Found In Translation

I hadn’t heard of this great organization, Found In Translation, before, but thanks to my fellow Bryn Mawr College alumna Enid and her son Noah, I’m pleased to have now done so.

The organization’s mission is: “To help homeless and low-income multilingual women to achieve economic security through the use of their language skills” and “To reduce ethnic, racial, and linguistic disparities in health care by unleashing bilingual talent into the workforce”. It sounds fantastic, and I recommend that you look into the work they do.

A Round-Up of Articles

This set of articles should keep you happily occupied for awhile!

Yesterday was the Nobel Prize ceremony. Literature prize-winner Doris Lessing was too ill to attend, but she recorded a lecture from the UK. You can read it here.

An article in English in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter gives a little insight into the way the Nobel Prizes are decided.

As this funny article shows, one mispronunciation can really change the meaning.

The much-beloved Paddington Bear is being updated to reflect the times. See this brief article for more on the new Paddington book.

A recent story from the Guardian is on on translating to Arabic and a project aiming to eventually publish 500 translations a year. “Four years ago the UN’s Arab human development report identified a lack of translated foreign works as an issue restricting Arab intellectual life. The UN report noted that Spain translates in one year the number of books that have been translated into Arabic in the past 1,000 years.”

This article is on translating the Gospel of Judas Iscariot.

As someone who has studied Latin, I was interested in this editorial on why studying Latin is useful. There is some talk of translation in the article too, such as in the following quote: “learning to translate Latin into English and vice versa is a tremendous way to train the mind. I think of translating concise, precise Latin into more expansive, discursive English as like opening up a concertina; you are allowed to inject all sorts of original thought and interpretation. As much as opening the concertina enlarges your imagination, squeezing it shut — translating English into Latin — sharpens your prose. Because Latin is a dead language, not in a constant state of flux as living languages are, there’s no wriggle room in translating. If you haven’t understood exactly what a particular word means or how a grammatical rule works, you are likely to be, not off, but just plain wrong. There’s nothing like this challenge to teach you how to navigate the reefs and whirlpools of English prose.”

I had no idea that Papua New Guinea Has Four Times As Many Languages As Europe. I also found it interesting to know that: “Only about 10,000 words in modern English date back to the Anglo-Saxon language used by the authors of Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon; the rest of the roughly 500,000 words in common use have been arriving for centuries from all directions.”

The A Word A Day newsletter recently included a link to this article about the Salish–Pend d’Oreille language and language death in general.

Finally, more children are studying Chinese today, according to this story. A quote says: “The number of elementary and secondary school students studying Chinese could be as much as 10 times higher than it was seven years ago, says Marty Abbott, spokeswoman for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. When the council surveyed K-12 enrollment in foreign language classes in 2000, there were about 5,000 students of Chinese, Abbott says. The council is collecting data for another survey, but Abbott says early figures suggest the number of students now studying Chinese has “got to be somewhere around 30,000 to 50,000.”” Another quote points out: “Interest in languages comes and goes. Latin was the sine qua non- from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 20th century. French has always been the language of culture. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, German was the choice among those interested in science.”

Car Doesn’t Run? Try Translation!

The last post was on internationalization and I mentioned advertising as something that needs to be carefully translated. I heard about an example of bad advertising translation in regard to Coca-Cola. The soda company tried to translate its “Coke adds life” ad to Japanese and ended up with “Coke brings your ancestors back from the dead.” Slight difference there!

Careful translation isn’t just limited to ads, but also affects product names and the instructions for using said products. A well-known example is the Chevrolet Nova car, which didn’t sell well in Mexico, since “no va” means “it doesn’t go.” Bill Bryson featured a funny example of poorly translated instructions in his book “The Mother Tongue.” On a package of Italian food, he found, “Besmear a backing pan, previously buttered with a good tomato sauce, and, after, dispose the cannelloni, lightly distanced between them in an only couch.”

A Wall Street Journal article on the importance of translation and adaption offers the following statistics from a survey done by a translation company a few years ago: “Close to 50% simply tune out the message of an ad if it is poorly translated. About 65% said bad translations show a lack of caring about the consumer, while nearly a third said it would hinder their loyalty to a product.”

A company can’t afford to waste time, effort, and money on mistranslations. Consumers may laugh at bad translations of ads, product names, or instructions, but the real question is whether they ultimately will avoid the company’s products. Mistranslation simply “doesn’t go.”

Internationalization

In today’s A Word A Day e-newsletter, Wordsmith Anu Garg focused on the word “internationalization.” He offers two definitions:

“1. The act or process of making something international or placing
it under international control.

“2. Making a product or process suitable for use around the globe.”

Something too many companies don’t recognize is that translation is an important part of internationalization, especially in terms of the second definition. Making something suitable for use in another country is not “just replacing error messages from a new language,” as Mr. Garg refers to the process of making a computer program internationalized. Rather, it involves understanding the culture behind the language, and adjusting the language usage to that.

When I taught some English courses at a Swedish advertising agency, I was surprised when some of the students happened to mention that ads they made for the Swedish market had to be significantly changed for the Finnish market. Finland and Sweden were geographically so close, I thought, and Finland was historically influenced by Sweden and even had Swedish-speaking populations, so I didn’t see why the ads wouldn’t work there. But as a translator, I soon realized that this made sense. Finland’s culture is not the same as Sweden’s and even if the countries share some history and some similarities, a Swedish company that assumed it didn’t have to adapt its ads to Finland, or even translate them to Finnish, was not being respectful of its market, and would perhaps not do much business there.

Besides understanding the target market, which some companies have even started employing anthropologists for, a company interested in internationalization has to hire skilled translators as well. But the sheer number of poorly translated products, instructions, and ads, some featured on Jay Leno’s “Headlines” segment each week, makes it clear that many companies around the world haven’t quite figured out just what internationalization means yet. Hopefully they got Mr. Garg’s message today.