<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!-- generator="WordPress/2.9.2" -->
<rss version="0.92">
<channel>
	<title>Translation Guy</title>
	<link>http://www.1-800-translate.com/TranslationBlog</link>
	<description>With all the new translation technologies, things have gotten easier, and more complicated.</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Tue, 07 Sep 2010 23:04:54 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<docs>http://backend.userland.com/rss092</docs>
	<language>en</language>
	
	<item>
		<title>Cherry on Top: Translation</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Translation Memory is the gravy on top of the translation business, the fat of the translation land, the easy money, the cherry on top…. So who gets the cherry? (Go to 5:58 in &#8220;The Fighting 69 and 1 Half,&#8221; an old Warner Bros cartoon on YouTube, to see how these things can wind up.) Moral of the story: Never bring live steel to vendor meetings.
Thanks to the vast amount of data now being translated, and the ease with which existing translation can be automatically aligned into translation memory text strings, the power and reach of translation memory technology into every nook and cranny of a domain mean that the bigger a translation memory, the better. So an industry-specific translation memory better than a client-specific one. But if you want a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.1-800-translate.com/TranslationBlog/index.php/2010/09/07/cherry-on-top-translation/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Sci-Fi Predicts End of Translation as We Know It</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve watched enough Star Trek over the years to know that all the best ideas come from space opera, which just goes to show that you translators are square in the cross-sights of a professional death ray from a vast conspiracy of Science Fiction hacks.
It’s not just that some Sci-Fi writers are good at predicting the future. The prognostication powers of some ink-stained SF wretch staring at a half blank page through a half empty bottle of Stoli are actually quite limited.   Cory Doctorow says, &#8220;Science fiction writers don’t predict the future (except accidentally), but if they’re very good, they may manage to predict the present.&#8221;
And that&#8217;s the problem for you translators. These SF guys pick up on all the memes and ideas floating around in the meme echo-chamber (aka the Republic of Letters) and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.1-800-translate.com/TranslationBlog/index.php/2010/09/03/sci-fi-predicts-end-of-translation-as-we-know-it/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>From Ebonics to Argot</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The DEA&#8217;s decision to recruit speakers of Ebonics―or African American Vernacular English (AAVE)―to listen in on wiretaps made for a brief brouhaha in the media a few days ago. But criticism focused mainly on the term Ebonics, which seems to be a trigger word for some of the racial divisions that dog American society.  No one objected much to the basic premise, which is the need for specialists to help cops understand perp-speak. See my previous post and the ensuing comments here.
But it got me thinking. We do our share of wiretap translation in other languages, and have found that people engaged in professional criminal enterprises prefer not to be understood by the law or other eavesdroppers. On more than one occasion, we&#8217;ve run into a wall when we&#8217;ve run up against an argot. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.1-800-translate.com/TranslationBlog/index.php/2010/09/01/from-ebonics-to-argot/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Guinea Pig Kids</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
A law intended to speed up the development of new pediatric drugs in the US has ended up pushing many trials to the children of developing and undeveloped nations worldwide, reveals a study published in Pediatrics.
“The trend that we describe brings up some scientific and ethical problems,” says Dr. Sara Pasquali, a pediatrician at Duke University Medical Center and lead author of the study in an interview with Reuters.
The Pediatric Exclusivity Provision passed by Congress in 1997 provides six months of patent exclusivity to pharmaceutical companies to conduct safety and efficacy studies of drugs in children. This program has resulted in more than 150 drug label changes for children’s medications, and led to an estimated $14 billion in profits to pharmaceutical companies.
This ramp-up has also had the effect of globalizing US pediatric clinical trials. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.1-800-translate.com/TranslationBlog/index.php/2010/08/30/guinea-pig-kids/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Ebonic Translators Wanted</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The DEA is seeking Ebonic translators to help interpret drug investigation wiretapped conversations, and that has got some people stirred up. Ebonics, a.k.a. African American Vernacular English (AAVE), is one of 114 languages that DEA agents require to understand in order to conduct investigations in the southeastern US.
AP reports that the Drug Enforcement Administration recently sent memos asking a bunch of language service providers for nine translators in the Southeast who are fluent in Ebonics. We were not contacted.
Linguist Robert Williams started calling AAVE &#8220;Ebonics&#8221; (combining &#8220;ebony&#8221; and &#8220;phonics&#8221;) in 1975, and the term saw some use in scholarly circles, but the concept really took off after The Oakland School Board decided &#8220;to denote and recognize the primary language (or sociolect or ethnolect) of African American children attending school, and thereby to [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.1-800-translate.com/TranslationBlog/index.php/2010/08/27/ebonic-translators-wanted/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Hollywood Does Foreign Languages</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Most of the travelling we do is in the movies. Even the most frequent of flyers would be hard pressed to see the sites we view so casually on the silver screen.  Filmmakers love to tell their stories in exotic locales. But just as a stage set may at times have to fill in for Deadwood, the exotic languages spoken in those exotic locales have to be tamed for local consumption. Eric Hynes has put together a great video slide show over at Slate to examine how Hollywood represents foreign speech.
Since the dawn of the talkies, filmmakers have had to face the challenge of foreign tongues. &#8220;Many filmmakers are content to shoot against a painted backdrop, toss in a few bonjours, and call it France, while others go to great lengths [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.1-800-translate.com/TranslationBlog/index.php/2010/08/25/hollywood-does-foreign-languages/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Bop the Snake</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Bop as in &#8220;bang.&#8221; You know, like to &#8220;nail.&#8221;  As in, &#8220;whack the gopher.&#8221; That&#8217;s what I mean. But in Hausa you say bop the snake.
My head hunter, Mike Klinger, used to be in the Peace Corp in Niger. (Just to be crystal clear, by head hunter, I mean Mike helps me to recruit people for 1-800-Translate. What he does in his own time is his own business, mostly, but I&#8217;ll get to that in a minute.)
Mike had been living in the sticks (&#8220;en brousse&#8221; ) in Guidan Roumji―a wide spot on Route N1 outside of Maradi in Niger―for the last two years with the Peace Corp. He was headed back Stateside, with a pile of gear stacked next to his table at a dusty teahouse, the only white face [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.1-800-translate.com/TranslationBlog/index.php/2010/08/24/bop-the-snake/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Silence After 80 Years. Plains Indian Sign Language Conference</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Earlier this month, fluent sign-talkers from tribes across Montana and surrounding states gathered on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation for the first Plains Indian sign language conference in 80 years.
The conference, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, began with field work last summer in Montana to search for fluent Plains Indian sign-talkers.
Jeffery Davis, a linguist at the University of Tennessee, and Melanie McKay-Cody, a Chickamauga Cherokee/Choctaw from William Woods University in Missouri, identified more than two dozen sign-talkers among the various tribes. The group includes several tribal members who are deaf.
Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL) is a sign language once shared among 40 different Native American groups on the Great Plains of North America, one of several Native American Indian Sign Language varieties. In 1885, it was estimated that there were [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.1-800-translate.com/TranslationBlog/index.php/2010/08/17/silence-after-80-years-plains-indian-sign-language-conference/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Consent Form Translation Fail</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Informed consent in clinical trials means different things to different people. Sometimes it means consent is given with full knowledge, and sometimes it just seems that way.
Nearly half of all U.S.-based clinical trials are now conducted overseas―many in countries where the native language is not English, where literacy in local languages is low, and health literacy is even lower.
Informed consent forms for international research are generally written first in English and then translated into the local language. In the latest IRB: Ethics &#38; Human Research, researchers Caroline Lithinji and Nancy Kass question the assumption that if an English language consent form is simplified, then the translated version will resemble the original form in its readability.
&#8216;The Kenya Medical Research National Ethical Review Committee determines readability of English consent forms before translation; however, it [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.1-800-translate.com/TranslationBlog/index.php/2010/08/13/consent-form-translation-fail/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Old News: Preference for the Unprofessional</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Back when I was calling in my stories from the telephone booth, I was also learning about the care and feeding of editors. They like a hook, something to make the story you pitch seem fresh and newsworthy. So what&#8217;s an intrepid reporter supposed to do when he wants to rehash some three-year-old study on bad medical interpreting practice? Regular readers will know that this little topic is my top choice for serious axe-grinding.
OK. But still no hook. How about this&#8230; Kids’ doctors avoid professional translation. 1000 days later, has anything changed?
Hmmm. Weak. It will just have to do&#8230;
This from UPI, &#8220;U.S. pediatricians use family members instead of professional translators with non-English-speaking patients, says a new study. [At least it was new back in April 2007.]
&#8220;Seventy percent of physicians surveyed said they use the patient&#8217;s bilingual [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.1-800-translate.com/TranslationBlog/index.php/2010/08/11/old-news-preference-for-the-unprofessional/</link>
			</item>
</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Dynamic page generated in 1.382 seconds. -->
<!-- Cached page generated by WP-Super-Cache on 2010-09-08 10:00:47 -->
