With the Olympics right around the corner, it’s hard not to think of the role language plays in the international event. With over eighty countries and 5,500 athletes and officials, the Olympic Games draws together an incredibly diverse group of people — all in the name of friendship and sports — and although English and French are the official languages of the Games, hundreds of other languages and dialects will pop up everywhere from the hockey arena to the luge. The task of addressing all of these languages at the drop of a hat is certainly one goal of the organizers, but how exactly do they do it and how has Vancouver prepared for the millions of people descending on its city this week?

During the Summer Olympics in Beijing, language played an important, and sometimes confusing role. According to a Telegraph article from 2008 , taxi drivers and Olympic officials completed an intensive English training course, but despite the country’s best efforts, much of the accented English was barely decipherable. In response to the language barrier, one company developed a new translation platform called Jajah Babel, which was essentially a free telephone service that translated English into Mandarin and vice versa. Marketed at visitors, the IBM-based platform helped Olympic tourists navigate simple questions and answers at the touch of a phone.

Some translation issues, however, cannot be navigated by a simple iPhone-type application. How do coaches and athletes and officials communicate during events? Almost all communication between officials and athletes or coaches occurs in French or English (or in the home country’s tongue, which, this time, is English and French, coincidently), but for visitor navigation and other Olympics-related language barriers, the home country, in this case Canada, supplies the translators.

According to Werner Patels, the blogger behind Translation-Language-Culture-Communication , Canada may not be prepared for the onslaught of Olympic crowds. In April of 2009, The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, reported that Graham Fraser, the Commissioner of Official Languages, i.e. the official promoter and supporter of a French-English bilingual Canada, appeared before the House of Commons’ official languages committee and stated that Olympic organizers were falling behind in their efforts to make the Olympics fully bilingual. Apparently the federal government was holding back on assistance to the Olympic organizers — an ironic stance given that the government aims to promote bilingualism.

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2009 proved to be a successful year for ALTA despite the economic conditions. In the Translation Services division, we managed thousands of projects that ranged widely in language combinations, scale, and complexity. As we noted in last year’s post, 10 Most Requested Languages for Translation in 2008, geopolitical events and economic trends are often reflected in interesting ways by our clients’ requests. This year, we’ve expanded the report to include the top 20 target languages, which we thought may be of interest to some of our Beyond Words readers:

Top 20 Target Languages (2009)

When news of J.D. Salinger’s death was reported late Wednesday afternoon, I was surprised, but then not. Despite being one of the most recognized American authors of the twentieth century, Salinger was also one of the most reclusive. After being thrown into the limelight in 1951 with Catcher in the Rye, Salinger moved to a 90 acre home in Cornish, New Hampshire and, after an unwelcomed newspaper article was published about him by a group of high school students he had befriended, he erected a 6 ½ foot tall fence around the perimeter in order to keep people out.

Even though few of us knew anything about his failing health or major accidents, Salinger was 91 years old, and 91 is a ripe old age.

Salinger’s most recognized work, Catcher in the Rye, faced issues in translation that still haven’t been resolved today, some fifty-nine years later. According to Bernd Wahlbrinck, an English teacher and Salinger enthusiast living in Germany, the novel was harder to translate into certain languages than others.

He writes specifically of Heinrich Boell’s German translation originally written in the 1950s. Part of the inaccuracies of the translation were possibly due to a lack of proper slang or the cultural taboo around slang—‘that David Copperfield kind of crap’ is translated into ‘David Copperfield Zeug’, where ‘Zeug’ more accurately refers to ‘stuff’ and should have been ‘Scheiss’, but also the:

…weird tendency to translate the past tense into German Praeteritum, which is, however, usually stupid because in colloquial language we just don’t use it most of the time. Thus, in the very first sentence of the novel, it says ‘… was meine Eltern taten…’. Actually, nobody says that, certainly not a kid of 17; we would say something like ‘was meine Eltern (so) gemacht haben’.

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The boundaries between formal and informal language are often blurry. Misunderstandings can arise when a language student or interpreter does not choose correctly when speaking a language that distinguishes between formal and informal personal pronouns. One runs a risk of being considered impolite on the one hand, or snobbish on the other.

The formal singular pronoun is used to express respect to an addressee, whether it is a superior, an older person, a business partner, or a new acquaintance. The informal pronoun, conversely, establishes a sense of closeness and trust among friends and relatives. There is a very special—even intimate—moment when the formal pronoun suddenly changes to its familiar form in the middle of the conversation; or there is a reverse effect of chilling distancing when the formal pronoun is uttered in place of the familiar. Interestingly, most European languages preserve the distinct forms of polite and familiar personal pronouns. In Modern English, however, the practice became largely obsolete.

A similar form of both formal and informal pronouns exists in almost every Indo-European language. Here are a few examples:

In linguistics, the practice of distinguishing personal pronouns on the basis of familiarity and social courtesy is referred to as a T-V distinction, from the first letters of Latin pronouns tu and vos. Common to most of the Indo-European languages, the formal singular pronoun derives from its plural form. Addressing someone in plural has been a universal symbol of inexorable power and authority. According to some sources, the first record of addressing a superior in plural dates back to the Roman Empire during the 4th century. Later, plural pronouns began to be commonly applied to the European aristocracy—so-called “majestic plural.”

In Old English, second-person pronouns thou and you derived from the plural ye. Originally, thou was simply a singular counterpart to ye. The Norman Conquest of 1066 AD marked the age of the French language influence on English. Thou—just like its French version tu—was used to express familiarity, affection, or even condescendence, while the plural ye was reserved for a superior during a formal address. Starting in the Middle English period (mid 15th century), ye gradually generalized to you, which became a standard in both plural and singular forms with no distinct connotation of familiarity or social distance. Thou, which was losing its prominence in the early 17th century, is still preserved in some regions of England and Scotland; it is also commonly used in religious context.

This can pose a challenge to translators and interpreters. They must be aware of the cultural and social circumstances that require a more formal tone to avoid an insulting statement and, at the same time, to avoid archaic and awkward wording. It is even more difficult to reflect the subtle nuances and shades of meaning that accompany the two forms of pronouns. One way to ameliorate the problem is to reserve to the so-called compensating translation. Using a first name or a nickname instead of honorifics or using some informal phrasing, one can “compensate” for the lost meaning or implication.

Last summer while I was researching various journals on translation testing methods, I constantly ran across articles mentioning the difficulty surrounding Cherokee language testing, specifically in the Bilingual Education Program. Although I don’t have the articles anymore, the gist was that under several testing programs it was nearly impossible to create an equal English language literacy and Cherokee language literacy test. In testing young elementary school children of both Cherokee and non-Cherokee background, the program administrators found that bilingual children achieved noticeably lower scores on the English language tests, and that these scores were not due to a limited exposure to English but due to the cultural-linguistic nature of the Cherokee language.

The problem with technical academic journals is that the amount of background information or history is limited. While the studies made sense and were useful regarding the information I needed for my own project, I was left wondering what exactly were the differences between Cherokee and English, and why exactly the two languages could not be accurately tested in a bilingual situation. I’d nearly forgotten about the issue until recently when I picked up a copy of Christopher Camuto’s book, Another Country.

I read Camuto’s three published books (the three I could easily access, he recently published a fourth book, Time and Tide in Acadia in 2009) in backwards chronology, starting with his most recent, Hunting from Home, then his second book, A Fly Fisherman’s Blueridge. As those titles suggest, Camuto’s writing is interested in the Appalachian landscape, in hunting and fishing and the environment of the Appalachian mountains. Camuto is also interested in language and the way language works in relation to the environment. In his first book, Camuto explores the relation of the Cherokee people to Appalachia and spends a great deal of time discussing the Cherokee language.

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A recent study conducted by researchers at The University of Granada’s School of Translation and Interpretation attempts to analyze and evaluate the results of machine translations done with popular online tools such as Google Translator, Promt, and WorldLingo. The study was published in this month’s issue of Translation Journal, and it raised interesting questions for me about the possible uses for online machine translation.

Looking at the findings, it should come as no surprise that all of the machine translation tools produced poor results in terms of the number of errors, or that after the translations passed through a round of human editing, the number of errors were drastically reduced. What is interesting, though, is that certain online tools performed better than others, and specific language combinations produced varying results. The graph below shows results from German into Spanish (the researchers used EvalTrans Software). The best translation machine is the one showing the lowest word error percentage (WER). Check out the study for more charts and an explanation of the sentence error rate (SER).

Doctors Lola García-Santiago and María-Dolores Olvera-Lobo do a thorough job of laying out the methodology that they followed, and of acknowledging the difficulties inherent to such studies. They write that,

Evaluation of machine translation is an unresolved research problem that has been addressed by numerous studies in recent years. The most extensively used assessment tools are classified into two major groups: automatic objective methods, and subjective methods (Tomás, Mas & Casacuberta, 2003). The objective evaluation methods compare a set of correct translations of reference against the set of translations produced by the translation software under evaluation. The units of measurement most often used work at the lexical level, comparing strings of text.

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New York—home of the Big Apple, the state of opportunity, a region far more diverse than many others—is more than just New York City with its Chinatown, Little Italy, and the Bronx, a place peopled by hundreds of different cultures—it is also the historic New Netherland, the remainder of a large and powerful Dutch colony with a largely heterogeneous society. While many of the European colonies in the New World were peopled by one or two major cultural groups, New Netherland was always a place of diversity. Anyone who came to live in New Netherland—Europeans, South Americans, Africans, Caribbeans, and the Native Americans already living in the region—was considered a Dutch New Netherlander.

Although Dutch was the lingua franca of the colony, several Algonquin languages, German, Scandinavian languages, French, English, Portuguese, Spanish, Ladino, and Hebrew were also commonly spoken. Much of the diversity of the colony is due to the open religious attitude of the colony. The Dutch West India Company declared the Reformed Church the official religious institution of the colony, in opposition to the Union of Ultretch which stated that “everyone shall remain free in religion and that no one may be persecuted or investigated because of religion,” but courts in the colony upheld the original religious freedom by granting residency for Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews and Quakers.

Today, much of the legacy of New Netherland’s diversity and openness is being translated by Charles T. Gehring and the New Netherland Project. Although the colony only lasted until 1674 when the Dutch relinquished the colony to the British after the Second Anglo-Dutch War, over sixty years of seventeenth century Dutch texts have been waiting to be translated and brought to English scholarly awareness. For the past thirty years, Gehring has been painstakingly transcribing, analyzing, and translating over 12,000 pages of water and fire stained Dutch records.

A fire in 1911 singed many of the pages and the first set of translations was lost in the fire. Starting from scratch, Gehring has completed over 8,000 pages to date. Russell Shorto , author of The Island at the Center of the World, explained the Dutch colony’s influence:

It was a place that people fled to in the great age of religious warfare; it was a refuge. At the same time, they were known for free trade; they developed a stock market — and those things, free trade and tolerance, are key ingredients of New York City.

Once Gehring’s translations are completed, scholarly work on American beginnings will have a completely new set of material to work with. As Gehring said, “What you find out is how deeply the Dutch cast roots here and how much of their culture they transmitted to this country.” Much of what we consider to be American may actually be Dutch, and a better understanding of that history is exactly what Gehring and his associates are interested in.

To find out more about The New Netherlands Project, visit their website here .

A new online resource for legal interpreters and translators has recently become available thanks to Vancouver Community College. A team of language professionals collaborated to compile an online legal dictionary consisting of 5000 Canadian legal and court-related terms in English, as well as six other languages: Chinese, Farsi, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. This multilingual glossary of legal terms can be found here: Multilingual Legal Glossary

The resource is the result of the collaborative efforts of terminologists, bilingual lawyers, legal translators, and linguists, as well as other qualified and experienced members of the legal and multicultural communities of both Canada and the country of origin of each language included.

A quick search of one commonly used legal term, “defendant,” yielded excellent results in Spanish, providing a thorough definition for the term in both English and Spanish. This is an excellent resource for anyone working within the legal arena, especially legal translators in Canada. While the dictionary aims to “explain Canadian legal terminology and to provide foreign language equivalents for concepts related to Canadian law,” many of the included concepts and terms are universal across the English language.

Add this site to your working list of references and support Vancouver Community College’s efforts! To help spread the word, ALTA is going to add a link on the Free Resources for Translators page. I hope to see more online reference resources of this nature in the coming years.

Last week when I read an article in the New York Times discussing the first full-length Hebrew translation of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan—a translation which appeared only last month. “While the first two parts have long been available in translation, the third and fourth parts — in which Hobbes addresses religion and the state — had not appeared in Hebrew.”

I’m not a philosopher, but I have read parts of Leviathan, arguably one of the most important works of Western philosophy, so I was definitely intrigued by the discussion launched by several of the leading U.S. and Israeli scholars on the translation. Fania Oz-Salzberger, professor at the University of Haifa, at Monash University in Australia, and a distinguished visiting professor at Princeton University, correlates the lack of a complete translation of Leviathan to a lack of funds. In 1962, the Hebrew University Magnes Press published the first Hebrew translation of Leviathan, but the press “was not a rich publishing house, and neither were its customers.” The edition featured only sections Parts I and II and cut out, in addition to the more Hebrew-oriented sections, the wordier and more heavily footnoted sections.

Oz-Salzberger makes an interesting point regarding the new translation that concerns all areas of translation:

Times have changed. Since 1962, the Hebrew reading public has grown at least sevenfold. No other language has ascended, during modern times, from under a million speakers and readers to well over seven million. The new and full Hebrew edition of Leviathan shows how Israeli culture has come into its own: it can now afford, both financially and intellectually, a full Hebrew rendering of this whale of a text.

My question regarding translation at large is this, how much revisionism has occurred over the years in translated texts? Certainly the population swell of Hebrew readers makes this particular translation issue pertinent, but how many other languages and cultures have been slighted over the year due to simple problems like funding or an available market? While some regions like the Arabic region, face tremendous hurdles in regard to translation, others can afford to revisit key texts and clean house if necessary.

In some ways, translation is curation. Like an art curator, a translator’s job is never done. While the artist (author) may be long gone, or at least unable to translate (not everyone is Samuel Beckett!), the work still remains, and over time it may show wear and tear, inconsistencies—it may even be missing huge chunks of texts as in the case of the 1962 Hebrew translation of Leviathan. Like a curator, the translator then revisits the text and reworks it, restoring the text as accurately as possible to the original language version. So maybe dissertations and panel discussions don’t need to focus on strange topics like television and popular culture (although there’s nothing wrong with that)—you never know when the classics might resurface and need a whole new set of eyes to read, translate, and interpret.