi-language translation capabilities for Zoom users. How genius was that?!

All in all, lots of encouraging stuff is happening. Sitting in a front-row seat, I eagerly await what comes next.

Please translate responsibly.

Signs Spotted in Taiwan

My family and I came across some signs with bad translations while staying in Taiwan for three weeks recently.  These are only a small portion of what we saw, mainly because there wasn't always time to take a picture whenever such an example presented itself.  

• (My hiking companion feigned a double take and asked what was so attractive about this trail.) A better translation for the sign below would be:
  行人小心 = Caution
  路滑崎嶇 = The trail is slippery and rough

Apologies for the blurry image. The English on the sign reads: Be careful. The road is rugged.

• I'm not sure why, but quite a few steak places in Kenting （墾丁）, Taiwan, omit the "k" on their signs. 

Where's the "k" in "steak"???

• "本停車場僅供房客停車使用，不負保管責任。" can be easily translated as:
  "Parking lot for use of guests at Château Beach Resort only. Not responsible for theft or damage to vehicles or contents."
  
  As for the "Kindly to Notice" part, it's possible they meant to say "A Friendly Reminder" or something to that effect.

Found in the parking lot of a beach resort hotel in Kenting, Taiwan.

• An interesting phenomenon in Taiwan is the promotion of healthy living.  I also saw signs about exercise, personal fitness, weight control, and healthy diet in a government office building -- in a stairwell.  The mistranslations on the sign below merit a separate post.  Right now I'm just pointing out a few obvious ones on the left of the sign:
  • "Interesting Sport Physiology" （有趣的運動生理） should be "Interesting Sports Physiology".
  • "Slender Stature"（苗條身材） should be "Slender Figure".
  • "Watch in sequence"（看本圖的順序） refers to how one should use the diagram to calculate calories used, starting with their pace in the lower left quadrant and going counterclockwise.  Therefore, a better translation would be "To use this diagram".
    

This sign (titled: 有趣的運動生理) was inside a national park.

There will be a separate post to further dissect this big sign.  Stay tuned. 



Please translate responsibly.

Subjects Matter

The practice of hiring translators located in their native countries may not be the best way to get the job done.

Before anyone gets offended by that statement, please let me make it perfectly clear that I'm not proposing to use non-native speakers to translate.  Nor am I suggesting that only expats are qualified translators.  It's just that some subjects are better handled by translators who have actually lived a long time in the environment where the source language is used.

Yes, subjects do matter.  And it's a project manager's job to know who should handle what assignment.  For a project manager that works in a big company, hopefully his or her account manager knows that distinction as well.  It's always a sad situation when there's not enough budget to work with because a decision maker underestimated the tasks involved.

Let's take U.S. English > Simplified Chinese translation as an example.  For most cases, hiring a translator in China is an obvious choice: their rates are much lower than what we find in the U.S., and they're native Chinese speakers that use Simplified Chinese on a daily basis.  So why not use someone in China to translate everything?

The biggest reason, I would say, is because there are things you can't learn thousands of miles away.  Translations about computers, software, patents, medicine, science, etc. may be done by someone in China with no ill effect.  But daily topics and life subjects in general are a different level of tricky.

I've seen translations where "the weave" (for one's hair) was translated as "织物" (knitted or woven things) and "spotting for someone" (as in workout) became "从背后偷窥" (peeking at someone behind their back).  And when a speaker in a film talks about "the Michigan State" as in the state penitentiary system, it was translated as "密歇根州" (the state of Michigan).  These distinctions are trivial for a native English speaker to pick up on, but to a non-native speaker who doesn't live the language, it may as well be Greek.  For subject matters like these, if you must use someone in China for budgetary reasons, the very least you should do is hire a good reviewer located in the U.S. to QA the translation before it gets handed off to desktop publishing or voice over work.

A stitch in time saves nine.  You don't want to have to re-do the voice over or printing, do you?


 
Please translate responsibly.

About Machine Translation

To keep myself informed of the industry I work with, I subscribe to quite a few translation and localization groups on LinkedIn.  Every so often, someone posts something that resonates with group members so much that people write comments to continue the discussion, even after the original inquiry has been answered satisfactorily.

One recent example was about machine translation.  Not surprisingly, many translators denounce machine translation and refuse to work with it in any shape or form.  And with good reason: there are unscrupulous agencies out there asking linguists to post-edit machine translations for a pittance, sometimes at rates even lower than proofreading.

As I mentioned before, with low-context languages, machine translation is actually doing an adequate job for the most part.  But to make a low-context language's machine translation up to snuff takes more than proofreading skills, and should be compensated accordingly.  Any agency equating MT post-editing with mindless work has no respect for this industry or profession, and deserves to be avoided at all costs.

That being said, I'd like to offer my own perspective on machine translation.  A few years ago, I really despised it.  Look at Google Translate when it came out: what a joke that was!  I had no faith in machine translation, and said so to any agencies that asked for my opinion on the matter.

Now that I have worked with machine translation personally, I can honestly say that it does have a place in this industry.  One shouldn't depend on machine translation completely, of course.  But the convenience it provides is well appreciated by many.  Depending on the subject matter and whether it's translating low-context or high-context languages, some machine translation actually can produce usable results.

I haven't been converted yet.  But I do think linguistic professionals shouldn't turn up their noses at the mention of "machine translation" alone.  If the compensation is reasonable, take the plunge and add a feather in your cap.  In my experience, the machine really is an ally worth knowing.  



Please translate responsibly.

The Thing About Character-Based Languages

This was spotted in Taiwan and then posted on FaceBook recently:  

A perfect example of someone using Google Translate without verifying the accuracy of machine translation, it caused enough of an uproar that a local newspaper took a jab at the sign as well. 

The following statements are all true:

報 = newspaper

到處 = everywhere

報到 = to report (for duty)

處 = location

報到處 = sign-in counter

The thing about character-based languages is, meanings mostly derive from phrases formed by two or more characters.  It's a game of memorization, therefore experience plays a big part in these languages.  Without enough data, a non-native speaker (or a machine, as demonstrated by the picture above) doesn't know how to parse a phrase to get the correct meaning: is it [報到]+[處] or [報]+[到處]?

As we find out, the machine guessed wrong this time.  But the sad thing is nobody caught it before it got printed out for the whole world to see.

While we're on the subject, the newspaper report mentioned above also contains errors.  This is what they said:

依據國家教育研究院機關雙語詞彙建議規定，中文的「報到處」正式英文翻譯應用「Checking Counter」、「Registration」用「Newspaper Everywhere」是錯誤的用法。

This is how it should be written:

依據國家教育研究院機關雙語詞彙建議規定，中文的「報到處」正式英文翻譯應用「Check-in Counter」、「Registration」。用「Newspaper Everywhere」是錯誤的用法。

 
Whether "Registration" applies is debatable; it depends on what kind of 報到處 the place is.



Please translate responsibly.

Image source: Liberty Times Net.

Funny Translation of the Day

I thought I'd share this image that someone sent me today:

 

An "explosive dog" is "a dog that is explosive".   Translated into Chinese, it'd be 爆发犬 (or 爆發犬 for Traditional Chinese).

The correct English for 搜爆犬 should be "explosives dog" or "explosive detection dog."

Please translate responsibly.

Image credit: Pleated Jeans.

The Skinny on the Languages in Taiwan

Quick question: what's the official language (written and spoken) in Taiwan?

If you don't know much about this island, chances are your answer would be "Taiwanese."  

And you would have guessed wrong. 

For the sake of brevity, I won't go into details about the history or politics of Taiwan vs. China.  What I'm going to attempt here is to address some general (but totally understandable) misconceptions some people may have about Taiwan, and other trivia on the languages used there.

1. Mandarin is the official language spoken in Taiwan, written in Traditional Chinese characters.
2. The "Taiwanese" language in Taiwan refers to a variant of the Fujian dialect.  It wasn't until about 10 years ago that the government in Taiwan realized the importance of revitalizing this second-most spoken language on the island.  The written form of "Taiwanese" is still in development and therefore not widely applied like the way Cantonese is.
3. The third-most spoken language in Taiwan is the Hakka language, which shares some similarities with Cantonese.
4. There are a dozen or so indigenous languages in Taiwan spoken by the Taiwanese aborigines.  Faced with the danger of extinction, quite a few of these languages are undergoing a revival similar to that of the Taiwanese language, with varying degrees of success in their progresses.
5. This has nothing to do with the languages in Taiwan, but is worth mentioning because of the confusion so many have had: Taiwan≠Thailand.

Please translate responsibly.