Google has launched a new translation service for mono-lingual English tourists, which may save them from making embarrassing mistakes in restaurants across the world.
The search giant unveiled its latest piece of technology at Mobile World Congress this week, which lets a baffled diner snap a foreign menu on their smartphone for an instant translation into English.
Currently Google’s early prototype can only translate German to English; so where it will save the unsuspecting tourist in Bavaria from a slice of gefullter Saumagen (stuffed sow’s stomach), the green-faced vegetarian in Paris will be left prodding his plate of pied de cochon (pig’s trotters).
However, in the future Google believes its technology will be used to translate everything from road signs, posters and even foreign novels between the 52 languages it supports.
Andrew Gomez, Google’s product marketing manager, said: “Imagine being in a foreign country staring at a restaurant menu you can’t understand, a waiter impatiently tapping his foot at your table side.
In an unfortunate result of translation, Pakistani diplomat Akbar Zeb will not become the next Pakistani ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Zeb’s credentials seem in order: He is the former ambassador to the United States, India and South Africa. He held the post of High Commissioner Designate of Pakistan to Canada and is the former director general of Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry.
But despite Mr. Zeb’s impressive career, the 55-year-old diplomat’s name proved to be the immovable hurdle. When translated into Arabic, Akbar Zeb means “Biggest Dick.” In a region that stresses modesty, particularly in public, this could not stand.
Akbar is a customary Muslim name for Arabic and non-Arabic speakers alike. The same cannot be said for Zeb. The name is common in Urdu, however in Arabic it is merely a slang reference to the male reproductive organ.
In hopes of minimizing the use of the word in public, Saudi Arabia has refused to accredit Mr. Zeb for the position.
The term ‘culture‘ addresses three salient categories of human activity: the ‘personal,’ whereby we as individuals think and function as such; the ‘collective,’ whereby we function in a social context; and the ‘expressive,’ whereby society expresses itself.
Language is the only social institution without which no other social institution can function; it therefore underpins the three pillars upon which culture is built.
Translation, involving the transposition of thoughts expressed in one language by one social group into the appropriate expression of another group, entails a process of cultural de-coding, re-coding and en-coding. As cultures are increasingly brought into greater contact with one another, multicultural considerations are brought to bear to an ever-increasing degree. Now, how do all these changes influence us when we are trying to comprehend a text before finally translating it? We are not just dealing with words written in a certain time, space and socio-political situation; most importantly it is the “cultural” aspect of the text that we should take into account. The process of transfer, i.e., re-coding across cultures, should consequently allocate corresponding attributes vis-a-vis the target culture to ensure credibility in the eyes of the target reader.
Beloved Belgian cartoon reporter Tintin is getting a makeover in China thanks to a new, more faithful Mandarin translation of his adventures.
Wang Bingdong, who first discovered Herge’s comic strip hero in 2001 at the age of 66, spent three years penning the new version of 22 Tintin books — a painstaking task he says was a pure delight.
“I really found myself feeling happy as I was translating — I felt younger with Tintin and the other members of the Tintin family by my side every day,” Wang told AFP with a grin.
The new Chinese edition includes nearly all of Tintin’s stories — “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets” was deemed too anti-communist by the country’s censors for its criticism of the Soviet Union.
After an attempted terrorist attack on a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day 2009, President Obama revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies had collected but then failed to piece together different threads of information about the suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Sound familiar? Just like the many warnings that were captured but went untranslated prior to 9/11, this latest incident highlights one of the U.S. government’s biggest counter-terrorism challenges – multilingual information management.While the attempted December attack differs from the pre-9/11 warnings in that, to our knowledge, it did not involve translation, the lesson is the same: managing flows of information across multiple countries, languages, and cultures is a complex undertaking. It requires both money and planning.
However, money isn’t really the problem. As a new report from Common Sense Advisory shows, the U.S. federal government spent US$4.5 billion on translation and interpreting services over the last 20 years (from 1990 through 2009). Most of these funds were disbursed in the past few years alone.
A new year and a new tool on the Kwintessential website!
The transliteration tool phonetically converts a word written in one script into another. Transliteration should not be confused with translation, which involves a change in language while preserving meaning. With transliteration, it is the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other.
The transliteraion tool currently only supports the following languages - Bengali (bn), Gujarati (gu), Hindi (hi), Kannada (kn), Malayalam (ml), Marathi (mr), Nepali (ne), Punjabi (pa), Tamil (ta), Telugu (te) and Urdu (ur).
Imperial College London is running a distance learning course:
Translation Technology: Localisation e-Learning Course
11 January - 26 March 2010
Imperial College London is pleased to announce next run of a popular 11 weeks e-learning programme for professional translators. This is an exciting course on software and games localisation run in collaboration with the Humanities Department at the College.
This course will be valuable to anyone who wants to further their career in the translation industry, and is a very important stepping-stone to becoming a software localiser.
Topics include:
• Introduction to the key concepts of localisation
• Localising resource (software) files
• Localising help files (WinHelp and WebHelp)
• Screenshooting and localising graphics
• Localising games
Places on the course are limited therefore early booking is recommended.
For further details please visit our website: http://www.imperial.ac.uk/cpd/localisation
In a bid to break communication barriers and help people sharpen their linguistics skills in a remarkable way, a Japanese firm NEC has designed a high-tech gadget, which offers users instant real-time language translation capabilities.
Dubbed as “Tele Scouter”, the gadget’s shape resembles that of a pair of glasses, and it helps users establish conversations with people of different languages by offering real-time language translation directly onto their retina.
The system incorporates voice recognition technology, microphones, along with various translations programmes to interpret conversations as they occur, projecting subtitles on the user’s retina, thereby eliminating the need of human translators completely.
In addition, the device also has the feature to offer audio translations via headphones.
Speaking about the features of the device, Takayuki Omino, NEC’s market development official, said in a statement: “You can keep the conversation flowing. This could also be used for talks involving confidential information, negating the need for a human translator”
Translation is tricky enough, but an app that turns your spoken English into Spanish in real-time? It sounds like something out of Star Trek, and that’s exactly what the Jibbigo app for the iPhone claims to do. We tried it out, and we like what we see.
At a glance: Jibbigo would be perfect for any iPhone owner who likes to travel to Spanish-speaking countries. It does well with vital phrases you’d need, such as asking for directions for specific things. It also does it all while offline, so you really only need service for updates. Its price is probably its greatest barrier to entry, and there are a few things it won’t do.
News trickled out this month that Bing Translator had gained Thai support, meaning that users can translate to and from the language in IE8’s Accelerator, with the Microsoft Translator widget, with the Windows Live Messenger bot, with Microsoft Translator for Office, and with the Microsoft Translator API. All in all, it’s good news for anyone who knows the Thai language, though we should note that Google has supported it for some time.
This information prompted us to a do a quick quantitative comparison between the comparable translator services from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Here’s a summary of the three websites:
Google Translate - 51 languages
Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Yiddish Bing Translator - 20 languages
Arabic, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Thai Yahoo Babel Fish - 13 languages
Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish
Regardless of the fact that Google has more languages, it’s important to remember to also compare quality. Assuming that your languages are supported by more than just one service, we recommend that you compare the two each and decide which one works better for you.
We should also note that while Microsoft and Google both allow any combination of two languages they support, Yahoo only allows translating between certain pairs of languages of the ones that it supports. The fact that Babel Fish is behind Bing Translator is not that surprising, even if Yahoo has a higher market share than Bing. Yahoo is hoping for the Microhoo deal to receive regulatory approval from the US and Europe, which will mean that Bing will be taking the reigns of all search from the two companies regardless. For this reason, Yahoo has likely let Babel Fish remain stagnant.
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