May 27, 2017

CAT tools for weapons license study

More than a decade ago I found a very useful book on practical corpus linguistics, which has had perhaps the greatest impact of any single thing on the way I approach terminology. Among other things, it discusses how to create special text collections for particular subjects and then mine these for frequently used expressions in those domains. It has become a standard recommendation in my talks at professional conferences and universities as well as in private consultations for terminology.

Slide from my recent talk at the Buenos Aires University Facultad de Derecho
In the last two weeks I had an opportunity to test my recommendations in a little different way than the one in which I usually apply them. Typically I use subject-specific corpora in English (my native language) to study the "authentic" voice of the expert in a domain that may be related to my own technical specialties but which differs in its use of language in significant ways. This time I used it and other techniques to study subject matter I master reasonably well (the features, use and safety aspects of firearms for hunting) with the aim of acquiring vocabulary and an idea of what to expect for a weapons qualification test in Portugal, where I have lived for several years but have not yet achieved satisfactory competence in the language for my daily routine.

It all started two weeks ago when I attended an all-day course on Portugal's firearm and other weapon laws in Portalegre. Seven and a half solid hours of lecture left me utterly fatigued at the end of the day, but it was an interesting one in which I had a lot of aha! moments as I saw a lot of concepts presented in Portuguese which I knew well in German and English. Most of the time I looked up words I saw in the slides or in the course textbook prepared by the PSP and made pencil notes on vocabulary in my book.

Twelve days afterward I was scheduled to take a written text, and in the unlikely event that I passed it, I was supposed to be subject to a practical examination on the safe use of hunting firearms are related matters.

Years ago when I studied for a hunting license in Germany I had hundreds of hours of theoretical and practical instruction in a nine-month course concurrent with a one-year understudy with an experienced hunter. Participants in a German hunting course typically read dozens of supplemental books and study thousands of sample questions for the exam.

The pickings are a little slimmer in Portugal.

There are no study guides in Portuguese or any other language which help to prepare for the weapons tests that I am aware of except the slim book prepared by the police.

There are, however, a number of online forums where people talk about their experiences in the required courses and on the tests. Sometimes there are sample questions reproduced with varying degrees of accuracy, and there is a lot of talk about things which people found particularly challenging.

So I copied and pasted these discussions into text files and loaded them into a memoQ project for Portuguese to English translation. The corpus was not particularly large (about 4000 words altogether), so the number of candidates found in a statistical survey was limited, but still useful to someone with my limited vocabulary. I then proceeded to translate about half of the corpus into English, manually selecting less frequent but quite important terms and making notes on perplexing bits of grammar or tricks hidden in the question examples.

A glossary in progress as I study for my Portuguese weapons license
The glossary also contained some common vocabulary that one might legitimately argue does not belong in a specialist glossary, but since these were common words likely to occur in the exam and I did not know them, it was entirely appropriate to include them.

Other resources on the subject are scarce; I did find a World War II vintage military dictionary for Portuguese and English which can easily be made into a searchable PDF using ABBYY Finereader or other tools but not much else.

Any CAT tool would have worked equally well for my learning objectives - the free tools AntConc and OmegaT are in no way inferior to what memoQ offered me.

On the day of the test, I was allowed to bring a Portuguese-to-English dictionary and a printout of my personal glossary. However, the translation work that I did in the course of building the glossary had imprinted the relevant vocabulary rather well on my mind, so I hardly consulted either. I was tired (having hardly slept the night before) and nervous (so that I mixed up the renewal intervals for driver's licenses and hunting licenses), and I just didn't have the stamina to pick apart some particularly long, obtuse sentences), but in the end I passed with a score of 90% correct. That wouldn't win me any kudos with a translation customer, but it allowed me to go on to the next phase.

Practical shooting test at the police firing range
In the day of lectures, I dared to ask only one question, and I garbled it so badly that the instructor really didn't understand, so I was not looking forward to the oral part of the exam. But much to my surprise, I understood all the instructions on exam day, and I was even able to joke with the policeman conducting the shooting test. In the oral examination in which I had to identify various weapons and ammunition types and explain their use and legal status, and in the final part where I went on a "hunt" with a police commissioner to demonstrate that I could handle a shotgun correctly under field conditions and respond appropriately to a police check, I had no difficulties at all except remembering the Portuguese word for "trigger lock". All the terms I had drilled for passive identification in the written exam had unexpectedly become active vocabulary, and I was able to hold my own in all the spoken interactions - not a usual experience in my daily routine.

The use of the same professional tools and techniques that I rely on for my daily work proved far better than expected as learning aids for my examination and in a much greater scope than I expected. I am confident that a similar application could be helpful in other areas where I am not very competent in my understanding and active use of Portuguese.

If it works for me, it is reasonable to assume that others who must cope with challenges of a test or interactions of some kind in a foreign language might also benefit from learning with a translator's working tools.

May 24, 2017

What is it with teaching translation at universities?

Many years ago as an exchange student at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken I marveled at the competence and breadth of the university's offerings for translation and interpreting and the great competence I found there in its Dolmetscherinstitut. Other programs in linguistics with Max Mangold and Vorderasiatische Archäologie offered complementary enlightenment for analyzing language structures, early writing systems and long-dead languages of the Fertile Crescent. Most of that is gone today.

Reports over the years of the decline of language teaching programs in Saarbrücken felt like watching a slow-motion car crash. So a few weeks ago when a friend in that area informed me of the demise of the translation and interpreting institute and its replacement with some IT-based nonsense emphasizing machine translation, I was not particularly surprised. I have watched other university translation programs wither or at least fail to thrive under current conditions, largely as a result of their failure to adapt to changing times in a responsible way.

Most would agree that adaptation is necessary, but there is less agreement on the actual changes which should occur. There is, of course, no single right answer to this dilemma (except in Germany, where such things are Pflicht), but it is nonetheless disappointing to see the lack of vigor and vision with which the necessary discussions sometimes take place.

A recent article by Ramón Inglada on the European Parliament DG TRAD Terminology Coordination site presents some key issues regarding the use of technology in translation teaching but fails to provide accurate information or useful recommendations. This is surprising given that the author has been a professional translator for some time, and colleagues tell me that he is not unfamiliar with the current state of technology in the the real world of commercial translation. I take particular issue with his mention of possible "disadvantages" to the use of technology in the instructional program:
  • Some students might struggle with the technology and this could have a negative impact on their acquisition of translation skills. 
  • Some universities might not have enough staff with the required technical skills. 
  • The potential costs associated with a technology-based approach (computer labs, software licences).
First of all, in the programs with which I am familiar, students do not struggle especially with technology taught in an appropriate way. The "struggle" is too often instead with teaching faculty unwilling to update their professional knowledge and not-so-quaintly antiquated curricula. One also encounters toxically ignorant professors like one I know at a Portuguese university, who did his best for years to discourage new students in the now-suspended masters program by informing them that translation is all about poetry and literature and that it is impossible to make a living as a translator.

I can understand the fear of some faculty who recognize that things have changed and continue to change but who are baffled by the bullshit barked in the catastrophic carnival of machine pseudotranslators and confusing and sometimes creepy CAT clowns. I take their concerns as a sign of mental health and hope for the future; a healthy dose of skepticism will be needed as some universities transition from pen and paper work, with the odd bit of word processing and Moodle thrown in, to more modern tools for organizing reference information, text sources to translate, and writing tasks.

Most of these skeptics understand some fundamental truths that many crazed advocates of computer-assisted translation have forgotten: without an excellent foundation in source languages, first-class writing skills in the target language and a clear understanding of the relevant subject matter to be translated, technology for translation is more useless than lipstick on a pig. Anyone who tries to tell you that machine translation or massive archives of parallel translated texts or any other gimmicks can replace the actual competent mastery of language and content by qualified translators or subject matter specialists with outstanding linguistic skills is either a liar or a fool or both.

Those who have the competence to assess translation quality are usually of the considered opinion that more emphasis should be placed on developing language skills, subject expertise and research skills, while the hucksters, the wordblind and those who really don't get the meaning of "fit for use" or who try to sell snake oil with a label stating that "Quality Doesn't Matter" tend to push more monetary transfers to the IT side of things.

One cannot argue responsibly against the first position: the utter train wrecks we see so often in the bulk market bog of translation, with its unsustainable practices of exploitation and frequent disregard of the occupational health and safety of service providers, make it clear that only a few dishonest middlemen are served much of the time by its unusual business as usual.

Good linguists are hard to find and often not so easy to train, so it is important to consider where technology can provide some relief in organization and ergonomics and improve the processes of learning and professional work. There is a lot of scope for technology to streamline current teaching programs at universities and in programs for continuing professional education and free up more time to focus on essential language skills and knowledge acquisition.

As for the concern that there might not be enough staff with the requisite technical skills to include technology in university programs of instruction, I find that suggestion ridiculous and insulting to a lot of competent people. Anyone who is competent enough to teach at university also possesses the wherewithal to evaluate how technology might contribute effectively to the curriculum. Too often, the failures are on the part of technology advocates who have too narrow an understanding of their own "expertise" and do not listen to the teaching experts and understand their needs and objectives. With patience and open discussion, we will all get a lot further.

As for "potential costs", I almost hurt myself laughing about that one. Universities are among the places on this planet most familiar with Open Source software, and there are quite a number of such tools or other free software which can fully meet the requirements of teaching professional concepts for the use of technology in translation. The OmegaT project is just one example, but it is an excellent one. Major commercial tools are also available for teaching and learning at low or no cost: SDL offers many resources to universities at minimal cost, and Kilgray's memoQ - the most flexible environment available for the widest range of translation workflows - is free to instructors and students for educational purposes, with server resources also available for a small support fee. There are quite a number of other tools available for corpus analysis, speech recognition, format management and a myriad of other peripheral needs of translators on similar terms. Money is not the real issue, but a commitment to doing better with the resources available most certainly is.

There are of course points of light in the firmament of academic blight. The Facultad de Derecho at Buenos Aires University is one such. In April 2017 I visited the law school's integrated translation program and spoke to students, some staff and guests about various ways in which technology can help to better organize the work of legal translation.


Students in the Certified Public Translator program at the Buenos Aires University Law School take many of the same courses as those working toward a law degree; some pursue both degrees. This means that the young professionals graduate with the kind of solid subject matter competence one might expect only from those with significant work experience or who have side-stepped to translation from another field.

In today's market situation, where very few translation graduates can look forward to staff positions in an in-house translating team for a law firm, engineering company, hospital or other institutions as they might have in the past, the problem of acquiring real subject matter competence seems difficult. But programs like BAU's Facultad de Derecho offer can serve as good examples of how similar programs might be established with engineering schools, medical schools, science faculties and other such institutions. Interdisciplinary cooperation is inevitably a great source of creativity and useful results, and I think that struggling translation programs at universities have much to offer in collaboration with other departments and much to learn as all reap the good harvest of such cultivated seeds.

Even the miserable state of translation's bulk market bog offers a fruitful source of research topics to investigate the implications on physical and psychological health under current conditions and to propose remedies for problems. This would seem a much more useful thing than yet another boring and useless doctoral thesis on machine pseudotranslation and post-editing underwritten by short-sighted and unscrupulous promoters of human sacrifice for corporate profit today and who knows what destruction tomorrow.

Do universities need to consider a greater role for technology in their teaching programs for translation? In most cases probably. But just as the real value of technology is measured only by its ability to improve our lives, the most difficult challenges ahead are not technical, but human. A program which fully embraces technology but fails to deal with matters of psychological and physical health and which does not reinforce its credibility and open doors with many possible alliances with other departments or outside institutions will sadly not achieve its full and evident potential. But with good will, open eyes and a willingness to commit to learning and partnership we can all get there.

May 23, 2017

IntelliWebSearch: really the best Windows-based search tool for translators.

When I began using Michael Farrell's IntelliWebSearch (IWS) about a year ago, shortly before a few IAPTI webinars on that subject, I was impressed with the tool's flexibility, but one thing drove me nuts: the browser kept adding tabs with each search, unlike the tool I favored at the time, memoQ Web Search. But the latter is restricted to use within memoQ, so I had some hope of sorting out the problem with IWS.

I asked the program's author for a solution, but I think I failed to articulate the problem properly: I was told that this was simply a shortcoming I would have to live with. Not true. Michael's tool is better than he said.

The solution turned out to be in the program's settings, which are accessed under the Edit menu.


An example of "improved" settings more to my taste is above. The important thing for me to get the behavior I wanted was to define the return behavior. Use the return shortcut and close the browser. Subsequent actions can include pasting any copied text if you like.

Of course, adding extra tabs to the open browser is not such a bad thing in some cases, providing a sort of tab-based "history" of the searches. And simply using the search window shortcut opens an IWS window with text copied to a search field, where individual searches can be launched in the browser of choice using icons for various configured searches.

The much greater flexibility of IntelliWebSearch, its universal application in any Windows software, its memory stability (memoQ Web Search has had a serious memory leak for a long time, resulting in crashes and other troubles) and its very modest price for licenses after a 2-month trial makes it my search tool of choice now that I can get the browser window behaviors I want. And various "profiles" for searching can be saved in external files for backup and sharing with others.

For educational and professional use, this is a superb choice. The program can also be linked to local information, such as CD-based dictionaries or desktop search tools. Check it out!

Your working software tools as Xbox "games" in Windows 10!

For the last few days I have been away from the office, working from home on a relatively new laptop which doesn't have a lot of the software installed that I use on my main machine. Then today when I needed to make a screen recording to document a memory leak in one of my software tools, I was annoyed to realize that Camtasia wasn't installed on the laptop and I had to find some other means of video capture.

That was when I found out about the nice little video recording tool included in a somewhat obscure way with the Windows 10 operating system. When invoked for the first time in an application, such as memoQ, the Windows Task Manager or anything else, you'll be asked if the program you are running is a game. Lie and click Yes, this is a game.



The recording bar invoked with the Windows-G key looks like this:


Continuous recordings can be made for long periods of time, but the really cool feature of this recorder is that it can be set up to maintain a history of a defined period just passed and save this history as an MP4 video file.


The default is 30 seconds; in the screenshot above, the backward recording buffer is set to three minutes.

What good is this? Well, one thing you can do is record a retroactive video after the program you use crashes. This can then be submitted to support experts to help them figure out what went wrong, or you can review the recording yourself to see what was done.

The videos are stored in the default path for Videos in a folder named Captures:


A very boring example of this is shown below; it shows the activity in the Windows Task Manager as I launch various applications. The results showed me the steady increase in memory consumption by the memoQ Web Search feature (amounting to over several gigabites after perhaps 20 minutes, leading to crashes and/or other problems) versus exactly the same search in 5 tabs of Internet Explorer using IntelliWebSearch. The latter is rock stable in its memory use, causing no problems at all and offering much greater flexibility, which is why I strongly recommend this search productivity tool, which can be accessed from any Windows application.


May 2, 2017

Survey on Internship and Mentoring in Translation

Internships are an important part of university translation programs in many places, and mentorships of various kinds play a significant role in professional development in a number of professional associations with which I am familiar. Attila Piróth, a Hungarian translator based in France, has conducted and published a number of very thorough, interesting studies on several aspects of the language services professions and is now undertaking the study of intern and mentorship arrangements from various perspectives. I think the results will be very interesting.

If you have been involved in such arrangements, please take the time to contribute your experience to the study. Please note that in its present form, it is difficult to take on a smartphone, so it is probably best to use a full-sized computer or large tablet of some kind.
In a series of surveys I want to explore translation internship and mentoring programs from the viewpoint of different stakeholders: interns/mentees, mentors, organizations running internship programs, educational institutions and translator associations. 
Through a mixture of learning by doing, expert supervision and building a professional network, internships and mentoring programs serve to accelerate the transition of early-career translators into the profession. Yet graduating students are often under pressure from their educational institutions to complete an internship in order to gain credits, but the internship environment is often quite different from their future work environment. 
Therefore this series of surveys aims to identify best practices for internship and mentoring so that students, mentors and other stakeholders can make better choices in planning and implementing their internship and mentoring programs. 
I would thus like to ask your help in completing this survey. There has been no comprehensive research conducted to date on internship/mentoring practices, even though such practices are becoming more common. All stakeholders can benefit from knowing more about current practices in order to avoid negative experiences, to promote positive ones, and to hear what the perspectives are of other stakeholders. 
If you participated in an internship/mentoring program as an intern/ mentee, please complete https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TR-int-I 
If you participated as a mentor, please complete https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TR-int-M 
If you represent an organization that runs internship programs, please complete https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TR-int-O. 
If you represent an educational institution, please complete https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TR-int-U. 
If you represent a translator association that has promoted internship/mentoring programs, please complete https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TR-int-A. 
Please also share information about these surveys among other stakeholders.
The full survey report will be available for free to survey participants and other interested parties. I thank my colleagues, Catherine Howard and Maria Karra, for their help in creating this series of surveys. 
Thank you for taking the time to complete it.
             -- Attila Piróth