Recently, ALTA received a fax from a law firm with a request to translate an attached document. Strangely, the lawyers had received this document enclosed in an envelope with no return address, and with no English indication as to what the sender wanted done. We receive translation requests daily, but this one was quite odd. The lawyers couldn’t decipher the language that was printed on the tattered page. It was a single sheet of thick, yellowing paper, about half-filled with ornate characters that looked “maybe Arabic?” — as the lawyers wondered. But it was not Arabic.

It was not anything that we at ALTA had ever seen before. The mystery document was passed around the office and we attempted to identify the source language. A few of us offered educated guesses based on the diacritical marks and some other aspects of the script, but no one could determine the language exactly. We scanned it and sent it out to a few translators who specialize in East African, Middle Eastern, and East Asian languages. A couple of them responded with the theory that we had uncovered an example of a Manichean script that was banned centuries ago!

They were wrong. It took ALTA’s resident language sleuth and linguist, Wes Cook, to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Here is the story, in the Language Sleuth’s own words:

It was a dark and stormy night and the office was in a stir about a letter from a lawyer. The letter was written in an unusual alphabet that resembled some modern and some ancient scripts. But it certainly wasn’t Manichean.

Manichean script was used by the followers of the Gnostic religion of the founding prophet “Mani” between the third and sixth centuries. As a linguist, my professional opinion was that the document was some sort of hoax, and not, in fact, an example of any rare ancient language. So, I put on my sleuth hat and got to work.

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Here at ALTA, we don’t get very many inquiries for translation services or language testing in Quechua. That’s not to say that the language of the Incas, which today is spoken by over 5 million Peruvians, Bolivians, and Ecuadorians, is not important. While Quechua may not be a top language of commerce, it is certainly an interesting, important, and resilient tongue. And since, on this blistering Bloomsday, I’m feeling a bit nostalgic for my more literary days, I thought I’d share the news that esteemed Peruvian scholar, Demetrio Tupac Yupanqui, has published the first Quechua translation of Cervante’s Don Quixote.

Yupanqui’s translation of the seminal work of Spanish literature is the most recent attempt by proponents of Quechua to increase the social and political cache of Latin America’s most widely spoken indiginous language. A great way to broaden any language’s sphere of influence is to introduce great works of literature in translation, and thereby help to involve speakers in a broader cultural conversation.

There are other indicators that Quechua may be making a comeback after centuries of decline. As reported in the NY Times article, both Microsoft and Google have recently made their services available in Quechua translations, and laws have been passed in Peru that prohibit discrimination based on language.

While I don’t speak Quechua, I’ll take Yupanqui’s word for it when he says, “If Latin is said to be the language of the angels, then Quechua is the language for expressing the subtleties of existence on Earth. That is why it is still alive.”

Atlanta - Multilingual and Multiethnic consumers no longer represent niche markets. The emerging majority of U.S. consumers is linguistically and culturally diverse, and one of the great challenges to building strong business relationships is bridging these language and culture gaps. ALTA Language Services has been helping clients to do just that for over 27 years.

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A spokesman for the president of South Korea made a public apology Monday for a misltranslated document about the safety of American beef imports.

After an unfounded mad cow disease scare in Korea, U.S. FDA cattle feed rules were translated to Korean and published, but it soon became apparent that the translation left out details from the English source text. As a result, the translated document communicated a much more stringent U.S. feed policy than actually exists.

A critic from one of Korea’s opposition political parties said, “What is more dreadful than mad cow disease is the Lee Myung-bak administration’s incompetence.”

Other critics have gone so far as to call for impeachment of the Korean president. In the official apology, the spokesman for President Myung-bak said, “We regret that we have caused unnecessary misunderstanding and concern…”

It is unclear whether the FDA feed rules were mistranslated on purpose in an effort to deceive the people of Korea, or whether it was an honest mistake. In either case, you can be sure that the Korean government will be checking and double-checking all of their translations in the future!

Read the full story here.