Only Human Translators
Aug 28, 2020 |
One of the few positive things that’s happened to me in this truly appalling year of 2020 is that I’ve become a published author for the first time. So apologies to those of you who don’t like to hear the sound of someone blowing their own trumpet, but this is the story of my book. When I was a boy, there was a foreigner living in our village. He drank in the local pub but, unlike nearly all the other older men who played bowls with my father, he didn’t speak with a Suffolk accent. They told me Gaby, which was what everyone called him, spoke like that because he was Spanish. They also said he was a musician – a cello player. Sometimes we even got to see him play on the television. I’d love to say that old Gaby (he would have been in his sixties at the time) and young me became friends, he told me his life story and then instilled in me a long-lasting love of classical music, but it didn’t happen like that. I spoke to him a few times, he bought me the occasional drink in the pub, then I left the village and didn’t really think about him for many years. But a quarter of a century later, and a few years after moving to live in Barcelona, I went to a party at a friend’s flat in the nearby town of Sabadell. There, I got into a conversation with a young woman who asked me the question so many people ask an immigrant from the UK. “Whereabouts in England are...
Jul 16, 2020 |
There is nothing like the COVID-19 crisis to teach us how important perception is. Of any group of people in the same place, at the same time, governed by the same rules, you will find some who are ultra cautious, going out as little as possible, always wearing a face mask and taking no risks and others stretching the rules to the limits and beyond, ignoring social distancing and making sure they’re the first on the beach or in the bars. The real risk is the same, but these people perceive it very differently. I was reminded of this a few weeks ago, when my attention was drawn to a European Union web page entitled “eTranslation for SMEs”. What it is, effectively, is EU-sponsored computerised translation aimed at small businesses – or “a state-of-the-art online machine translation service”, as it describes itself – between the 27 official EU languages. “The eTranslation service is free of charge and will help you save time and money to translate your documents and text between any two official EU languages, and more!” trumpets the blurb. On top of this, and unlike rival services, “eTranslation guarantees the confidentiality and security of all your translated data”. There is even €4 million available for businesses to integrate the service into their processes. In a Facebook discussion on the subject, some colleagues made the quite reasonable points that machine translation is nothing new and that the service appears to be no better than those already available. Others found (I did not) a caveat on the website stating that for critical documents human translators would always be necessary....
May 26, 2020 |
All over the world, like other conferences and congresses, translation events have fallen victim to the coronavirus. The question I want to answer in this post is what they are going to look like in the future. And can online events ever provide a real replacement? In the lockdown period, we’ve all, including – or perhaps even especially – our school-age children, become accustomed to the Zoom video conference. It’s a wonderful thing for seeing each other’s faces, chatting, playing games and even having a drink with friends, together but socially distanced. Does it, though, really work as an educational tool? I’ve had several different experiences with it over the past few weeks that make me wonder, at least about whether it can be used for everything. First of all, I took part in a MET workshop which was moved online after the face-to-face version in Barcelona had to be cancelled. Three hours in front of a screen is a long time and I have to say that at times I felt my attention wandering. I also felt for the presenter, who had had to adapt his face-to-face workshop into an online version in quite a short time. The amount of information he was trying to give might have been possible with us all in the same room, but online it seemed way too much. He also tried some hands-on activities, using a Zoom feature which allows a group to be randomly broken up into twos or threes but once again it was not entirely successful. The problem is that being in a group of three on a video...
Apr 27, 2020 |
In my last post I talked about coping with the coronavirus lockdown we’ve almost all been living with in one form or another for several weeks. This time, although the confinement seems to be continually extended, I want to look forward. What’s our professional world going to look like when all this is over? How can we face up to the future? I mentioned last time that I had been quite busy in the first two weeks of lockdown, and I’ve continued to have a good amount of work since. I’m under no illusions, though. I am very fortunate and this state is unlikely to continue. A colleague, Andreea Sepi, who lives in Germany, wrote to me after my last post confirming that I am a lucky exception. “My income has plummeted, since I was also teaching, and that’s all closed now, as lots of older language students are not fond of Skype,” she said. Most of us have seen online references to colleagues applying for the various government assistance programmes that are available in different countries, although often the conditions attached make this money difficult for self-employed people like us to claim. There is certainly no doubt that the pandemic is going to cause, and is already causing, the biggest recession any of us has ever seen. We just don’t know how many of our clients are going to survive the pandemic, or what kind of a world we will emerge into. Will people still travel and go on holiday? Will we do the same things we always used to or will our priorities change? In terms of...
Mar 31, 2020 |
Three weeks ago we were just beginning to get an idea that this wasn’t going to be an ordinary spring. Since then, the world has fallen in very quickly and, as I write this, it’s not at all clear how or when we’re going to come out of the coronavirus crisis. I want to look forward to what happens next, but I’m going to save that for another post. For now I would just like to document how this has been affecting my life and work and maybe draw one or two conclusions. Before the lockdown The crisis caught me just as business was picking up after one of slowest months I have ever had. After that disastrous February, March was looking good and I’d picked up one or two big projects. About the time it became clear that we were all going to end up confined to our homes, I was offered another piece of work it looked as if it would be difficult to fit in and I decided to work over the weekend to make sure I could take it on. It was already obvious that the shut-down was going to lead to a recession and I thought it was wise to take all the work I could, while it was available. That week was probably the strangest of my life. Things that, on the Monday seemed perfectly normal, like having coffee with a friend or going to the swimming pool, by the Friday seemed unthinkably dangerous. I spent the weekend between work and taking the chance to go for a couple of walks by the...
Feb 23, 2020 |
Last week, I was invited to a language awards ceremony by a good client of mine. As I’d never met any of the many people I deal with at the organisation, I thought it might be a good idea to go along and get to know them a little. So it was that I found myself at the presentation of the 7th Martí Gasull i Roig award, organised by my client, Plataforma per la Llengua, an organisation promoting the use of the Catalan language. In most countries, a language award would be a literary matter, given to a writer, or perhaps a publisher. Here, the finalists were a group of Wikipedia enthusiasts, some computer game fans and a bookshop. Because the Martí Gasull i Roig award is about services to Catalan, not use of it. In fact, it is given for defence of the language, or a notable contribution to improving its situation. For speakers of one of the world’s dominant languages, like English, this is hard to grasp. Why would a language need defending? What would be the point? But our language hasn’t been banned within living memory. And people are not, even now, commonly discriminated against or humiliated for using it. If you think I’m exaggerating, you should read some of the reports I’m asked to translate. Perhaps in order to understand you need to be in the situation I was in when I first arrived in Catalonia. I had met Marta, who is now my wife, some months earlier and I had almost immediately decided to learn her language – the one she spoke most often...
English
