The translation profession would not be what it is today were it not for people like Alicia Gordon.

The Alicia Gordon Award for Word Artistry in Translation has been established in memory of the translator, whose work ranged from technical to literary translation, with a specialty niche in the music and film business. As a musician, world traveler, talent agent, Mac enthusiast, and translation company owner, Alicia Gordon was known for her creative approach to life.

The American Translators Association is actively seeking submissions for the 2009 award. It is open to ATA members in good standing. Passages may be submitted by the translators themselves or by others on their behalf. The translation that, in the opinion of the judges, demonstrates the highest level of artistry in translation will receive the award.

To enter, send a sample of 750 words or less (From French or Spanish into English, or from English into French or Spanish) by the deadline of June 1, 2009. The winner will be announced during ATA’s 50th Annual Conference in New York City on October 28–31, 2009. Visit the American Foundation for Translation and Interpretation Website for more information.

Alicia Gordon’s presence on the first non-university computer translation forum to be accessible anywhere in the world – (CompuServe’s FLEFO) and her regular contributions to the Wordfast user group, were instrumental in establishing and maintaining bonds between translators everywhere, thus pioneering international cooperation between translation industry colleagues.

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Topanga, California Sunrise photo courtesy of Ben Ellett
Some text adapted from In Memoriam | Alicia Gordon | legacy.com.

                          

The Keirin is presented by No Brakes & Kazane. If you’ve never witnessed track racing here in Atlanta, this is your chance!

The Keirin is an Olympic event where riders are paced up to maximum speed behind a motorcycle until the final lap and a half when they tear up the track to the finish.

A field full of local and imported talent, including Masters World champion Steve “Hitman” Hill, Lanell “The Rock” Rockmore and his Pennsylvania crew, Collegiate National Sprint Champion, David “Goliath” Espinoza, Team Type 1’s “Blazin’” Joe Eldridge and more will battle it out over 4 heats of Keirins to see who the top 6 riders will be to compete in the A-Final and take all the cash and bragging rights as Dick Lane Velodrome’s Keirin Champion. Arrive early to catch the Little League kids race and Men’s and Women’s categorized races.

Afternoon program kicks off at 3pm with the main events beginning at 6pm.
Admission: $5 per person or $10 for the whole family.
Food & Drink: Concessions include the best Hot Dogs in Atlanta!!!

Visit www.dicklanevelodrome.com for more info.

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Photo Courtesy: Chris Kelly

                          

In the desert of Mahler Gobi there lives a herd of Grass Mud Horse. Their diet consists of grass, and they’re able to adapt to harsh conditions as there is little water available in Mahler Gobi. The peaceful life of the grass mud horse is threatened by the encroaching migration of river crabs. A battle ensues and the crabs are defeated.

This seemingly innocuous story, and more specifically the grass mud horse itself, has become a global phenomenon. It’s thriving popularity is the latest expression of the Chinese Government’s online censorship policy . The catch is that the names of the animals and their indigenous region are homonyms for vulgar Chinese phrases that otherwise would have ensured any affiliated website the same fate as the 3,000 websites and 270 blogs shut down by censors in China as of last month.

In a recently published Language Log post about the grass mud horse, Mark Liberman, of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, sheds light upon this fabled creature’s linguistic roots and social implications. The article, and it’s many comments, will quickly bring one up to speed on this revolutionary beast’s struggle.

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Photos Courtesy: chinakorea55 & Language Log

                          

Donna Parrish over at Blogos, just informed us that United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has released the most recent “Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger“. Now in its third edition, the Atlas’ release was especially poignant considering that UNESCO had proclaimed 2008 to be the International Year of Languages and its release intentionally coincided with the latest issue of the UNESCO Courier, in which contributor Lucía Iglesias Kuntz wrote an editorial entitled, Endangered Languages, Endangered Thought.

Back in December we featured a video of linguist, David Harrison, discussing the devastation to culture that occurs when a living language disappears. Apparently, Kuntz shares this sentiment:

When languages die, not only words disappear, but ways of seeing and describing reality; we lose valuable knowledge and worlds of thought.

The mere prospect of a language going extinct is harrowing. As Kuntz’s quote illustrates, the implications of such a tragedy are truly far reaching. His editorial details the scope and reach of the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. The Atlas was edited by Australian linguist Christopher Moseley. Moseley also authored the Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages. This encyclopedia catalogs and describes a vast majority of the world’s six thousand or more distinct tongues, which are in danger of dying out within the next few decades.

Kuntz continues to cite UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura in regard to the death of a language,

[It] leads to the disappearance of many forms of intangible cultural heritage, especially the invaluable heritage of traditions and oral expressions of the community that spoke it – from poems and legends to proverbs and jokes. The loss of languages is also detrimental to humanity’s grasp of biodiversity, as they transmit much knowledge about the nature and the universe.

If such statements are not troubling enough, consider that the last three genrations have witnessed the extinction of more than 200 of the aforementioned estimated 6,000 existing languages in the world. There are, according to Moseley, 538 critically endangered languages, 502 severely endangered, 632 definitely endangered and 607 unsafe.

Unlike the formerly ubiquitous and equally as puzzling Homeland Security Advisor System of multiple hues of fear and fright ranging from green to red, UNESCO’s methodology for accessing language vitality and endangerment actually quantitatively appraises a threat in a tangible manner. To learn more read the concept paper entitled “Language Vitality and Endangerment”.

Endangered Languages, Endangered Thought is not an alarmist tract; there is some good news. For instance, Kuntz references Papua New Guinea, which has the greatest linguistic diversity on the planet with more than 800 languages and only 88 endangered languages. Furthermore certain endangered languages are currently experiencing an active revitalization. Languages like Cornish (Cornwall) and Sîshëë (New Caledonia) now face the prospect of becoming living languages once again. Some languages like Central Aymara and Quechua in Peru, Maori in New Zealand, Guarani in Paraguay are benefiting from linguistic sustainability conducive legislation and policies.

To learn more about Moseley’s stance on the crucial importance of preserving languages read this interview.

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Image Courtesy of: Obi-Akpere

                          

Our friends over at Blogos just published a blog post on the film “The Linguists“.

The documentary, made possible by major funding by The National Science Foundation (NSF), chronicles two ethnographers’ endeavor to record endangered languages around the world. It has steadily garnished recognition since premiering early in 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

The film dramatizes the kind of work involved in reaching indigenous communities and documenting their languages. It premieres Feb. 21 at UNESCO headquarters in Paris in conjunction with “International Mother Language Day,” an annual observance intended to promote multilingualism worldwide.

Keep reading to check out the trailer!

It will be broadcast at 10 p.m. EST this Thursday, Feb. 26, on PBS stations. (Check your local listings.)

Over the past year the film has played at international documentary film festivals and been featured in the Filmmakers@Google series on You Tube.

For more information on “The Linguists”, visit the film’s website.

                          

A recent TechCrunch article penned by Leena Rao posed the common question: How does one say Vimeo in French?

The translation left Rao’s readers grinning, but it was unfortunately much to Vimeo’s chagrin: Google Translate thinks ‘Vimeo’ is pronounced ‘youtube’.

When prompted to translate the English sentence ‘videos on Vimeo’ into French, Google produced: ‘des videos sur YouTube’. According to Rao, only when Vimeo is submitted as a singular word, does Google correctly keep it as Vimeo in French translation. However, when it is incorporated into a sentence, Google chooses to change Vimeo into YouTube.

According to Nick from Many Body Theory, Google arrived at this using Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). In a comment on the TechCrunch article, Nick suggested that SMT is more complicated than just casting it off of Bayesian (as another commenter had previously).

For Google, SMT is a lens through which it determines if certain words can be used interchangeably. Nick broke it down as follows:

In the most basic terms, it notices that many times when someone writes a sentence about YouTube, the same type of words/phrases around it are also common for Vimeo. It is a very cleaver method of using user generated content to come up with translation of texts that normally dictionaries would not be able to provide.

Well, according to bloggers at Search Engine Roundtable, this nearly landed Google with accusations of libel and slander from Andrea Allen, Vimeo’s Community Assistant, in their Google Groups forums.

Google Translate has since ceased translating Vimeo into YouTube.

ALTA’s Angle:

Google Translate poses a particular threat of mistranslation that other arguably less advanced free online translation services do not.

The potential for malicious manipulations of the “suggest a better translation” function could, ostensibly, grant a user the power to influence the translation of any word with a False Friend indeed .

Irrefutably, Google Translate is a convenient tool. But it is by no means a dependable mechanism for translating brands across languages and cultures. In fact, there is no such mechanism. Such endeavors require translation and localization services performed by experienced human translators.

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Images courtesy: Jason Webber & Régis Gaidot

                          

txteagle is an ambitious initiative that aims to empower and employ the people of least developed nations via their cell phones. By leveraging a vastly underused work force in some of the poorest parts of the world, its founder, Nathan Eagle, hopes to change the world for the better.

Despite the great innovations that computers engender in societies around the word, the perception and dexterity of a human being remains unmatched in tasks such as transcribing and translating text from another language.

The business of utilizing this human expertise to address problems where automated solutions come up short has become a mainstream phenomena called crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. Google is allowing its users to refine search results, Amazon uses a system called Mechanical Turk to off-load all manner of simple tasks to humans around the world and even the Catholic youth organization of Cologne, one of Germany’s largest dioceses, is on board!

According to Nathan Eagle,

“We’re trying to . . . tap into a group of people to complete these tasks who haven’t been tapped before and we’re using mobile phones, which have a high penetration rate. More people are mobile-phone subscribers in developing countries than in the developing world, so we can get a user base of billions of people.”

Cell phone manufacturers and users alike would love to have phones in every African’s mother tongue, but translating words like ‘address book’ into every language poses a particular obstacle.

Nokia has recognized this challenge and is playing a fundamental role for txteagle by funding Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles (EPROM). Nokia is interested in software localization. Translating its software for specific regions of the world, with specific regions of countries can be facilitated and performed by txteagle users. According to Eagle,

There are 60 different languages spoken in Kenya, and txteagle users can earn money by acting as resources to various localization projects. [...] For example, people receive a survey or questionnaire, and translate the words into their own languages. We keep issuing the same task to different people until we get enough of the same translated word responses to ensure a minimum 95 percent confidence interval that we have the correct translation of the word.

Users would be paid via a service called mPesa, which enables currency to be sent and received via cellular phones. The individual would then use their phones to claim the money at mPesa agents and post offices.

In a recent article about txteagle, written by Kate Greene in MIT’s Technology Review, Greene cites Sharon Chiarella’s, the vice president of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project, comments on bringing crowd sourcing to developing nations and its limitations. For instance, the most widely available cell phones are generally only able to send and receive text and voice messages. More complex tasks, such as tagging images, are not always possible.

“The cell-phone screen size somewhat limits the tasks that can be viable via the phone, But I think that as cell phones continue to evolve, some of those issues will go away.”

Well, it seems, they recently have. Granted, it’s no Nokia but Samsung recently unveiled a solar powered phone. The Blue Earth phone will be made from the plastic of recycled water bottles and contains no Brominated Flame Retardants, Beryllium or Phthalate. Could such technology be the missing link for the global implementation of txteagle and other such crowdsourcing concepts?

Perhaps, but Eagle plans to maintain the goal to start small (though, Africa is hardly small!) and see if the model works well enough to expand. He hopes to receive grant money that will allow txteagle to roll out the service in Rwanda, Kenya, Bolivia, and the Dominican Republic within the next year.

Translation is not txteagle’s only mobile task possibility. Transcription, Citizen Journalism, Search Relevancy, Blog / News Translation & Sentiment and Surveys are just the start. To learn more go to the txteagle website here and watch the video below.

                          

While promoting his latest film, Valkyrie, Tom Cruise recently startled both reporters and fans in Rio de Janeiro with his disoriented comprehension of Brazil’s language and culture.

According to Brazilian gossip website Glamurama, Mr. Cruise reportedly addressed the press conference with the Spanish words “hola” and “gracias”. the correct words in Portuguese would have been olá and obrigado.

In addition to his language fail, he continued to showcase his Latin culture expertise. Tom mentioned that the tango was one of the reasons he fell in love with Brazil. The tango originated in Argentina.

Tom Cruise Photo Courtesy: Paulo Fernando

                          

In her 1996 book, Lexical Changes in Present-day English, Roswitha Fischer details how Bell Laboratories first coined the term acronym in 1943, defining them as, “words made up of initial letters or syllables of other words.”

The creation of acronyms by the U.S. government began during WWI, and increased during the second World War to denote concepts and organizations as concisely as possible, and also to obfuscate their meanings for foreign enemies. Later, the use of acronyms spread to the technical and medical fields, and eventually into corporate jargon throughout the world.

It could be argued, as the editors of the Internet Acronym Server do, that certain restricted forms of the acronym have been in use for thousands of years.

Take, for example, SPQR (pictured above). SPQR is an acronym for the Latin phrase Senatus Populusque Romanus, or, The Senate and the People of Rome, which was the official signature of the ancient Roman Republic, and appeared on coins, buildings, and monuments that date back to 500 BCE. If only acronyms today were so rare as to be carved in stone; each letter glimmering with a profound, lucid and logical lemma. But then we wouldn’t have such a tasty modern dilemma: the rampant overuse of acronyms, with often hilarious and unintended results.

Back in November, Time Magazine’s economics blogger The Curious Capitalist ran the following headline:

TARP goes TALF as FRBNY lends against AAA ABS

Really?

Are you, too, scratching your head saying WTF?

To be fair, the Curious Capitalist was being tongue in cheek. He was referring, of course, to The Troubled Asset Relief Program (a TARP that, for many Americans, seemed to be made of wool and pulled over our eyes). Perhaps he was right that a more appropriate acronym would have been BARF, as in Bank Assistance Relief Fund.

So, how can we keep acronyms from inciting similarly nauseating reactions? ALTA has the answer! This post’s intention is to advise beginning initialers to better admonish the spurious and ill concieved. In other words, It is A BIT BASIC. Let’s get started by exploring some unfortunate military SNAFU’s via Wired’s Most Awesomely Bad Military Acronyms:

• Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office (DISCO)
• Airframe Structure Support Boeing Advisory Group (ASSBAG) suggested by Boeing’s AB
• Eliminate Needless and Excess Material in Accountability (ENEMA), suggested by Northrop Grumman’s JC
• Compression Osmosis Water Purification Installation (COWPI)
• Man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS)

This phenomenon trickles down to the state level. Acronym Finder Blog reports that the The National Association of Local Government Auditors (NALGA), based in Lexington, Kentucky, had to change its name to Association of Local Government Auditors (ALGA). Nalga, as ALGA soon realized, means “butt cheeks” or “rump” in Spanish. This made the organization the butt of many jokes.

It’s certainly not just just the U.S. government issuing abbreviated ambiguity. Take, for instance, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure (RATS).

The disregard for potential misunderstanding is often dizzying. The Seattle Post Intelligencer reported on the South Lake Union Trolley and its unfortunate acronym, SLUT. Not to mention, the New York State Unified Court System, NYSUCS. Bummer.

Americans Against Awful Acronym Abuse – AAAAA is currently rallying support and raising awareness across the country on the issue of rampant acronyms. Professional writer, Zach Everson is a vocal opponent of acronyms, referring to them as, “Annoying, Convoluted, Random, Oblique Names You Make.” According to Everson, the first rule for creating new acronyms should always be, “Don’t use acronyms.”

We respectfully disagree. There is a distinct science of acronym development that renders their use fairly innocuous. Expertly implementing acronyms into one’s speech and writing is a journey, not a destination. The Everyday Scientist Blog offers beginners a roadmap for success. Here is a summary of the blog’s Guidelines for Introducing a New Acronym in a Paper (GINAP):

1. First off, for new compounds, basically anything goes as long as the acronym is simpler than the IUPAC name.

2. Ask yourself, Does this method/system/etc. need a new acronym? Does it deserve one?

3. Don’t try to be too cute

4. Make the acronym descriptive and meaningful

5. Make the acronym unambiguous

6. Be consistent

There you have it, the simple Do’s and Don’ts of acronym building.

Nothing should interfere with your new A BIT BASIC approach. Now, spread your wings and SOAR!

We know what you are thinking:
what does ALTA stand for?
Well, it’s actually…

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— Photo Credit in order:

Claudia Perilli, randomcamel, Don Morley, I Elmira, Hornbuckle

For a TLC of TLAs go here.