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Carbon-neutral translation?

When it comes to the environment, we are constantly being told that we all have a part to play, that every little change we make, no matter how small, adds up and will help us avoid a flaming, flooded, hurricane swept, ice-cap melting Armageddon at the hands of global warming. So where does this leave translators? Is there such a thing as an environmentally friendly translator? Is it even necessary for translation to go green? If you think about it, it’s hard to imagine how we could be playing a large part in the extinction of life as we know it. We don’t appear to be using up lots of resources: computer, light and heat for translators are all reasonably minimal. Those among us who are freelancers don’t have to commute so pollution from cars isn’t much of an issue either and because most of us work directly on our computers there’s not much printing being done. So if we are all supposed to play our part in helping the environment what can we do?

The eco-friendly solution to personal transportation

The eco-friendly solution to personal transportation

Well according to the New Scientist (“Is the net hurting the environment?”) the Internet has a carbon footprint roughly equal to that of the airline industry, accounting for around 2% of global CO2 output. Apparently it takes an estimated 152 billion kilowatt-hours just to run the data centres that run the Internet. According to Google the electricity needed to power one single Internet search generates 200 mg of CO2. The New Scientist article admits that this may not sound much but 1000 searches produces the same CO2 emissions as an average car traveling 1 km.

So given that, as I mentioned previously, translators have become so dependent on the Internet not only as a way of researching translations but also as a way of finding work and communicating with colleagues and customers, I imagine that it’s safe to say that we are easily at the mid to upper end of the scale of hardcore Internet users and are contributing quite a bit towards the Internet’s emissions. And you thought that searching for terminology was harmless?

Build your own house (some assembly required)

Build your own house (some assembly required)

There have been various initiatives aimed at reducing the environmental harm done by computers such as the RoHS directive and the black version of Google – imaginatively called “Blackle” (www.blackle.com) – which claims to reduce users’ energy usage because it takes less energy to display the colour black on a computer screen. Other companies like IBM have developed new hardware and software monitoring technologies to minimise the amount of energy used in data centres but is there anything translators can do? Probably not but it’s worth remembering this next time we click on that “Google Search” button. Of course we could reject our toxic, environment-killing lifestyle and addiction to “mod-cons” and go live in a hut made from recycled guano and knit our own muesli but to be honest I don’t much fancy dumping such creature comforts as light, heat, the Internet, my car, clean clothes and non-scratchy underpants.

An alternative would be for translators to sign up for some form of carbon offsetting scheme. The Carbon Trust in England describes offsetting as a scheme which “allows organisations to indirectly reduce their carbon footprint through the purchase of carbon credits associated with emissions reduction projects (such as energy efficiency and renewable power) that have occurred elsewhere”. I looked at the CO2 Balance website and discovered that to offset the 1.72 tonnes of CO2 my car produces each year I can spend £15.50 on energy-efficient wood stoves for villagers in Kenya, donate £12.92 towards an 8 Megawatt hydroelectric power station in China or fork out £20.66 to plant trees in a forest in Brittany. I’ve no idea how much I’d need to spend to offset my Google habit but it’s probably better to give something than nothing at all even though I’d prefer to see my money go towards reducing exhaust emissions from farmyard animals. I wonder if carbon neutral translation will be the next big selling point for translators much in the same way as Trados certification (supposedly).

Will scratchy, organic knitted underpants really save us all?

Can scratchy, organic, knitted underpants really save us all?

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Translators make bad language students

Over the Easter break I decided to take the plunge and enroll on an intensive French language course for beginners. French has never been a language that I’ve been particularly attracted to. Instead I’ve always been drawn to the languages of Northern Europe for their logic, order and general coolness. In fact the list of languages that I would love to learn includes Finnish, Swedish and Icelandic (but this probably has a lot to do with my liking for bands like Korpiklaani, Amorphis, Entombed and Sigur Ros). Having said that I’ve dabbled in Romanian so there’s probably no real logic to my languages wish-list and whether I get around to learning them is another matter altogether.

But anyway, back to French. I think the accent is always something that put me off learning French. Not because I don’t like it, but because it seems to require a lot of effort to achieve the right level of sophistication and “Frenchness”. As an Irishman, I’m not a huge fan of flamboyance or drawing attention to myself and this gives rise to a sort of linguistic shyness which has put me off learning French for a long time. But I decided to give it a go because I’m going to a music festival called Hellfest in June which happens to be in France.

Excusez-moi, il faut prendre quelle direction, pour aller vers le centre ville?

Excusez-moi, il faut prendre quelle direction, pour aller vers le centre ville?

Being a very well-organised festival there’s absolutely no need to speak French because everyone speaks English and there’s absolutely no danger of me going hungry, or more importantly, thirsty but as a linguist, I don’t like being reliant on the language skills of others. I’m used to being able to communicate with people, even if it’s just a few broken words and phrases to order a pizza or buy a train ticket and I find it frustrating when I can’t do this. Several translator friends have told me that I’m not alone in experiencing that incredible frustration of going to another country where I don’t speak the language. Last year I had this experience in China and in France and I didn’t like it. China in particular was especially frustrating because it is such a fascinating and exciting place that I felt I was missing out on a world of interesting things by not being able to speak or even read the language and it felt like I was just scratching the surface. I think the translator in me is so used to seeing something in a foreign language and understanding it that couldn’t come to terms with the fact that here was a language situation that I couldn’t decipher.

So I turned up on a Monday morning for my French class, a little apprehensive, but looking forward to it nevertheless. I told myself that I’m not here to become fluent, just to learn enough so that I can ask for directions, food and beer… no more! And I really enjoyed the class. The teacher had a nice relaxed style and there was a really friendly atmosphere in the class. But I found myself wanting to know more and I was actually in danger of becoming one of those students who constantly asks questions the answer to which is “we’ll be coming to that in a little bit if you’ll just bear with me” (and as a lecturer I know how annoying this type of student is). Once I’d reined in my enthusiasm I wondered whether the fact that I am a translator makes me an impatient language learner? Does being a career linguist make you impatient with yourself and your ability to pick up a language? I think that being a translator gives you a unique insight into how language works and you start making links between the different aspects of the language and then mapping it onto other languages. You then start to look beyond the set phrases and situations of a beginners class and want to know how to put the limited knowledge you’ve picked up to use. In the controlled environment of a language class this inevitably creates a little tension because your brain is trying to use the language at a faster rate than you can get the raw materials into your head. I think maybe at a subconscious level, translators view languages as a way of making money and when they learn a language their eye is on the meter and they just want to get to the stage where they can translate and earn money from it. Eeep, that makes us sound like a gang of mercenaries…

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Translator, interpreter…tom-ay-toe, tom-ah-toe

There’s nothing more likely to get my professional hackles raised than hearing some clueless news reporter saying something like “Speaking through a translator, Mr. Smith gave a press conference…”. Apart from the obvious practical considerations of how you hold a translator up to your mouth and where do you speak through, it galls me to hear people over and over again refer to translators as interpreters, and vice versa.

And it’s nearly always television and radio reporters who are the culprits. Our fellow wordsmiths in the newspapers generally get it right, thankfully. But it is surprising that people have such difficulty in grasping the difference between a translator – someone who takes stuff from one language and writes it down – and an interpreter – someone who takes stuff from another language and speaks it. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with interpreters at all and am in awe of conference interpreters (except for one nameless interpreter in Dublin who spoke about “research machines” when the French speaker was talking about “search engines”). It’s just that translating and interpreting are two very separate jobs which require different skills and qualities. It’s like the difference between pirates and ninjas, apples and pears, cornflakes and rice crispies… they’re similar but very different.

Priates vs. Ninjas (Source: Geeklogie.com)

Pirates vs. Ninjas (Source: Geeklogie.com)

Perhaps it’s merely a symptom of a wider ignorance among the general public of what it is language professionals in all of their flavours actually do. Maybe it’s a wake-up call for the translating and interpreting communities to raise awareness… then again, maybe it’s only me that’s bothered by this in which case, never mind!

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An easy target for cash-strapped universities

A recent article by Melanie Newman in The Times Higher Education makes for grim reading about the state of higher education in the UK. The article reveals a raft of job losses, voluntary redundancies and recruitment freezes at four more institutions which is causing alarm among staff. Nothing new you might say. Indeed this is pretty much par for the course across the university sector but one particular example, if it is true, is especially worrying. Newman writes that the Centre for Translational and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick is set to close following an internal university review. With Susan Bassnett, who heads up the centre, approaching retirement and the failure to find a replacement for her, it looks quite certain that the centre will be shut down, although no final decision will be made until July of this year. The article quotes an unnamed academic who says that student recruitment for MA programmes hosted by the centre has been halted.

Unions are blaming this development on the university’s preoccupation with money from research funding, or in the case of the centre, the lack of it. It seems that the way in which universities’, with their current business model, evaluate the usefulness or, regrettably, the profitability of various disciplines whereby huge value is placed on external research funding is not only inequitable but downright inappropriate. Sure, a department offering translation and languages , for example, may not capture massive research grants but it will attract students to the university and this brings in money. Possibly a lot more than any research grant. By offering translation programmes we create additional demand for languages at an institution and this serves to reinforce the system.

All of this begs the question of whether Translation Studies (and languages in general) is seen as financial deadwood by universities. Is it an easy target for university bean counters looking to shave a few zeroes off university expenditure? The move to close the translation section at Warwick could be regarded as a opportunistic cost-cutting exercise but more cynical souls could be forgiven for wondering whether universities see translation and languages as nice to have, but not, strictly speaking, necessary; an expense that doesn’t return on the investment. The argument that researchers need to pull in external funding is one with which all academics are familiar but we all know that the humanities and languages in particular are never likely to attract the same level of funding that the biosciences and engineering disciplines seem to do so effortlessly. There simply isn’t the same pool of money to drawn from so when you look at funding revenue you’re not comparing like with like.

Money matters aside, it is unthinkable that a university could conceive of jettisoning languages and translation. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to propose some form of soft-minded, woolly, right-on, touchy-feely model of education where we defend and indulge useless academics who can’t get a job in the real world and allow them to research and teach ridiculously obscure and – let’s be honest here – pointless topics like the effects of wallpaper on the linguistic and cultural identities of bilingual Russian hedgehogs between 18-27 August 1892 (incidentally, if this is your research area, shame on you, wasting all of that precious research funding!). It’s just that some subjects which need to be taught have an intrinsic value for a country and an economy which is less obvious and which cannot be measured solely in terms of grant capture. Translation Studies is one of these subject areas but the lack of high levels of visible revenue in comparison with other disciplines shouldn’t be seen as evidence of a discipline which isn’t pulling its weight and it certainly shouldn’t be used as an excuse for questioning its continued existence. Let’s just hope that the Warwick case is just an isolated case of financial opportunism.

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Are translators too reliant on the Internet?

I had a strangely unsettling experience over the weekend which has left me a little concerned for the future of translation and possibly even the world as we know it.  OK, maybe not the world, just translation. What happened? I couldn’t access the Internet! Yep, my ISP decided that the day I started on a large medical translation was the day they would shut down half of their network for “essential maintenance”. Typical!

A drug-eluting coronary stent

A drug-eluting coronary stent

So there I was, ready to start working on a medical text (on coronary stents and aortic aneurysms no less) and about to do my usual ritual of spending some time scanning the web for parallel texts and clarifying the meanings of unusual terms, but not this time. After the initial indignation bordering on rage at the fact that I couldn’t get online, this indignation gave way to unease. What if there was term I didn’t know? How would I find out how to translate it?  Now I have dozens of general and specialised dictionaries at hand and over 12 years experience as a translator so there really wasn’t anything to worry about but not having Internet access, and more specifically no Google, knocked me sideways and it took me a good half hour to regain my composure.

Google has helped reinforce my belief that translators shouldn’t put too much faith in dictionaries because they are often out of date and won’t tell you which of the various synonyms is correct. On top of that they rarely tell you how to use a particular word; the style and general language usage of certain genres of texts often being every bit as important as the specialised terms they contain. (I have to confess that I have been known on occasion to advise students to forget about paper dictionaries and use Google instead because parallel texts in particular are the only way to go when translating.) But Google has also made researching subjects much faster – or at least it seems that way. You mightn’t really find the answer any sooner but you’ll plough through a lot more material looking for it in the same time. I think I’ve gotten used to the fact that with access to Google, you can find the answer to any question providing you know how to search and more importantly, how to separate the wheat from the chaff in search results and you can do this much more quickly than nipping down to the local public library. There’s also a certain reassurance that comes from simply knowing it’s there.

This begs the question of whether we (I’m assuming it’s not just me who’s been affected by this) have become too dependent on the Internet. Yes it’s amazingly useful and fast, and yes it helps us to access enormous amounts of resources but what would happen to us as translators if we woke up one morning in an apocalyptic post-Internet age where Luddites danced through the streets rejoicing at the fact that there was no Internet and no search engines, iPhones, netbooks or online databases? Would we have become so reliant on the Internet that we would have forgotten how to do translation the old-fashioned way (”acoustic translation” for want of a better term – ok that’s probably not as funny as it sounds in my head). Would the quality of translations suddenly plummet? Would translators simply sit there, bewildered and at a complete loss as to where they should start?

Or am I just getting my undergarments knotted over nothing? Is lamenting the good old days when translators used pens and paper and the occasional carrier pigeon and never resorted to such demon-possessed trickery as the interweb the same as yearning for the “make-do” days when people could darn socks, use an abacus or wash half a dozen kids with one bathful of water? Useful skills maybe but, let’s be honest, not particularly desirable or likely ever to come back into fashion. Was translation “purer”, more honest and more difficult back then? Who knows?

As for my translation, I finished it on time and my subject knowledge of the area and old-fashioned paper dictionaries came through in the end… it just took a little longer to get started.

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