Language Museum Blog

Over at the LanguageHat blog I saw a post about a live translation event taking place as part of the London Review Bookshop’s World Literature Weekend.

The challenge has been set by the francophone novelist Alain Mabanckou – two translators will offer up their translation of his short text, and then discuss and debate the differences with the author and each other. The idea is to bring out aspects of the text that aren’t normally paid attention to as well as paying attention to the process of translation itself.

Audience members will receive a copy of the French text as well as the two English translations to help them follow along.

The event is being held at the British Museum in London on Saturday 19th June. Definitely looks well worth attending!

A cool new application from Google will soon be able to help you translate from written words.

Google Goggles users can point their phone at a word or phrase they wish to have translated, and then fine-tune their onscreen selection to a smaller area. Using the phone’s camera, the application will recognise the language and give you an option to translate it. This makes the application perfect for globetrotters – whether you need a menu or sign translated, you can do so without the hassle of searching through a guide book or dictionary.

The application can only translate languages based on the Latin alphabet such as English, French, Italian, German and Spanish at the moment, but once the text is captured it can be quickly translated to other languages. Google are apparently confident that other languages, including Chinese, Arabic and Hindi will soon be added to the app.

Whilst the app is free, you’ll need a mobile device running Android 1.6 or higher. I’ll definitely be giving this a try on my trip to Italy next month!

Closed captioning (subtitles) have recently been introduced to some videos on YouTube, which could potentially be a great language learning resource. The service is in beta mode at the moment – and apparently it needs a lot of work. From Dvice.com:

Engadget first spotted how weird Apple’s iPad launch video got when the feature was activated — sometimes the text is so different from what’s being said that you wonder if Google is just having a laugh. “A high-res color display” becomes “a high risk going to split,” and when one of the designers says he doesn’t have to change himself to use the iPad, the captions make it sound like he very clearly does. If you were relying on these captions, it would be a very different commercial.

The captioning is machine-generated, so it seems the software has a ways to go before this becomes a reliable means of translation!

So as we near the end of the year, there are a lot of awards and ‘top ten’ lists everywhere. We’ve already seen that the Word of the Year 2009 is either unfriend or Twitter depending on who you choose to believe, but more amusing (for me) is the recent announcement of the First Annual Jelly Donut Awards.

Never heard of them? Well, an American translation company has decided to award the donuts to the top 5 real translation and interpreting errors of the year. The name is in honour of John F. Kennedy’s pronouncement “Ich bin ein Berliner”, widely mistranslated as “I am a jelly donut”.

In first place, in a great example of being very careful about the words you choose, a high-level meeting between US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov became an international joke – all because of a button.

Look at the rest of the top 5 here.

I wear spectacles, but they’re nowhere near as hi-tech (or useful) as these glasses invented by NEC.

The company says it is planning to launch spectacles that can aid real-time translation, allowing chat between users to flow freely. Whilst they’re not exactly like specs (they won’t help you see better); they more resemble a headset with a microphone, and this is how they work:

…the microphone on the headset picks up the voices of both people in a conversation, pipes it through translation software and voice-to-text systems and then sends the translation back to the headset.

At the same time as a user hears a translation, they would also get text subtitles beamed onto the retina. (Source: BBC News)

I’m not so sure about having “subtitles beamed onto [my] retina” (sounds painful!) but this definitely sounds like a useful tool. (https://baycities.com) I can imagine as a language learner you could use it to connect with native language speakers all over the world, turning the translation on and off as and when you want to use it. Sadly, we’ll have to wait til 2011 to find out how useful it really is!

With no previous knowledge of Spanish before I moved to the Canary Islands recently, I have found myself relying on other people for translations and information.

As someone who is very independent and capable, I’ve found it quite difficult to depend on others. A recent article brought my situation in to perspective, however. Whilst I am only in Spain for a few months, there are people who move to a new country permanently without speaking the language – and sometimes have to rely on children to translate their everyday needs.

The first woman in this article, Dolores Pedro, has learned two additional languages in order to fit in to her community – first Spanish and now English. Her son says translating for his parents is not hard, as he “speak[s] three languages”.

There is some debate about the effect this responsibility has on children, however, especially when it comes to medical issues.

Whippo said the hospital tries to discourage using children as translators because the child may not have the vocabulary in both languages to fully explain the situation in English and another language. Also, she said, medical information can be a heavy burden on a child. (Source: Garden City Telegram)

A doctor in Tennessee, USA, also wrote an opinion piece earlier this year putting himself in a child translators shoes. He concluded that “children often lack the vocabulary and the psychological and emotional maturity required to communicate health information.” (Source: Education Week)

Luckily, I have no need to rely on children to communicate for me. Much like the woman in the article, I’ve made the conscious decision to learn the local language and improve quickly, so I can depend less on others.

Recently I posted about the pros and cons of machine translation versus human translation.

It seems computers are also helping people to communicate in other ways – a new study shows they may be more effective at lip reading than humans.

Researchers compared the accuracy of an automated lip-reading machine to that of 19 people who had lip-reading training. The study found that the automated system recognized 80 percent of words, compared to 32 percent for human lip readers.

The machines were also able to read lips on simplistic representations of facial shape, whereas human lip-readers required a video of actual people speaking.

“This pilot study is the first time an automated lip-reading system has been benchmarked against human lip-readers, and the results are perhaps surprising,” said study author Sarah Hilder. (Source: US News)

This could be of major benefit to lip reading learners, and lead to new and improved methods of learning. A difficult to learn skill, lip reading will become more essential as people live longer. Any skill that helps people communicate is valuable – can you lip read?

When a translation goes wrong, it normally results in laughter rather than anything more serious (see this list of humorous ads for example). But sometimes the incorrect words have consequences, as an airline found out recently.

French passengers on an Aer Lingus Dublin-Paris flight were thrown into panic when a faulty announcement told them the plane was about to make an emergency landing, the airline said Friday.

An English-language announcement 20 minutes after leaving Dublin said the plane was heading into turbulence, asking passengers to return to their seats — but the pre-recorded French version said they were about to ditch.

One passenger told the Irish Examiner newspaper that a French man who was dozing next to him suddenly woke up and looked very startled.

“He translated what had been said to me. The message, he said, was that we should prepare for an emergency landing, note where the emergency exits were and await instructions from the captain.

“As there was turbulence as well I got quite alarmed. The woman behind me was crying.

“All the French freaked out,” he said.(Source: Google News)

Not being a huge fan of flying myself, I can imagine the horror the French passengers felt when they heard this announcement. Let’s hope they saw the funny side of the error in the end!

Following the somewhat mixed reaction to the introduction of Cockney cash machines in London, the company behind the idea is now thinking of expanding.

Bank Machine is apparently thinking of putting 250 cash machines in Glasgow and Edinburgh, with Scots as a language option. Instead of money, users would be offered “bawbees” and a mini statement would become a “wee statement”.

Dr Christine Robinson, director of the Scottish Language Dictionaries in Edinburgh, said: “We’d be delighted to see it happen and would be happy to help with the translations. Scots is, at present, completely invisible in the public space.

“Furthermore, there are still a large number of Scots who, because they were criticised for their speech at school, think they are speaking slang or bad English when they are actually speaking perfectly good Scots.” (Source: Deadline)

It would be brilliant if this reinvigorated languages around the UK – as I’ve noted previously, there are many more languages in the country than English.