Doc Byrne’s Translation Miscellany
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.
The devil is a great language teacher
Posted by Jody in Doc Byrne’s Translation Miscellany on October 9th, 2009
Technically I was learning Spanish here with my band Mortuum
I was toying with calling this post “The devil made me do it” or “Heavy metal made me what I am” but I was a little concerned about the kind of people that would attract to the site. Anyway, what I’m trying to get across is that in this day and age of global English and what many people regard as cultural homogenisation, heavy metal is one of the few remaining bastions where it’s actually okay not to be a “world citizen” speaking (and singing) in some clichéd mid-Atlantic variety of English.
This might sound like some pathetic exercise in jingoistic fist-waving at all things global but it’s really not. Spend more than a few minutes looking through the Myspace pages of various metal bands and you’ll notice something strangely curious. Lots of them are singing in their own languages. Even the people who speak languages that aren’t considered to be “beautiful” in the traditional sense. It doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t make sense, but for some strange reason it does.
A few months ago I discovered a band called Equilibrium who hail from Bavaria in Germany. They’re really good in the battle/folk metal genre but their vocal style means that unless you’re really used to this kind of music, they could be singing in any language. But in their press release they mention the fact that they have established a huge fanbase “despite the fact that they sing in German”. This seems to acknowledge the perception that in order to succeed, you need to sing in English. Thankfully, this seems to be changing primarily as a result of the folk metal movement where bands take pride in their cultural heritage and combine it with metal music.
One of the very first bands I can remember to brush aside the “rules” of heavy metal was a thrash metal band called Sepultura from Brazil. I’ll admit they’ve never been one of my favourite bands, mainly because they have a truly annoying vocalist, but they have had some rare moments of inspiration. Ratamahatta from their Roots album is one such moment and it is a mix of indigenous Brazilian rhythms combined with stripped down metal guitars and a whole dose of Brazilian Portuguese lyrics. Like most people at the time, I had never heard anything like this before: it was dark and exotic, sinister and a little bit hypnotic and I was absolutely blown away. The video was in stop-motion and with its voodoo, zombies and jungles it just served to add to the whole awe of the experience. It will probably be one of the best examples of national pride expressed in metal and it certainly made me realise that there’s a lot more to Brazilian music than samba and the Bossa nova and there’s more to Brazil than the carnival in Rio. It wasn’t long after that album though that fatherhood and various internal squabbles put Sepultura on a lengthy hiatus but at least they went out on top. [Although other bands like England's Skyclad were probably the first to fuse folk-influenced music with metal, Sepultura showed it could be done with mass appeal and without being cheesy]
Sepultura - Ratamahatta
(Language: Brazilian Portuguese; Genre: Thrash)Some of the lyrics:
Biboca, Garagem, Favela
Fubanga, Maloca, Bocada
Maloca, Bocada, Fubanga
Favela, Garagem, Biboca, Porra !!!
Ze Do Caixao, Zumbi, Lampiao
Ratamahatta !!! …
Some of the best bands sing in their own language despite the commercial pressures to sing in English to satisfy the demands of the UK and US markets - both notorious for their lower than average foreign language skills. But while singing in English can kick-start a band’s career - it can have quite the opposite effect and can be quite be fatal for a band’s success. Look at Rammstein from Germany. The main reason I started listening to them was because they spoke German and heavy metal always sounds good in German. I was one of the few kids on the dancefloor who could sing along with the songs and I liked that a lot. But their brand of metal, a kind of operatic industrial hardcore, worked incredibly well in German. And so they got more and more popular, and more and more people I know started learning a bit of German. I know it definitely helped to motivate me and it made learning the language a lot more fun.
Rammstein - Sonne
Then what happened? The fools started throwing in the odd English line here and there. Now more and more of their songs have English; some are even more English than German and in my opinion they have completely lost what made them unique. Now they’re no different to any other generic, middle-of-the-road rock band that plays to hordes of mopey-looking emo kids with dodgy hairstyles and too much eyeliner (and that’s just the boys!). The decision to start pandering to what they thought non-German speaking audiences wanted was seen by a lot of people as selling out and Rammstein have started to lose a lot of their shine .
But bizarrely enough a hybrid approach hasn’t affected bands like Korpiklaani who have many bilingual songs. It’s possible that they started out with varying degrees of bilingual-ness and so can’t be accused of suddenly changing their philosophy. Perhaps it is possible to combine more than one language but like, treason, it’s simply a matter of dates.
Some languages lend themselves really well to contemporary music, although many only really work well for particular genres. Think of French: perfect for love songs and folk music but terrible for rap (but then rap sounds pretty rubbish in most languages). And now, thanks to bands like Orakle, it turns out that French works for black metal too. Some languages like German are obvious choices for metal but there are surprises - Finnish for example, has a particularly epic feel to it and Spanish can muster up a level of menace and intimidation that few others can. I’ll let you make up your mind about Master’s Hammer from the Czech Republic, Lithuania’s Obtest and Latvia’s Skyforger who all sing in their native languages.
People have tried to copy foreign music styles and transpose them into other languages. There’s a particularly dodgy band called Mortiis (don’t even bother looking them up, it’s really not worth it) who have emulated the sound and style of Rammstein really well except they sing in English (despite being Norwegian) but it still doesn’t work. Sometimes you need the va va voom of a foreign language.
On the other side of the coin are those bands who don’t sing in their native tongue but still manage to somehow avoid the acultural blandness of their peers and remain firmly rooted in their own culture. They actually succeed in bringing people into their cultural circle. Bands like Amorphis who base almost all of their lyrics on the Finnish epic poem the Kalevala but sing in English are a prime example. They have the accessibility that monolingual English speakers crave but still “get their message out there”. (Their lyrics are pretty corny in all honesty but you’ve got to give them credit all the same!).
Ireland too has a proud tradition in this particular approach. Possibly because, shamefully, not enough of us speak Irish well enough to be able to write or understand the lyrics (myself included) or possibly because Irish is one of those languages that doesn’t lend itself to metal but the vast majority of celtic metal bands like Cruachan or Waylander sing in English but about themes from Irish folklore and mythology. But unlike bands such as Amorphis they incorporate lots of influences from traditional Irish music and culture, which in my mind, makes up for the lack of Gaeilge. I do know of one metal band from Cork called Corr Mhóna who do sing in Irish but alas, I think they’re something of a rarity. You can listen to some of their work here.
For me, one of the biggest aids for learning languages was listening to foreign bands - Brujeria and Radikal Hardcore in Spanish and Rammstein, Die ärtze and Die Fantastischen Vier in German. I know a few people who have learned languages simply to find out what their favourite bands were singing about. I even know of Irish people who have learned how to speak Irish in order to play folk-based metal; sometimes even just to research the lyrics. For those of you not in the know, Irish children begin learning Irish in primary school and continue right through secondary school. Unfortunately for most of us, our competence rarely extends beyond “where are the toilets?”, “my name is…”, “what’s your name?” and “how are you? ” so this is some achievement.
What better way to practice your Spanish pronunciation than singing in Spanish about satanic Mexican drug dealers (this is me by the way!)
I would even go so far as to say that I am where I am today in part because of foreign heavy metal. It made languages even more relevant to me because it wasn’t just about getting a job it was about having fun too. Listening to German and Spanish metal bands helped me through those dark days when all I seemed to do was practice grammar exercises and nothing seemed to be sticking and I wondered if I’d ever make it as a translator. I even learned a bit of French so I could go to a festival. Metal has also helped me from an intercultural point of view. No matter where you are in the world, a Metallica t-shirt is always a Metallica t-shirt. You can be in the middle of a small village in the middle of nowhere, see someone in a Napalm Death and know that you have something in common and could probably have several beers and laughs.
But in all seriousness, given the fact that so many multilingual hairy rockers are wandering around because of metal shouldn’t more attention be paid to promoting music, not just metal but all types of music? Shouldn’t the EU, for example, promote and subsidise bands that sing in their own language. Not only will it make for much better music but it will undoubtedly provide another means of promoting its aim of multilingualism throughout the continent.
A Quick Crash Course in Non-English Language Metal
There are so many bands to choose from that the problem is deciding who to pick and which languages to represent. Some bands are far too extreme to include, whether because of their music, their vocal style or their subject matter so that helped to narrow the field somewhat. But there are still hundreds of songs. In the end I decided to pick stuff I like a lot so what you have here is a very short introduction which is very tailored towards my own musical tastes. All I’ll say is if you don’t have eardrums of leather and haven’t listened to much metal, turn the volume down a little bit but definitely give each song a proper listen.
Equilibrium - Blut im Auge
(Language: German; Genre: Battle Metal)
From the lyrics:
Was ich sah auf meiner Reise,
Scheint zu wahr es zu erzähln,
Drum versuch ich auf meine Weise,
Euch mit mir dort hinzunehmn.Wie ich einst auf dunklen Pfaden,
Weit von hier in Nordens Land,
Sah was mir den Atem raubte,
Was ich bis da nicht gekannt.Blut Im Auge
Auf wunde Knie
So sank ich nieder
So fand ich sie
Korpiklaani - Keep on Galloping
(Language: Finnish; Genre: Folk Metal/Huppa)
From the lyrics:
Lennä, laukkaa heposeni,
lennä, laukkaa hallavaharja,
kiiä halki kangasmaitten,
murjo poikki pientareitten,
kanna minnuu maailmalla,
kulettele kuskiasi,
näytä kaikki nähtävyyet,
uuet maat ja uuet paikat.Mikäs täss’ on matkatessa,
mikäs täss’ on elellessä,
kaikkee saam mie matkav’ varrelt’,
kaikkee mitä tarvittenki.
Paljon nähty maailmalla,
paljon vielä nähtävätä,
monta maita minun mennä,
Kuulla noita tarinoita.
Finntroll - Trollhammaren
(Language: Swedish, one of Finland’s official languages; Genre: Metal/Folk Metal)
From the lyrics:
Trollhammaren sveper igen!
Hugga ned, broder igen!
Hör det sista ropet -
Trollhammaren är här!Trollhammaren!
Han är inte en människa.
Inte bräcklig och svag som dig.
Du ska vara maktlös.
Inga ögon ser din änd.Trollhammaren!
Sedan mörkret övertog.
Räds den frostens kalla fingrar.
Som griper tag och förlever.
Under kommande vinternatt.
Brujeria - La Migra
(Language: Mexican Spanish; Genre: Death/Grindcore)
From the lyrics:
Siguen al brujo, te llevo por gratis
Trae to abuela, to tio, el lelo
Pinches polleros, viven pa’ feria
Te cobran to sueldo y largan to abuela
La pinche migra te esta esperando
Te devuelven despues de una paliza
La migra haya to abuela en el desierto
La mandaron a Tijuana pegada con palos
El brujo tiene contrabando bien bueno
Numeros de seguro y cartas verdes
Arkona -Pokrovi Nebesnogo Startsa
(Language: Russian; Genre: Death/Pagan Metal)
ArkonaA
Weird translation request of the week
Posted by Jody in Doc Byrne’s Translation Miscellany on October 7th, 2009
I got an enquiry from a client I work for on a regular basis asking whether I would be available to do a translation review for them. I’m pretty busy at the moment and can’t really take on any more work just yet but I thought I’d have a look at it and see if there was any way of tweaking my schedule to fit it in. The email arrives with all of the files attached. Looking through the English texts first I noticed a few “odd” formulations and some generally unidiomatic expressions here and there. This is nothing surprising – most things need to be proofed and this is why people have translations reviewed and edited.
But when I went to open the source file to get a feel for the project I realised that there was no source file. Thinking that this must have been an oversight on the part of the PM I went back to the email whereupon I spotted the following: “This is a translation from Chinese. The client won’t give us the source text but we’re pretty sure that the translation is factually correct”.
Needless to say the prospect of trying to edit a translation without benefit of a source text for clarification didn’t appeal and certainly would have taken more time than I had to spare. Now this probably isn’t worth a post all of its own but I love the comedy value of an Irish translator, living in England who translates from German and Spanish into English being asked to review a translation from Chinese, a language he doesn’t speak. You really do have to love translation sometimes.
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