Doc Byrne’s Translation Miscellany
Intercultural awareness guide for hospitals
Posted by Jody in Doc Byrne’s Translation Miscellany on November 17th, 2009
The Health Services Executive – the body responsible for managing public healthcare provision in Ireland – has just launched a guide for front-line healthcare staff entitled Health Services Intercultural Guide: Responding to the Needs of Diverse Religious Communities and Cultures in Healthcare Settings. According to the HSE website it is
primarily targeted at in-patient settings including acute, paediatric, maternity, hospices, residential/community units, etc. and will be of interest to a range of staff including chaplains, mortuary staff, nurses/midwives and health care assistants.
The HSE hopes that this guide will provide healthcare staff with the necessary understanding to allow them to deal sensitively with the numerous different, mainly religious, groups who are cared for in Irish hospitals. Having quickly leafed through the guide, which is available on the HSE website here, it certainly looks to be a useful resource. It outlines the basics of what makes the different groups tick and then provides advice on how to care for them sensitively.
The guide deals with a range of religious, spiritual and cultural traditions such as Sikhism, Islam, the various flavours of Christianity, Witchcraft and groups such as the Chinese Community, Irish Travellers and Roma as well as people with no religious beliefs, which is refreshing (although sadly, there’s no section on Flying Spaghetti Monsterism).
I have a colleague who would probably have kittens at what she might regard as an attempt to distill entire cultures into a compact set of “stereotypes” but I’d probably have to disagree with her. Okay it’s impossible to completely and accurately profile 25 different groups in one 228 page document so a certain amount of generalisation is inevitable but I think it is a very useful resource all the same. Like most people, I hardly know, let alone understand, even a fraction of the groups and cultures that make up the world so any document that casts even a little light on matters has to be a good thing.
My only concern would be that having to remember so much intercultural information might get in the way of medical treatment. While the value of holistic care is widely recognised – particularly by nurses who know that you don’t just treat the illness, you treat the person – there is a risk that bureaucratizing cultural sensitivity might force medical aspects of treatment into second place, ultimately compromising patient care. All in all, though, it’s good to see the HSE taking the issue of cultural diversity seriously. Let’s hope they sort out the issue of access to qualified interpreters too!
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Tales from Portsmouth
Posted by Jody in Doc Byrne’s Translation Miscellany on November 9th, 2009
Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth (via Wikitravel)
I’ve just come back from a conference in sunny Portsmouth where I gave a keynote on the subject of “the translator as writer“. Of course you can never be completely happy with your performance at conferences but overall I think my presentation went down pretty well. It was quite unnerving though that it was recorded on video so hopefully I won’t find it too painful when I get to watch it back. My topic was “Are technical translators writing themselves out of existence” and at some point over the next few days I’ll write something about it here.
The conference itself was excellent as usual with a good variety of topics presented by practitioners and academics from all over the world. The Portsmouth translation conference is, I have to admit, my favourite not just because of the topics discussed or the friendly, relaxed atmosphere but because it draws practising translators as well as researchers. For me, conferences that are solely for academics can be quite dull so to have presentations from the word-face too is quite refreshing. Sometimes academics can lose sight of what translation is about and focus on obscure issues far removed from the actual process of translation.
There were some hits and one or two misses at this year’s conference. I won’t name and shame the misses because that’s not nice but I will point out some of the highlights for me. First up was Arvi Tavast from Talinn University who gave a really interesting and really useful look at how translators view their roles and whether they should correct errors in the source text. Backed up with empirical research, Tavast showed that there was quite a significant difference in how translators approached, for example, errors in source texts. He also showed that opinion is divided among agencies as regards expectations for translations and translator behaviour. For me, this was one of the most relevant pieces of research I have come across in quite a while.
Quite a useful way of explaining punctuation as it turns out (via Air Guitar Australia)
I also went to a workshop by Janet Fraser which looked at how we teach writing skills to translation students although the activities, she stressed, could be used by professional translators as a “warm-up” exercise. Normally I run a mile whenever someone mentions workshop but this one was actually useful and fun. The activity involved giving participants several trigger words and asking them to write an advertisement aimed at tourists. The upshot of it all was that without exception everyone knew how to write texts like this. We all knew that particular linguistics structures and strategies were expected and we all produced quite similar texts. The challenge, then, is getting students to unlock these skills when translating.
Other highlights were Stephen Crabbe’s talk on the development of controlled language as well as the other keynote, entitled “Inspiration” by director and translator Neil Bartlett. Neil managed to persuade a room full of people to act out some bizarre circular arm movements to illustrate the need to be mindful of punctuation in translation. From the back of the room the result looked like the national air guitar championships. Classic stuff!
One theme which cropped up a lot over the course of the various presentations was that the public doesn’t fully understand what translation involves. Some of the examples of how this manifests itself included vague instructions for translation jobs, unrealistic expectations as regards the type of translation, unreasonable deadlines etc. This is probably true and it might suggest that there is a need to educate the general public and raise awareness among non-translators of what it is we do. But the thought also occurred to me that this might come across as some sort of cheap and desperate attempt to make people respect us, maybe even love us poor misunderstood translators. After all, do we fully understand what it is doctors, architects or pilots do? Nope! But we still respect them and trust their judgement. I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m still exhausted from the drive back from Portsmouth and could really do with a nap.
A truly multilingual web?
Posted by Jody in Doc Byrne’s Translation Miscellany on October 31st, 2009
A unanimous decision last night by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers which regulates the naming system for websites, to permit domain names to be written in scripts other than English, is being heralded as a new era of international web use.
Traditionally, domain names have been restricted to 26 characters in the Latin alphabet and could include ten numerals and a hyphen. Critics have long argued that this was unfair on groups whose languages did not use English characters. In many ways this is true – is it really fair to expect someone in China with a Chinese keyboard to figure out how to input English characters so that they could visit a website in their own country? Absolutely not. Similarly, it is hard to justify forcing someone in Israel or in Saudi Arabia to transliterate the names of companies or organisations just so that they can get a website.
Promotional video from ICANN explaining internationalised domain names (Source: http://tinyurl.com/y8oehy3).
Part of the reason for this, as I have written about before here, is that the Internet, like computers in general, has its origins in the largely monolingual, English-speaking engineering community of the United States. There’s nothing wrong with this – they had to start somewhere although thankfully, these days, multilingual issues are usually considered from the start of development projects.
Things have changed, however, and computers are now a global phenomenon as is the Internet. In fact the Internet, more so than any other modern invention, is a truly global entity and it is only right that everyone should be able to use it in their own language. So from this point of view, ICANNs decision to permit Internet domains to be written in Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Korean, Hindi and various other non-Latin scripts is timely and to be commended.
But I can’t help wondering whether this decision might actually prove to be counterproductive, at least in the short to medium-term. Think about it. Up to now, English speakers have had it easy, no matter what website they wanted to access, regardless of what country the site was hosted in they simply typed in the address using Latin characters. Good for people with English keyboards but not so good for those who didn’t who had to figure out how to input Latin characters on their computers.
From now on, people will be able to access websites with names written in their own languages and they won’t have to bother with complicated foreign characters. But wait a minute. Whereas before, people only had to contend with Latin characters – and like it or not, English is still something of a lingua franca so quite a lot of people are at least familiar with the characters – now they are going to have to deal with Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Hebrew, Hindi and who knows how many other writing systems.By permitting different countries to use different writing systems for their domain names, ICANN have made the process of accessing websites from around the world much more complicated unless someone comes up with some form of domain name translation service to allow people to type in phonetic versions of website names and be brought to the correct website. Even then this wouldn’t solve the problem for people who don;t know how to pronounce foreign language characters.
I know I’m probably on my own in thinking this and I also know that this might be seen rather cynically as sour grapes that English has just lost its dominant position on the Internet (honestly, that’s not it), but what worries me now is that the new rules, while undoubtedly democratic and beneficial in many ways, will ultimately fragment the Internet by causing people to stick to those websites whose names they can actually type into their computers. Surely there must be a more practical solution?
Instead of reinforcing the Internet as a “worldwide” infrastrctural resource, by bowing to pressure to cater for national linguistic preferences means the authorities have lost sight of what the Internet is about and set the scene for numerous regional Internets, effectively making the Internet world smaller. There are rumours that ICANN had no real choice but to approve the new internationalised domains because thefear of provoking a split in the international web community which would see the creation of new, separate and independent Internets, thus seeing its authority disappear. The only real benefactors as I see it are the domain registrars who will make a fortune registering billions of new domain names. I can’t be the only one to wonder what the next big counter-intuitive idea will be. Can I?
Who’d have thought dictionaries could be sexy?
Posted by Jody in Doc Byrne’s Translation Miscellany on October 22nd, 2009
I take it back, not all dictionaries are bad. Without a word of a lie, not half an hour after I posted my last piece about dictionaries and how over-rated they can be, a book (an unsolicited one I might add) landed on my desk which made me wonder whether dictionaries really can be useful after all. I’m a little hesitant to say what this book is about partly because I know I will be swamped by dozens of comment spammers offering me all manner of filth and potions, and partly because I don’t think anyone will believe me. It’s a dictionary of sex terms. Honestly, you couldn’t make it up.
Ooh, it goes where?!
Respected German publisher of dictionaries Langenscheidt has teamed up with leading “sexperts” Erika Berger and Lilo Wanders to give us its latest novelty dictionary, “Langenscheidt Sex-Deutsch/Deutsch-Sex
In fairness, it’s a tiny little book and it’s probably not enough to corrupt the youth of our nation (no, hold on, it might actually) but – and this is important – it does actually perform a public service. Can you imagine trying to find translations and definitions for various coitus-related concepts for yourself? No matter how legitimate and pure your intentions, typing these words into Google will open up a whole world of nastiness right there on your monitor. Get it wrong and you could end up unemployed, divorced or on some sort of international register of sex offenders.
So yes, dictionaries can be useful but more than that, they can be quite funny too.
Time to throw away your dictionaries?
Posted by Jody in Doc Byrne’s Translation Miscellany on October 16th, 2009
One of the great myths of technical translation is that it is all about specialised terminology. It isn’t that surprising really because it is one of the first things that strikes most people when they look at a technical text. But is it really such a problem? Peter Newmark once said that terminology accounts for a mere 5-10% of a typical technical text. I recently spoke to a senior translator from the World Intellectual Property Organization who said that their analyses of patent abstracts showed a 50% terminology content but I would say that, given the specialised and highly specific function of these texts, this is probably the exception rather than the rule.
A more practical use for dictionaries?
But anyway, assuming that Newmark’s estimate is true and even taking into account the myriad types of texts where the proportion of terminology may vary slightly, you have to ask the question: So what? What’s the big deal with terminology?
Traditionally in translation circles researchers have only been interested in terminology but unless you’re actually a terminologist, to reduce technical translation down to the level of a purely terminological issue is downright blinkered and misses the point completely. This approach also had the rather unfortunate effect of supporting Friedrich Schleiermacher’s horrible claim way back in 1813 that technical translation is a mechanical activity that anyone with a grasp of two languages can do. I know that as a philosopher it was his job to spout all kinds of insane nonsense on everything from the meaning of life to how many sheets of toilet paper you should use for a number 2, but I’d still like to bludgeon him about the head with a couple of soggy dictionaries for saying that. Oh, if I only had a time machine…
If you ask any experienced technical translator they’ll tell you that, more often than not, it’s not individual terms that cause most problems, but the way those terms fit into sentences that cause the problems. To tell the truth, depending on the subject area and the language pair you are working with, specialised terminology is sometimes (though not always) the easiest part of a text to translate. In other words it’s the things in a text that aren’t terminology-related that pose the greatest challenges; it’s not the cargo but the ship that needs attention. Things like register, style, set phrases, references to laws or sometimes whether certain information is appropriate for the target audience or whether the way in which information is sequenced in instructions, for example, makes sense. Sometimes you just don’t know what it is the original author is trying to say. That’s what causes us problems and that’s what we should be concerned about instead of getting undergarments in a bunch about specialised terminology. It doesn’t matter how good our cargo of precious specialised terms is, if we’re going to load them onto a leaky old rust bucket which will probably sink before it leaves the harbour, we’re wasting our time. This isn’t to say that getting specialised terminology right is not important. It simply means that we need to put it in perspective; we shouldn’t devote too much time to it and risk neglecting other areas which are equally or even more important.
There are, however, two real issues at play here. The first is the tendency of people to become fixated on the specialised terminology in a text – perfectly understandable to a certain extent, particularly in the case of trainee translators or if you are less familiar with the subject area. When training to become a translator it is sometimes easy to become obsessed with finding the best specialised dictionaries because those specialised terms are so damn scary.
This leads on to the second point which is where should people go to find terminology. Accepted wisdom would tell us to look in a dictionary but many people would disagree for the simple fact that dictionaries, like computers, become obsolete the second they are made. With technology, for example, evolving so quickly new terms are emerging while others fall out of use and even with the latest production methods, traditional dictionaries cannot be manufactured quickly enoughto stay completely up-to-date . The result is that dictionaries will contain words which are never used while omitting new terms which are used frequently. What’s more, you can never be really sure which of the possible words suggested by a dictionary is the right one. In the absence of detailed contextual information, using a dictionary can sometimes be a lottery and I often have a sinking feeling after using one. My students sometimes look at me in disbelief when I tell them to forget about dictionaries, that they are just a last resort – finding reliable parallel texts which contain the terms is always more useful because you get the translation as well as the collocation and other stylistic information to boot. Soon enough though, most people realise on their own that their efforts are best spent on finding parallel texts instead of searching for the ultimate specialised dictionary.
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