The Translation People specialise in providing business to business translation and language services for its international client base through a global network of translators and strategic partners.

We have a new opportunity for an Account Manager to join our Birmingham (UK) team and handle translation projects for a diverse range of clients from quotation stage to final invoicing. We are looking for an Account Manager with fluent German to native standard to be based in Birmingham. Extensive client and supplier liaison is required as is proofreading of smaller projects. As an Account Manager you would also be responsible for increasing your client portfolio, so an aptitude for sales and developing customer relations is essential.

A graduate in translation studies, modern languages or similar, the successful candidate should be a fluent German speaker and have outstanding written and spoken English. You should share our passion for language and delivering a high quality service.

Key attributes for this post are: organisational skills, a desire to exceed client expectations, a keen eye for detail, adaptability and a high level of IT skills. You should have a professional attitude, be self motivated and able to work equally well unsupervised or as part of a team. Experience in a similar role is desirable but not essential.

Whilst your administrative and organisational skills are of paramount importance, your attitude and approach are of equal value. We are looking for a hardworking and conscientious individual with a positive outlook and cheerful personality; someone who is calm under pressure and who strives to deliver the best possible service to their clients.

If you wish to apply for this position, please email your CV and a covering letter to Jasmin Schneider, Operations Manager no later than 24^th May 2013.

Jasmin Schneider

jasmin.schneider@thetranslationpeople.com

www.thetranslationpeople.com

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The answer seems to be yes. NTT Docomo, a Japanese mobile network company, has developed an app which will potentially allow me (a native English speaker) to have a conversation with a friend in Japan, each of us speaking a different language. Lately, other companies in different countries have also been developing similar products.

The app “provides users with voice translations of the other speaker’s conversations after a slight pause” – which, described in other words, might sound as though this will be the equivalent of having an interpreter on the phone call.

If you have followed the news, then you’ll know that the integration of speech in translation application has rapidly become a hotly-debated topic in the industry.

For any interpreters reading this article and wondering if they can still sleep soundly tonight, we would suggest that the answer is yes, definitely! The BBC quote a gentleman called Benedict Evans, who wisely says that speech recognition is sort of there if you’re not too fussy. Well said…here at The Translation People, we are fussy, and getting it right means not replacing the value of a human interpreter who has extensive knowledge of the subject area in question, with the spoken equivalent of Google Translate…at least not for 10 years or so anyway (joke!)

Author: Hannah Snell

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However, these in turn can be difficult to predict, and researchers are now working to better understand which words make it into the mainstream, and which fall by the wayside.

Anthropologist Michael O’Brien of the University of Missouri-Columbia gives the example of ‘meme’, as opposed to ‘culturgen’ – both mean the same thing, a cultural item such as a saying that has become widely adopted, but most people would be more likely to recognise ‘meme’.

For technical translation, however, it is Mr O’Brien’s research on the vocabulary of climate change that is perhaps more likely to be involved in the document translation process.

He has revealed an arc of 30-50 years that it can take for new words to fully enter a language, and even then only a handful make it to the true mainstream.

Among them in the area of climate change are ‘biodiversity’, ‘Holocene’, ‘paleoclimate’ and ‘phenology’, all of which were almost unheard-of in the early 1900s, but which have their place in single-language English texts, and in the document translation process, for modern-day items relating to climate change.

Source: EurekAlert!

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You may have heard in the past couple of weeks, of Lady Ada Lovelace, whose name has been mentioned by several media outlets since the anniversary of her birth on December 10th 1815.

While we are just three years away from celebrating her bicentenary in 2015, many of us use machines every day that might never have existed without her.

An Official Google Blog post explains the back-story to her ‘invention’ of computing, when Lady Lovelace completed a detailed document translation of an Italian work describing Charles Babbage’s idea for the construction of an ‘Analytical Engine’.

She added extensive notes of her own to the finished translation, including what Google call “the world’s first published algorithm” – instructions for how a machine could calculate the numbers of the Bernoulli sequence.

In this way, a 170-year-old example of technical translation helped create the basis of our modern-day concept of computing, from the automation of high-level services, right down to everyday tasks like emailing and tweeting friends.

Source: Google blog – Honouring computing’s 1843 visionary, Lady Ada Lovelace

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Arabic speakers can be found in almost every country of the world, but while they account for over 5% of the global population, Google estimate that only 3% of web content is available in the language.

The search engine giant is now taking steps to correct this disparity, with action focusing on its Middle East operations.

Maha Abouelenein, head of communications for the Middle East and North Africa, writes on the Official Google Blog that the 30-day itinerary includes Google+ Hangouts on how more Arabic web content can be made available.

Sessions looking at Arabic-language channels on YouTube and the celebration of National Arabic Web Day on December 12th add to the events planned.

For webmasters elsewhere in the world, it’s a good opportunity to hire translation companies to prepare Arabic-language versions of your site content.

Publish it within the next 30 days, and you can benefit from Google’s campaign, making your new content available at a time when the issue will be on many people’s agendas worldwide.

Source: Google blog – Join the Arabic Web Days movement

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For instance, if a document is fairly old, there is the issue of whether the translation should use language that was common at the time it was originally written, or that is more commonly used in the present day.

Translation agencies must make this decision based on the characteristics of the original document, and on the wishes of the client.

In a recent book by Mats Malm, professor of comparative literature at the University of Gothenburg, the author explains how modern readings of older texts differ from their original audience’s interpretation.

This can cause difficulty in modern editions – particularly if an original sense of humour must be conveyed in a way that is still appropriate for the present-day audience.

“The voice of a text is always important,” the author asserts. “Just think of all the smileys we have started using to add clarity to texts.”

While emoticons might not be appropriate in technical translations, the point is still valid – and choosing a good translation agency can make sure the voice of a text is not lost as it moves from one language to another.

Source: EurekAlert!

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Any similarity between grammar and sentence structure makes our job easier – and can allow translation companies to more accurately convey the original meaning of the text in the target language.

Luckily, because languages are a human development, such similarities exist in many cases even where the languages developed separately.

For generations, scientists have tried to determine whether this is because those languages share common roots, or simply because the human brain always thinks with the same processes and structures.

Now it seems like the latter is the likely explanation.

Researchers at the University of Rochester devised two artificial languages, and asked English-speakers to use them to describe images.

They found a tendency for the speakers to alter the languages slightly to remove ambiguity from what they were saying – and always in similar ways, suggesting that the languages would develop in that way in the real world.

As a result, they suggest that the human brain is responsible for much of the structure of language, even in remote parts of the world, helping to explain some of the similarities translation agencies encounter on a daily basis.

Source: EurekAlert!

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That is because the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention, a non-profit standards-setting organisation whose opinions are used on a global basis, has raised concerns about how well individuals with different linguistic backgrounds can understand what are often thought of as basic English instructions.

For instance, an instruction like “take 2 tablets twice daily” can be more difficult to interpret than “take 2 tablets in the morning and 2 tablets in the evening” – even for English speakers.

New guidance from the USP now suggests: “Whenever possible, the directions for use on a prescription container label should be provided in the patient’s preferred language.

“The drug name shall be in English as well, so that emergency personnel can have quick access to the information.”

Within the UK itself, English is perhaps more prevalent than in the US, where predominantly Spanish-speaking communities are not unusual.

However, with Asian and Eastern European communities now to be found in many British cities, technical translation of medicinal packaging could literally be a matter of life and death in the years ahead.

Source: Eurek Alert

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Survival International, an organization that supports tribal people worldwide, and VOGA (Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese) deal with endangered languages. Both recently reported on their efforts to preserve the Bo language even after the death of the last known speaker Boa Senior, the only native speaker for nearly 40 years. The language dates back 65,000 years to Africa and was spoken on the Andaman Islands. Since January 2010, Bo has been considered a dead language, and it isn’t only linguists that mourn its extinction. Anthropologists also mourn the last Bo speaker since her death means the loss of historical knowledge and a cultural identity. The director of Survival International commented on this, “With the death of Boa Sr. and the extinction of the Bo language, now a unique part of our human society is nothing more than a memory. Bo’s death should be a warning to us all and not just the other tribes of the Andaman Islands.”

Boa Senior’s death was reported on by the BBC by K. David Harrison. Harrison is the author of The Last Speakers: The Quest to Uncover the World’s Most Endangered Languages, and has appeared in The Linguists, a documentary about the efforts to capture endangered languages. At the film’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival 2008 it received worldwide recognition. Harrison equates the survival of languages with the survival of species and speaks in this context of a parallel extinction. Harrison believes that 80% of the species are unknown, and even 80% of the languages are not yet documented. He emphasizes the important relationship that exists between our language and the environment in which we live. Harrison is also a strong supporter of new technologies which can help to make people aware of endangered languages. After The Linguist documentary aired at various film festivals, in 2009 it was published on the Babelgum website: “If the internet is used properly, it can be an enormous influence on enhancing the people’s awareness and may help to preserve minority languages.”

International organizations and institutions share this view. The European Union is funding a project for the protection and preservation of languages. The ELDIA program (European Language Diversity for All) has a grant of almost €3 million and makes use of the so-called “vitality barometer”, a gauge to show the risk of a language. ELDIA focuses its work on 14 Finno-Ugric languages, such as Meänkieli in Sweden, and the variant of the Estonian language, which is spoken by Estonian workers in Germany.

Under the “Endangered Language Program” Rosetta Stone created a 2010 Chitimacha language version of its software. The objective of this program is to “prevent global language extinction”.

The people and organizations that are fighting for the survival of these languages will do anything to ensure that future generations cannot lose sight of this problem. Or to express it in the words K. David Harrison: “The fate of these languages is in the hands of the few remaining speakers, or rather, in their minds and mouths. Let’s listen to them, as long as it is still possible. “

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British and American signers do, for example, find it very difficult to understand each other. Paradoxically, there are fewer differences between American Sign Language and French, because the American version is based on the French. German sign language also differs from the Austrian and Swiss versions.
Even within a sign language there are regional differences, similar to dialects in spoken languages. For example within the German Sign Language, the sign for the days of the week is different in North and South Germany.

There are attempts to create a comprehensible, artificial sign language to provide for international conferences, similar to the principle of Esperanto. The sign equivalent is called “Gestuno”,  - a mixture of the word gesture ‘and the UN. It includes 1500 signs, which are like any other living language adapted and expanded gradually. The disadvantage of this standard version is that the vocabulary is limited making it difficult and longwinded to translate long descriptions of facts.

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