Metaglossia: The Translation World

La traducción de documentos del ámbito académico es una cuestión muy interesante y, ciertamente, poco estudiada. Los traductores jurados nos enfrentamos con frecuencia a este tipo de encargos.

It’s all happening in Hangzhou, China this May! I recently posted about the Third International Conference on Law, Translation and Culture, …Continue reading »

Within a globalised world, International Cuisine has become more and more popular.  On the high street of every major western city you can now find restaurants fromMongolia,Ethiopia,Vietnam, andLebanon, alongside the more staple Indian, Italian, Chinese, andThai.  There is truly a taste to tickle everyone’s buds, and now increasingly people are attempting to recreate their favourite international dishes in their own kitchens.

If a patient does not speak the same language as their medical care provider, they may need certified translation services. This will help the patient to understand their diagnoses, their treatment, and their prescriptions, and it will help the doctor to ensure that they are giving the best level of care. With certified translation, both the patient and the doctor can rest assured that there will be nothing lost in translation. To ensure that these services stay safe, there are several governing bodies that oversee the certification process.

The International Medical Interpreters Association sets the standards of practice for certified translation services. This organization was founded on the idea that the translator's most important job was to get the message to the patient as clearly as possible. In order to achieve that end goal, the translator must be fluent in the doctor's language and the patient's language. They must also be able to understand the original message clearly and quickly, and they must be able to translate it clearly and quickly.

Pamene Palibe Dokotala, the Chichewa translation of Where There Is No Doctor was finalized in 2006 in Malawi. 456 translated pages provide practical, heavily illustrated and easy-to-understand heal...

Since a big part of the world lives every day the consequences of the current financial crisis we need to put the correct words to the concepts and facts that are happening nowadays.The Terminology...

Use this glossary to better understand key financial terms you'll run into when running or starting a business.

Specialising in legal translation(11:30 - October 25th, 2012)
This webinar will provide the audience with an overview of the field of legal translation, focusing on the following aspects:

Why legal translation as a specialisation?
How to get into the legal translation field
Disparity between Anglo-American law / continental law
Types of documents usually translated and some basic vocabulary (examples translated into French and Spanish)
Main features of Legal English
Some practical problems in legal translation
Target audience: Practical advice for the budding legal translator seeking to work in this field.

Speaker: Ricardo Martinez of City University, London

Ricardo has been translating, interpreting and lecturing since 1990, both in the UK and Spain. As an Intérprete Jurado he specialises in the legal and financial fields. He has expanded his areas of expertise throughout the years to other fields such as journalism, TV, tourism, engineering, software localisation and IT. As a lecturer he has taught at the Escuela de Traductores e Intérpretes in Madrid in the 1990s and is currently responsible for the English-Spanish language pair of the Legal Translation MA at City University.

Technical manual translation requires top professionals.
Posted on October 16, 2012 by admin

If you market a product or system outside the country and need to have technical manual translation, you already know that freelance translators or automatic translation software won’t do. What you need is a professional translation service experienced in both technical writing as well as translating formal technical terms and instructions from one language to another.

Avoiding the pitfalls…

The pitfalls of technical manual translation have little to do with grammar and syntax differences between languages. A technical manual has to meet rigorous professional, and sometimes legal, standards of its target audience. It must be written in an understandable, idiomatic style that users of all levels can comprehend. Since technical language everywhere is formal, always stilted and usually in the passive voice, the translator must understand the nuances involved between informal, spoken language and its various written forms.

For example…

How would you translate something like, “The pendulum activation switch must be calibrated towards a negative amplitude when activating the affected unit” from English to Spanish? An experienced technical manual translator has undoubtedly encountered both the difficult terminology and knows how to make the verb-tense switches to make the phraseology conform to the less frequently used passive voice in other languages. The result would not only be a translation, but also an educated and intelligently edited rewrite.

Technical manual translation must be culturally adapted.

Language translation difficulties are frequently compounded by the legal and cultural ethos of another country. For example, some countries like Japan and Finland prefer to use comic strips for instructions in technical manuals. On the other hand, Spanish language technical manuals tend to be densely worded with far less punctuation and more of an overblown bureaucratic style.

The company/team approach to technical manual translation…

The great equalizer, then, is the trained and experienced technical translator, who is part of an experienced organization. The bottom line is that you need the best technical manual translation service that goes a step beyond just translating your product or service manual. That step involves quality control, coordination and meeting of important deadlines that can mean the difference of repeat business or loss of an overseas customer.

Entradas con la etiqueta ‘traducción científica’

Cómo garantizar la calidad de una traducción técnica o científica

Miércoles, 10 de octubre de 2012
Entre los distintos campos de la traducción, la científica o la técnica es una tarea que requiere de un amplio conocimiento y experiencia de la industria a la cual pertenecen y de su material.
Muchas empresas técnicas especializadas eligen asignar la traducción de material a empleados bilingües ya que creen que son los únicos con el conocimiento necesario de sus productos y procesos. Sin embargo, es necesario contratar a un traductor profesional para que realice el trabajo ya que como tal, cuenta con el conocimiento necesario para comprender el arte y la ciencia de transferir el significado de un idioma a otro.
Los traductores son lingüistas con grandes habilidades de investigación necesarias para poder traducir con exactitud un documento complejo o un informe médico. Explicarle esto al cliente que duda en enviar un documento para que se cotice puede ser extremadamente beneficioso para el gerente de cuentas, ya que le dará seguridad al cliente sobre nuestra experiencia en el campo además de informarle sobre el proceso de funcionamiento de la industria.

Además, es de suma importancia pedirle al cliente sus glosarios. Para poder establecer una preferencia en cuanto a qué términos utilizar en una traducción, el cliente debe enviarlos junto con toda la información del producto.
Estos materiales le permitirán al traductor visualizar el producto y comprender el contexto del mismo o del proceso para poder traducir de una mejor forma hacia el idioma de destino. Enviar glosarios y material de referencia también reduce el tiempo y el dinero necesarios para que el traductor realice una investigación por su cuenta sobre el texto.
Si no se establecen preferencias antes de iniciar el proyecto, entonces se puede realizar una segunda revisión de la traducción para la aplicación de cambios preferenciales, pero esto deberá ser compensado por parte del cliente. Algunos clientes creen que esta revisión posterior a la traducción para establecer las preferencias, está incluida en el precio original aduciendo que son errores de la traducción original. En realidad, los cambios preferenciales en cuanto a la terminología no son errores de traducción (como lo sería un error gramatical o de puntuación) y el traductor pasará más tiempo haciendo estos cambios que no eran errores.

Most translators believe that it is necessary to specialise in one or more areas of translation; to know a field well enough to feel comfortable working on any text from within the genre.

For the next few weeks eCPD concentrates on specialising in three different areas: biotechnology, financial, legal.

First up is another information-packed session from Dr. Ed Zanders. This time he will be talking about the terminology surrounding the fascinating field of biotechnology as used in the development of new medicines. Not to be missed if you specialise in medical translation – or wish to.

In October we move to the financial and legal sectors. On 2 and 9 October Javier Gil gives a two-part webinar on how to specialise in this fast-moving and extremely active field.

This time we have invested in a full and professional legal translation of all of our documents so that we have every piece of information that the other side does.

Business language translation is in high demand now, but there are still a few misconceptions about this field. Here is a look at the top five misconceptions about business translators.

5 Misconceptions About Business Translators
Posted on August 20, 2012 by Affordable Language Services posted in Articles / Tips / Advice, Business Translation
Business translation is in high demand right now, thanks to an ever-widening global marketplace, but it is still a commonly misunderstood career field. Here is a look at five misconceptions about business language translation:

1. If I can write in another language, I can translate. Translation requires more than just writing competency. Business translators must have specialized translation knowledge and experience – otherwise, some meaning will be lost. For instance, a person may be able to write in Italian but unable to translate a complex, meaning-rich English idiom such as “Go jump in a lake!” into Italian. Translation requires more than basic writing skills.

2. No extra training is required if a person is already fluent in the target language. Again, translation is difficult enough to require specialized training. The first issue here: The spoken word is very different than the written word. Even if a person is entirely bilingual and was raised to speak both tongues, he or she does not automatically have the qualifications required for business language translation.

3. These days, computerized business translators are just as good as their human counterparts. If you want to fail in international business, use translation software. Chances are your key business message will be garbled so badly, it will make your firm look bad. Translation is not a straightforward task; “Input English, output Spanish” doesn’t work because a human mind is needed to express tone and voice. Computerized translation cannot convey metaphors or idioms, either.

4. Our customers speak some English, so we don’t need business translators. Studies have shown that those with limited English proficiency are more likely to buy a product if they can understand it in their own tongue. Consumers are picky these days; they want all the details, and only professional business language translation can guarantee accurate communication.

5. Business language translation takes the same amount of time, no matter what document requires translation. More complex, formal documents require more time than informal, simple documents. Just as it would probably take you much longer to write a Shakespearean sonnet than it would to write an email, business translators need different amounts of time according to the type of the document at hand.

Why should a battle between two extremely minted Russian oligarchs be fought in a British court? Don't we have enough on our plate? The benefits, of course, are plain to see – The British law system is our greatest industry – and second most economically profitable (behind finance itself), renowned worldwide for its honesty, integrity, intellect, and morality. The financial benefit then of hosting foreign cases reverberates around industry connected with the court system.
With foreign cases you need interpreters and legal documents translating. There is obvious potential for big business. The contract to supply our courts with these multi-lingual magicians is worth a staggering £300 million – I know this because the Guardian tells me this is the value of the contract given to Applied Language Solutions in August 2011. A little research at the ministry of Justice's website shows that 'between the 30th January and the 30th April 2012 there were 26,059 requests for language services covering 142 different languages. The courts and tribunal service cancelled or failed to attend 11% of requests. Of the remaining 23,234 requests, the contractor Applied Language Solutions were able to fulfil 81% of the assignments.' (www.justice.gov.uk) 81%!

A house of commons select committee has been set up after 2,232 complaints in that same period were filed against the company. It looks like time for translation companies to get their business plans out and structure a bid for a new contract because it doesn't look likely ALS will be providing interpreting and legal translation solutions for much longer.
The wider context is, of course, potential for a financial windfall. If your translation company is respected and holds high standards in their translators (some don't actually even require fluency in the translating language for example) then you are in a position to compete for this lucrative contract.

I will leave out his build-up to his conclusions (you can read in the full story in the link above), and cut right to the chase, and what his conclusions are for businesses and clients.

He uses B2B businesses as an example, but I think that his story also applies to the translation industry. He called a pest disposal company (NW Pest), and they said they would do the job for $ 125. If they were not successful, he would pay nothing.

Baron writes:

"Our porch was saved and life could return to normal. We were overjoyed. I told my wife it was the best $125 we ever spent. For everyone but the squirrel, this story has a happy ending.

There are a number of pricing lessons that B2B companies can take from this story. Bob spent only 5 minutes with us. So the $125 we paid for Bob’s expertise was equivalent to $1500 per hour! Now, there are very few situations where I would willingly pay someone $1500 per hour. Yet I was delighted to pay in this situation. What was going on?
• NW Pest offered a guarantee that was appropriate for their business and customers. If they could not solve the problem, then we did not have to pay.
• We were in pain. The stench from the dead animal was impacting our quality of life.
• There was a huge financial risk if we did nothing. If my mother in law was correct, tearing down and rebuilding the porch would have cost at least $20,000.
• The emotional aspect of this problem was real. We were anxious about the situation and angry that we could not use the porch.
The value to us of fixing this situation far outweighed the $1500/hour cost.

Communication Legal Translations (CLT), one of the leading legal translation offices in Dubai, accredited by the Ministry of Justice of the United Arab Emirates, recently announced the launch of its breakthrough 'Online Human Translation' service.

Dictionnaire de la comptabilité et de la gestion financière is a unique
English-French dictionary of accounting and financial management terms. With updates made to reflect and integrate the terminology used in International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and in auditing standards (ISA and CAS), this international dictionary covers more than 16,400 English terms and over 22,000 French terms – including more than 850 new entries.

Designed to assist accounting professionals, students, managers, translators, writers and others working in French, this extensive resource
will help users find precise and nuanced answers to all their questions
concerning accounting and financial management terminology.

A recently study showed that 63% of African translators believed greater access to translated information could have saved the life of a friend or family member.

In many ESP programs in South America, teaching ESP is the equivalent to teaching reading comprehension.

What can be said of ESP in your part of the world? Southamerican colleagues are invited to corraborate or support my perception.

El árabe ha sido el idioma más solicitado por los juzgados de la Comunitat Valenciana para los servicios de traducción, con un 25,94 por ciento de la demanda total durante el primer semestre de 2012, según la empresa SeproTec Multilingual Solutions, proveedora de los traductores e intérpretes para los órganos judiciales valencianos.
Según ha informado la compañía en un comunicado, los cinco primeros puestos en el ranking de idiomas más solicitados para traducciones en los juzgados se mantienen sin variación en el primer semestre del año en comparación con 2011. Así, tras el árabe se sitúa el rumano, con un 21,83 por ciento; el inglés, con un 15,23 por ciento; el ruso, con un seis por ciento; el francés, con un 4,2 por ciento y el búlgaro, con un cuatro por ciento.
Por debajo de este umbral, se encuentran el chino mandarín, con un 3,9 por ciento; el alemán, con un 3,1 por ciento; el wolof, con un 2,9 por ciento y el hindi/hindú, con un 1,7 por ciento. Del ranking se cae el urdu/paquistaní.
Entre los idiomas intracomunitarios, de acuerdo con esta información, el ranking lo encabeza el rumano, con un 41,10 por ciento del total, seguido del inglés (28,68%); francés (7,92%); búlgaro (7,70%); alemán (6%); polaco (2,16%); lituano (1,9%); holandés (1,8%); italiano (1,3%) y portugués (1,17%). En esta lista, se mantienen los seis primeros puestos si bien varía el orden de tres de los cuatro restantes, ya que el italiano ha cedido dos puestos al lituano y el holandés, mientras que el portugés se mantiene en último lugar.

Organizado conjuntamente por Tremédica (Asociación Internacional de Traductores y Redactores de Medicina y Ciencias Afines), APTIC (Asociación Profesional de Traductores e Intérpretes de Cataluña) y la UPF (Universidad Pompeu Fabra), las IX Jornadas Científicas y Profesionales de Traducción Médica reunirán el mes que viene en Barcelona a cerca de dos centenares de interesados, estudiantes y profesionales.
Será en el salón de actos del IDEC (calle de Balmes, 132-134) los días 20 a 22 de septiembre, con un denso programa de ponencias y talleres sobre los más diversos aspectos teóricos y prácticos de la relación entre traducción, lenguaje, idiomas y medicina: “Tipografía y notaciones científicas”, “Dificultades de traducción en el campo de la salud pública”, “Las preposiciones como conectores en el discurso biomédico”, “La investigación y el desarrollo farmacéutico”, “Criterios terminológicos en biomedicina”, “El traductor médico 2.0″, “Lenguaje médico y lenguaje general”, “Nomenclatura anatómica comparada entre los mamíferos domésticos y la especie humana”, “Corrección de textos biomédicos”, “Nomenclatura de los compuestos orgánicos” y “Traducción y redacción de guías para pacientes”.

LANGUE GHOMALA ET CONCEPTS SCIENTIFIQUES
Par KOM Bernard, Chercheur Indépendant
Douala - Cameroun
Août 2012
Le souci du progrès, quelle ambition bien naturelle chez les peuples. Que ce soit en pays riches ou en pays pauvres, en occident ou dans le tiers monde, le souci du développement constitue un crédo permanent chez les autorités politiques, administratives ou traditionnelles et autres.
Et pour parvenir à la réalisation quotidienne de cet objectif commun, il est indispensable qu'une mobilisation des ressources disponibles soit faite systématiquement dans tous les différents domaines: Politique, Agriculture, Urbanisation, Éducation, culture, Science etc. Cette dynamique le plus souvent impulsée par les pouvoirs publics, sont quelques fois aussi l’œuvre d'initiatives indépendantes.
Pour revenir au cas du continent africain en proie à moultes difficultés de développement, une préoccupation culturelle permanente est la promotion des langues locales, lesquelles sont le plus souvent menacées d'abandon ou de disparition. Mais cependant, malgré l'immensité du travail à faire dans ce sens, une certaine recherche linguistique a plus ou moins lieu en vue de préserver ou d'améliorer ce qui existe déjà.
Le GHOMALA, comme beaucoup d'autres langues africaines, dites à tons, se trouve aujourd'hui être enseigné sur la base de l'écriture phonétique internationale. Or, un tel enseignement assez exclusivement basé sur la phonétique, même s'il a certains avantages, contribue malheureusement à enfermer la langue à l'usage par écrit, à grande échelle.
Dans le développement qui suit, il s'agit d'oser donner une autre dimension au niveau actuel d'intégration de la langue ghomalà dans les habitudes linguistiques quotidiennes. A cet égard, il serait indispensable d'en justifier au préalable la nécessité, de définir de nouveaux concepts ensuite, ainsi que leurs modes d'utilisation.
1- Quelques définitions préliminaires
i) Le son: C'est est une sensation auditive provoquée par une vibration, d'après le E-book de la sonorisation.
ii) Langue à tons: C'est une langue pour laquelle une différence de tonalité dans la prononciation de mot entraîne des significations différentes. C'est le cas du Ghomalà, par exemple, où Mtze peut désigner ‘‘devant’’, "la chèvre", "l'habit", ou "les testicules", selon les tonalités adoptées. La majorité des langues du monde sont tonales, et de telles langues existent sur tous les continents.
iii) Langue vernaculaire: La langue vernaculaire, ou le vernaculaire, est une langue parlée seulement à l'intérieur d'une communauté en général réduite.
iv) Langue véhiculaire: La langue véhiculaire, qui est une langue de communication entre des communautés d'une même région, dont les langues vernaculaires diffèrent plus ou moins.
v) Homographes: Ce sont des mots qui s'écrivent de la même manière, tout en se prononçant ou non de façons différentes. S'ils se prononcent de la même façon, ils sont alors également homophones.
iv) Diacritique: C'est un signe accompagnant une lettre. Il peut être placé avant, après, au-dessus, en-dessous ou autour de celle-ci, dans le but de modifier la valeur phonétique de la langue, permettre une lecture plus précise, éviter une ambigüité entre les homographes.
vii) La phonétique: Du grec « phônêtikos », où « phônê » qui signifie la « voix », le « son », est une branche de la linguistique qui étudie les sons utilisés dans la communication verbale.

Scientists study murky ponds, holes in space, and atoms that refuse to touch. Science is inspiring and beautiful. But scientific articles are not. Most scientific articles are so impenetrable that even scientists cringe to read them. Instead of expanding our collective wonder, they intimidate, and we leave it to science journalists and university extension associates to translate these ciphers into accessible prose. But shouldn’t good writing be required of scientists, too?

Today scientific articles are constrained by convention and myth.

The conventions of scientific writing have two goals: to convey authority, and to demonstrate the author’s objectivity. Conventions that convey authority include a standardized article structure (Introduction, Methods, Results, Conclusion); booster words (Scientific articles contain more booster words [clearly, obviously] than other research articles, but less hedge words [may, seem, possibly].); and invocations of doom (To justify experiments articles often begin with overblown sentences like “As we all know, all species are dying.”).

Conventions that convey objectivity include the erasure of scientists as actors in their own experiments via past passive voice (e.g. “the chemicals were heated” versus “I heated the chemicals”) and the use of nominalizations or zombie nouns, which make actions themselves less visible by presenting their results as states of being (Compare “The rate was a reflection of population density increases,” to “The rate reflects an increased population density.”).

Tips is a series which aims to provide young and early-career science writers with, well, tips to aid them in their budding careers. The series will attempt to link out to existing resources available online.

How I Write About Science is a blog series contributed to by reputable science writers in which they tell us, well, how they write about science! It’s run every year in conjunction with the Wellcome Trust Science writing prize and is hosted by the Wellcome Trust and the Guardian. Here’s a snapshot of what the series is all about.

–

It’s not only about the tips and advices, it’s also about getting inspired. The “How I Write About Science” blog series by the Wellcome Trust and the Guardian was set up to help potential applicants of their science writing competition. Contributed to by established science writers like Mo Costandi, Mark Henderson and Simon Frantz, the series gives potential science writers first-hand tips and advice but also an insight into the writing process of those writers. Always inspiring.

It’s really beneficial to have people to look up to and to learn from. This perhaps applies the most to younger writers. “How I Write About Science” has no lack of ‘mentors.’ Besides, the pool is large and includes writers who focus on various fields of science from astronomy to biology so chances are that you will find a writer to aspire to.

The pool will keep increasing too. Currently, the series spans two years’ worth of contributions (10+ contributions a year) and will probably continue with next year’s edition of the Wellcome Trust Science writing prize with other science writers.

But in the meantime, check out the current crop. Here’s a snapshot:

The Guardian and SciLogs.com blogger, GrrlScientist on writing about what you know:

Start with what you know.“ But that’s too easy,” my students often tell me. I know this sounds obvious, but when I’ve talked with my students about their writing assignments, many of them were surprised when I told them to choose a topic that they already know something about — especially something they are deeply interested in or something they want to read about. I say this because writing about a particular topic means that you will be reading and thinking deeply about this topic for the next month or so.

Ed Yong on what makes a truly great science writer (like Carl Zimmer):

Scientific papers aren’t known for their catchy titles. Here’s a typical example: “Ancestral capture of syncytin-Car1, a fusogenic endogenous retroviral envelope gene involved in placentation and conserved in Carnivora.” A good science writer could tell you what each of those technical words meant, or translate them into their everyday equivalents. They would also explain the concepts encapsulated by those words, and why they deserve your attention. And a great science writer might start with something like this: “If not for a virus, none of us would ever be born.”

The BBC’s Simon Frantz on writing long-form articles:

Superb writing does not tend to feature highly on the list of technical translator’s skills. The focus is usually on subject-matter expertise or methods for terminology research. While these are important, good technical writing is also crucial. What's more, it's a skill that can be developed quickly and easily, and to maximum effect on the quality of your translation.

This session will give practical tips for 'into English' technical translators, with a view to producing higher quality texts that convey information effectively, precisely, clearly and briefly. Become the translator you aspire to be!