Keep your eye on Google Translate

March 10, 2010 – 1:52 pm

We at the Translation Center have never been a supporter of machine translation and have always advocated the use of humans, but I have to admit that we have been following Google Translate closely.

Traditional machine translation programs use a decode/recode methodology, with programmers teaching the machines the syntactic and lexical rules of grammar in the two respective languages. Over the last few decades, despite the investment of millions of dollars, the results have been disappointing, averaging about 75% accuracy and useful for very little besides weather reports.

Google Translate, however, uses a corpus-based approach, searching its massive databases of human-generated translations for matches. In the past, computers were never large enough to handle the data needed, but Google, by networking is resources, is quickly approaching the critical mass.

In a March 8 New York Times article titled “Google’s Computing Power Refines Translation Tool,” Miguel Helft reports on Google’s efforts to feed their program millions of passages and then search the translations for the best fit. It seems as if Google’s infrastructure, collected data, including its book-scanning projects, and search engines are particularly well-suited for the new technology.

Google Translate now handles 52 languages, more than other systems, and draws on billions of words, again more than any competitor. The larger the corpus to draw upon, the better the translations. And people are using it, too. According to Helft, hundreds of millions times a week to translate Web pages as well as other texts.

New projects, such as combining text searches with image searches, allowing people to take a cell-phone picture of a text and use Google Translate for an instant translation.

While the accuracy of Google Translate is still less than perfect, and we at the Center still recommend using humans, we need to keep an eye on Google Translate as it continues to expand and improve.

By Edwin | Posted in News, Translation News in the USA | Comments (0)

2009 MLA Features Translation

February 1, 2010 – 3:10 pm

“The Tasks of Translation in the Global Context” was the presidential theme this year at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, Dec. 27-30, 2009. Catherine Porter, MLA President, Professor in Humanities at Cornell, and translator of contemporary French philosophy, including the works of Bruno Latour, Michel  Foucault, Luce Irigaray, and Jean-Didier Urbain, presented the keynote address, which is available online at presidential_address.

UMass was well represented at the conference: Edwin Gentzler participated in two panels at the MLA: the first was titled “Developing a New Generation of Translator,” organized by  Martin Riker of the Dalkey Archive Press, with participants including Emmanuell Ertel (NYU), Bill Johnson (Indiana), Suzanne Jill Levine (UC Santa Barbara), Benjamin Paloff (Michigan), and Lawrence Venuti (Temple). It was interesting to note that many of the schools represented are starting new translation programs, which shows that the future bodes well for the field.

Edwin’s paper was on developing new strategies for better introducing linguistic and cultural differences into the translated text; while students feel comfortable experimenting with such strategies in the classroom, they seem slow to implement them when submitting work to publishers. The constraints of the marketplace remain quite strong. Perhaps more collaboration is needed between presses publishing translation and university programs teaching translation, which was one of the goals of the panel. Martin Riker has published an article for Inside Higher Ed summarizing the panel, which can be found at Guest Post: Martin Riker.

Edwin’s second paper was on the panel “(Re)Interpreting Translation,” with Moira Inghilleri (UC London), Cristiano Mazzei (UMass Amherst), and Carolyn Shread (Mt. Holyoke). Cristiano is currently in the UMass PhD Program, and Carolyn graduated with a PhD in French and MA in Translation from UMass  in 2008. Edwin’s paper was on the social and psychic costs of the lack of public support given to interpreting, especially when individuals’ rights are violated in civil liberty cases.

Carolyn’s paper was on plasticity in translation, where plasticity is understood in an artistic fashion (as in the plastic arts) and an incendiary fashion (as in explosives). The goal of the panel was to help articulate a new vision of the ethics, praxes, and theories of interpreting.

Julie Hayes, Professor of French and Translation Studies at UMass Amherst, chaired the session “Retranslation: When and Why” at the MLA, with panelists Philip Steward (Duke), Babriel Louis Moyal (McMaster), and Barbara Godard (York), and focused on the aesthetic, linguistic, ideological, and commercial factors that motivate the production of new translations of the same text, an often understudied aspect of translation. Altogether, there were over 50 panels on translation, which well marks the arrival of the subject in higher education in the United States.  In many ways, the University of Massachusetts, with its strong translation program, anticipated the translation turn in modern languages.  For more on the conference, see the article Translation has its Moment in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

By Edwin | Posted in Edwin's Translation Blog, News, Translation News in the USA, Translation Studies News | Comments (0)

Translation backlog still haunts FBA, CIA

October 30, 2009 – 12:53 pm

A new report by the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Justice reveals that translation issues still trouble the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).  While the FBI has translated and reviewed 100% of the written texts it has collected, there are huge backlogs in terms of translation of electronic and audio files:  31%  of the electronic files  (over 14.2 million files) and 25% of the the audio files (1.2 million hours) remain untranslated. Despite this situation, the number of linguists who do the translations has actually dropped 3% since 2005. Further, government security clearances now take over 14 months, and 70% of the new linguists do not attend required training in the first year.

In an article posted by the the Global Watchtower of the  Commonsense Advisory, the author Donald De Palma quotes the I.G. report as saying, “Failing to hire an adequate number of linguists in a timely manner adversely affects the FBI’s ability to manage the growing translation workload and reduce the current backlog of unreviewed material.”

In the same article, the Commonwealth Advisory also reports that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is having its own problems.  In May it announced its plans to improve its ability to translate, review, and act on non-English information. Presently only 13% of current CIA employees are fluent in a second language.

This is an area where clearly U.S. universities could be of help.  While we offer Arabic-English translation in our MA in Translation Studies Program at UMass , we currently only have one Arabic speaker in the program.  In the past, we have had several students from Iraq, and one of our graduates currently teaches Iraqi dialects at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. We could handle more students, if there were more undergraduates coming out with the language pairs needed by our government, or if their were more funding for international students in our graduate programs.

By Edwin | Posted in Edwin's Translation Blog, News, Translation News in the USA | Comments (0)

Help support our new multimedia lab!

October 5, 2009 – 12:12 pm

Ayuda! Bangzhu! Au secours! Hilfe! Pomóz nam! Hjälp!  Please help us renovate our Language Lab.  Dean Joel Martin has challenged us to raise $20,000 by December 31, and will match every gift toward the total renovation goal of $40,000 for a New Multimedia Language Lab. You may give your donation online at https://www.umass.edu/development/give/?a=6. Choose Language Lab from the Gift Allocation drop-down menu at the bottom of the form.

The new Multimedia Language Lab will enhance interpreting, translation, and second-language learning at UMass and help prepare a new century of UMass students for our increasingly global society by providing:
•    A fully-redesigned and centrally-located lab (within Herter Annex)
•    An interactive space for the introduction of new digital technologies
•    An setting for the integration of various group- and distance-learning opportunities
•    9 additional Sanako 100 Audio Learning Stations for a grand total of 24
•    10 iMac stations with access to computer- and internet-based interpreting and language learning tools

For more information, please contact Nora Maroulis, (413) 577-4421 or maroulis@admin.umass.edu.

By Edwin | Posted in News, Translation Center News | Comments (0)

2009 translation students largest group ever

September 1, 2009 – 8:39 am

The incoming 2009 graduate class in Translation Studies is our largest group ever, attesting to the growth and success of the program.  New students entering the program this year include:

New PhD students:

Eyal Tamir earned a BA from Tel Aviv University, Israel in English/Psychology and his MA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in English and American studies, as well as a second MA from Brandeis University in English and American Literature. His specialization is literary theory, film, translation studies, and popular literature; he is currently a visiting lecturer in Modern Hebrew at Indiana University.

New MA students:

Jacob Dyer-Spiegel (USA) is a graduate student in the English Department here at UMass. He did his MA at SUNY-Buffalo/University de la Habana, Cuba, majoring in Caribbean Studies, and his BA in comparative Literature here at UMass Amherst. He is working on Yoruba religious systems that crossed the Atlantic during the African slave trades and continue to thrive today in the form of Candomblé and Macumba (Brazil), Regla de Ocha (Cuba), Santería (Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, U.S., Venezuela), Shango (Trinidad, Jamaica), and Voudún (Haiti).

Christine Gutman (USA) did her BA in French at Simmons College (2007). She has worked at the Québec Government Office in Boston and in the Boston French Library and Alliance Française. She did a semester abroad in Aix-en-Provence, when she studied literary translation. She also knows German.

Erin O’Rourke (USA) did her BA at Bard College (BA, 2003), majoring in Italian.  She also knows Spanish. Her senior thesis project was on film adaptations of a group of novels focusing on post-WWII Italy. She has translated poetry, too, including a series of poems by Pablo Neruda.  Over the last few years she has worked on her own creative writing, writing in English, Spanish, and Italian.  Her goal is to become a certified translator.

Yuko Takehashi (Japan) is currently a graduate student in Political Science at UMass Amherst. She did her Masters at the University of Tsukuba in International Politics, and her BA at Meiji Gakuin University, majoring in International Studies.

New Non-degree students:

Aaron Holmes (USA) did his BA at Doane College in Nebraska, majoring in Spanish, and has taken graduate courses in Spanish and Translation at the University of Nebraska.  He did a semester abroad in Chine. He is interested in translation and film animation.

Glauco Micsik Roberti (Brazil) is a PhD candidate on exchange from the Universidade de Sao Paulo (USP), where he is working on his dissertation on Irish Literature and Language related to war and identity, using cultural and translation studies approaches to analyze texts from the old Irish period to the present.

Wen Hui (China) is currently a teacher at the School of Foreign languages, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China, here as an exchange student, part of an agreement between the University of Massachusetts and Shaanxi University. She is here doing research on translation, feminism, eco-feminism, and ethics.

Xu Xiaomin (China) is also a teacher School of Foreign languages, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China, here as an exchange student under the same agreement. She is doing research on poetry translation, especially on the transference of the musical effects from classical Chinese into English.

Welcome to all!

By Edwin | Posted in News, Translation Center News | Comments (0)