Tag Archives: translation

Online volunteering with the United Nations

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Surprised that you can volunteer online? Well, you can! I’ve been doing this for a number of years now, and thought I would share the information with you, because I don’t think that many people are aware that they can help out from their desktop.

Why volunteer online?

“Volunteering online is an opportunity to support the cause of sustainable human development working from a computer anywhere in the world. Volunteers do not need to travel and have a great degree of flexibility in volunteering the hours that fit their schedule.”

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Legal considerations – machine translation and copyright

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This guest post is published under a GNU version 2 licence, and comes from the Open Translation Tools Manual (more about that in a forthcoming post). It was written by Ed Bice in 2009, with modifications by Thom Hastings also in 2009. Despite being 3 years old, I think it brings up some very interesting topics for discussion. I look forward to reading your comments!

American copyright law considers a translation a derivative work. As such translators must obtain permission from the copyright or derivative right holder of the source language text. With regard to online translation, we expect that as Machine Translation (MT) and Hybrid Distributed Translation (HDT- strategies combining human and machine translation) come of age significant changes will need to be made to the legal framework to accommodate these technologies.

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Quantifying the cost of poor quality in translation – sour cherries

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The Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission has made available a report written late last year, as part of the ‘Studies on translation and multilingualism’ series, on Quantifying Quality Costs and the Cost of Poor Quality in Translation. The document can be downloaded in PDF format here.

Items such as prevention of poor quality, evaluation, and clarification of original texts may be of interest to those of you procuring translation as well as to translators. Some case studies from ‘real life’ have been given.  One interesting example relates to protective measures on the import of sour cherries which accidentally became “sweet cherries” in the initial German version.

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Translation of ancient Chinese legal texts ‘as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls’

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The University of California Santa Barbara has issued the following press release:

UCSB History Scholar Translates and Interprets Ancient Chinese Legal Texts

In an ancient tomb in China’s Hubei Province, archeologists discovered a basket of medical, mathematical, and legal texts that date back to the late third and early second centuries B.C. A historian at UC Santa Barbara is working to translate and interpret the legal texts, of which there are two, and describes them as “a gold mine of social and legal history.”

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Taniguchi case outcome – A good or a bad thing for justice?

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Following on from my February post about the US Supreme Court case differentiating translation costs and interpretation costs, today we have a second thought-provoking guest post from Tony Rosado (see his earlier post here). In addition to discussing the outcome of the case, he also gives some very good advice on how to deal with its aftermath.

Tony has been a freelance conference interpreter for almost 30 years and is Federally, Colorado, and New Mexico certified. He also qualified as an attorney from the Escuela Libre de Derecho in Mexico City. You may also be interested in his English/Spanish blog. Tony runs Rosado Professional Solutions in Chicago.

“After watching many of our colleagues celebrating because the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the definition of an interpreter in the Taniguchi case, and more importantly, after reviewing the briefs, oral arguments, full written decision, and the dissenting opinion by Justice Ginsburg, I wonder if this decision should be cause for joy or grounds for concern.

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Translating through the fog

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The other day I came across this nice clean web-based tool which calculates the Gunning Fog readability score for a piece of text. Just for fun, I put a few sentences from a translation I was then doing (on VAT legislation!) into the tool. It came up with scores ranging between 23 and 29.4 depending on the sentences I chose.

Gunning Fog is not the only readability indicator – others include Flesch-Kincaid, SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook), and Coleman-Liau.  A comprehensive article by Ronald & Ruth Reck describes a number of them in detail. There are also lots of simple online tools available.

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When we are asked to translate useless materials…

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A thought-provoking guest post today from Tony Rosado, of Rosado Professional Solutions in Chicago. Tony has been a freelance conference interpreter for almost 30 years and is Federally, Colorado, and New Mexico certified. He also qualified as an attorney from the Escuela Libre de Derecho in Mexico City. You may also be interested in his English/Spanish blog.

Over to you, Tony!

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Translation of national legislation

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In connection with a recent Law Library of Congress event which I hope to report on more fully soon, the Library has released an excellent new publication in PDF form, Translation of National Legislation into English (click on the title to download). This guide, prepared by the staff of the Law Library’s Global Legal Research Center, is a reference tool for locating translated materials from thirteen nations: Afghanistan, Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, and the Russian Federation; international organizations; and international courts and tribunals .

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Interpretation versus translation at the US Supreme Court

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I think that most people reading this will agree that interpretation (or interpreting) is not the same as translation. However, outside the strict circle of the profession, the difference is not so well known.

Today we shall see how this distinction is causing a real furore!

The US Supreme Court is currently deliberating over whether costs of translation differ from costs of interpretation, in a case involving a Japanese man. Indeed the transcript of last Tuesday’s session goes into great detail. It’s 63 pages long (perhaps demonstrating the complexity of the issues involved), but well worth reading if the issue piques your interest.

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