Who owns street art?

Ignoring the advice of the Association for the Defence of Printed Wishes Via the Postal Service, we went ahead as usual this year and sent our sincerest wishes to friends and clients by personal email. Previous greetings cards had featured public street art, and although we credited the photographer when we could, copyright was probably not an issue. This year's card credited the original artists, but some people thought the little © signs were a bit small to read and wondered whether this was "fair use" of copyrighted works. So here's the score: the lips were painted by Man Ray in Paris in 1933, and were used pending the permission of the Man Ray Trust. The mosaic was part of another pair of lips, Geneviève Cadieux's La Voix Lactée, a gift from Montreal now installed in the Paris metro (thanks to Catherine-Alice Palagret at Archéologie du futur for the photo we used). And Canadian poet Anne Hébert wrote the poetry, which is on public view in the corridor between Saint Augustin and Saint Lazare. So I guess that makes it street art, right?

Paper still sets the agenda for newsreaders

According to a recent University of Oregon study, readers of the print edition of the New York Times recall more than readers of the online edition. The paper explores several theories for why print still rules, Jack Shafer reports in Slate:

Online newspapers tend to give few cues about a story's importance, and the "agenda-setting function" of newspapers gets lost in the process. "Online readers are apt to acquire less information about national, international and political events than print newsreaders because of the lack of salience cues; they generally are not being told what to read via story placement and prominence—an enduring feature of the print product," the researchers write. The paper finds no evidence that the "dynamic online story forms" (you know, multimedia stuff) have made stories more memorable.

English as she is spoke

I thought I was being terribly clever when I used that headline many years ago in an article to promote business English courses at a corporate university. I thought our Dutch readers were humourless or ignorant when they denounced our howling error. I've changed my tune a little since then. I try to respect our global audience by avoiding expressions that are too tribal or too idiomatic. I do damage control on the CEO's statement instead of editing his broken English into pitch-perfect prose. Most of the time, I think I find a good balance between local colour and readability. But is it authentic English?

BBC Online's recent series of rants about Americanisms, reported this week by The Economist, suggests that plenty of people have a tribal attachment to their own particular flavour of English. The suddenly popular www.samosapedia.com is a light-hearted clarion call to 1.5 billion South Asian users of the language formerly known as English. And Microsoft offers me no fewer than 18 standard variants to choose from – concerned, no doubt, that South African English would alienate my Zimbabwean readership.

Lingua franca

Authenticity is a thorny issue in our line of business. And if broken English is the lingua franca of the global economy, what is the added value of a business writer whose native language is British?

As a consumer, a basic command of the language is probably all you need to stay informed, place an order and use the customer support forum. But as a producer, settling for unwieldy English in your marketing and corporate communications more than likely erodes the credibility of your brand, and it's a missed opportunity to differentiate yourself.

Even if your readers are non-natives, chances are they're educated enough to recognise standard English when they see it. They'll probably understand your message better if it's crafted by a communicator with a full mastery of the tools of the trade. And when they compare your home-grown efforts with your native-English competitors, I bet their perception of your company – your eye for detail, your project management skills, your quality control – will be downgraded a notch.

The ROI of standard spelling

Online entrepreneur Charles Duncombe says an analysis of website figures shows a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half because of consumer concerns about a website's credibility.

"You get about six seconds to capture the attention on a website," says Mr Duncombe. And in that short space of time, apparently, you can send potential consumers rushing for the door.

Just imagine how much damage you could do in six seconds with a B2B website in a language other than your own! When you're fighting for attention and trust, 'good enough' could be counterproductive.

Google shuts down its translation API

Asia Online CEO Dion Wiggins gives an excellent informed analysis of Google's decision to shut down its translation API and improve its control over content quality. He says Google in reality has been "polluting its own drinking water by crawling and processing local language web content that has been published without any human proof reading after being translated using the Google Translate API."

Part II of the analysis, including the impact of the decision on the professional translation industry, can be found here.

Growth is overrated

Where have I been all these months? Spending too much time following language industry trends, which can make it sound as if we're all out to machine-translate as much low-grade content into as many languages as possible.

"Now that it's so beneficial to offer a service to just a few, with focus and attention,"says Seth Godin, "perhaps we need to rethink the very goal of scale." Time to focus on what we do, which is pamper a few important documents for a few clients in a few languages at a time.

Corporate intranets are social media too

Despite the risks of mismanaging a crowdsourced translation project, enthusiastic user communities are in an excellent position to propose authentic turns of phrase for social media tools in their own languages. The HootSuite translation project is a good example. I challenge any professional translation agency with a top-down process to get it right first time or do a better job than a well managed crowd of passionate users.

And it doesn't only apply to social media tools in the conventional sense. Corporate intranets are social media too. If our clients would only crowdsource the translation of their run-of-the-mill intranet content, their readers may feel more engaged and part of a group. Corporate should only have to moderate the process to ensure the key messages are getting across. Our role as professional linguists needs to change - we (and corporate) have to stop alienating the readers by second-guessing how they communicate as a group!

Go forth and xl8

During the Internet boom of the 1990s, writes Jost Zetzche in the ATA Chronicle this month, the term "translation" no longer seemed adequate to the movers and shakers of the translation industry. So new terms were coined—localization, globalization, and internationalization (aka l10n, g13n, and i18n). Now times have changed again, and the term transcreation is gaining traction as translators try to look "aware" rather than just technically savvy.

Translation has always come in different flavours, and inventing euphemisms probably doesn't help translation users in choosing the right combination of skills that different parts of our industry have to offer. "Let's embrace who we are!" Jost concludes. "I am proud to say that I'm a translator."

Machine translation in the news

Machine translation rocks. Really. Google Translate is the holy grail, the key to browsing the world outside and understanding 90% of life, the universe and everything. It's good news for world peace, human understanding and Google fans. And it's good news for the human translation industry too.

Rather than simply highlighting the silly mistakes that machine translation makes, some translation and localisation providers are embracing its ability to cope with exponential growth in demand -- and basking in reflected glory as the PR machines of Google and Asia Online thunder on.

If you ever need to explain the difference between these systems and what bio-translators do for a living, Fire Ant & Worker Bee recommend the chain saw analogy. It's hilarious. "Translation software is like a chain saw," ATA's media spokesman Kevin Hendzel is quoted as saying in a letter to President Obama. "It's an invaluable tool when you have to chop a lot of wood in a hurry, but you need skill to use it safely -- and it's not recommended for surgery."

Nor will a chain saw get you far if you want to cut boards, paper, textiles, a roast turkey, your fingernails, or a steak at a business lunch, says Fire Ant. At the same time, why use human translators to gist huge quantities of random content? "Surgeons could also saw logs with their scalpels, but it would be an absurd waste of their talent and capabilities."

Google's guide to the galaxy

Don't bother to learn foreign languages, advises the Daily Mail. Google says it plans to launch smartphones that will translate for you in real time. Franz Och, Google's head of translation services, admits that speech will be an even tougher challenge than text, and linguistics guru David Crystal agrees the problems of dealing with speed of speech and range of accents could prove insurmountable. So don't hold your breath. It's just a case of iPad envy.

Unfortunately for professional translators (or in this case interpreters), Google's latest gambit adds to the popular perception that effective communication is a question of terabytes and algorithms.

Don't forget the Babel Fish in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - a small yellow creature capable of translating any language when placed in a person's ear - sparked a bloody war because everyone became able to understand what other people were saying.

Buzz off Google. Get over yourselves.

Ericsson France's award-winning blog

We're proud to be translating content for Ericsson France's award-winning corporate blog, which started life in June 2009 and has been extensively covered in the French trade press ever since. In December, the worldwide Ericsson marketing and communications community selected the blog for the annual Best Media Relations award. The bloggers at Ericsson France also presented at the recent Media Aces conference in France and wrote a guest piece including "10 golden rules for a social networker" at PR Conversations.

Is Jeromobot a hobgoblin?

Lifelong terminology evangelist Steve Dyson concedes that terminological consistency – one of the major selling points of translation environment tools – may be overrated after all. “For sizeable chunks of the translation industry, including translators of technical journalism and marketing materials, terminological consistency (TermCon) is culturally alien and stylistically unacceptable,” he says.

“TermCon receives little more than lip service from journalists writing in English and is often seen as a failing by journalists writing in other languages,” says Steve. In French journalism, for example, the quest for ‘elegant variation’ often takes precedence over the kind of ‘foolish consistency’ that translation memory tools tend to promote. “It’s another example of how technology can unleash powerful tools on people who simply don’t have the training, experience or cultural sensitivity to use them professionally.”

Steve will be running a workshop on translating technical journalism at the Tradulínguas conference in Lisbon in May. His 2007 paper on the same topic can be acccessed here.

2010: Year of the Purge

Jost Zetzsche, a leading proponent of translation environment tools (TeNTs), wrote an enlightening piece about his experience in Accurapid's Translation Journal last month.

As his personal translation memory grew and grew, Jost found its usefulness "seemed to decline rather than improve. Too much time had passed between the earlier projects and the current ones (...), language had changed and my skill levels had, too." Gradually, he found he was spending "a lot of time deleting or wading through useless suggestions from the TM." With the newer TeNTs offering subsegment as well as segment matching, the problems were getting even worse.

His conclusion? Gigantic vaults of bilingual data are fantastic as reference materials, "but I am just not sure about their value as translation memory data in the classic sense." My conclusion: this is the year to purge the dross building up in our own bilingual resources, such as wobbly source texts and translations the client didn't like (yes, this happens!). Our resources may be carefully vetted, but they're never vetted carefully enough!

And hats off to Jost Zetzsche for his realistic analysis in a world obsessed by the power of the crowd and the value of the terabyte.

You align it!

Terminotix, makers of the LogiTerm TM tool and (more to the point) the excellent alignment engine AlignFactory, launched this free web service a few months ago. It uses the same algorithms as AlignFactory, which will also be included with the 2010 update of LogiTerm.

There's probably no better alignment tool on the market. In the free version you can't edit the bitexts, but for rough-and-ready alignment it can't be beat.

And what happens to the files you just aligned on the Terminotix servers? Back in August when the service launched, the Canadian company's (excellent) customer service said "All files are deleted as soon as you close YouAlign. We will soon be indicating that procedure on the Web site so that our clients know what happens to the files." Sure enough, tucked away in the sign-up page, the privacy policy now says this in black and white, so there's every reason to trust them not to feed our confidential data into the mother of all translation memories... or sell it to Google!

That sinking feeling

French shipbuilder DCNS launched a spiffy new website last year, sourcing everything - from graphic design to translation - from the same full-service agency. It seems they have noticed some oddities in the English text (you know, that grey stuff in between the rich content). Better late than never. Rumour has it they're in the process of getting the copy fixed. But before they do, this photo caption for the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier, the jewel in the crown of the French fleet, needs to go on the record. I wonder how their Russian is?

A game-changing warship

A cutting-edge French warship sailed into St. Petersburg in November to show off its capabilities to potential buyers in the Russian Navy. Bruno Daffix, a spokesman for the French Defense Ministry's export and sales agency, described the ship as a "Swiss Army knife" of military ships - able to carry helicopters, land forces, hospitals or refugees, among other things, the Wall Street Journal reported. But critics of the potential deal in nations neighbouring Russia - such as Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic states - say it would dramatically increase the military threat from Russia, increasing tensions in some already difficult relations.

LOL: Naval defence can be fun too!

New-generation marketers for a new generation of procurement officers? This animated video was on show at DSEi to promote integrated topside design from Thales.

Israeli missile maker goes Bollywood

Engaging its customers with references to local culture, Rafael is making a break with some of the defence industry’s old-school paradigms, deemed overly serious by a new generation of marketing executives.

Punctuation makes a comeback

Lucy Kellaway's column in the FT suggests that speaking to people in a culturally appropriate way may have its merits after all...

Meanwhile the out-of-work French business school graduate who put himself on eBay got pretty well flamed for his presentation skills and trying to get a job with a CV full of grammatical errors.

Back in the blogosphere

This blog has existed off and on for seven years in blissful oblivion. The experiment continues! Here's one about Obama's oath of office and the trouble being a die-hard pedant can get you into. Maybe someone else would like to post some stuff here too. Let me know and I'll add you to the authors list.