1) Is it ok to post insults on this list?
2) Not everyone on this list is a kneejerk liberal.
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 16:19:10 -0700 (PDT) Jack Kessler <kessler@well.com>
writes:
>
> FYI France: Digital Library reference -- translation
>
> .. aaaaand a very large truckload of very smelly cheese to...
> Charles Krauthammer...
>
> Time Magazine, July 12, 2004
>
> "Why the French Act Isn't Funny Anymore : Their
> resistance to helping in Afghanistan and Iraq is now
> downright dangerous"
>
> by Charles Krauthammer
>
> "It is easy to make fun of the French and their pompous
> pretense... the grandeur they shed a half-century ago...
> second-class power... Gaullist anti-Americanism...
> ostentatious self-aggrandizement... France's willful
> obstructionism... dangerous and deadly... That
> obstructionism was on amazing display at the recent NATO
> summit in..."
>
> -- etc., etc., ad nauseam...
>
>
<http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1101040712-660973,00.ht
ml>
>
>
> It is time, it seems, for the Anglophone and Francophone worlds
> to brush up on their mutual translation abilities. Recently too
> much, which once might have been consigned to the fuzzy although
> entertaining areas of "l'ironie" and "double entendre", has begun
> to stray over into the far more dangerous and apparently far more
> crystal-clear arenas of "politics" and "national policy", where
> these days there is too little humor left.
>
> A first step might be made by considering the art of translation:
> particularly on the Internet, where too much of momentous import
> gets imperfectly researched and discussed and defined, nowadays.
>
> It never is entirely obvious, what another who knows it
> imperfectly is trying say in one's own language: "meaning" rarely
> enough is obvious even among native-speakers, let alone among
> those of us who learn another's language imperfectly and only in
> school or at college or even later on in life.
>
> Translation at least pretends to ease the communication process.
> To someone French struggling with the meaning of an American
> phrase such as, say, "pre-emptive strike" -- or to someone in the
> US attempting to figure out a French term such as, say, "force de
> frappe" -- it can be reassuring to have a rendering of terms and
> explanations in one's own native language to turn to. Assuming,
> that is, that the rendering is correct... and that it explains
> policy nuances, and context, and subtleties, and history...
>
>
> A brief exploration of language "translation" alternatives
> currently available follows here, then: perhaps useful to
> websites, researchers, writers, libraries "digital" and
> otherwise, Internet developers, even to political columnists --
>
> * "Commercial" translation services.
>
> One current commercial leader in the translation field is the
> "Language Line" service, begun by a San Jose police officer and
> developed by AT&T --
>
> <http://www.languageline.com/home.php>
>
> -- an airport police officer, tackling a suspect who protests in
> some strange argot, or comforting a bewildered elder sobbing in a
> weird-sounding gibberish, now has only to dial a password -
> protected telephone number to gain rapid access to fluent
> speakers of 150 human languages...
>
> So criminal situations get sorted out more quickly now, and lost
> passport situations resolved, and health emergencies dealt with
> -- in this Globalizing world characterized, daily, by tense
> situations involving every one of those 150 human languages.
>
> And this commercial service -- just to begin, here, with a
> commercial example -- offers many other forms of "translation"
> help. Increasingly services like this one are being sought by
> governments, and corporations, and many others, as we all cope
> with said Globalization. But the services of commercial firms
> like "Language Line Inc." are not free: their document
> translation fees, for example, currently are advertised as --
>
> Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, French, Japanese, Korean,
> Russian, Vietnamese
> $9.50 per 25-word block
>
> All other languages
> $13.50 per 25-word block
>
> <http://www.languageline.com/pdf/DocTrans_Att_A_102103.pdf>
>
> I would expect that such prices are the most expensive rates, and
> that discounts must be available for any customer -- or
> consortium of customers, say... -- which could promise such a
> firm a steady business flow. Still, though, such "translation" is
> not cheap: something for legal and business documents, perhaps,
> and for emergencies. One senses that Internet access might be
> useful, in this, but one senses as well that "security" issues,
> or at least worries, might complicate that.
>
>
> Another "commercial translation service" variety nowadays
> includes those which are directly online, on the Internet.
>
> Altavista's "Babelfish" is one established example:
>
> <http://world.altavista.com/>
>
> -- another is "FreeTranslation.com" --
>
> <http://www.freetranslation.com/
>
> -- or consider "Google Language Tools" -- offering translations
> to & from Pig Latin! --
>
> <http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en>
>
> All this is the much-lampooned land of "machine translation":
> where input such as "la plume de ma tante" gets rendered as "the
> feather of my aunt"... or ponderous Biblical sayings such as "the
> spirit was willing but the flesh was weak", get transformed into
> the very non-Biblical "the whiskey was good but the steak was
> bad"...
>
> Nevertheless... such free services, and their many not-so-free
> extensions now getting built up around them by their providers,
> can be useful. For getting "the gist" of a foreign phrase or
> document, if not its exact meaning: for example nowadays at least
> someone French is able, very easily online, to render a tortuous
> American English language passage such as, say,
>
> "For centuries, international law recognized that nations
> need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take
> action to defend themselves against forces that present
> an imminent danger of attack."
>
> ("The National Security Strategy of the United States")
> <http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss5.html>
>
> -- into the parlance of Voltaire, or sort of, thus --
>
> "Pendant des siècles, le droit international a identifié
> que les nations n'ont pas besoin de souffrir une attaque
> avant qu'elles puissent légalement agir pour se défendre
> contre les forces qui présentent un danger imminent
> d'attaque."
>
> -- even though, rendered back à l'américain, the passage does
> appear to have changed a bit --
>
> "During centuries, the international law identified that
> the nations n'ont not need to suffer an attack before
> qu'elles can legally act to be defended against the
> forces which present a d'attaque imminent danger."
>
> ("Babelfish", URL above)
>
> -- nevertheless perhaps, as Mercutio put it, "'tis enough, 'twill
> serve": the French reader can get the general gist, at least, of
> what the Americans are trying to say. Not that this makes her/him
> feel any better about the message, in this particular case. But
> understanding the language used is a start: later, then, for the
> "context", and the "entendre double"...
>
> So there are "commercial translation services" available now:
> some of which can be expensive, but also some of which, although
> they can be less "perfect" than the others, still are useful, and
> are free of charge.
>
>
> Other alternatives not so commercial and not so expensive now
> exist too, though, for "translation", many of these thanks to the
> new global networking capacities of the Internet:
>
> * "Campus" translation services.
>
> Any "campus", academic or corporate or government or other,
> nowadays contains enormous and largely-untapped human language
> translation resources: in the large and growing segments of
> campus populations composed of native speakers of other
> languages, people who often even are fluent in several.
>
> Consider any large university, nowadays, with all of those
> "foreign" students and researchers and professors and staff... Or
> consider any large hitech or other company anywhere, now, where
> multiple nationalities pass each other in the halls constantly:
> all of those people "know other languages", and each of them
> could "help with translation"...
>
> Even government agencies and departments -- those which have
> remained politically open-minded enough to still employ recent
> immigrants and foreign nationals, anyway -- there too, when
> "government" emergencies and other language needs arise, there is
> a huge and largely-untapped language translation resource, simply
> in the daily workstaff of most such organizations. Someone in
> "the department" who speaks Urdu, or someone fluent in Bengali...
> or a typist who, it happens, was born and raised in Paraguay
> and may know Guaraní ("anybody else know Guaraní?")...
>
> Or a computer technician who as a teenager fled troubles in her
> native land but still retains her knowledge of Yoruba, or of Ibo:
> when the documentation on some new problem in Lagos comes in, and
> even the English in it appears to be indecipherable, passing it
> by that native speaker, on the chance that she might understand
> some double meaning or other context involved, might be very
> productive for the department. Or say it's a radio transmission,
> and she can tell others that the speaker is not, in fact, where
> he says he's from, just by his accent...
>
> Would that we in the US had had more such capacity for
> translating and interpreting various forms of Arabic, for
> instance, over the last few years, in our "government
> departments"... we had it, but we didn't use it... there might
> have been more realistic "alerts", and greater understanding...
>
> The language translation problem on any campus, I suggest -- in
> any campus situation, for we now have the virtual campus,
> increasingly, scattered across the planet but tied more and more
> closely together by the Internet -- is the problem of reaching
> the translators when we need them.
>
> They are there: Globalization plus multi-culturalism plus our
> shrinking planet increasingly guarantee that foreign language
> speakers are nearby, no matter where we happen to be. But as
> generations of librarians have discovered with OPACs, "you can
> lead a user to the catalog but you can't make her use it"... The
> problem is tieing in these foreign language speakers to a system,
> so that those in need of translation can get to them, rapidly and
> effectively, when needed.
>
> The Internet... Would it be so difficult, on any campus, academic
> or corporate or government or other, to assemble databases of
> people with language abilities, and a system for putting people
> in need of such capacities into contact with them?
>
> Would it be expensive? Would the translators be paid? Depends on
> local conditions... But would the coordination of such a
> "language translation network" be possible, and easy? Yes, I
> would think, using the Internet: sounds to me like just a simple
> list, in the simplest case -- email addresses.
>
> To offer a concrete example, taken from a very traditional
> library context:
>
> Translation services for digital libraries:
> at the online reference virtual "desk"
>
> A recent FYI France issue, that of May 15, presented the new
> "Guichet de Savoir" service of the Bibliotheque municipale de
> Lyon. Several correspondents since have asked about the
> multi-lingual access capacities of such a service. The BM Lyon's
> proud and generous reply has been,
>
> "We'll answer any language we understand. Danish, I don't
> think, but Chinese yes !! If you are inscribed, you may
> change your profile and get a skin in English..."
>
> But then of course the BM Lyon is in a position to make such a
> reply: they are an enormous library, amply-endowed with
> collections both ancient and extensive, and multitudinous and
> talented staff, and good government and international connections
> -- not all libraries wishing to provide online reference service
> enjoy such exalted status, and resources, as does the BM Lyon.
>
> Lyon also prides itself on being somewhat of an international
> city -- "European", at least -- and "trans-national", even. The
> city does healthy international / trans-national business, and
> boasts a major airport and TGV link, and a notable university,
> and other such resources: a library can draw upon all of these,
> perhaps, for language translation work.
>
> But _need_ any library do so, any longer? Shouldn't it be
> possible for any library, anywhere, to obtain language
> translation assistance simply by using the Internet?
>
> All that is required, in principle, is an email to someone, and
> an email back: "Here, we have this Ural-Mongol-Finno-Turkic
> online reference desk inquiry which I need to understand: if you
> would be kind enough to translate it for us, we promise to do the
> same thing for you, the next time you need something translated
> into _our_ specialities, French / English / Spanish / Tagalog..."
>
> Something along the lines of Inter-Library Lending, perhaps: but
> so much easier, and cheaper, as all it would require would be
> Internet email organization... a Language Translation Network...
>
> (If anyone reading this knows of working examples of such
> "campus" or "campus situation" networks for human language
> translation -- already in existence or under construction,
> informal or otherwise -- academic, corporate, government agency
> or department, libraries "digital" or other, or anything else --
> I would like very much to hear about them. Pls send me email at
> kessler@well.com.)
>
>
> * "Independent" translation services.
>
> The traditional publishing industries long have used
> "translators". As a trade, as an industry, as an art form,
> "translation" has employed the talents and dedication of
> countless individuals, drawn from all walks of life, for
> centuries.
>
> >From Michael Ventris poring over the mysterious scribblings of
> "Linear B", to Joseph Needham wading through the nuances of
> thousands of years of Chinese scientific effort, to Champollion's
> personal mastery of Hebrew & Arabic & Syriac & Chaldean & Chinese
> & Coptic & Ethiopic & Sanskrit & Zend & Pahlevi & Persian (!),
> translators of human language and cultural traditions have been
> remarkable individuals: as focussed as Ventris, as encyclopedic
> as Needham, as eclectic as Champollion.
>
> And nowhere near as omnipresent in the past as they now are,
> thanks to the Internet... I would think that any "campus" or
> other translation effort -- one to mount multi-lingual web pages,
> for example, or one to provide translation services for students
> and researchers and others -- might take advantage, easily, of
> the global reach of networked information, to tap into
> language translation abilities located far from "home".
>
> How many Tamil-speakers, fluent also in English and even in
> French and other languages, reside now in Tamil Nadu? Once a long
> way away, now merely a URL or an email address... So the
> documentation in the terrible political fight now brewing in the
> US over "foreign outsourcing callcenters" might be translated
> from Tamil into English, and from English into Tamil, and from
> both into Hindi and vice versa, the better to enable participants
> and journalists and researchers on all sides to understand the
> issues. No, everyone "out there" does not, "_really_ all know
> English ok, don't they?"... as a very young American Internet
> developer once pointedly demanded of me, over a decade ago...
>
> Or consider the AIDS crisis: the views, and concerns, and
> realities, of people faced with this problem in Cameroon, might
> best be expressed in translations from their own native English,
> to people in France -- or from their own native French, to people
> in the US -- or perhaps "really" from their own native Fulani, to
> people in both places.
>
> And, if English and French translation happens to be plentiful,
> in France and the US, what about Fulani?... Nowadays, though,
> Fulani translation is a simple step away, via the Internet: find
> someone in Yaoundé who knows it -- just a mouse-click away.
>
> So why aren't we doing more of this? Why aren't all libraries,
> and other organizations as well, offering global human language
> translation services? It seems simple.
>
> The Internet reaches most nations, now, and most international
> language groupings: if all 6000 or so human languages are not
> yet fully "online" they will be soon, via Unicode, and in the
> meantime there always is voice & fax transmission, once the
> initial contact is established via email. So there seems to be
> little excuse left, nowadays, for the purely-linguistic barriers
> in human communication at least, language translation being so
> readily available now via Internet.
>
>
> * Confidentiality and Competence
>
> There do seem still to be a number of generic questions involved,
> though, in the process of human language translation, no matter
> how eased this process has become thanks to digital
> communications. Among these are confidentiality and competence.
>
> The question of confidentiality has come up in the emotive
> political noise now surrounding the increasingly hysterical
> "foreign outsourcing callcenter" issue of the US presidential
> campaign. Notorious incidents have included that of the
> outsourced worker in India who, cheated of her pay by the US
> "backoffice" service bureau which hired her, threatened to reveal
> online the medical records of patients at a major US hospital.
>
> Also, now, there are worries about outsourced "contractors" of
> the US military in Iraq, who unlike official military personnel
> appear to be subject to neither the laws of the US nor those of
> Iraq, nor of anyone else, and who recently have been implicated
> in Abu Ghraib and other scandals... and whose revelations under
> pressure might prove to be embarrassing to many...
>
> The question one needs to ask, however, regarding the
> confidentiality of the "foreign outsourcing" of anything -- of
> military contracting or recordkeeping or language translation or
> anything else -- is how relevant the "foreign" aspect of this
> really is, to concerns such as reliability and security.
>
> If the worst, or among the worst, "terrorism" and other such
> incidents in fact are committed by a nation's own citizens upon
> one another -- the Oklahoma City bombing still ranks as among the
> worst, in the US, and that was a crime not committed by
> "foreigners" -- then perhaps concerns for confidentiality, in
> "foreign outsourcing", are overblown. If we use the Internet to
> get human language translation done, then, we should be careful
> -- there are all sorts of "nuts" online, on the Internet -- but
> not all of them are "foreign"... _most_ of them aren't, maybe...
>
> And as with "confidentiality" so with "competence", and perhaps
> so with most other concerns about turning to our global Internet
> for language translation. The question is not so much where to
> obtain the "best" translation, as it is where to obtain one
> "better" than another.
>
> Certification of translation is an imperfect process itself, even
> in the most formal and official procedures used by courts and
> government agencies, in the US or France or elsewhere. Human
> language is a supple and imprecise communications tool at the
> best of times, and two human translators no matter how expert
> rarely will come up with the identical rendering of any phrase at
> all complex or significant, let alone of any document of any length.
>
> So the question becomes whether to settle for "imperfect"
> translation: the answer being that we'll make do, and when
> something "perfect" comes along well then maybe we'll change to
> that...
>
> Still, though, improvements can be made: native-speakers
> generally do a better job of understanding a language than do
> those who have acquired their proficiency in it later on in life.
> So the new ability to reach more native-speakers in more places,
> than we ever have in our history, thanks to the Internet, would
> seem to indicate that human language translation ought to benefit
> from this new access in some way.
>
> So, competent to translate? Well, perhaps... But perhaps the
> more relevant question to ask is that asked of the "machine
> translation" which can garble phrases on occasion: Mercutio's
> whether "'tis enough, 'twill serve"?
>
> For a court document perhaps not, but all translation is not just
> court documents. For French Internet readers worried about a new
> American pronouncement on "pre-emptive strike", though, perhaps
> it is enough at least to get the best translation of such an
> awful-sounding phrase which can be found -- and a native speaker
> of French who also knows American "official" English well, and is
> acquainted with the general context and history of the phrase,
> might translate this more usefully than someone American
> possessing only high school French.
>
> Likewise for "force de frappe": we now have many native speakers
> of American English available, via the Internet, who know the
> French context and thus can translate both syntax and semantics,
> and context and history, for those of us in the US wondering and
> worrying about such a phrase.
>
> It might do us all well to work on expanding such translation
> capacities, then: at a time when, ironically, we have such
> wonderful technological capacities to aid us, but at the same
> time our intellectual understanding for and sympathy toward one
> another seem to have taken a few severe hits -- an era of much
> heat but little light, and as such always dangerous.
>
>
> * Translation is an art, not a science
>
> The last word on "competency" in translation, though, is the
> gentle reminder provided by the example of Arthur Waley, the last
> century's famous British translator of ancient Chinese classics:
> that human language translation is an art not a science.
>
> Waley was a true artist: his wonderful renderings of Chinese
> poetry and other literature into English have mystified many
> Chinese, as well as English speakers in possession of exacting
> knowledge of the classical Chinese language themselves. But
> Waley's work nevertheless did its job better than any other,
> reaching and inspiring generations of Westerners to open and
> enjoy and appreciate Chinese works which, but for Waley, would
> have remained inaccessible and unknown to them.
>
> The merits of Waley's translations, and their eccentricities, are
> memorialized in the title of an "appreciation and anthology" of
> his work, "Madly Singing in the Mountains" (Berkeley : Creative
> Arts Book Co., 1981, c1970) -- which is a phrase from Waley's
> translation of a 9th c. Chinese poet, but one which only could
> have been uttered by an Edwardian English Bloomsbury gentleman...
>
> The most general point being, I suppose, that human communication
> itself is an art, not a science. As observed initially here,
> "meaning" rarely enough is obvious even among native-speakers,
> let alone among those of us who learn another's language later on
> in life, and imperfectly... Nevertheless, we must make the
> attempt: to translate what we say and write, to and about one
> another, and to communicate, and to understand. And we all need
> to try harder than we have been, recently: between the Americans
> and the French -- old friends who seem to be having some fallings
> out -- and with other old friends, and among friends and enemies.
>
> There is too much at stake now not to try. "Walking a mile in the
> other man's moccasins" may not be practical, in world affairs,
> nor even "standing in his shoes", but at least translating and
> understanding what he has to say would be a start: all of our
> websites need to become multi-lingual -- our children, too. All
> "libraries" need to offer all languages. Translation services
> need to be provided, and the Internet can help.
>
>
> As for columnist Charles Krauthammer... and other France-bashers
> on the western side of the Atlantic, or for that matter
> America-bashers on its eastern shore... the Republic founded in
> 1776 might do well to heed a few of the sincere warnings sent to
> it by the Republic founded in 1958, following Kent's advice,
>
> Think'st thou that duty shall have dread to speak,
> When power to flattery bows? To plainness honour's bound,
> When majesty stoops to folly.
>
> Reverse thy doom; And, in thy best consideration, cheque
> This hideous rashness: answer my life my judgment,
>
> Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least...
>
> For France has faced all these current things since long before
> 1958, after all: the threats and temptations which America now
> confronts are as old as humanity. So Americans might do well to
> "translate" what our foreign friends are saying to us nowadays
> very carefully, and to understand it well: so that we Americans,
> again following Kent's advice, might,
>
> See better, Lear...
>
>
> --oOo--
>
>
> FYI France (sm)(tm) e-journal ISSN 1071-5916
>
> *
> | FYI France (sm)(tm) is a monthly electronic
> | journal published since 1992 as a small-scale,
> | personal experiment, in the creation of large-
> | scale "information overload", by Jack Kessler.
> / \ Any material written by me which appears in
> ----- FYI France may be copied and used by anyone for
> // \\ any good purpose, so long as, a) they give me
> --------- credit and show my email address, and, b) it
> // \\ isn't going to make them money: if it is going
> to make them money, they must get my permission
> in advance, and share some of the money which they get with me.
> Use of material written by others requires their permission.
> FYI France archives may be found at http://infolib.berkeley.edu
> (search fyifrance), or http://www.cru.fr/listes/biblio-fr@cru.fr/
> (BIBLIO-FR archive), or http://listserv.uh.edu/archives/pacs-l.html
> (PACS-L archive) or http://www.fyifrance.com . Suggestions,
> reactions, criticisms, praise, and poison-pen letters all will be
> gratefully received at kessler@well.sf.ca.us .
>
> Copyright 1992- , by Jack Kessler,
> all rights reserved except as indicated above.
>
> --hjlm--
>
>
>