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Invalid Swedish VAT numbers – how to correct them

Posted on 9 May 2012 by Timothy Barton

I have recently arranged a job with a client based in Sweden. I asked the client for the company’s VAT number, and he sent me a number with the format SE123456-7890. I tested the number (without the hyphen, since you should always remove hyphens and spaces when entering a VAT number) on the VIES website and was told the number was invalid. The VIES website lists the formats of VAT numbers for each EU member state, and says that Swedish numbers contain 12 digits. Mine, as you can see, only had 10.

Fortunately the Wikipedia’s list of formats gives additional information. It says that all Swedish numbers end in 01, and gives a link to a Swedish website. Although I don’t speak Swedish, I do understand enough words to see that it’s saying that you add 01 to convert a national number to an international VAT number. I tried adding 01 to the number, and sure enough the VIES website gave me the name of my client’s company, thus confirming that I had the correct number.

So, if a Swedish-based client sends you a 10-digit, rather than a 12-digit, VAT number, just add 01 to the end of it.

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

How to say “Camp Nou” (and “Salou”)

Posted on 28 April 2012 by Timothy Barton

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.

Anglo Premier now translates LaTeX documents

Posted on 27 March 2012 by Timothy Barton

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.

Machine translation and context

Posted on 6 February 2012 by Timothy Barton

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.

Linguee

Posted on 7 October 2010 by Timothy Barton

Linguee is an online tool that searches for online translations of terms. It was originally only available for English<>German, but French, Spanish and Portuguese have now been added. You have to look carefully at the sources use and check the results for reliability, but provided you do that it’s a very useful tool.

Linguee website

Spanish<>English toolbar button (drag to the toolbar if using Firefox)
French<>English toolbar button (drag to the toolbar if using Firefox)

Did the Queen have a sex change? Automatic translation of speech

Posted on 26 April 2010 by Timothy Barton

There have been many articles recently, like this one, about advances in the automated translation of speech, and I’ve even read stories about armies using them. I find the latter news very worrying.

Automated translation of speech basically combines two previously existing technologies: speech recognition and machine translation. The problems with the latter are well publicised, and despite the advances made, the problems remain. Google’s corpus-based translations mean that sentences tend to be more coherent nowadays, but a coherent sentence can also be an incorrect translation.

Voice recognition has come on leaps and bounds recently. I use it myself when translating. But as every user of such technology knows, you have to train it to your voice, and even then it makes mistakes that you have to correct. The article from The Times I’ve provided a link to discusses the problem of understanding “high-speed Glaswegian slang”. Current technology would no doubt be absolutely useless at understanding this. But what about more standard forms of English?

I decided to test how Google’s new speech-recognition tool would cope with the Queen’s English — literally the Queen’s English — a speech made by Queen Elizabeth II to parliament in 2009. As I expected, because the tool is not trained to the individual’s voice, the results are pretty awful. To see the video, click on this link. Pause the video, move your mouse over the “CC” button at the bottom of the video, then click on “Transcribe Audio” (don’t click on “English”, as that just gives you captions provided by a human, rather than the automated transcription), click on OK, and the video begins. The Queen tells us how she “was a man that’s in the house of common” [sic].

We can, if we wish, have these captions translated into another language. Just go to the “CC” box and click on “Translate Captions”, then choose your language. But the machine translation will only translate what it’s asked to translate, so we are still likely to get told that the Queen is a man. The translations into the three other languages I work with begin like this:

Catalan: “Jo era un home que està a la Cambra dels Comuns”
Spanish: “Yo era un hombre que está en la Cámara de los Comunes”
French: “J’étais un homme qui est dans la Chambre des communes”

As you can see, there is a very high risk of misunderstanding when using this technology. If the army wants to communicate with people in other languages, I’m afraid they’re just going to have to hire trained interpreters.

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