Category Archives: Translation & linguistics

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The importance of context and testing

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I’ve just been installing the program that enables me to generate my end-of-year tax declarations, and I was rather confused when I came across this screen:

One of the options says “Crear teclas de método abreviado para todos los usuarios”, which means “Create keyboard shortcuts for all users”. It seems a strange question to ask when installing a program. When you toggle the option, the list of programs in the above window changes, which is when I realised what had happened.

It should be asking whether I want to place a shortcut in the Windows menu for all users. The installation program was probably translated from an English installer that said “Create shortcuts for all users”, and the translator interpreted it as keyboard shortcuts (teclas de método abreviado) rather than shortcuts in the Windows menu, which I believe are called “accesos directos” in the Spanish versions of Windows.

Either the translator failed to use the context, or more likely, the translator was not given the context and was simply given a list of words and phrases to translate. There was probably no testing either. Whenever a translation is done and then transferred to another environment, somebody should view the translation in its final environment to check that all is well and rectify any problems (referred to as “testing” in the industry). Types of documents that require testing include websites, Powerpoint presentations and software. Similarly, before any translation are sent to print the translator should see the proofs to ensure nothing has gone wrong during the typesetting phase. Testing and checking proofs are both services provided by Anglo Premier Translations.

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translatorsx.com

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translatorsx.com is the latest business created by Juan Fernando Valls, who previously used the names Maremagnum and MTM, among many others. The whois record confirms what I already knew based on advertising material I received containing Juan’s name and phone number. In May, Juan Fernando was arrested on suspicion of swindling translators and using other people’s identity.

If you have not heard of Maremagnum or MTM, you can read more information in this previous blog entry [this post has been temporarily removed pending legal proceedings, but there is plenty of other information online].

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Working with your author to find the mot juste: journal vs magazine

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Spanish and other Iberian languages do not make a distinction between a journal and a magazine. They use the same word for both, a revista. For translators this can cause us a headache if information about a particular publication is sparse. An abstract I was translating today mentioned two underground Catalan revistas from the 1940s, so it was hard to check whether they were journals or magazines.

One solution is to do what I did twice in the previous paragraph: translate revista with its hypernym, the more generic word publication. But if we want to be more precise – you probably don’t want to repeat the word publication too often in the same text – then you can ask the author, who will probably know about the publication and will be able to tell you which is the more appropriate word.

But the author might not understand the difference between the two terms, or might think that magazine refers only to glossy, tabloid-like magazines like Hello!, when in fact some magazines, like Time, are more serious. To solve this problem, this slide presentation in Spanish is a good resource to send your author, who should be able to identify which word is more appropriate based on the explanations on the slides.

This nuance between a journal and a magazine is another example of the dangers of machine translation. Google Translate might pick the right word if your sentence contains the name of a well-known magazine like ¡Hola! (the Spanish version of Hello!), but for a 1940s publication it will most likely just be guessing.

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How to say “Camp Nou” (and “Salou”)

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Anglo Premier Translations provides translation and editing services from Catalan, Spanish and French to English. For more information, click here to visit our main website.

When a foreign word is used in the media, journalists are normally advised to pronounce it as closely as possible to the original pronunciation, but using English phonemes. So when Real Madrid is said in the English-speaking media, the word Real (which means royal) is pronounced as two syllables and not like the English word real.

But journalists never seem to have got the hang of the name of FC Barcelona’s stadium. Apart from the fact that the words Camp and Nou are often switched round in the English-speaking media, the word Nou is invariably pronounced noo.

Some journalists realise this is not the correct pronunciation and try to pronounce it the proper way, but end up pronouncing it like the English word now. English speakers often produce the same vowel sound when pronouncing other Catalan words, like the name of the popular beach resort Salou. You even hear the same sound for Catalan words ending in eu, like Bernabeu in the name of Real Madrid’s stadium, probably due to influence from German, in which the eu is pronounced this way.

However, this ow vowel sound would be written au in Catalan, and appears in words like palau (palace).

The correct pronunciation of ou contains English phonemes, but it is the combination of phonemes that feels unnatural to English speakers. To pronounce the word nou properly, first pronounce the short o sound that appears in words like hot or cod. Now pronounce the sound written as oo in English, as in boo and coo. Now pronounce one straight after the other quickly, and you’ve got it!

Since this combination of sounds feels unnatural to English speakers, we could use a compromise pronunciation. But I would suggest the best compromise would be to pronounce the word nou as no, rather than as noo or now.

Finally, in the word Camp, the letter p is silent in the variety of Catalan spoken in Barcelona, although it is pronounced in some other varieties of Catalan.

If you’re still confused, why not listen to a couple of natives pronounce it.

And if you’re still confused, just pretend it says “Cam No”, as that’s a pretty close approximation.

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Anglo Premier now translates LaTeX documents

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In addition to the dozens of formats Anglo Premier already works with, we are now able to translate LaTeX files. We use a special filter that protects the code used in the LaTeX document, which means we can guarantee that we won’t spoil any of the code so that you will be able to compile the final document in the target language. Contact us if you need a LaTeX document translating.

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Translating Latex files in MemoQ

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LaTeX is a format that uses tags to enable authors to not have to worry about typesetting their text. Unfortunately, at the time of writing there do not seem to be any CAT tools that accept this format. However, MemoQ lets you label tags using regular expressions. We have created a filter for importing LaTeX files into MemoQ. If you normally use a different CAT tool, you could import your file into MemoQ (you can use the demo version for up to 45 days) then export it into a format you can use in other CAT tools (for example, the XLIFF format).

To use the filter, download it here. Next, go to the Resource console in MemoQ and click on “Filter configurations”. Click “Import new” and add the file you just downloaded.

Now all you need to do is go to “Add document as” in a MemoQ project, click on the “Open” button in the Document import settings window and select “Latex all” from the list.

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Termcat databases with 73,016 entries

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Download 73,016 terminology entries from Termcat’s database for the price of £12 or €14.50.

You can download a free sample of the first 1,000 entries (which covers the entire database on Video games and part of the Telecommunications database) here. Apart from the CSV format for importing into a CAT tool, the sample file also includes a version in Excel format so that if you don’t know how to import a CSV file into Excel you can visualise the data more easily.

On its website, Termcat provides 27 terminology databases in an open, xml format. Although it is an open-source format, the xml format used is not easy to import into a terminology database. Previous posts describe how to use Excel to convert the format, but even using that method is very complicated and takes many hours to do. It also requires Excel 2007, since Excel 2003 and earlier versions does not have enough rows (it is limited to just over 60,000) to enable the method to be used.

The databases contain 73,016 entries. All of the entries contain Catalan, and the vast majority also contain Spanish, English, and to a slightly lesser extent French. Termcat’s XML databases also have some entries in other languages. You can see the domains covered and which languages are covered for each domain here.

Since it is so difficult to import the XML files into computer-assisted translation tools, we at Anglo Premier are offering our converted version – which took us many hours to produce – for the price of just £10 or €12.

Our version contains all the entries available in Catalan, Spanish, English and French. Since the file is aimed at translators rather than terminologists, the data includes only the terms in each language (including all synonyms), as well as the domain (or subject), and the database from which it was extracted. The domain and database names are always in Catalan. They are usually the same, but some databases have various domains, for example, the “Videojocs” database has some records labelled as “Dispositius de joc” and others labelled as “Interacció i comunitat”. I would therefore recommend importing the database name into your CAT tool’s domain/subject field rather than the “domain”.

If you would be interested in having the entries that Termcat has produced in other languages (such as German and Italian) please contact us. If there is sufficient demand we will make a version with the other languages.

Buying the database

To purchase the product, please write to us using the contact form on our main site with your name in the subject line. In the body, please include your name, e-mail address, full address and, if applicable, your VAT number. Please also state your preferred payment method. We accept wire transfer to a British or Spanish account or Paypal or Skrill (formerly Moneybookers). We will reply with the necessary details to make the payment and a reference number for you to use. Once payment has been received you will receive a link to download the full file within 48 hours.

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Conversion of Déjà Vu memories into MemoQ memories

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If you export a Déjà Vu (DVX) memory or terminology database and import it into MemoQ, you lose some of the data such as the client, subject, project, user name and creation date. This is because the tmx format created by DVX does not match the tmx format created and understood by MemoQ. For example, Déjà Vu has separate creation dates and user IDs for the source and target, whereas MemoQ has a single creation date for a translation pair (which makes more sense). Also, the tmx created by DVX contains the subject and client codes, not the actual names. For example, if you used the subject “33 – Economics” in DVX, you will be importing the number “33” as the subject, not the word “Economics”. Similarly, if you used client codes, like “MST” for “Microsoft”, you’ll be importing the code rather than the full name.

Anglo Premier recently migrated from Déjà Vu to MemoQ. After much labour we succesfully converted our translation memories and terminology databases, preserving all the subject and client data and the dates. We initially described the process on this blog, but the procedure is complicated to follow and the script we created won’t run properly on all versions of Windows. It also requires the user to have Excel and Access 2003. Instead, we are offering to convert your translation memories and terminology databases for you. For a fee of €20 or £16.50 we will convert a translation memory or terminology database, and for €40 or £33 we will convert up to four databases. None of the content of your databases will be read and we will delete the databases from our system as soon as the conversion has been done and the file(s) have been sent to you.

If you wish to use this service, please contact us via the contact form on our main website.

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Machine translation and context

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A sentence I’ve just translated is an excellent example of the advantages and disadvantages of machine translation. The original sentence said this:

Los rankings se basan en indicadores sociales y económicos.

Google Translate offered this:

The rankings are based on social and economic indicators.

This is a good example of how machine translation can speed up the translation process. The translation is almost perfect. I say almost, because the translation doesn’t quite work in my context. The reader is left asking “Which rankings?”.

The original sentence is actually talking about rankings in general, rather than any specific rankings. Unfortunately Spanish does not make this distinction in the use of articles, so the word “los” is needed whether talking about rankings in general or specific rankings referred to earlier in the text. Google Translate works sentence by sentence, so it has no way of knowing whether the word “the” should appear at the beginning of the English translation.

Another similar problem comes up when I translate biographical texts. Imagine a sentence in Spanish that says the following:

Nació en Tolosa en 1960, pero desde 1970 vive en Roma.

Is Tolosa referring to the city of Toulouse in the Languedoc region (Tolosa is the traditional Spanish spelling of the city) or the small town in the Basque Country? OK, so I’ve deliberately come up with an ambiguous place name, but the other problem in this example does occur more often: is the text talking about a male or female? Google Translate has no way of knowing, since it only looks at the context of the sentence. It normally chooses a sex seemingly randomly. In this particular example it has produced a translation that does not specified the sex of the person:

Born in Toulouse in 1960, but since 1970 living in Rome.

Although it has avoided assigning a sex to the person the text is talking about, the translation is unacceptable and would need considerable editing. By changing the sentence slightly I can force Google Translate to assign a sex:

Nació en Tolosa en 1960, pero desde 1970 vive con sus padres en Roma.

Born in Toulouse in 1960, but since 1970 living with his parents in Rome.

The pronoun “his” is used, but the person we’re talking about could just as well be female. As additional evidence that Google Translate doesn’t use context I will now ask it to translate the following two sentences together:

Julia es una ilustradora francesa. Nació en Tolosa en 1960, pero desde 1970 vive con sus padres en Roma.

Google Translate provides the following translation:

Julia is a French illustrator. Born in Toulouse in 1960, but since 1970 living with his parents in Rome.

Google Translate still uses the word his, yet to any human translator it is blatantly obvious, thanks to the context of the first sentence, that the correct pronoun is her.

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Invertext glossaries

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Edit on 29 March 2012

I have looked at this glossary more closely and having seen entries like this I can only conclude that it is not a reliable source.

End of edit

For professional translations, visit www.timtranslates.com.

Today I stumbled across this little beauty of a webpage. It contains a bilingual Spanish<>English glossary with 6,000 definitions in the fields of banking, stock markets, accounting, money and currencies, corporate banking, retail banking and money laundering. I’ve not really tested it yet, but it looks promising.

The glossary is produced by Ediciones Verba, who have produced what looks like a very interesting set of technical dictionaries. I’d be very interested in hearing from anyone who has bought the dictionaries.

I’m a little hesitant about buying them because I wonder whether at some point they’ll put everything online. Also, the dictionaries are not cheap (though given the number of entries, that’s not surprising). I do hope that at some point they will produce digital versions, because that’s what most translators prefer searching in. I’d rather select the terminology I’m looking for and activate a search on my computer or online than get a bulky paper dictionary and look for it manually. In fact, I’d be willing to pay more for an electronic dictionary than for a paper version.

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