The Pitfalls of Using Gestures

Ultan Ó Broin's blog post Natural User Interface Gestures. Are They Global? brought to mind a conversation I had many years ago with a Turkish-German court interpreter in Austria. He told me how judges in Vienna's court system kept misinterpreting Turkish defendants' body language. The gesture in question is the Turkish "no", which is expressed by jerking the head back, then bringing it forward; a gesture that looks very similar to a German nod of approval. The interpreter said that in one instance the judge had told him that his interpretation was incorrect, since "clearly the defendant is agreeing" with a statement the defendant had just vehemently denied.

Similarly, when I first moved to Mexico, I would walk away when my co-workers were gesturing for me to follow them because their gesture for coming (palm down, moving palm towards wrist) looked to me like I was being shushed away.

Just as gestures don't always mean the same thing in different cultures, so pictures and colors don't necessarily convey the same thing everywhere. In the West red is usually associated with danger, in Chinese culture it's the lucky color, certain body parts are considered rude in some cultures, ...

I understand how companies attempt to save money on instructions for their products by making them image-only. That way, the product -- such as the assembly-required chair I just bought for my home office -- can be sold anywhere in the world with the exact same package contents, including the instructions. All you need to do is slap a different label on the outside of the box and, presto, there is your Spanish, or Hindi, or Swedish, item. Besides, you don't need to have all these instructions translated into 20, or 50, or 100, different languages.

However, since images may have different meanings in other cultures, this approach may well backfire. I wonder how a pet-care company's all-image instructions would fare in an Arab country where dogs are considered unclean. Would the cute dalmatian licking the properly assembled pet-food station elicit the "oohs" it might in the West, or would it cause buyers in Cairo to return the product?

The moral of the story is, if a company decides to go the all-image route for their instructions (as Ikea does), it can't cut localization out altogether. Rather, localization professionals need to be involved in the design process for these instructions, so that potential pitfalls can be caught early on. No words doesn't mean no translation/localization required.

Always On, Even on Vacation

On the subway to the airport for this vacation, I answered a query from a current client regarding a project due a week after my return. By the time my family and I arrived at the airport, I have negotiated the project and received the final files for it. I wrote this post on the plane to New Orleans. While waiting at the gate, I used my husband’s Smartphone to check that I had not only written, but also turned on, my out-of-office outgoing e-mail message.

Modern technology makes such seamless work out of the office possible. A recent article in the New York Times decried the fact that family members are so engrossed in their constantly-on devices and services that they do not talk to each other anymore. That was evident when we were waiting at the gate: my son was listening to music on his iPod, my husband was answering an e-mail on his Smartphone and I was reading posts from e-mail lists to which I subscribe on my Blackberry. A few years back, when we had one plain cell phone for the entire family, we sat at the gate each reading a different book – less technology, but not more communication.

Because the technology exists, many clients also expect us to be constantly available. As self-employed freelancers, we could choose to leave our cell phones and laptops at home, but we may well lose clients if we are unavailable even for 2 weeks – let alone the 4 weeks of vacation common in Europe. On the other hand, without paid vacations, I do enjoy knowing that there is paid work waiting for me when I get back. As long as I can answer e-mails at my leisure, rather than within an hour or two of receipt, I don’t mind much negotiating projects with existing clients during vacation.

I do draw the line, however, at actually translating during that time or acquiring new clients. It takes time to perform due diligence research on new clients, and working on projects would clearly subvert the vacation’s purpose of relaxing with my family and learning about a new city. I will be on vacation until August 18, and may not post anything until after my return to the office. Then again, if I find any interesting tidbits about French (or Spanish) in New Orleans, I may post.

Laissez les bon temps roule (let the good times roll), as they say in New Orleans …

GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out)

As with software, if the data fed into the computer program (read source text) is bad, the program's results (read translation) will also be bad. I thought of this when reading ultan's recent post "Information Quality, MT and UX" on Multilingual Computing's Blogos blog. ultan notes that quality information not only makes machine translation easier, but simply is better information that is more easily understood by both humans and machines.

So what is quality information? I think quality information consistent and concise, but well-written text with an audience-appropriate level of technical terminology. In this context, well-written refers to grammatically correct, clear structures free of spelling and punctuation errors. Clearly the amount and complexity of subject-specific terminology used depends on the text's end users. Installation instructions for consumers will need to be practically jargon-free (and contain explanations of any unavoidable terms), while specifications for computer programmers can contain quite a few acronyms and still be easily understood.

While this last statement is generally true, I have had to deal with source text that was replete with abbreviations specific to a particular company, without having access to an internal list of these acronyms (if such a list even existed). Since the assignment was the usual rush job via a translation agency in another time zone, there was no way to ask for and receive such a list in a timely manner. I did my best guessing the meaning of many of the abbreviations from context and annotated the rest with translator's notes.

I was initially surprised at how frequently source text -- even fairly lengthy whitepapers and similar types of text -- appears not to have been proofread, let alone copy-edited. After reading a couple of books on technical and business matters recently, I am no longer surprised. Even books being printed and sold in bookstores don't seem to undergo much of a quality-assurance process any more. A case in point is Tamar Weinberg's "The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web", which I am in the process of reviewing for an upcoming issue of the Society for Technical Communication's magazine Intercom, which contains quite a few instances where sentences seem to have been hurriedly revised and fragments of the sentence's previous incarnation left behind or too much taken out. So if books aren't proofread any more, what can we expect from internal industry papers or instructions?

However, such poorly written source text not only hampers the flow of reading, it often also adds ambiguity to the text. After all, if there are two conjunctions when only one should be present, which of the two did the author intend to use? And if I pick the wrong one, the translation could be completely misleading. But never having seen the machine for which I am translating the instructions, how would I know whether the correct conjunction here was "and" or "or"?

Yes, we do need quality assurance for translations. But we also need quality assurance for the source text -- not only for the translator's sake, but also for the reader's sake. As programmers are fond of saying: Garbage In, Garbage Out -- GIGO.

Backing Up Work

The recent heat wave (and resulting meltdown of my sister's computer) had me thinking about backup procedures. Introductions to becoming a translator do state the need to back up at least work in progress and recent projects, but they generally don't provide specifics. There does not appear to be a "best practices" standard stating how frequently (hourly, daily, weekly, ...) and where (on the same computer, an external hard drive on site, off-site media, online storage) work should be backed up. Similarly, a discussion of the merits vs. dangers of secure online storage seems largely absent from the larger translation community.

Some translators' blogs do talk about backup tools they use. For example, Céline Graciet extols the virtues of her online backup to dropbox in her naked Translations blog. She synchronizes that backup with multiple devices, updating them automatically with the latest version of her work. That is certainly one way to go, but not the only -- or even the best -- one. There were a number of comments to Ms. Graciet's post, including a reference to a post in another blog, the Blogging Translator by Philippa Hammond. Ms. Hammond uses multiple online backup solutions. Both blogs briefly state that online backups are sufficiently secure, but don't actually discuss the pros and cons of online storage.

I tend to be fairly obsessive about backing up data (daily to secure online storage, completed projects to separate CDs for each client, weekly entire hard drive to external hard drive, printouts of all client orders). After just moving my office from a converted attic to a (cooler) 2nd floor room and lugging all those file folders with printouts, I wonder whether that's not too much safekeeping. On the other hand, I find it much faster and easier to thumb through a folder of printouts than to open a number of different e-mails in order to find the one I'm looking for.

For quite some time I was concerned about the security of online storage, but I finally took the plunge a few months ago and began regularly backing up work to a secure online site (using Norton 360, which is already my Antivirus solution). In the end, I figured that this wasn't any less secure than sending documents via standard e-mail. I still wouldn't upload my own financial data to such a site, however (although I do use my bank's online payment and account access system).

What are your thoughts on online backup solutions? What other backup solutions do you use?

Training Volunteer Interpreters in Small Immigrant Communities

Today's New York Times reports on a lawsuit challenging New York city agencies' compliance with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's order to provide translation and interpreting services to non-English speakers seeking city services. In "Language Help for New York Immigrants Using City Services Falls Short of Goals", Fernanda Santos quotes, among others, a woman from the Dominican Republic who said that workers at an upper Manhattan food stamp office ask volunteers in the waiting room to serve as Spanish-language interpreters.

For those of you outside New York, upper Manhattan is home to a rather large Spanish-speaking community. As a result, the chances that someone in the waiting room of this agency speaks both English and Spanish are rather good. However, the chances that this person is familiar with the specialized social services vocabulary in both languages and also possesses the other skills required for consecutive interpreting are quite low. Contrary to some people's beliefs, growing up with two languages provides a good foundation for becoming an interpreter and/or translator, but is not enough in and of itself.

If in a city where 24.5% of respondents in the 2000 census speak Spanish at home, providing Spanish-language services at an office that serves a large Latino neighborhood is such a problem, what does that mean for smaller immigrant communities? While the city -- and other large institutions dealing with the public on a regular basis -- needs to do better in providing translation and interpretation services for the major immigrant languages, it cannot be expected to do so for every language that might come up.

Which leads to the next question: how to ensure access to services for people from less-common linguistic backgrounds. Professional interpreters for these languages are clearly the preferred solution. If not enough (or no) such professionals exists for a particular language, using telephone interpreting services provided by an interpeter located elsewhere may be an option in some cases. But sometimes you need someone on site.

Professional translators' organizations, such as the American Translators Association, were organized to protect the interests of professional translators and interpreters. However, they are also in the best position to offer training in basic interpretation skills to members of underserved linguistic communities. Since there are not enough professional interpreters for these languages, such training will not take potential work away from existing interpreters. Rather, it will supplement existing interpretation services to ensure that non-English-speaking immigrants accessing vital services do not have to rely on the sometimes haphazard interpreting skills of children and other untrained volunteers.

The training I envison would focus on basic consecutive interpreting skills (note taking, breaking text into chunks, listening for key words, etc.), supplemented by medical and social services terminology in English, with English explanations of each term. It seems to me that it should be possible to get a philantropic organization to fund such an undertaking, so that the cost of the training could remain low, or the training could even be offered for free. And, who knows, some of the people so trained may decide to pursue this career and eventually become professional interpreters -- and ATA members.

Machine Translation Instead of Global English?

I just read an interesting article in the July 2010 issue of Wired magazine. In "No Language Barrier", Clive Thompson talks about how automated machine translation could make the emergence of a lingua franca obsolete since people can interact with each other using their own dominant language, with the machine providing the linguistic, as well as technical, interface. Such an interface could halt the spread of English as the de-facto lingua franca across the world, he argues.

While this sounds like good news to those of us who are concerned about the increasing influx of English into the world's languages and consequently increasing homogenization of cultures, it may not be so. Language and culture are certainly intertwined, but an American movie in, say, Samoan, is still an American movie with American cultural references, values and view of the world. Being able to communicate in one's own language is certainly a step forward in letting people across the globe communicate with each other, whether they know English or not. (Although whether that will entice my non-English-speaking mother to finally learn how to use a computer is another question ...). Technical solutions, such as automatic machine translation, cannot curb the march of U.S. culture across the globe. That can only be achieved by political and economic means.

Mr. Thompson also cautions that "Certainly any activity requiring serious precision -- legal proceedings, business discussions, diplomatic negotiations -- will still need expert human translators." He is certainly right in this assessment, although judging from some of the translations I have encountered and/or been asked to "fix", not all potential translation clients seem to think so. The challenge for us translators now is to educate clients why machine translation may be fine for a chat on Facebook, but isn't sufficient for a contract to build a new factory in Romania (even if face-to-face negotiations for that factory were conducted in less-than-stellar English).

International Technical Translation Conference

Last week was rather busy, what with all the work accumlating while I was in Portugal. Now that I'm (sort of) caught up, here is my take on the Tradulinguas Technical Translation Conference in Lisbon:

On Friday, I attended the following presentations:

• Mathilde Fontanet's session on translating English technical texts


• Suzanne Goujan's lecture on renewable energies terminology


• DeAnn Cougler's presentation on terminology management


• Jerzy Czopik's "Tagology for Dummies"


• David Hardisty's talk on technical translations into English as "language B"

Mathilde Fontanet works for the translation department of CERN, the Swiss particle collider. I hadn't even known that CERN had such a department, but given the international collaboration this project requires, it makes sense to have a team of in-house translators. Ms. Fontanet spoke about some of the difficulties she and her colleagues encounter in their work. For one, English technical texts are often written by experts whose dominant language is not English. Having just finished a large software translation project myself, I can attest that this problem isn't limited to English, but can happen with German originals, as well. In addition, Ms. Fontanet said, U.S. technical texts frequently don't conform to European Union requirements in terms of the information that must be included (e.g., safety and environmental statements, ...). Translators aren't only transferring meaning from one language to another, they are also the original text's editors/proofreaders. Such functions distinguish human translators from machines, but that only becomes apparent if the human points potential problems in the source out to the client (and/or fixes them, if they're obvious errors).

Suzanne Goujan offered a number of (English) definitions for various terms used in the renewable energies sector. It had likely taken quite some time and effort to amass this information, but the lecture added little beyond what could be read in a book or handout. I had hoped for more discussion and examples in an in-person session.

DeAnn Cougler offered some helpful suggestions on managing terminology as a freelancer, as well in-house. She recommended scheduling a daily time slot for terminology work so that one's own database remained well maintained, making work easier and faster in the future. I should really do that, since I tend to stop working on terms once I complete a project. Over time, this leads to a jumble of terminology files that could use an organizational overhaul. Ms. Cougler also suggested tracking time spent on terminology research and offering such work as a separate service to clients, invoiced either by the hour or by the term. While that sounds like a good idea, I am not sure how many clients would be willing to pay for it. As far as they are concerned, such (sometimes time-consuming) work is part of what they pay for -- even if that pay is relatively low.

I had heard Jerzy Czopik speak at the ProZ conference in Vienna. This time, he talked about the tags inserted by many CAT tools into the text. While the talk was informative, much was familiar to me from my work coding HTML and XML/XSL. However, he recommended a tool, CodeZapper, that removes unnecessary formatting in MS Word. I'll have to try that one out (sounds like there is another follow-up post to be written...).

David Hardisty teaches technical translation into English at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where most students' dominant language is Portuguese. Many of his students will end up translating into their non-dominant language. Mr. Hardisty highly recommended Brian Mossop's book "Revising and Editing for Translators", which I'll have to check out. It does sound like a useful resource. He also thought that it would be helpful if technical translators took a class in technical writing. Having been a technical writer myself before becoming a translator, I very much agree.

The conference was held at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. During lunch, another translator and I got lost and ended up in the student cafeteria. Fortunately, my companion spoke Portuguese, and we had quite an interesting lunch amid a crowd at least 20 years younger than either of us. Made me feel a little like I was back during my own student days ...