infundibulum

Oddly enough, for some reason I stuck a search for Education Equality Act after blogging my response to someone’s post that mentioned it. That was last June.

Well, those two lonely hits finally have a third: The Wonkster: Translation Bill Vetoed.

This move really makes me wonder if people who claim to support “English only” in the states actually intend to promote English. Because no politician would argue that parents shouldn’t be involved in their childrens’ education. It’s a known fact that children tend to learn languages faster than adults.

So, it stands to reason that even if you are completely against use of any language but English at all in the classroom, those children will still need the involvement of their parents. And those parents do not know English.

Thus my suspicion, that what he’s really promoting is preventing education.

And why is it that public volunteers can’t help do translation of things like report cards over the web? If a second-generation Vietnamese American in Fresno saw a website where he could translate a report card (with the students’ privacy protected) for the children of first-generation immigrants in Boston, why shouldn’t they be able to? Why does the government have to spend money on this at all?

Yes, quality control is an issue, but it could happen. As opposed to what’s being legislated now: leave the kids and the parents out in the cold.

Nice.

From a pointer at Transblawg I came across this rather astonishing article:

Daytona Beach News-Journal Online

DAYTONA BEACH — Unable to speak English, Juan Ramon Alfonzo stood before a judge and expected to receive probation for stealing a toolbox. To his surprise, the judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison, followed by 15 years of probation, for stealing a dump truck valued at $125,000. Now, court officials agree Alfonzo entered the wrong plea because his court-hired interpreter, Marianne Verruno, provided an incomprehensible translation. Two weeks ago, a circuit judge tossed out his plea and sentencing to allow Alfonzo to start the court process over. “Ms. Verruno is far from being fluent in Spanish,” an expert interpreter wrote in a report to the judge. “She may be conversant enough for social situations but her Spanish is not minimally adequate to interpret in a court of law.”

Words fail me.

But words jailed him. Almost.

Good grief.

Pretty interesting article:

Kevin Malone with the DMV says his agency is aware of the different dialects in the Silver State. “The Hispanic community and language is diverse. There are different words for turn, different words for test, which one is right depends on who you’re talking to. We’re just trying to meet a happy medium.”

KLASTV.com - Lost in Translation: DMV Spanish Driving Manuals

But I must admit this bit surprised me:

Currently there is no translation budget, so the DMV is open to community volunteers who are interested in helping in the publication of the new Spanish driving manual.

Golly ned. That sounds like something that should really have professional translators involved. But if not… well… it should certainly be done on the web.

I’ll get right on it!

Just in time for Halloween, the Blogamundo Hacklog has come to life. Jonas Galvez and myself will be blogging about the trials and tribulations of starting up Blogamundo.com, our new project to help jumpstart translation in the blogosphere.

All the language & translation stuff that’s been showing up around here will be there, henceforth.

This blog will probably be dedicated to cats and teen angst.

Because there isn’t enough of that on the web, after all.

So check it out!

As for the lack of updates here of late, here’s the deal: I’m starting a brand new project pretty soon, and to go with it there will be a new blog. All the stuff having to do with language, translation, and programming will be in the new blog — this one will remain for everything else.

(Unfortunately, comment spam has forced me to turn on “registration” here, I’ll try to fix it.)

As for the new project: it’s a new kind of translation tool for the web . I’ve been working on it pretty much full time with the only other guy in the company the South American Geek Department, Brazil Chapter: Jonas Galvez.

The site’s called Blogamundo!

We haven’t set up a proper mailing list yet, but you can drop me an email with Blogamundo? in the subject line if you’re curious about the project!

More soon, not because I’m trying to be stealth-mode-y, but just because we haven’t set up the new blog yet.

☺

I’m subscribed to some news feeds that send me updates with articles about translation, and here’s the latest one I came across:

Speaking the same language

Police are reaching out to migrant communities, with information in seven languages now available on the force’s national website.

Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Somali and Vietnamese speakers can now access police information online.

The site which was translated by NZ Translation Centre explains how to contact local police and liaison officers as well as giving tips on crime prevention and safety tips.

So I took a look at the site itself:

New Zealand Police Official Website

All said, it’s a pretty nice site — they’ve done a good job localizing it. One interesting bit, however: the character encodings aren’t consistent.

I suppose there are compelling reasons to use those legacy encodings for Korean and Japanese — but it really doesn’t make sense to encode English as Latin-1, when the same site is using UTF-8 for a language like Somali, whose alphabet is strictly “roman” characters.

It seems to me that they’ll be looking at more headaches down the road as a result of not just going ahead and serving the whole site in a single encoding.

Here’s an update to a random idea I had a while back: Want to Know How to Make Some Money?, where I babbled:

Want to Know How to Make Some Money? Here, I’ll tell you.

News Sentinel | 06/24/2005 | Funding cut for translator service

Asterisk
+ Wireless network + Laptops + Webcams + Subscriptions + Nationwide
(Worldwide?) network of on-call interpreters for lots of languages.

Well, go on.

The idea being that one could start a business capitalizing on the relatively cheap availability of video conferencing tools to sell distributed interpretation services.

Well, I talked to my sister about this idea. She’s a nurse.

The concept is D.O.A., and here’s why: there are strict rules about how the interaction between doctors, patients, and interpreters are to take place. Specifically, the interpreter is not allowed to be a “participant” in the conversation: the interpreter must not speak directly to the patient. The patient looks only at the doctor, never at the interpreter.

That’s a rule.

Which obviates the whole point of the webcam idea. Perhaps the VOIP aspect would still be doable, however.

An opinion piece from the Japan Times:

The most dangerous civilian job in Iraq.

Being an interpreter, of course.

Interpreting is the most dangerous civilian job among employees of private contractors with the U.S. Labor Department. Interpreters’ deaths accounted for more than 40 percent of the more than 300 death claims filed by all private contractors operating in Iraq.

One interpreter said if he were caught by insurgents his head would be cut off because imams say interpreters are spies. This interpreter has been threatened 15 times, including by a neighbor. One female interpreter was shot execution-style at her home in front of her family.

Yikes.

Yahoo! Search blog: Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

Machine translation was once a rather obscure field — until Babelfish hit the web, I suppose.

Wait, I take that back. There was a period of time back in the 50’s when MT was very much in the public eye — until it became clear that it wasn’t going to be useful (well, not for a few more decades, anyway). Check out this nice history of MT in a nutshell for details.

But I digress.

If you’ve nosed around in academic MT within the last decade or so (or even just poked dilettanteishly at its periphery, as I have), then you were surely inundated by the torrents of boffin-speak.

I find it interesting to watch public-facing search engine companies like Google and Yahoo are being forced to find simple terminology to describe their work in MT . I often find myself mentally, uh, translating from these more verbose descriptions back into the terminology of academia. From the above link, for instance:

So what does this really mean? We apply our Yahoo! Search Translation Technology by taking your query, looking across the entire Web and across languages to assemble the most comprehensive set of relevant results, and then returning that information in your local language.

“Oh, you mean this thing does CLIR…”

People complain a lot about technical terminology, but of course it’s actually useful. It’s just that it’s more trouble than it’s worth, for most people. In any case, it’s great to see this kind of tech seeping out onto the web.

Since I’ve started paying more attention to translation on the web, one country has started to stand out in terms of the sheer amount of translation: China. Deutsche Welle and BBC World Service and VOA News all make massive translation efforts, but it turns out that China’s national Xinhua news service does as well: China to standardize minority language translation system drives home the point:

According the State Ethnic Affairs Commission, More than 60 million people from 55 minority populations within China use more than 80 spoken languages and about 40 written languages.

China has about 300 minority language translation organizationswith part-time and full time staff of more than 100,000.

CRI Online has a list of forty-plus languages. (Looking at some of the content there doesn’t seem too impressive, however–the text on the Burmese page, for instance, is all images.)