Multi-directional Translation

The translation industry is a profession like any other; it's got its shares of unwritten guidelines and rules that translators should follow along with translators who do and don't follow them.

 

When I was in my translation program in college, one of these "guidelines" that the professors told us over and over again was that we should only ever translate into our native language. So I should only ever translate from Spanish to English and native Spanish speakers would do the opposite.

 

This counsel we were given does seem to make sense when you first begin as a translator. You are usually more fluent in your native language and have an easier time rendering another language into that language, than vice versa.

 

However, when translators finally leave the comfort of school and begin competing with other translators in the market, they often find that this guideline is hardly ever adhered to. Translators who promote their services advertise that they are equally able to translate both directions between a language pair. I often wonder how many of these translators are as good as they advertise and are able to go both ways.

 

The American Translator's Association (ATA) provides certification tests for translators and they are very specific that translators who advertise their certification must pass language direction-specific tests. For example, a Spanish-to-English translator must pass a Spanish-to-English translation test in order to be certified in that specific language pair and specific direction. If they want to be certified from English-to-Spanish, they must take another test specific to that direction.

 

So why do translators who are not certified advertise multi-directional translation services? I think that one of the reasons is because of the number of translators in the market. If you are an English-to-Spanish translator, you could be losing business by not accepting offers for Spanish-to-English translations.

 

Also, certain a certain language direction might not be in as high a demand as the other direction. For example, I've noticed that there are more translators offering Spanish-to-English translation services than English-to-Spanish and so therefore there might be more jobs going from Spanish-to-English.

 

Now the real question is whether or not this is an ethical thing to do. I know many translators that are not certified by the ATA and they get plenty of business from clients who are happy with their work. Individual translators need to honestly assess their translation abilities and decide whether it would be fair to a client to proclaim their ability in a certain language direction.

 

By doing so, they will help the translation industry earn more respect and be able to provide a better product to the client.

 

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Keyword Popularity

For the past few months, I've been getting a keyword report from Worktracker. This report contains two lists. The first is the Top 300 Surge Report and according to Wordtracker, "contains the top 300 queries from the last 48 hours, which represents the complete queries from the largest Metacrawlers on the web for the last 48 hours."

 

I enjoy getting this email because it helps me see trends that are developing and also gives me new ideas for various projects. However, there is something I don't understand.

 

The top three search terms on the list are, in order:

1. Google

2. Ebay

3. Yahoo

 

My question is this: Why are these search terms? Don't most people know that the URLs of the above companies are the same as the business name? It would seem to me that people interested in finding the Google webpage would already know where to find it and not have to search for it.

 

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New poll on bilingual dictionaries

I've just added a new poll (my very first one, in fact) to the blog. I'm curious to what everyone's preferences are. After the poll ends, I'll let you know what mine is.

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Simultaneous Interpretation is no curling match

First of all, let me say I have nothing against curling. I think people who do it must be very talented and work very hard to be good at their sport.

 

That being said, I think I'd have a better chance of being a curler than being a simultaneous intepreter. When I was in college, I took Spanish translation classes and these classes mostly focused on the art and skill of written translation. However, to get us a feel for what intepreters do and to engrain in the students that interpreters and translators are not the same, our professors let us practice doing simultaneous interpretation.

 

After I went through that, I realized that I could never be an interpreter. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done and I gained a new respect for people who could sit down and concentrate to such a degree that they could interpret somebody else speaking in nearly real time.

 

Not only do interpreters have to be able to multi-task efficiently, they have to be walking encyclopedias that are not phased by anything they come across, because if they do, they'll be behind the speaker and it'll it be tough to catch up. Interpreters also have to be able to work with audio equipment and not let it various intricacies distract them.

 

Most of the time interpreters work in tandem, and because it's such a tiring and draining job, they have to rely on their partner to take over. But, while an intepreter is not interpreting, he/she is helping the other person, looking up terms that might be unknown, and helping to deal with any technical issues that might arise.

 

So while I love translating and think I'm decent at it, I could never be an interpreter and would rather go one-on-one against Maria Sharapova on the tennis court.

 

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Spanish translation for Harry Potter

On Thursday of last week, three different Spanish translations of Harry Potter were released. One translation was bound for Spain, one for Argentina, and one for the other locations in Latin America. It's amazing how a book like Harry Potter can have such a following and that the power of that following can demand three different Spanish translations for different regions of the world. I wonder if the previous Harry Potter books were also translated into slight variations from one another. I have the second and third Harry Potter books in Spanish and they seem to be translated with "Spain" Spanish.

 

On Amazon.com you can't tell which version it is that your buying so it would be interesting to know the distribution of the versions. I imagine that the books sold in the U.S. would be the version sold to the majority of Latin America.

 

On another interesting note about the book, the English title, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" was translated as "Harry Potter y el misterio del príncipe" and did not include the possibly more accurate translation of mestizo due to negative cultural connotations that exist with that word. It shows once more that a translator's job is not to merely render one language into another, but to always take into consideration the culturual implications of the translation.

 

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The Altavista Spanish Translator

There are a ton of free online translator programs. A lot of these translators offer roughly the same options there really doesn't seem to be much difference in the quality of the translations that they produce.

One of the most popular online translators is the Altavista Spanish translator, or Babel Fish. This translator can be found at the Babel Fish site.

Here are some of the features of the Babel Fish translator:
-Provides translations for 36 language pairs
-Can translate a block of text up to 150 words
-Can translate web pages
-Has a World Keyboard for entering accented or Cyrillic characters

In terms of the quality of the translation, it's like I've mentioned on my site, you get what you pay for. It's good for shorter texts when you want a rough idea of what the text says, but for anything official or important, it's best to get help from a qualified translator.

You can also read some reviews about some other popular online translators, as well as see a sample of how they (along with the Altavista Spanish translator) perform at the Spanish-translation-help website.

S.I.D.A. in the Salt Lake airport

Over the Christmas break I went out west to visit some family and I saw something that made me chuckle. I was in the Salt Lake City airport and as I was getting ready to board the plane, I saw on some of the doors a stop sign with the abbreviation S.I.D.A. in the middle.

It made me stop and think because that (as you probably already know) is the very common abbreviation for AIDS in Spanish. I bet it's an old joke among all the Latins that work at the airport there.

By the way, what it really stands for at the airport is Security Identification Display Area.

New page added

I finally got around to adding another page to the site. It's up to about 68 pages I believe. My goal is to have anywhere between 150-200 pages. If I can double or triple the traffic I have now, that would most likely reflect on my clickthroughs, which would be a good thing. My new goal is to do 3 new pages a week, which will give me about 160 total pages by next August, which will be my two year mark.

My new page is song-translations.html and is all about how translating songs can help you become a better translator.

Marketing with Hispanics in mind

I was perusing some business news today and ran across an article on Internet activities of Hispanics.

There were some important statistics the report pointed out that are important to keep in mind, especially if you're thinking about marketing to the Hispanic population, or if you're an online information publisher.

• 56% of Hispanics online want to own their own business
  
• 52% of Hispanics online connect with a broadband connection
  
• 51% of Hispanics online agree that they "get more information about products and services from going online than they do from television or newspapers or magazines."
  
• 67% of Hispanics online feel it's important to have Spanish content online
  

More stats are available from the article. It is a must read especially if you are in the entertainment, health, or financial industry.

New pages to website

I've added some new pages to Spanish-translation-help.

Feel free to check them out:

Becoming a certified translator

Spanish translation programs

Spanish professor jobs

Freelance transltion jobs

Online translation jobs

First batch of medical translators graduates - 2005-04-20

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation provided a grant in Memphis in order to train medical interpreters and the first batch of interpreters has just graduated. It's about time people started focusing on this problem and began thinking of ways to deal with the problem of people not getting the care they need because of the language barrier.

Hopefully this will lead to more people and programs for medical interpretation.

First batch of medical translators graduates - 2005-04-20

Spanish Ecommerce Package: iSpeak Launches Its Turnkey Spanish Ecommerce Package - iSpeak.net

There's some new software out there that might be able to help you market your business to the world's Spanish speakers. iSpeak.net looks like it might be a good solution for those interested.

While it's not the solution I use for my ecommerce business, it could work for you. (Within the next week or so I'll tell you how I do it with my Spanish translation website.

Want to do machine translation?

Anybody out there interested in working for a group doing statistical machine translation in a variety of languages (including Spanish)? According to a business wire release, a company in California called Language Weaver looks like it's growing and maybe they could use the likes of you.

While I have done a lot of translation work, my heart lies in doing linguistic things with computers and if there is anybody interested in natural language processing or computational linguistics, I highly recommend looking into it to see if it fits with your interests. There is a lot of work to be done, especially in languages other than English. If you're wondering what it's all about, check out the article on computational linguistics that got me interested.

New incentive for brushing up on your Spanish skills

TheLadders.com (a website for executives making over $100,000 annually) recently posted a survey of executives. The survey asked them to rate which language (behind English) is the most important for them to learn (and subsequently will have the most impact on them as business owners and executives). Not suprisingly, Spanish was at the top of the list (followed distantly by Mandarin Chinese). Read the article.

New page

I just put up a new page on the website:

Translator jobs

Feel free to visit...

The life of a court interpreter

I've worked a fair amount of years in the translation industry but I have never professionally done any interpreting? Would I ever consider doing it? No way. When I was in school working on my degree in Spanish translation and interpretation, we mostly focused on translation theory and practice. However, we were introduced to interpretation and even practiced doing some. Let me just say that I think it is an extremely challenging activity.

However, if intpretation is your cup of tea, and especially if you speak a less-commonly taught language, chances are you could readily find work in any of the larger population areas doing interpretation for the courts.

I've read a couple articles the past little while about the need for more court interpreters in all kinds of languages, not just Spanish or Mandarin.

Here's an interesting article about the need for more interpreters.

400th anniversary of Don Quixote

It's the 400th anniversary of the classic book Don Quixote. I think everyone that has anything to do with the Spanish language should read the book, in Spanish (that goes for me as well). I started to read the book in English a while back and then felt guilty that I hadn't even read it in Spanish. So my new literary goal for this year is to read the entire Cervantes classic in Spanish. If you feel too intimidated to read it in Spanish, you can always try an English translation. You can follow along with Sam McManis from Tacoma who will be writing about his adventures reading the book this year.

Tuning out Hispanics

In Boston, an AM radio station that traditionally played Spanish programming announced it was being bought and the format was going to change to ESPN sports programming (Boston.com). Just the opposite happened in Washington, D.C. a while ago. 99.1 (a rock station that had been around a long time) just one day converted over to Spanish music. Let's just say that a lot of people were definately in shock when that happened. I can see that happening in more markets around the country. Especially in high population areas.

"Rise of Spanish does not predicate decline of English"

Here's a good article on not only why Spanish is becoming so important in the United States, but also why it will never overtake English as the most important language in the country. (A good reason to have top skills in both languages.)

As a translator, it's especially important to have skills in both languages because your skill is only as successful as is your complete understandin of all the nuances in both. If you don't know one very well, chances are you're going to miss something important in some future work that you have to do. - The Japan Times Online

Unique Barcelona City Break Takes On Language Barrier : Khalsa News Network- KNTimes.com

Unique Barcelona City Break Takes On Language Barrier : Khalsa News Network- KNTimes.com

There are so many schools that offer language programs not only in Spain but all over Latin America as well. It can be a daunting task when trying to find one that fits your particular situation, as well as your budget and your expectations. I wrote an article a while back about what to keep in mind when choosing a Spanish language school. You might find it interesting: Choosing a good Spanish school abroad.