NET225S Writing for Electronic Media - Translation

NET225S Writing for Electronic Media - Translation

NET225S Writing for Electronic Media

 

Translation

 

 

Several events occurred to inspire this lesson in writing for electronic media. First, one day last week I had two messages in my In Box that made me pause:

 

One email alerted me to a comment on one of my blogs from a person in Russia (.ru) and the comment was posted in Cyrillic. The other email is from a student whose first language is Japanese, and in the “From” field, the name is rendered in Kanji.

 

A few days later, I encountered an article in my newsreader that claims that 70 percent of the world’s internet users do not speak English.

 

Now, what was really interesting is that the above-mentioned Russian comment wasn’t lost to me. With barely a thought, I copied the text from the email, opened Google Translate, pasted in the text, and read the result. And this seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Really, though, a tremendous amount of clever programming and computing power is behind this seemingly mundane act. (Google Translate, Babelfish.com and other translation services can translate entire websites - just paste the URL into the translate box.)

 

First, the program must recognize the alphabet, then the language, then the words, then the meaning, and render that into an entirely different language. It made sense. Here is the translation:

 

Excellent article! Many thanks to the author for interesting material. Good luck in development! :)

 

Machine translation (as opposed to human translation) has made great strides in the last few years, as processing power has increased, translation tables have been populated, and artificial intelligence models try to tease out contextual clues. Fluent and instantaneous machine translation has been a staple of science fiction for over a century, and we are now very close to its realization, both from language to language and mode to mode (text to speech or speech to text). There has even been experimentation of voice in language A to text in language B!

 

Machine translation breaks down when we use idioms - words that seem to have one definition but are used in a different way in conversation. Humans are pretty good at understanding idioms, but machines are terrible at it.

 

When we use idioms and metaphors to communicate, and a non-native speaker (or machine) tries to translate, it can sometimes sound like a Star Trek episode. For example, we commonly use the phrase “That’s big of you” when we mean someone is being generous (or sometimes we mean it sarcastically when they are not, but that’s a different problem!). Translating that phrase to Latvian, for instance, results in:

 

Tas ir liels jums

 

It is a word-for-word translation. But if we translate it right back to English, we get something else:

 

It's great for you

 

Uh, oh. “Big” became “great” and “of” became “for.” So let’s say we are in a business deal with a Latvian partner, and she makes an offer that is to our advantage. We reply “That’s big of you,” to indicate that we think she is being generous. However, on the other end, it sounds like we are saying, “That’s great for you!” meaning we think it is in HER favor. That could be taken as an insult, and the entire deal could collapse.

 

So, what can be done to avoid such miscommunication? Let’s try the translation again, this time being more precise with our language:

 

Original phrase: You are very generous

English to Latvian: Jūs esat ļoti atsaucīgs

Latvian to English: You're very generous

 

The more precise and non-idiomatic English phrase avoids the mis-translation seen in the earlier example.

 

The activity for you, then, is to identify five or so idiomatic or metaphorical phrases that you are prone to using. (Review your email archives for one source.) Enter them into a translation site and translate them into several languages, then back to English. See how they change, then try to re-write the original text to remove the idiom or metaphor and use direct language, and run them through the same translators to see whether you have succeeded. Post your phrases, translations, back-translations, revisions and re-translations to your blog site.

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