Ein Artikel auf Englisch in der Technology Review beschreibt die Versuche der FBI und CIA, mit modernen Technologien Dokumente in Fremdsprachen zu analysieren. Maschinenübersetzung wird nicht weiterverfolgt; der Computer soll Humanübersetzern (ein schönes Wort) unterstützen, nicht mehr ersetzen.

In the Technology Review, there is an article by Michael Erard called Translation in the Age of Terror. The topic is the National Virtual Translation Center in Washington D.C., the FBI & CIA’s joint project to expand the use of computer-assisted translation technologies in the intelligence community (to quote Michael Erard’s own description on the Forensic Linguists mailing list.

bq. In a Washington, DC, conference room soundproofed to thwart eavesdropping, five linguists working for the government—speaking on condition their names not be published—describe the monumental task they face analyzing foreign-language intercepts in the age of terror.

In view of the mass of material collected, technology has to assist translators. It seems that attempts to use machine translation have been given up in favour of techniques to assist human translators. For example, software might make Arabic easier to read – the documents are often in bad condition. In one example of the way things might work, a document containing one suspicious word is farmed out to a retired translator in Idaho (!), who uses translation memory with a shared database of translated phrases to determine that the document is not suspicious. (This is an odd example – I would have thought a quick human inspection would have done that, saving the OCR time, and if not, that machine translation rather than translation memory would have been used to give the document a once-over).

Other software processes Arabic text to make it easier to search.

Of translation memory it says:

bq. A translation memory works sort of like a spell-check application; it selects a chunk of text—whether a word fragment, several words, or whole sentences—and matches that chunk against previously translated material, saving time and improving accuracy by providing at least a partial translation. It’s already a key tool in the medical and legal industries—where the same jargon frequently crops up in different languages.

The reference to the ‘legal industry’ is rather brief and I have my suspicions. The article also has a sidebar on ‘white elephants’ – transliteration and multimedia systems that have not lived up to the hopes invested in them in the past.

For more forensic linguistics links, see my earlier entry.

(Click to enlarge)

Further to my recent entry, one of the comments on language hat’s site points out that the term ‘brain up’ was used in a Guardian article of August 2002, which I quote:

bq. Mr Saumarez Smith, a former academic, believes the answer is not to dumb down, “as the Department for Culture Media and Sport would sometimes seem to like us to do”, but to “brain up”.

Charles Saumarez Smith is the new director of the National Gallery. I found a brief biography (in Google’s cache) but with no suspicion indications, for example of him being German.

I am ashamed to say I believed the letter to the FAZ which had done an Internet search. In fact, a Google search brings more evidence that the term ‘brain up’ does exist. Not much support, but a ‘margaret’ (not me, however) contributes to the British Council word exchange:

bq. Word::brain up
Meaning::to bring some intelligence to a conversation, activity or presentation
Type of word::
Example::If this chat show host doesn’t brain up, I’m switching channel

‘Switching channel’ in the singular sounds a bit foreign.

Here’s another Guardian example, from the Education Guardian in January 2004:

bq. The message is that we have to brain up or fall behind, and that means two things.

Well, I shall e interest to hear how the FAZ discussion continues. It looks to me as if the word exists but is very new and may not even take hold. But some of the blame should be withdrawn. If an SPD education minister can’t trust the Guardian education section, who can she trust?

Pf arbeitet als Lektor für eine türkische Zeitung, die auf Englisch erscheint. Die englischen Texte, die er redigieren muss, sind anscheinend kaum verständlich.

This is copy-editing rather than translating, but somehow it reminds me of some translations I’ve read.

The famous pf, of pf’s blog, is copy-editing for an English-language newspaper in Istanbul. Here’s an early example (February 19th) of copy before editing:

bq. Global variation wavy began at last quarter of previous century and gained acceleration in 90’s, shaked political and ideological positions in us extremely.

bq. Because the lived was not the influence of West norms to the world. At the same time, the modern world?s perception was opened to interrogation and a new mental formation’s prolongation entered to policy over democratism.

And here’s an example of February 21st. Here is the way pf wrote it (it’s about cloning for stem-cell research):

bq. “Science has never been in the monster-production business, however Hollywood might film it. The real monster is the unequal distribution of wealth in our society.”

He (I think) uses block quotes plus quotation marks, the belt-and-braces approach. Here is what the paper did before putting it online:

bq. “Science has never been in the business of producing monsters, assuming of course we ignore Hollywood’s portrayals! The real monster is the unfair distribution of the wealth among people.”

Here’s the paper itself, Zaman Daily News. One good thing – after a year and a half of trying to learn Turkish, I can still understand this better than Hürriyet. Ah, but this is good – I can get the same stories in Turkish. But will the English ‘translation’ bear any similarity to the original?

I have rarely encountered English as incomprehensible as the example first quoted, but the general behaviour of the client ‘improving’ the English is very familiar.

I’m not sure how this got here, nor what function it has other than to advertise lifts.

LATER NOTE: I photographed this on Friday February 20th, and I now see that the solar-power company solid had an open day on Saturday. Perhaps this vehicle had to make the long trip from Erlangen (20 kilometres or thereabouts) a day early?

Soeben erreicht mich folgendes (erschienen in der FAZ am 21.2.2004):

bq. Aus einem Leserbrief in der FAZ (von einem Prof. Dr. Dieter Mindt, Berlin):
“Bundesministerin Edelgard Bulmahn (studierte Anglistin) verkündet allenthalben: ‘Brain up! Deutschland sucht seine Spitzenuniversitäten.’ Eine Suche in großen Datenmengen des britischen und amerikanischen Englisch hat nur ein einziges Vorkommen der Verbindung von ‘brain’ mit ‘up’ ergeben. Die Fundstelle aus dem British National Corpus lautet: ‘He’s got no brain up here.'”

bq. From a reader’s letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, from Professor Dr. Dieter Mindt, Berlin: ‘Federal Minister Edelgard Bulmahn (who studied English at university) is announcing everywhere: ‘Brain up! Deutschland sucht seine Spitzenuniversitäten.’ (‘[Incomprehensible English embellishment] German is looking for its top universities’). I searched British and U.S. English corpora and found only one example of “brain” together with “up”. It was in the British National Corpus and read: “He’s got no brain up here.”‘

Zur teilweise Entlastung der Ministerin: es gibt sehr wohl “brain up” im britischen Englisch. Collins English Dictionary gibt es im Sinne von ‘den Lehrplan geistig anspruchsvoller machen’, allerdings nur mit Objekt. Ich verstehe immer noch nicht, was Frau Bulmahn sagen will, kann es also nicht ins Englische übersetzen. Die Suche sollte aber nach ‘brain’ und ‘up’ mit ein paar Wörtern dazwischen sein.

Collins English Dictionary does give ‘brain up’: to make more intellectually demanding or sophisticated: We need to brain up the curriculum. However, it is a transitive verb and takes an object. So the minister’s use of the term is still quite mysterious.

I think I’ve come to this topic rather late: see ‘Brain up? Shut up!’

Incidentally, the reference to top universities relates to the current ideas about creating universities in Germany more like the Ivy League or Oxbridge, free to design their own programmes and funded privately.