Translation - Language - Culture

Simplified Chinese script: necessary or dumbing down?

“Spelling reform” in China:

For better or worse, Mao Zedong usually came out on top, whether facing Japanese invaders, nationalist warlords or Communist Party rivals. But for all his success in overturning traditional values and institutions, the founder of modern China came up short in his desire to convert written Chinese from its character-based system to an alphabet. Intellectuals resisted fiercely, some out of the belief that China’s writing system was superior to any other, and unified a land of many dialects far better than a phonetic system, others on simple sentimental grounds.

Many claimed it could not be done, despite the examples of Korea, which managed the trick in the 15th century, and Vietnam which, like China, has a tonal language with many homonyms but switched successfully to an alphabetic system. In the end Mao settled on a halfway step: cutting the number of strokes in some Chinese characters (from 18 to four in the case of feng, which means “abundant”, and is shown above). This set China apart from Hong Kong, Taiwan and most overseas communities. Many purists thought simplifying characters as appalling as eliminating them.

That fierce debate is now being rekindled with the government’s announcement of plans to issue later this year a new list of character modifications, aimed mainly at correcting certain “oversimplifications” undertaken in the past. Some characters will have more strokes added and thus be brought closer to their earlier, more complicated forms. But officials insist the move does not mark the start of a campaign to scrap simplified characters. China, they say, need not move back toward the traditional forms, nor further along the path of simplification. It simply needs to “standardise” things.

This will disappoint Pan Qinglin, a member of the consultative committee that advises China’s government. In March he submitted a proposal to the government calling for a return within ten years to the greater expressiveness and “artistic quality” of the traditional script. Others, however, will be pleased, including the internet commentator who recently compared reviving traditional characters to “asking women to revive the practice of foot-binding”.

Other arguments focus less on deep issues of cultural identity than on practical concerns, such as how hard the new forms will be to learn, how much it will cost to convert signs, replace textbooks and adapt software, and whether the government will pay for the changes. Mao famously argued that “revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture”. It might, however, be reforming orthography.

I don’t think that’s such a good idea. We’re already trying to simplify too many things in life, thus contributing to the “dumbing down” of society almost everywhere.

One only needs to look at the “German spelling reform” several years ago, which in my view has been a total disaster. Today, German spelling is all over the place, and only very few people actually know the proper rules of spelling these days.

Years ago, I had to learn around 2,000 Chinese characters (i.e., the most basic ones used in Japanese), and it wasn’t very easy in the beginning. But once you get used to this way of writing, learning new characters – including those with a large number of strokes – becomes easier with each new one. At least, this has been my personal experience.

For me, and I’m still trying to find the time to learn Mandarin, it would be highly unfortunate if China decided to “dumb down” its script. Where’s the fun in simplified characters?

Language and questions

A quote by Eric Hoffer:

“Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.”

CTTIC exams: Taking longer and longer

Each year, CTTIC organizes its annual certification examination for translators in February. When I took the exam years ago, it took the markers until early April or so to release the results. Since then, though, the pace has slowed down considerably.

In past years, I’d be one of the markers, and I was able to identify one main factor behind the excessively long time it takes for candidates to find out their results right from the start. The exam is usually held on the second Saturday in February. Markers, however, wouldn’t get the papers until late March or early April. (Why????) Since many markers, at least the ones I had to team up with (each paper must be graded by two markers in a team), can take up to a month after receiving the papers to grade them, candidates can easily wait until late April or well into May before they learn whether or not they have been accredited.

Today, one of the provincial translators’ associations in Canada sent out the following note:

The results from the Feb 28, 2009 exam are not expected to be ready until late June or even late July. The CTTIC has requested we inform members that they require more time this year, plus the exam was held later than usual in February.

As if holding the exams two weeks later than usual is any excuse for making candidates wait even longer. Markers should have received the papers within a week or so after February 28, and should have returned the results by the end of March. So, what’s the holdup? Why must candidates wait until late June or even late July? Ridiculous.

For the record, this is the first year I haven’t been called in as a marker. You see, I decided to cancel my membership with the Ontario association, ATIO, and apparently, that disqualifies me now as a marker. CTTIC is supposed to be a national organization, with the various provincial associations helping out with the administration. But, I suppose, unless you’re a member of the Ontario association, you’re no longer considered a suitable marker.

Mind you, I’m still a member of CTTIC through my membership of STIBC (British Columbia) and ATIA (Alberta), but both are “Western Canadian associations”, and since Easterners hate all Westerners (which is why I support an independent Western Canadian Republic), I’m now “second class” according to CTTIC.

Sorry, but ATIO membership simply didn’t do anything for me anymore. Their fees are the highest in the country for the worst possible service. Unlike the online directories of STIBC and ATIA, the ATIO directory is a joke and doesn’t show up in Google searches either.

What is more, ATIO began to establish very close links with translation agencies several years ago – including agencies who are known across Canada and the rest of the world as “non-payers”. I just didn’t like the fact that my (excessive) membership fees were going to this cooperation that is nothing if not extremely detrimental to the translation profession and freelance translators.

Oh well, who cares? I’m through with Ontario in every respect of the word. I am a proud Westerner. I only feel sorry for all those candidates now having to spend summer worrying about their professional future.

A handy research tool for German/English translators

I recently came across a new web-based tool for translators working with German and English: Linguee.

As you know, professional translators are not supposed to rely on bilingual dictionaries, because no matter how good they may be, they’re never perfect. Back at university, my professors told us incessantly always to use parallel texts (i.e., in the source and target languages) as our primary research resources.

This is why I usually go on Google, enter the term or expression I’m looking for, followed by “English” (or “Deutsch”, as the case may be), and then scour the search results for websites that are available in both English and German to find comparative material.

Of course, this method can be time-consuming. Sometimes, or, indeed, very often, such searches will capture websites that merely offer a Google machine translation into other languages, instead of an actual translation. So, you have to browse through the results and weed out those “duds”.

Quite often, too, websites that do provide authentic versions in various languages take a shortcut and tend to provide only bare-bones summaries in other languages. In other words, the page that contains the term you’re trying to research may not exist at all in the other language.

It can therefore take quite a while before you find the one site that delivers its information and content in a truly bilingual package (i.e., with a complete translation provided by human translators, rather than by machine translation).

Thanks to the new website Linguee, I’ve been able to do without that time-consuming “Googling”. Enter any term or phrase, and Linguee will throw up a split screen (German/English) of parallel texts, with the term or phrase in bold, so that the user can locate it more easily and faster.

Granted, some of the results are total nonsense, but the site does put up a warning sign in such cases, which is a helpful time-saver.

Here’s more on Linguee:

What is Linguee?

With Linguee, you can search many millions of bilingual texts in English and German for words and expressions. Every expression is accompanied by useful additional information and suitable example sentences.

What is the benefit?

When you translate texts to a foreign language, you usually look for common phrases rather than translations of single words. With its intelligent search and the significantly larger amount of stored text content, Linguee is the right tool for this task. You find:

• In what context a translation is used
• How frequent a particular translation is
• Example sentences: How have other people translated an expression?

By searching not only for a single word, but for a respective word in its context, you can easily find a translation that fits optimal in context. With its large number of entries, Linguee often retrieves translations of rare terms that you don't find anywhere else.

The funny thing is that I’ve been thinking about a service like that for the longest time. But since I don’t know anything about programming and creating such a site and search engine, building a site like that myself was never an option.

The brains behind Linguee are:

Linguee was founded by Gereon Frahling and Leonard Fink. CEO Gereon Frahling came up with the idea in autumn of 2007 after being a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Google Inc. in New York.

The site itself is still in its beta version, and hasn’t been live for very long. But I’ve been using it now for almost a week, and I have to say, chapeau! Well done, indeed.

I hope in future Linguee will be available in other language pairs as well (e.g., French/English, etc.).

There’s a recession? What recession?

I know, the title is not exactly fair to all those who have lost jobs over the last twelve months or so, or those whose jobs are on the line right now. But this recession has provided me with proof of something I’ve been saying all along: if there’s a recession-proof profession or line of work, it’s translation.

It seems that translators are especially busy during times of economic crisis. I’m currently booked solid straight into June, handling a 25,000-word project, a 15,000-word project as well as several “smallish” ones.

In my recent and current projects, I’ve also identified several that probably wouldn’t have materialized if it hadn’t been for the recession.

Let me give you a few examples:

Exhibit A:

A company in Canada that produces audio and hi-fi equipment determines that the Canadian market isn’t big or strong enough anymore. So, the company decides to start selling its products in a number of international markets, which requires the user manuals of its products to be translated into several languages. I’m currently translating some of their manuals from English to German, and more are coming in all the time.

Exhibit B:

A company in Canada that produces equipment and installations for playground and park facilities has felt a need to expand. I’ve just translated their main brochure from English to German, and I’m quite sure there’ll be follow-up work.

Exhibit C:

An investment company in Europe wants to expand. It’s been active in two European countries as well as in some areas of the United States. Now it wants to make inroads into Britain, trying to attract British investors for a new series of investment funds. I’m currently translating their main prospectus into English.

In short, this is, indeed, how things work. When the economy takes a nosedive, local or national markets aren’t strong enough to sustain all the existing businesses. The only way for many of them to avoid disaster is to seek out new markets in other countries – and for that, of course, they will have to avail themselves of the services of professional translators.

Added bonus for translators: once the recession has subsided, many of these companies will become permanent clients for many years to come.

Some people simply have no clue

First off, allow me to say that I love my clients. They're knowledgeable, professional, friendly and they know how to cooperate with translators.

But there are also many who don't have any clue as to what it is we translators and/or interpreters do. Take a look at a recent job posting on the TraduGuide website:

Do you translate movies off the screen as well?
There is no subtitles available for this movie as far as I know.
It was a tv movie. It can be translated to English, Polish or Russian. I speak these three languages.
I can provide with the movie od DVD or as .AVI
If you don't translate movies... could you tell us who does, please? [sic]

This is a private individual who's dying to see a certain movie that happens to be in French. Too funny. Well, I doubt he'll find any professional translator to agree to such a harebrained project, seeing how a professional subtitling job would cost him at least ten to fifteen times the price of a standard movie on a DVD.

As for companies providing these services, they only work for the movie studios, but not private individuals.

So, for this individual, who incidentally resides in Australia, I have only one, realistic, suggestion: Purchase all three levels of the Rosetta Stone French program, immerse yourself in the language, and then watch the movie.

Olympic Games: Canada fails to meet bilingual standards

As a country with both English and French as official languages, Canada is quickly becoming an embarrassment ahead of the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver:

When the world beats a path to Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics, many may expect both of Canada's official languages, French and English, to be on full display.

But, zut alors, they could well be disappointed, according to the country's language czar, Graham Fraser.

Appearing yesterday before the House of Commons' official languages committee, Mr. Fraser said organizers of the 2010 Olympics are falling short in their efforts to make the Games sufficiently bilingual.

But there's more:

The federal government, which has a translation bureau with a worldwide reputation for excellence, has provided hardly any assistance to hard-pressed Olympic organizers, Mr. Fraser said.

"There's been this attitude that, 'Oh, that's not really our job, that's not our responsibility and everything's fine.'... The federal government, which does have the expertise, has a whole body of resources that they should be discussing with VANOC."

Unfortunately, this is not quite true. Translation and interpreting services provided by the federal agency are often substandard and sometimes performed by people who don't meet even the most basic professional standards.

For example, the Translation Bureau has been known to award contracts to one particular individual in Toronto who then, without the knowledge of the Bureau and against Bureau policies, farms out the work to "translators" all over the world – to make matters worse, he regularly defrauds his subcontractors by never paying them.

The Bureau has been notified by several translators about that individual, yet still continues to send work to him.

What is more, the Bureau has its own certification/accreditation process for translators and interpreters, which is completely unnecessary, as both the federal and provincial associations already have such a system in place – and theirs is of a higher quality than the standards applied by the federal government.

As a result, the quality of Bureau translators and interpreters is often far below that of translators and interpreters accredited by the professional associations.

Bureau interpreters, for example, regularly interpret into a "B" or "C" language, rather than exclusively into the "A" language (A being the interpreter's mother tongue). English Canadians who want to follow proceedings in the federal parliament are therefore treated to "English" interpretations with thick and often unintelligible French accents. Quite often, too, those interpreters produce a kind of franglais that makes most people's hair stand on end: in this context, I always give as an example that francophone Bureau interpreter with a really thick accent who rendered "dans un café" as "in a coffee" several times in a row in such phrases as "We discussed it while sitting in a coffee".

I don't know about others, but I certainly wouldn't consider this "a worldwide reputation for excellence."

Transilators in Canada

Yes, you read that right: transilator.

This is taken from a Google search that led to this site:

can i be self employed as transilator in canada?

Well, dear Google user in the City of London, the answer to this question is quite simple, given your language skills: No, never, not a chance, not on your life!

Late payment - time to teach someone a lesson

Here's a story about a Montréal-based translation agency I have done the occasional little job for here and there over the last three years or so. I have worked for them a few times, and each time they needed to be reprimanded before they made payment.

Here's the latest on that "outfit":

This morning I get the following email from one of their PMs:

Can you please translate a text of 5250 words from German to English?

Nothing more, nothing less. So I replied:

As I have already explained to you several times on previous occasions, any request for a translation project MUST be accompanied by:

1) an indication of the subject matter AND the actual document to be translated (I never commit to anything unless and until I have seen the actual document in question)

2) all the information regarding the project, i.e., project number, purchase order (PO) and your expected delivery date.

I cannot possibly answer a question that is given in a complete vacuum of facts.

Well, they sent another message, with the file attached, and, wouldn't you know it, it ended up being only 260 words to be delivered the next day.

What they didn't know was that I set them a little trap. You see, they still owe me money (about $80) from a previous job done several months ago.

I did the small translation but didn't send it out to them. Instead, I sent them an email tonight and told them about the outstanding balance and that they would receive today's translation only once I had received payment for the previous invoice.

They needed their translation by 8am Montréal time, so I sent them the link to my online/PayPal payment page and told them to send the money ASAP and that they would get their translation as soon as I saw the notification of payment received in my inbox.

I also told them that from now on all payment would have to be made in advance because of their chronic tardiness when it comes to paying their translators.

The whole thing doesn't involve a fortune, but since they seem pressed for time with this most recent translation, I figured this would be as good a time as any to teach them a valuable lesson.

I'll report back and let you all know how this story ended.

Update:

Here’s the update I have promised you (sorry, I’ve been too busy to post here).

The next morning I received irate emails and voicemail messages from the agency. I repeated my demands: Settle your outstanding balance by PayPal ASAP, or you won’t get your translation today.

One of their managers sent me an email and lied to me by claiming that they’d never received my original invoice. Too bad for them, because I had both read receipts and actual acknowledgments of my invoice having been received all those months ago.

I told him to stop lying to me and send his payment instead. A few minutes later, he asked for my PayPal email address so that he could send the money. Well, there you go!

About ten minutes later, I did get a notification email from PayPal that payment had been made, but the agency didn’t put it on its credit card but used the eCheck option instead, which meant that payment would take 6-8 business days to clear – and in the meantime, the agency could cancel the transaction quite easily once they had received my translation.

I told them that this wasn’t the deal, as I had demanded immediate and instant payment.

To cut a long story short, they never got my translation, so they had to find someone else on the fly to do it for them, and the eCheck payment did eventually clear.

But I’ll never work for them again, and I told them so in a very harsh email.

Readers can contact me privately if they want to know the name of the agency.

Between you and me ...

Kudos to Calgary Herald columnist Licia Corbella for showing how to use the English language correctly.

Exhibit A:

That meant either my sister or I was in charge of the Volvo's radio, switching from station to station to avoid commercials and seek out the best song.

Exhibit B:

My long-suffering and good-natured father would drive my sister and me along with several other swimmers to the pool for our 5 a. m. workout and he was also responsible for driving the lot of us home from our evening workout which ended, typically, at 6:30 p. m.

Finally, someone who gets it. It is absolutely wrong to say, for example, "between you and I", but this is what you hear on TV and read in newspapers, magazines and books nowadays all the time.

Just the other day, while watching some TV show, I heard dialogue that went something like this: "... and then he gave my husband and I this thing .... ." No, the character was not meant to be representative of an uneducated underclass, but a district attorney. Clearly, the scriptwriter didn't know his or her grammar very well.

So, kudos to Ms. Corbella for being one of the very few professional writers out there today who actually know how to use the English language.