Category Archives: translation

Economist on translation and the law

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An article in The Economist on the growing demand for legal translation: Translating and the law.

It envisages this as a good prospect for underworked lawyers:

Specialised “e-discovery” software helps lawyers cull the masses of electronic data. But in international deals and lawsuits, such software must be run by cultural and linguistic experts to make sure the correct search terms are used and the right information is ferreted out. Translation is still something that computers do badly much of the time, especially when the topic (a drug patent, say) is a difficult one full of technical details.

The many law students wondering if the rotten legal job market will ever improve should take note. The twin forces of globalisation and technology may put many mediocre lawyers out of business. But those who master languages and computers may find themselves in demand.

There’s nothing wrong with lawyers translating – I am a Germanist who became a solicitor and spent 20 years teaching legal translation, for which there was at the beginning little demand and where I had to teach myself. But I hope those lawyers with language skills get some kind of training on what translation and working with related software involve, and above all have experience.

The article originates in New York and the discovery problems in the USA are particularly great. I think the patent translator Steve Vitek spends a lot of time telling his clients which Japanese patent documentation needs looking at more closely. I tell clients or potential clients what statutes or judgments are available in translation on the Internet and whether I think the translation is reliable. That sort of thing requires experience.

Tweeted by Helen Gibbons, retweeted by Kevin Lossner

MOOC free online course on crowdsourced translation – English/Spanish

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I am not really into crowdsourced translation, but it appears that the Open University in the UK is about to run a MOOC, a Massive Open Online Course on Open Translation tools and practices.

There’s more information here, including a video. The pilot runs from 15th October to 7 December 2012 (8 weeks), with the accompanying course website opening on Oct 10th 2012.

The project is aimed at speakers of English or Spanish who are also proficient in Spanish or English (level B2 or above of the CEFR). You might be a language learner, a translation student, or simply looking to develop your translation skills. The project will provide the following opportunities:

Introduce learners to open translation tools and generic translation skills, developing useful employability skills in a global context;
Promote plurilingualism and intercultural communication;
Promote the internationalisation of the student experience;
Introduce learners to real-world translation tasks for volunteer translators in well-established community translation projects (e.g. Wikipedia, TED talks, Global Voices);
Develop translation skills in subject specific domains (maths, education) through translating OpenLearn content (http://www.open.edu/openlearn/).

Not awfully good online translation/”Übersetzung” online

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1. This is really about legal translation – on fucked translation, kalebeul has done the work on describing the Spanish Facebook translation of civil union (civil partnership) as a homosexual union, thus excluding the heterosexual variant. Here’s the original Lexicool post. (Germany has a Lebenspartnerschaftsgesetz, and the parties are known as Lebenspartner).

2. This is interesting: machine translation, such as Google Translate, can be helpful in giving the gist of a web page. But what do people think when they read such gibberish without explanation? Here is an IKEA Hack in gibberish: Portable drawer … a box of second growth … This seems to have caused no unrest – of course, the photos help. The list of products is almost correct. Second growth seems to mean resurrection. This sounds a bit disgusting, though:

I just painted, I set the rear side, standing in the rolled up in my wrapping paper.

This is puzzling too – the original (Hungarian) must have meant something:

Here it is important enough for accurate measurement….(this is unfortunately the experience of my sentence:))

Corpora for (legal) translators/Textkörper für (juristische) Übersetzer

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I did some months ago intend to write something about my experience of using corpora for translation purposes, especially legal translation. (See earlier entry and footnotes by John Kuti there)

At that time, it appeared the free programs I might have recommended had lost their value for me because they had access to fewer corpora.

Then again, one could get fairly similar results with a Google CSE (custom search engine).

I followed a webinar on the topic last year, and it ended with a contribution by Juliette Scott, who is a legal translator who is doing a Ph.D. on the subject. She now has a weblog, called Translation & the Law: from words to deeds, which is certainly a good place to find out more.

There was also a blog post by Kevin Lossner in Translation Tribulations, entitled A NIFTY method for legal terminology (I thought NIFTY was a play on NIMBY, but I found out it is the name Juliette Scott gives her method) – Here you will find the links to use if you want to help in Juliette’s research/find out more.

From a real-life seminar in London a couple of years ago I also have a most wonderful and useful book on the subject of corpora; Working with Specialized Language: A practical guide to using corpora” by Lynne Bowker and Jennifer Pearson (dated 2002 but still useful in 2012: you can look inside at amazon)

The basic approach to making a corpus of legal texts is to collect them on the internet or from other sources and convert them all into a format readable by the corpus program. This takes a bit of time. It also raises copyright problems unless you just use it for your own purposes. This was the problem with the free software BootCat, which had lost the right to use certain sources from the Web. The free software AntConc is for a later stage of the process.

Here’s an article by Michael Wilkinson: Compiling Corpora for Use as Translation Resources

I did have some rapid success in one field of legal English late last year. I sometimes translate lawyers’ websites and also extracts from directories in which law firms are described in glowing terms. Here’s an example from a firm I have nothing to do with:

CMS Hasche Sigle
Aufbruch in eine neue Zeit – und zwar mit Schwung. Unter dieses Motto könnte man das vergangene Jahr bei CMS stellen. Schon lange gehört die Kanzlei in Hamburg zu den führenden Adressen, jedoch monierten Wettbewerber, CMS sei zu breit aufgestellt, um im Markt wirklich hervorzustechen.
Diese Zeiten gehen zu Ende: V.a. die M&A-Praxis hat zuletzt einen deutlichen Schub erhalten und sorgte für Schlagzeilen, als ein Hamburger Team zusammen mit dem internationalen CMS-Verbund Takeda bei dem €10 Mrd schweren Erwerb von Nycomed beriet. Dies spiegelte sich auch im Markt wider, die Gruppe erntete in diesem Jahr spürbar mehr Lob. Gemeinsam mit Dr. Marc Riede betreute er zudem die HSH bei der Restrukturierung von Hapag-Lloyd.

It’s quite easy to collect this kind of thing in English from UK, USA and other sites and to search it for useful expressions. I might find more ideas for words like betreuen.

But I still have the feeling that a corpus would not help me with most legal translations, because I am not trying to create a text that looks like it was written in English about English law, but one that is clearly about a foreign legal system. If I created a collection of contracts, for example, every potential match of phrase would need to be checked legally to see if it meant the same thing. I have the feeling that I’d love to computerize my vocabulary work, but it would then bypass my own brain and experience.

Becoming a translator with educated proficiency/Geld verdienen als Übersetzer

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I am gearing up to start blogging properly again, but meanwhile some reading from a website on running a small business from home. Someone tweeted it this morning, I hope as a joke but perhaps not. The site gives advice on how you can earn money as a ‘verbal translator’ (this seems to mean an interpreter) or a ‘text-based translator’ (apparently a translator). This opportunity is open to you even if you do not have the ideal qualification of having grown up bilingual:

Most organizations who are looking to hire a verbal translator will prefer to find translators that grew up speaking both languages. Fully bilingual, these translators have been speaking both languages since their childhood and this can help bring a fluid mastery that many other translators will not have. These translators will often understand the rhythm and cadence of a particular region which many students of language cannot master.

I have always had the impression that ‘true bilinguals’ are not typically ideal translators, but apparently I was wrong. Looking at my day’s work today, I must admit that fluid mastery is not the first description that occurs to me.

Another important point made, if I interpret it correctly, is that whereas interpreters can just babble away, we translators need to know grammar. That’s good, because I’ve spent quite a few years teaching grammar. The students didn’t seem keen, but I always knew it would be useful some day.

While a verbal translator needs to be able to efficiently handle the ever changing dynamics of a language, text based translators often need to have a better hold on grammatical structure of a language. Both types of translators should certainly be able to both speak and write the language, although text translators should know the specifics behind important grammatical rules of the language. Most written documents will need to have an educated proficiency behind them.

Looking behind me, I haven’t spotted the educated proficiency yet, but I feel sure it must be there.

This is why a number of different tools can all come in handy when you are learning how to become a translator.

Here I am disappointed. I was hoping they would tell me what tools they meant. Do they mean software, or is it hammers and screwdrivers? Still, I am presumably past that point and there seems hope here:

Once you are able to hold a conversation or read a book in two different ways, though, you will know that you are ready to find work as a translator.

(I wonder whether these texts are bought in from Asia?)