Communication:
Communication is the transfer of an intended
message, and this is the purpose of language itself. Obviously,
this process can be divided into two broad stages: transmission
(speaking, writing) and reception (listening, reading).
But there are another two stages: before
transmission, formulating the message accurately (coherence)
and after reception, understanding the message accurately
(assimilation). These sound like simple processes, yet in
fact they are not: for example, how often do we really have
the patience to listen closely to what someone else is telling
us?
Consecutive
Interpreting: The interpreter starts to translate only after the speaker
has finished his/her utterance. Often used at smaller conferences
etc., generally used in courtroom settings, speeches. Just
one interpreter is often enough.
Creole:
A mother tongue formed from the contact of a European language
(esp. English, French, or Portuguese) with another (esp. African)
language. (OED)
Dialect:
1. A form of speech peculiar to a particular region.
2. A subordinate variety of a language
with non-standard vocabulary, pronunciation, or grammar. (OED)
Chuchotage:
The interpreter is posted beside the client and in real time
discretely 'whispers' his/her translation of the speech activity.
Discourse: Modes of speaking and writing which involve participants
in adopting a particular attitude towards areas of socio-cultural
activity (e.g. racist discourse, officialese, etc.). (DaL)
Discourse Analysis:
In this context, the study of meaning using a large unit of
translation, e.g. paragraph or page level, and taking into
account the widest possible context.
Discourse
Markers:
Words such as 'good', 'but', uh-huh', 'well' that divide up
(and also link) sections of speech.
Effectiveness:
Optimum achievement of a communicative goal. (DaL)
Efficiency:
Achievement of a communicative goal in the most economic manner
possible. Language users normally counterbalance effectiveness
and efficiency in order to achieve maximum effect from minimum
use of resources. (DaL)
Free Translation:
Translating loosely from the original. Contrasted with word
for word or literal translation, this may be the best method
depending on the most appropriate unit of translation involved.
Globalization:
Globalization addresses the business issues associated with
taking a product global. In the globalization of high-tech
products this involves integrating localization throughout
a company, after proper internationalization and product design,
as well as marketing, sales, and support in the world market.
(PGL)
Honorifics:
All languages have particular ways of showing politeness (e.g.
French tu/vous, Spanish tu/usted, Japanese yomu/yomi-masu).
(Aol)
Idiolect:
Features of language variation characteristic of an individual
speaker: basically, everyone has a unique way of talking.
Inflection:
A change in the form of (a word) to express tense, gender,
number, mood, etc. (OED)
Internationalization:
Internationalization is the process of generalizing a product
so that it can handle multiple languages and cultural conventions
without the need for re-design. Internationalization takes
place at the level of program design and document development.
(PGL)
Interpreting:
Interpreting can be defined as the translation of speech orally,
as opposed to translation of written texts. (OED)
It requires special skills (note taking,
summarizing, language skills), a good memory, sheer mental
stamina and, often, arduous training.
A number of national and international
organizations govern the profession, while the United Nations
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights entitles
every defendant in a criminal trial to have the assistance
of an interpreter, if necessary.
There are several types of interpreting:
simultaneous, consecutive, liaison
Simultaneous interpreting:
The interpreter starts to translate before
the speaker has finished his/her utterance. Most often used
at large events such as conferences and carried out by panels
of at least two interpreters using special equipment. As this
type of work is particularly tiring and stressful, the rule
of thumb is that an interpreter should be able to take a break
after 45 minutes of continuous work.
Liaison interpreting:
A generic name for business interpreting;
also just interpreting for trade conventions and other general
business situations. Usually refers to the activities of a
single interpreter who accompanies an individual or delegation
around.
Consecutive interpreting:
The interpreter starts to translate only
after the speaker has finished his/her utterance. Often used
at smaller conferences etc., generally used in courtroom settings,
speeches. Just one interpreter is often enough.
Language:
1. The method of human communication, either spoken or written,
consisting of the use of words in an agreed way. (OED)
2. The distinctive form of speech of a
particular community, most or all of which is unintelligible
to outsiders.
Language
Family:
A set of languages that can be shown to derive from a common
root. (AoL) (e.g. Indo-European, Austronesian)
Language Type: According to their word structure (morphology), languages
can be divided into four basic types:
1. Isolating: each element is an
independent word without inflections (Chinese and Vietnamese)
2. Agglutinating: elements combine
without changing their form to express compound ideas
(Japanese, German)
3. Inflectional: the boundaries
between morphemes are fuzzy, and morphemes can express more
than one grammatical meaning at a time (Latin, Russian) (AoL)
4. Polysynthetic: several morphemes
are put together to form complex words which can function
as a whole sentence (Chukchi) (AoL)
Legal Translation:
Legal translation is a distinct specialty.
What skills does it need?
Done well, it requires a variety of advanced
skills to be present in the translator: first, complete mastery
of both source and target languages; second, a good knowledge
of the two legal systems involved; third, knowledge of the
relevant sub-areas of law; fourth, an awareness of any other
relevant disciplines and subject matter, ( e.g. steel making,
if the documents of a case concern a steelworks); fifth, training
in the art of translation itself. It's clear that it's
not easy to find such a combination of skills, especially
as they are not acquired quickly -- either on their own or
collectively.
All this reflects the unique nature of
legal language.
As the noted language authority, David
Crystal puts it:
"Legal language shares with science
a concern for coherence and precision; and it shares with
religion a respect for ritual and historical tradition"
"Legal language has always been pulled
in different directions. Its statements have to be so phrased
that we can see the general applicability, yet be specific
enough to apply to individual circumstances. They have to
be stable enough to stand the test of time, so that cases
will be treated consistently and fairly, yet flexible enough
to adapt to new social situations. Above all, they have to
be expressed in such a way that people can be certain about
the intention of the law respecting their rights and duties.
No other variety of language has to carry such a responsibility.'
When referring to legal English, he states:
"Legal English has several subvarieties,
reflecting its different roles. For example, there is the
language of legal documents, such as contracts, deeds, insurance
policies, wills and many kinds of regulation. There is the
language of works of legal reference, with the complex apparatus
of footnotes and indexing. There is the language of case law,
made out of the spoken or written decisions which judges make
about individual cases. There is the spoken language of the
courtroom, with the ritual courtesies of judges, counsel and
court officials and constraints governing what counts as evidence
and what may or may not be said. Legal language is unique
in the way utterances are subject to sanctions, such as a
fine or imprisonment for linguistic contempt of court.
A fundamental distinction separates
the language of the Legislature÷which institutes a legal text
and the language of the judiciary which interprets and applies
that text. A pivotal role is played by set of constitutional
statements statutes (Acts), and other documents which come
from the Legislature. In these cases, the words, literally
are law." (CoL)
Liaison Interpreting: A generic name for business interpreting;
also just interpreting for trade conventions and other general
business situations. Usually refers to the activities of a
single interpreter who accompanies an individual or delegation
around.
Localization:
Localization involves taking a product and making it linguistically
and culturally appropriate to the target locale (country/region
and language) where it will be used and sold.
Translation is only one of the activities in localization;
in addition to translation, a localization project includes
many other tasks such as project management, software engineering,
testing, and desktop publishing. (PGL) More:Download
Localization Tools | Intro
on Localization
Buy Bert Esselink's excellent book on localization Amazon
US | Amazon
UK
Machine
Translation: Machine translation (MT) is automatic translation,
in which a computer takes over all the work of translating.
Obviously, a computer will work much faster (and is cheaper)
than a human being. It can be a useful method if the purpose
of the translation is a limited one; for example, to gain
a rough idea of what a text contains ('gisting') and/or to
process large numbers of documents very rapidly.
MT works best on highly repetitive texts,
involving a restricted range of vocabulary. Typically, these
are highly intricate scientific or technical texts. It does
less well on more general or varied texts, and those involving
a high degree of abstraction, and with these often yields
useless results. The problem here is that it fails to cope
with speech acts.
Even on repetitive texts, the finished
output often needs to be checked to by a human translator,
and varying degrees of post-editing might be necessary.
Another factor is the source language -
target language pair. MT works best also where languages are
of a similar type (isolating: English - Spanish) or related
(German - English) or closely related (Norwegian - Danish).
At the time of writing, the obvious advantage of using MT
to translate from one dialect to another in the same language
(e.g. US English - British English) seems to have been overlooked
but, using the same logic, it should work well on this.
It has been suggested that, sooner or later,
computers will make all human translators redundant.
We believe that this will never happen. The complexity
of language mirrors the infinite subtlety of the human mind.
To put it differently, human translators will be replaced
only once computers are developed that can write good poetry.
However, MT technology is improving all
the time. Many well-funded R&D programs are going on around
the world right now and it constitutes an exciting area of
translation research, especially when combined with other
technologies, such as speech recognition and natural language
processing. It is likely that, over time, this research will
gradually extend the boundaries within which MT can operate.
To use MT software to process large batches
of documents, several problems need to be overcome. First,
you need to get the original text into a form the computer
can read. Unless you are lucky enough to have it all in the
form of word processor files already, it will have to be scanned
and then put through an optical character recognition (OCR)
process. This will convert the documents into word processor
files, typically in Microsoft Word format. It would be a big
mistake, though, to underestimate the amount of time, effort
and expense this process involves; so much so, that it is
often cheaper and quicker to just to get the work done manually.
Machine-Aided Translation: If you can't replace the human mind when
translating, the next best thing is to speed it up. In recent
years, general technological advances have revolutionized
the translation industry. Starting with the humble fax machine,
and moving through the introduction of email and word processing
right through to reliable dictation software, the computer
is now the translator's the main working tool.
In recognition of this, a range of specialized
software tools have been developed to enhance the skills of
human linguists. The most obvious one is computerized dictionaries,
encyclopedias and term banks, which can be consulted either
off a CD ROM or over the Internet. The fruits of many years
work by panels of outstanding academic minds are now available
in a split second. This innovation has both accelerated and
improved the translator's achievement of semantic accuracy.
Not to be forgotten are translation memory
programs. These use complex algorithms to perform the apparently
simple task of remembering words and phrases that may have
been translated from a particular language before. By giving
the translator the option to accept or reject suggested translations,
the tedium and potential inaccuracy involved in translating
repetitive texts can often be largely eliminated. Speed is
of course also enhanced. However, these programs have the
disadvantages that they require some significant amount of
routine maintenance, and also, the source text must first
be available in the form of a word processor file.
Mediation: The extent to which text producers and
receivers feed their own beliefs into their processing of
a given text. (DaT)
Morpheme:
A meaningful morphological unit of a language
that cannot be further divided (e.g. in, come, -ing, forming
incoming). (OED)
Morphology:
The system of forms in a language.
Natural Language
Processing:
NLP systems interpret written rather than
spoken language. In fact, NLP modules can be found in speech
processing systems that start by converting spoken input into
text. Using lexicons and grammar rules. NLP parses sentences,
determines underlying meanings, and retrieves or constructs
responses. This technology's main use is to enable databases
to answer queries entered in the form of a question. And newer
application is handling high-volume e-mail. NLP performance
can be improved by incorporating a commonsense knowledge base
-- that is, the encyclopedia of real-world rules. (Wired Magazine)
Pidgin:
A simplified language containing vocabulary
from two or more languages, used for communication between
people not having a common language.(OED)
Register:
The tendency to pattern language behavior
in relatinon to a particular type of activity, level of formality,
etc. (e.g. colloquial, legal, scientific, religious) (DaT)
Semantics:
The branch of linguistics concerned with
meaning. (OED)
Simultaneous
Interpreting:
The interpreter starts to translate before
the speaker has finished his/her utterance. Most often used
at large events such as conferences and carried out by panels
of at least two interpreters using special equipment. As this
type of work is particularly tiring and stressful, the rule
of thumb is that an interpreter should be able to take a break
after 45 minutes of continuous work.
Source Text: The language from which translation or
interpreting is carried out.
Speech Act: The action which is intended in the utterance
of a sentence. Speech acts may be direct (e.g. Get out!) or
indirect (e.g. it's hot in here = Open a window).(DaL) How
often do we say exactly what we really mean? This is one of
the things that most often fools computers performing machine
translation.
Speech Community:
The group of people sharing a language
or dialect.
Syllabary:
A list of characters representing syllables
and (in some languages or stages of writing) serving the purpose
of an alphabet. (OED) (e.g. in Japanese - hiragana and katakana)
Target Text:
The language into which translation or
interpreting is carried out.
Telephone Interpreting:
Interpreting carried out over the phone,
using a three-way calling phone patch. Also with video-conferencing.
Tenor:
The relationship between addresser and
addressee, as reflected in use of language (e.g. level of
formality, relative distance). (DaL)
Text Act: The dominant speech act in a text. (DaL)
Tone Languages:
Languages that use pitch to distinguish
words, either by meaning or grammatical function (e.g. Chinese,
Thai) (AoL)
Translation:
The transfer of meaning from one language
to another. Translation takes place in writing and interpreting
is its oral counterpart. The two terms are often confused.
At its best, a successful translation should read as if it
were originally written in the new language.
We believe translating is an art, not a
science. You might get the impression that it's a mechanical
process involving a box with a handle. All you need to do
is turn the handle on the side of the box, and out comes the
translation.
This is wrong.
Recent academic research has shown that
translating from one language to another is one of the most
complex higher order activities of the human brain. In fact,
your wrong impression may be evidence of a good translation:
great skill will often make an exceptional achievement look
easy.
The translation method is dictated by the
purpose of the translation. While the best translations will
always be performed primarily by a human being, in some (limited)
situations, machine translation can be a useful technique,
and this is likely to increase in importance over time as
this technology evolves.
Translation
Memory:
A translation memory is database where a translator may record
(usually semi-automatically) old translations for future reuse
and easy searches. Although these programs are best classified
under computer-aided/assisted translation, one must not confuse
them with machine translation programs - translation memory
software does not translate anything by itself, whereas a
machine translation system actively produces language and
translations based on linguistic data, such as grammatical
rules and glossaries. More:Download
Translation Memory Tools
Unit Of
Translation: The smallest entity in a text that carries
a discrete meaning. It varies all the time, ranging from individual
words through phrases and sentences right up to entire paragraphs.
Whistled
Speech:
A system of communication using set whistles
and tones.
Word Order: Arrangement of words in a sentence. There
are some distinct, recognized patterns:
SVO - 'cows eat grass' - English, Finnish,
Chinese, Swahili
The similarity of word order patterns between
source and target languages is a factor in the relative ease
of translation - or otherwise - between them.
Word-For-Word
Translation:
Transferring the meaning of each individual
word in a text to another, equivalent word in the target language.
Sometimes called 'Literal Translation'. While this is clearly
appropriate for dictionaries, it can produce very for complex
passages of text. See 'Unit of translation'.
World Knowledge:
Whatever extra-linguistic or real-world
factors are brought into the translation process in the mind
of the translator. We are starting to see this introduced
into the newest machine translation technology research projects.
Also called 'shared assumptions' or 'real-world knowledge'.