As Wi-Fi Havens And E-Book Centers, Public Libraries Aren't Going Away Soon

A new survey by the American Library Association shows that 99.3% of public libraries offer free access to the web even if you don't have a PC and 67% offer e-books. Summer just got a whole lot cooler. 

 

More on http://www.fastcompany.com/1763377/wi-fi-haven-e-book-lending-center-the-public-library-isnt-going-away-any-time-soon?partner=rss

The science of scientific translation

Saturday, 25 June 2011

by Christian Arno

Translating scientific texts is one of the most difficult tasks in the field of translation. It presents a number of challenges that the translator, author and editor must overcome. We will examine some of those challenges here, as well as looking at some of the skills required for the successful translation of scientific texts.
The aim of any translation is to provide a clear, concise text whilst preserving the original meaning. In order to achieve this with scientific texts, the translator will first decide whether the original text is in a satisfactory state. The original text may need some judicious editing to reduce wordiness and to ensure that it is as clear and concise as possible. The translator will liaise with the author and/or editor of the original text to ensure they have a satisfactory version which can then be translated.

more on http://www.machineslikeus.com/news/science-scientific-translation

C2 translation technology series

In 2011, the C2 module of the MScTrans, translation technology, will include a couple of visiting seminars/workshops. Students will enjoy joined translation technology events. These will always take place on Wednesdays, 1-3pm.

  

These seminars/workshops are open to non-MSctrans or non-Translation Group participants. However, these people are asked to pay a £10 contribution. 

Please find dates and locations listed below:

• Yves Champollion (and Wordfast), Wednesday 19 January, 1-3pm in Huxley 144
• Thomas Vackier, Yamagate Europe (and QA Distiller), Wednesday 23 March, 1-3pm in Huxley 311
• John Hutchins (and the state of MT), Wednesday 11 May, 1-3pm in Huxley 144

Pornography, all in a day’s work for a lecturer in translation

Even though I do tend to vary my course material as much as possible, taking in new developments, assuming a different perspective on a subject and so on, a few things return every year. Since 0809 I have included a questionnaire in the two hour session on translation and ethics, which again took place today.

The questionnaire contains nine real-life situations – albeit slightly modified for the purpose of the questionnaire – taken from personal experience or from the experience of people I know. Ethical issue number six has been the same for the past three years, with a reason.

You are a translator with some interpreting experience. You also have a smooth voice. You are asked to translate the audio description of a foreign porn movie. Later on, the same company enquires whether or not you would want to do a voice over for another porn movie. Do you accept the project?
1. Yes
2. No
3. Depends (explain:...)

It might be worth knowing that students fill in the questionnaire anonymously. Two years ago there was hardly a person who dared to come out about possibly accepting that job. Last year that number was slightly up. This year, however, about one in four students would accept that job. Other than a few smirks and laughs, the topic was never discussed really, leaving the case to the imagination of the students whether this is more an ethics of service or an ethics of representation.

Later on today, the Translation Group was happy to welcome Dr. Gillian Lathey from Roehampton University. The topic of a guest seminar, Invisible Storytellers, the role of translators in the history of English-language children’s literature, had little in common with the case mentioned earlier. Or so it seemed.

During the talk it became clear that Charles Samber, translator and transformer of the fairy tales of Charles Perrault into popular children’s stories in the late 1720s, also was a translator of pornography, or whatever was considered as such (one student dubbed it ‘distasteful’ in the questionnaire) at the time.

This not only raised a few eyebrows but also a few comments, not least that the rather lax attitude in morality of the time was abandoned soon after that. In the 1740s texts were rewritten and existing translations were retranslated. All the more strange as this all happened during the reign of the same British sovereign, George II, who reigned from 1727 to 1760.

Along with the comment that the 1720s was the time of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders too, Defoe’s link with children’s literature is obvious, the idea came to me that this perhaps was the same time as well when the medieval Dutch tale – originally French for that matter – of Van den Vos Reynaerde was sexed down.

The raunchier version of Van den Vos Reynaerde is said to have been one of the inspirations of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Dutch tale has been translated into English by Caxton as The Historie of Reynart the Foxe, and even Shakespeare’s Tybalt is said to have been mirrored on the character Tybeert from the story.

Concluding the seminar was my comment that I thought Puss in Boots had appeared first in Shrek. Real boots of Spanish leather! Tsjakka!

Workshops in translation technology

You are cordially invited to join on of the workshops in Translation Technology and Audiovisual Translation at Imperial College London's Translation Group

A summary list is given below, more information can be found via this link.

15 Jan 2011: Introduction SDL Trados, Christophe Declercq
5 Feb 2011: Subtitling for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing, Soledad Zárate
26 Feb 2011: Audio Description, Josélia Neves
19 March 2011: Dubbing, Frédéric Chaume
14 May 2011: Advanced Subtitling, Adriana Tortoriello
28 May 2011: Term Extraction and Terminology Management, Bettina Bajaj

SDL benefactor to the conference

Dear all

Slightly belated but still: all the best for the new year!

Regarding the Media For All conference the Translation Group is organising in June 2011, we are happy to announce that SDL has become our latest benefactor.

You can find more information about our patrons, benefactors and sponsors on our conference website

.

Patrons to the Mediaforall TakingStock conference

We are happy to announce that the European Commission Representation in the UK has become our latest Patron.

You can find more information about our patrons and sponsors on our conference website.

Mediaforall TakingStock on facebook

Dear all

As some of you already know the MScTrans is hosting a conference next year. The 4th International Media for All Conference – Audiovisual Translation: Taking Stock will run from Wednesday 29 June to Friday 1 July 2011, at Senate House. On Tuesday 28 June, workshops will take place at Imperial.

The event now sports its own facebook page, you are invited to join us there already.
You can find more information on www.imperial.ac.uk/mediaforall4 as well.

best wishes
the M4A-4 team

Reminder for Call for Papers

4th international Media for All conference
Audiovisual Translation: Taking Stock

29 June – 1 July 2011

CALL FOR PAPERS reminder
www.imperial.ac.uk/mediaforall4

The 4th International Media for All Conference – Audiovisual Translation: Taking Stock aims to bring together professionals, scholars, practitioners and other interested parties to explore audiovisual translation (AVT) in theory and practice, to ascertain the language needs of distributors and broadcasters, to discuss the linguistic and cultural dimensions of AVT, to look into potential synergies between the industry and the academic worlds, and to investigate the relevance and application of translation theory for this very specific and rapidly expanding translational genre. Special attention will be given to the notion of accessibility to information and to the social and economic implications of implementing appropriate quality standards.

In the global village of today, AVT is a form of communication expanding at a mind-boggling rate. Its active engagement with social, cultural, political, and technological changes calls for increased specialisation and greater diversification on the part of practitioners, trainers, and researchers alike. AVT crosses many disciplinary borders and offers a world of possibilities and challenges to its users. Markets worldwide are changing fast with distribution policies and strategies being shaped by political decisions, economic factors and audience expectations. AVT, from both the traditional translational perspective as well as the more encompassing accessibility angle, is considered to be a tool for social integration. The conference organisers are especially interested in the progress being made in turning today’s information society into an information society ‘for all’ and in the links between AVT and other disciplines within translation studies, or even text production. The traditional notion of what constitutes a ‘text’ has been eroded and this has led to a converging of research areas and a need for more interdisciplinary approaches.

This conference aims to map the current status of AVT profession, research, production, and consumer needs. The complexity and the ways in which research input, technology, user needs and the business aspects of AVT intertwine, merits serious thought. By taking stock of developments on these and other fronts, Media for All 4 will address the many questions raised by the rapid expansion of audiovisual communication, rising to the challenges posed by translation in the global market.

Through papers, panels, and round-table discussions, we hope to investigate these issues and to be able to promote new perspectives. We are inviting presentations reflecting the developments of our rapidly changing times within the scope of the themes listed below, and with a focus on audiovisual translation and media accessibility:

· Language transfer on screen: dubbing, interpreting, narration, opera and theatre surtitling, subtitling, voice-over, localisation, fandubbing, fansubbing
· Media access / cultural access: subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, live subtitling, respeaking, audio description, audio subtitling, sign language interpreting
· Innovation and new technologies: formats, platforms, 3D
· AVT in the global market: production and distribution, new trends, tools, needs, project management
· Professional practice: labour market, working conditions, standardisation and harmonisation, productivity, costs
· Professional ethics: public image of translators, relationship with clients and public organisations, the role of professional organisations, intellectual property rights, crowdsourcing and amateur translation
· Lobbies, policies, legislation, law enforcement and audience involvement
· History of AVT
· Quality standards and quality assurance
· Literacy and language learning/acquisition
· AVT research, old and new: globalisation, cultural transfer and nationalism
· Different (interdisciplinary) approaches (cognitive psychology, linguistics, discourse analysis, cultural studies, film studies...)
· Reception research and audience needs, broadcasting for minority audiences
· Censorship and manipulation
· AVT training: curricula, new needs, standards, didactics and skills

Proposals
Papers are allotted 20-minute slots to be followed by 10 minutes discussion (30 minutes in total). Proposals for papers should be presented on the attached abstract proposal form, also available on the conference website. Abstracts of 250-350 words should be sent to j.diaz-cintas@imperial.ac.uk by 15th November 2010. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 10 January 2011.

Conference venue
The 2 day conference, 30 June – 1 July 2011, will take place at Senate House.

Workshops venue
The workshops will be held at the Department of Humanities at Imperial College London on 29 June 2011. The topics and prices can be found on the conference website.

Official Language
English

Publication
A selection of the papers presented at the conference will be published by the organising committee

Important Dates
Deadline for the submission of proposals 15 November 2010
Notification of acceptance of proposals 10 January 2011
Early bird registration deadline 31 March 2011

Fore more information about the fee, visit the conference website. The fee includes: programme, abstract book, lunches, coffee/tea and biscuits.



Organising Committee, TransMedia Research Group
Mary Carroll (Titelbild Subtitling and Translation GmbH, a Red Bee Media Company, Berlin, Germany)
Jorge Díaz-Cintas (Imperial College, London, UK)
Anna Matamala (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)
Josélia Neves (Instituto Politécnico de Leiria, Portugal)
Pilar Orero (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)
Aline Remael (Artesis University College Antwerp, Belgium)
Diana Sanchez (MundoVisión, Red Bee Media, Seville, Spain)

Imperial College Organising Committee
Christophe Declercq
Jorge Díaz-Cintas
Andrés García García
Marga Navarrete
Mark Shuttleworth
Adriana Tortoriello

Local Organiser
Jorge Díaz-Cintas, Imperial College, London, UK
j.diaz-cintas@imperial.ac.uk

Monash University

We've had a visitor today, Shani Tobias, from the translation and interpreting studies at Monash University in Melbourne. Do have a look at their website.

The people there also publish the AALITRA Review, a peer-reviewed journal that publishes papers on literary translation into English. Do have a look a the website of AALITRA and download the first issue, for free.

So we can all go home now?

At the Trieste Conference on New Pathways last week, I squeezed too many slides into a ppt again, but at the end of the paper, a leading academic who shall not be named here now, got up and commented "So we can all go home now?"

Admittedly, the way translation technology is going these days is not an easy one and requires continuous updating. Already groups on next generation localisation are formed and so on.

I would like to paraphrase a current MSc student of ours who mentioned that the last thing she was expecting to hear was that machine translation might very well be part of a future translator's life and that this future is pretty much around the corner.

I hope the people at my presentation in Trieste also got the idea that the main purpose of my paper was to express both interest in future developments and personal concern.

Facebook Translations nearly patented their concept, which is good because the consequences would be difficult to gauge otherwise. However, in that respect do have a look at how the Geni genealogy portal in the US is trying to implement something similar (and has its website translated in 7 languages in 2 weeks by sheer crowdsourcing only).

And yes, I would love to spend the rest of my days writing poems and translating fiction, but the control freak in me also wants to keep an eye on these technological developments.

Christophe

Through the Language Glass: How Words Colour Your World by Guy Deutscher

from the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/12/language-glass-colour-guy-deutscher

YouTube subtitler - subtitling from a novice's perspective

This is not exactly new, subtitling material using content from YouTube has been around. However, I only started playing with it really thoroughly just now.

The YouTube blogspot explains how to get started. Of course I used a clip from 'The Thick of It', series 3, episode 8, the endings speeches and started providing English subtitles first and tried translating into Dutch after that.

Admittedly a translation approach in which you omit all the fucks does make the task of subtitling / translating a lot easier here! Translating into Dutch omitting the swear words as such but maintaining the register was an interesting exercise.

An overview of other software that could be used to play around all of these can be found at reelseo.com.

A final word should be kept on how YouTube tried to apply voice recognition for the English first (clearly a BBC-beep equivalent as it does not (want to) recognize the four letter words. The MT into Dutch which was then applied even made it more hilarious. In fact, closer to the excilerating dialogue of the original than was aspired initially.

For anyone who has not been spending an evening on this, highly recommended. For anyone who has, fast forward to another blog post!

Translation: why faster isn't better

Straight from the profession of para-legals a quite sensible approeach to translation!

Legal Translation – Why Faster Isn't Better

"Some misconceptions about translation:
You just "run the document through your computer" and then print out the translation
There is special computer software that automatically translates from one language to another
Anyone who took a foreign language in high school or college can translate
All you need is a dictionary to translate
Any bilingual person can translate
There's a website that translates sentences as you type them"

And on it goes

freelance work

Came across this rather miscellaneous looking blog, outsource translation, which in fact includes an extensive list of possible rates in many language pairs.

Also interesting: an online translation rates converter. For what it's worth.