Jun 24, 2017

The multilingual toolkit for getting a date in Swahili


Some time ago, I was asked by IAPTI to provide some technical support for a developing effort to assist professional translators in various African regions. The flame of the Translators Without Borders center established a few years ago in Kenya has apparently sputtered out due to an incredibly silly anti-business model which undermined local professionals, so various initiatives were launched to help translators in the region grow stronger together and improve their professional practice.

Since memoQ is perhaps the best tool for managing the challenges of expert translation under the widest range of languages and conditions, I considered how I might contribute to solving some of these and reduce the frustrations of language barriers in Africa. I thought of all the business travelers there, as well as the NGOs and representatives of governments around the world who want a piece of what's there. All alone, strangers in a strange land, sweltering in some Nairobi hotel, how can these people even get a date in Swahili?

Once again, it's Kilgray to the rescue... with memoQ's auto-translation rules!

Using the various methods I have developed and published for planning and specifying auto-translation rules, I assembled an expert team for translation in Swahili, Arabic, Hebrew, English, German, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Russian, Hungarian, Dutch, Finnish, Polish and Greek to draft the rules for getting long dates in Swahili.

And using the Cretinously Uncomplicated Process for Identifying Dates (CUPID), these results can be transmogrified quickly to support lonely translators working from German, French and English into Arabic or from German, French, English and Spanish into Portuguese, for example, or in any combination of the languages applied for Swahili dates or others as needed.

With memoQ and regex-based auto-translation, you'll never be stuck for a quality-controlled date in any language!

1 comment:

  1. That is very interesting especially for those who are in the African project and centres like the Centre for Translation and Interpretation in the University of Nairobi

    ReplyDelete

Notice to spammers: your locations are being traced and fed to the recreational target list for my new line of chemical weapon drones :-)