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More sessions, and too many at one time, making it hard to choose which ones to attend. Some offer significant added value in the attendance; some don’t (the corresponding paper on the Conference CD suffices).
And some may not be worth going to at all. I ran across an old acquaintance, Paul G., who mentioned that he decided to leave a session devoted to petroleum industry terminology when the speaker described the distillation column as an apparatus in which “long chains of hydrocarbons are broken down into shorter chains” (a function actually performed by various “cracking” units, whereas the distillation column separates crude oil into component fractions, some of which are later cracked).
You can’t win them all.
Next year’s conference is scheduled for about the same time in my back yard, in Denver.
The morning’s program was devoted to the annual meeting of all ATA members, which I decided to skip, as I have nothing valuable to add to the discussion.
My day began by walking to the Marriott from my base near the United Nations. Once in the vicinity of the conference hotel, I kept walking, past The Lion King, past Hamlet (starring Jude Law), and past the Kodama restaurant, where I had lunch on Thursday.
I ended up at another Japanese restaurant called Ryo & You, where I had a very nice meal. Unlike the Kodama, where most of the staff is Hispanic, the staff at the Ryo & You were Japanese, upon whom I could practice my fledgling phrases in Japanese. The lunch special was excellent, but the memory I will take away from the place is the wall of sake bottles labeled with the names of their respective owners, allowing ongoing consumption of the contents whenever they return to partake of a meal.
The sessions I attended were excellent. The first was a terminology “bootcamp” aimed at transltation-related terms. As a translator who came into the business with no formal linguistics training (as opposed to language education, which I do have), I have increasingly begun to understand how the lack of ability to express ideas about what I do acts as an impediment to growth.
The second session was related to conference interpreting and was most excellently presented. (It also gave me another data point in support of my idea that good interpreters are good performers, in the sense of performing for an audience.) I picked up more tips in this session than I do in most sessions.
In between, I wandered the exhibitor area. There would appear to be an ever-increasing number of software products out there intent on competing with Trados, one of the currently better-known translation memory products.
One of these is Snowball, a product being promoted by an affable fellow from Denmark, Erich Hegenberger. I had run across Erich on Twitter some time back, and did a cursory evaluation of an early version of the product (and even provided feedback, some of which influenced the current iteration of the product). I look forward to spending some more time with the updated version of the product once I get back home.
The evening was taken up with the annual Slavic Languages Division dinner, which was held at the Russian Samovar restaurant on West 52nd. A more complete report will appear later, as I am on the hook to provide a review of the festivities for the Division’s newsletter.
I took the opportunity to sleep in this morning, and then to wander Manhattan’s streets in zig-zag fashion on my way from 2nd Avenue & 45th to Times Square. Although I grew up in Queens, just across the East River, I left New York more or less permanently a quarter century ago, so in a way, all of what I’ve seen today seems new and fresh to me.
I managed to show up at the Association’s meeting in time to cast my vote (I’m a certified and hence, voting member), and attended a useful presentation on the use of verbs (”verbing”) in translation, which I am sure sounds dull as beach sand to the uninterested bystander, but the meeting room was packed, and the presenter knew his stuff. I’m ambivalent about the subject, as I think verbing weirds communication.
Afterward, I grabbed lunch at one of those Japanese run-in-quick places before the afternoon’s main event, 12th Annual Susana Greiss Lecture, which this year was given by Pavel Palazhchenko on the subject of Translation and Interpreting in a Pragmatic Age. The talk was well-received, as was the presentation that followed, on Internet resources for translators.
Completely unrelated to the ATA, I called my old Russian professor, who works in Manhattan, but my planning was poor and I shall have to do better next time. Before cutting the connection, my old prof did turn me on to a wonderful store that sells writing instruments (pens) – Arthur Brown on 45th Street just west of 5th Avenue – where I met a breathtakingly knowledgeable saleswoman when I stopped by on the way back to the hotel.
I plans hold, I will be dining with a couple of friends who are also here at the conference, so I should go get dressed. It’s been a good day.
The American Translators Association returned to New York, the city of its roots, for its 50th Annual Conference.
When I registered for the conference two weeks ago, all of the rooms set aside by the Marriott Marquis (just off Times Square and 45th) had been reserved, so after a few more sticker-shock-inducing calls to nearby hotels, I went to priceline.com and bought a room at a hotel near the United Nations headquarters building, six “long” Manhattan blocks from the conference hotel.
Part of the reason for the dearth of rooms two weeks before the conference is that attendance is way up compared with previous years. I buttonholed Walter Bacack, ATA Executive Director, and he told me there were something like 2400 persons registered for the conference.
It’s also likely why the President’s Reception, traditionally held on the Wednesday before the first full program day, was so packed.
It’s off to sleep, as it’s been a long day (I got up at oh-dark-thirty to catch the flight out of Houston).
I ran across the name of Yulia Dubinkina-Ilina a couple of years ago in connection with a parable she apparently wrote that caused me to arch my eyebrows and imagine hearing a little “pop!” of realization. It is a shame her work is not concentrated in one place, or perhaps that makes finding her gems that much more of a pleasure.
I found the following parable in a post at “The Touching Center” (my translation follows):
Однажды к Хинг Ши пришёл его ученик и спросил:
— Учитель, объясни мне, почему я, имея такие же глаза, как и у тебя, часто не замечаю того, что замечаешь ты.
Хинг Ши вышел из комнаты и через какое-то время вернулся, держа в руках папирус на незнакомом для ученика языке. Развернув его, он спросил:
— Что ты видишь?
Ученик, не желая выдавать своё незнание, сказал:
— Я вижу многовековую мудрость в этих словах.
Тогда Хинг Ши сказал:
— На самом деле перед тобой — записка египетского купца. А знаю и вижу я это потому, что однажды, не побоявшись признаться себе в том, что я чего-то не знаю, выучил этот язык.
Once upon a time, Hing Shi’s student came to him and asked “Teacher, explain why I – who have the same eyes as you do – often do not notice the things you do.”
Hing Shi left the room and after some time, returned carrying a papyrus that was written in a language unknown to the student. Unrolling the papyrus, Hing Shi asked “What do you see?”
The student, not wishing to betray his ignorance, said “I see centuries-old wisdom in these words.”
Then Hing Shi said “In fact, what is before you is a note written by an Egyptian merchant. This I know and see because once, unafraid to admit to myself that I didn’t know something, I learned this language.”
There is always something new to learn.
Too many times, I’ve backed up what I thought were relevant parts of my office computer to take along with me on a road trip, only to find, once I’m at my destination, that I hadn’t included some out-of-the-way directory in my backup. Via Lifehacker (Disk2vhd Turns Your PC Into a Virtual Machine), I ran across a Windows utility called disk2vhd that creates a file representing a “virtual hard drive,” which is essentially a file containing the contents of an entire physical disk.
The idea behind this VHD file is that it can be used inside of a “virtual machine,” which is an environment that operates like a physical computer, except that this environment has been created by a computer program. This kind of approach is useful for testing, or for running multiple virtual machines on the same computer simultaneously.
But you don’t need to use a virtual machine program to make use of VHD files.
Creating the VHD file is pretty easy with disk2vhd, as it doesn’t matter whether you have software running while you’re creating the disk image. Afterward, the VHD file can be used with a virtual machine program (like the free Microsoft Virtual PC), or it can simply be “mounted” as if it were a drive on a computer, using any program that works with VHD files.
A little while ago, I ran across a program called Gizmo that does exactly that, although I had been using it to mount images of data CDs that I carry around (indeed, my Aspire One doesn’t have an optical drive, so creating .ISO images and mounting them using a program like Gizmo is about the only way I can think of – short of plugging in a USB optical drive – to conveniently install software on such machine).
So now, after having created a VHD file of my work computer, I can access the entire contents of my work computer while on the road.
There comes a point, in using Microsoft Word, where you realize you’re more productive using your keyboard than a mouse, and very often, it’s easy to encapsulate a mouse action into a keyboard-activated macro.
For example, the text I translate often involves superscripts and subscripts, for which Word helpfully offers toolbar buttons. The following one-line macros let me superscript highlighted text without taking my fingers from the keyboard:
Sub AA_ToSuperscript()
'
' AA_ToSuperscript Macro
'
Selection.Font.Superscript = wdToggle
End Sub
Two additional observations about this macro:
- setting Selection.Font.Superscript to wdToggle means that if you execute the macro again, the superscripted text will be returned to normal;
- prefixing the names of my personal macros with AA_ groups them all at the top of the macro list, should I care to display it.
The macro for subscripting is a simple variation on a theme, with Selection.Font.Subscript replacing Selection.Font.Superscript in the above code.
Do you have any nifty Word macros that you’d like to share? Post ‘em in the comments!
My attention was directed a couple of years ago to New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which had apparently made the decision to forego human translation, deciding instead to offer non-English speaking visitors machine translations of site pages. Presumably this was done as a cost-cutting move, despite the fact that the resulting translations were, by the MTA’s own modest admission, “imperfect.”
On a page devoted to electric car evacuation procedures, for example, the term “Long Island Rail Road” was rendered in Russian as “Длинняя дорога рельса острова” (literally – and it’s hard to do this because the endings make no sense – “Long road of island rail”), and from the same page (devoted, by the way, to safety issues), there was this:
Whatever the emergency, rest assured that your LIRR crew will keep you informed and assist you in any way necessary.
Аварийная ситуация, остальные убедили что ваш экипаж LIRR будет держать вас после того как он сообщен и помогать вы в любой дороге обязательно.
(Believe me, the Russian is a terrible mishmash of Cyrillic words that fails to even communicate even the gist of what was intended. Ultimately it is a waste of pixels.)
I went back to the site a little while back to see if any changes have been made at the site since my visit two years ago. There have.
The MTA still firmly believes in machine translation, but has switched from whatever it had been using to Google Translate. Now, for the examples cited above, no attempt is made (and properly so) to translate “Long Island Rail Road” and the translation offered for the sentence shown in the quote above has improved, though it still falls short of a colloquial, grammatically correct translation:
Независимо от чрезвычайных ситуаций, будьте уверены, что ваш LIRR экипаж будет информировать Вас и помочь Вам в любой ситуации необходимо.
The gist is there, certainly.
Though the overall trend has been toward improvement, machine translation still has a long way to go, and while there are some that feel machine translation will never amount to much, progress in a related area of artificial intelligence should not be ignored.
The idea of programming computers to play chess was depicted in broad brush strokes at roughly the same time as the idea of machine-based language translation. Both eventually became part of a coordinated interest in machine-based intelligence.
In the early years of computer chess, it was commonly thought that really successful programs would have to be programmed to replicate the way humans think in order to achieve good results. (Contrary to what you might think, human grandmasters invariably consider no more than two or three different moves in any given position, and rarely calculate exhaustive variations to any great depth.)
It turns out, however, that massive brute-force searches and refinements in the way programs evaluated chess positions were able to make up for the lack of imagination, and in fact, research into finding ways of selecting likely “candidate moves” the way humans do didn’t advance very far.
So it may very well be that we’re merely awaiting a spectacular paradigm shift in the field of machine translation – and perhaps also in the very way humans use language in an increasingly binary world – that will usher in an era of acceptable machine translation. The best information and smart money indicate that currently, the statistical approach – such as the one apparently used by Google – yields only slightly better results than traditional methods.
How long it will take machine translators to achieve the same kind of success as chess-playing algorithms, which went from playing beginner-level games in the early 1970s to beating the reigning World Champion by the end of the century?
That remains to be seen, but in my opinion, the day is still far off, if the state of machine-translation art is any indication.
Every once in a while, I’ll be invited to fill out a questionnaire for a translation agency. Said questionnaire usually asks for all sorts of information, often at an exhaustive level of detail (for example, just in the phone number section, asking for work phone, home phone, cell phone, secondary cell phone, fax number, as well as a contact number to call if none of the aforementioned respond!).
Other requested data typically include a marked set of check boxes to indicate subject areas of expertise, which mostly amuses me, because all too often, the subject breakdown is either overly granular or not granular enough to be really useful (but that may be just my opinion).
One questionnaire I received a few years ago wanted to know everything about my office setup, from whether I owned a laser printer down to the clock rate of my computer’s CPU and how much memory was installed on my system – though to be frank, I couldn’t imagine how useful such data might be in selecting me over anyone else for a job, and anyway, I own more than one computer.
Back when I was starting out in the business, I used to fill out lots of such questionnaires, thinking that the more agencies knew of me, the better shot I had of landing jobs.
As time passed, a Small Truth™ smacked me in the head: those completed questionnaires never resulted in a single assignment. And my experience wasn’t unique. In fact, a good friend of mine summarized this Small Truth™ as follows:
Your chance of landing a job with an agency is inversely proportional to the length of their questionnaire.
Why might this be?
I can’t say for sure, but I think the nature of the beast is such that if the agency relies on the results of database searches more than the relationships developed by their project managers, you will have to be incredibly lucky – or you will have had to quote a rock-bottom rate – to land a job. On the other hand, if the agency relies on a database only when its “regular” freelancers are not available, well… it’s pretty much the same result, but with an even lower probability of walking away with an assignment.
What has your experience been in this area? Are agency questionnaires worth filling out?
An incident from my days as an engineer made a deep impression on me.
It was the day after the 1984 Academy Awards, during which Milos Forman’s film Amadeus had walked away with the Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor. Exchanging morning pleasantries with my boss, I jokingly noted that there was still hope for the cultural redemption of the country.
“What do you mean?” asked my boss.
“Well, if a film about Mozart can win an Oscar, then anything is possible,” I said, light-heartedly.
“Who?” asked my boss.
When it became clear that neither the name “Mozart” nor the film title Amadeus meant anything to him, I was… well… a little shocked, to say the least. In my world view, being out of touch with what was popular at the box office was forgivable, but to be so narrowly focused in one’s life as to not have picked up the name “Mozart” from somewhere – if only by a kind of social osmosis – or to be aware even of the existence of a thing called classical music (even if one never listened to the stuff)… that just made my jaw drop.
Having a narrow focus is not a malady unique to techies, but many techies suffer from it (indeed, some even boast of it). For as long as I can remember, though, despite a natural inclination toward the technical end of the world, I’ve striven to develop my “weak side.” By this I mean I’ve worked at learning something about the nontechnical world: languages (of course), art, literature, and so on.
Not too surprisingly, this “broadening” has paid benefits to me in the interpretation and translation end of the world. (I don’t doubt that some technical “rounding” would not benefit nontechnical translators, either.)
For some time, however, I’d noticed that the “Russian” side of my life lagged behind, from both a cultural point of view (a common shortcoming among Americans, it is said) and that of non-technical vocabulary. So, some time ago, I decided to do something to remedy this defect.
The first fruit of that effort was the translation of the lyrics to the song Ваше благородие from Vladimir Motyl’s popular Russian film Белое солнце пустыни (White Sun of the Desert).
An interesting piece of lore about the film is that it is an obligatory part of a cosmonaut’s ritual on the eve of a trip into space from the space port at Baikonur. (I seem to recall someone telling me that this tradition dated back to Gagarin’s flight, but as the film was shot in 1970, I have my doubts. Nonetheless, somewhere along the line, it did become a tradition.)
When I had an opportunity to watch the film, I was struck by the melody of Ваше благородие. Unfortunately, between my deficient non-technical Russian vocabulary and my poor skills at deciphering sung lyrics in any language, the only words I could make out were those of the refrain in the last line: Не везет мне в смерти, повезет в любви! (I’m no good at dying, I’ll fall in love instead!) The line intrigued me, so I resolved to get hold of the lyrics and translate them.
I’ll not bore you with the details of the consultations, false starts, and dead ends involved in attempting to fashion a workmanlike translation that I felt was true to the original. What I will tell you is that the experience of working outside of what you normally do will make you a stronger translator.
Rounding can take various forms, too. Recently, I returned to stamp collecting, after an interval of more years than I care to count, having given up the hobby in my teens because of the sheer extent of the what could be collected, combined with an unwillingness to settle down and concentrate on some kind of specialty – a country or a topic – the way most collectors eventually do.  Paleolithic Cave Paintings at Lascaux, France I decided to collect French stamps for a number of reasons, among them, to learn more about French history and culture. Sure, you can get that kind of thing out of books, and in great truckloads as well, but the stamps of a country provide a sort of “CliffsNotes” version of what that country – through its postal authorities – thinks is notable, best, and worth commemorating about the country. I’m not at all sure the hobby will make me a better French translator, but it does provide a concise and enjoyable way of learning more about the culture.
These and other activities provide an environment for continued growth and improvement. Try it yourself. Develop your weak side. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
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