Mice Like Us

Among my great passions are myths and children's stories. The transformative, symbolic qualities of the good ones carry forward ideas, moral and ethical concepts in ways few classrooms can, and even bad ones may communicate at a level many a gifted orator cannot.

In many ways, the translators I know are like mice. They see themselves as small compared to the great Bridges Lying Across their peripatetic professional paths, easy prey for the More Ravenous, to be consumed perhaps by HAMPsTr hordes or Transformed Perfectly into thepigturds polluting the waters of roadside ditches.

The Merchants of the Machine - and you know who they are - have a story line consumed gladly by those who, placing presumed balance sheet profits ahead of real producers and lacking a long-term commitment to service and the interests of those from whom they extract toil and cash, position themselves as transformers of communication and translation, surfing the Big Wave of Big Data to a Bigger Future. Humans are fallible, alas, but the miraculous Machine in its comprehensible simplicity shall save us from the messy human mystery and lead us to a calculable future, a Thousand Years of Grace and Prosperity for the Chosen in control of the channels of distribution and marketing magic. But real life isn't like that.


We need a different narrative. As Dr. Bronowski said, "We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act." In alternative narratives, the mouse is not always the easy prey to the CAT, nor to any other creature. It's a matter of attitude, and sometimes organization.

From the simple act of kindness in Aesop's tale to the complex world of Redwall, we mice can read examples of how those seen as small and insignificant can in fact be the key to survival and triumph. Lacking the bluster and flames of the Great Beasts of our "industry" we must instead rely on those most essential tools, our brains, to come out ahead in the asymmetric competition.

Technology is, in fact, on our side as translators when it is used in conjunction with BAT*. There are Open Source tools available for organizing the work of individual translators or teams which, in clever hands, can compete at most every level with the finest of commercial technology. OmegaT, Rainbow and GlobalSight are just a few of a long list of these. And for the less "clever" (or those who prefer a bigger slice of normal life) there are simple software service offerings like Kilgray's memoQ cloud, which puts my freelance team on equal footing with any agency or corporate department using the latest and greatest technologies for their language processes. All this for a fraction of what my monthly phone bill used to be in the days before flatrates and Skype.

So what will it be? Will you be willing meat for some weasel's pot?

Caught in a trap of your own denial, uninformed belief and fear, listening to naught but Common Nonsense?


Or, like the mice of Redwall, will you gather your strength and skills, apply them in concert with like-minded professionals in your own interest and the interest of the public you serve and partake of the great feast on a table set for all who will come?

* Brain-assisted translation

Medienbruch.

For years now, I've watched the German term Medienbruch and derivatives like medienbruchfrei seep their way into various, well, media. And the results are, by and large, linguistically discontinuous and/or broken :-)

The screenshot above shows a sampling from the "feast" of bilingual web alignment offered by Linguee, one which those who are familiar with the service realize must be enjoyed with some care to avoid the odd bits of broken glass and strychnine that may be found in its sometimes machine-translated, sometimes Bulgarian-inspired English. Some of the more thoughtful marketers in the translation profession may use the site as a source to research firms desperately in need of better translators rather than merely pan its buckets full of linguistic swamp sediment in desperation to find the few flakes of gold which might have settled there. Not to say that Linguee is not a valuable working tool, but its use requires a great deal of professional judgment in most cases and often further research is one is on unfamiliar ground. It is a tool, and a fool with a tool remains a fool. Like the often criticized Wikipedia, it is often a good starting point but seldom the journey's end.

Why not just Google "media discontinuity", for example, and see how often the particular phrase occurs? Uh huh. You got 8,100 results, did you? Sounds pretty authoritative, right? Look again at where the sources are. Ah, you say, Kevin ought to have used Google's advanced search options to narrow it down. Have a look at the garbage on the first page again, and tell me with a straight face that better sources will somehow rise to the top of that like tasty cream.

At this point, a colleague less overcaffeinated might point out that I'm going about this all wrong and that I might do better searching some of the monolingual corpora available free online, such as the British National Corpus (which is great for making Americans believe that Brits really do say "at the weekend" most of the time or the BYU Corpus of Global Web-based English, which allows those who master the arcana of its search rules to compare Indian weekends with those in Canada or Kenya. But these text collections, for all their value for a general understanding of common language use, are seldom satisfying for specialized use and neologisms.

A cooler head might point out the terrible bias in my approaches so far and encourage me to consider the context in which this word has occurred while percolating into my awareness in recent years. Hm. Well, usually when some German public authority decides to bring its information management practices up to 20th century standards. Since they usually follow well behind practice in English-speaking countries for this sort of things (I still see German government texts that put "E-Mail" in quotes as if it were something new and exotic), it's a good bet that a corpus of texts from similar institutions in the UK or US might reveal some interesting and useful and even natively acceptable possibilities. (That's how I learned years ago that a usual and proper term in English for Vieraugenprinzip is "dual review", not the "four-eyes principle" that some so happily click their heels to. In the elementary schools I attended, that was the principle based on which bullies punched my friends with glasses in the face.)

Juliette Scott, who writes a rather nice blog mostly concerned with legal translation issues, has done some nice (NIFTY) work as part of her doctoral thesis using monolingual corpora to study patterns of use in target languages and suggest useful strategies for building collections of specialized text. Good, perhaps even obvious stuff which applies to any domain I can think of, though the practice of building focused corpora from carefully selected sources is still far too rare among those of us who use the label "translator" or "language professional". I certainly need to do that more often.

Ah, but if I have just a monolingual corpus to understand proper use of terms in the target language, how will I know what the right translation is? That's a hard one. One that perhaps I can't answer. At least not without the use of a BAT* tool. But if that's too hard, I know just the place to go: proZ.com, where "certified pros" compete for points on KudoZ and offer mutual reinforcement and enlightenment to those who run rapidly on their wheels to keep pace with changing expectations of quality.

I could of course take one of the accepted "solutions" from Linguee and feed the same sort of self-recycling GIGO loop that Google now admits to be an ever-growing part of its searched wisdom.

So what is your solution to the Medienbruch? Or are you part of the problem?

Just for fun: 8 MT engines for DE>EN compared

When technology guru Jost Zetzsche (Twitter: @jermobot) recently reminded the world of the relative new memoQ plug-in for itranslate4.eu, I thought I would test and blog it for fun if not profit. Alas! The key validation for the free demo (10,000 characters) I "purchased" isn't working for me, so I decided to have fun another way until that gets sorted out. I plugged two sentences into their engine offering translations from six commercial MT tools, then I put the same two sentences in Google and Microsoft's MT engines. One of these sentences is fairly simple in structure, the other less so. I won't comment the results much; I leave judgment to experts and fools to make as they choose.

The results layouts for Google & Bing were modified for better viewing. I think there are plug-ins for all these engines in a number of tools if anyone is daft enough to really want to use them productively (thus unprofessionally ignoring many confidentiality requirements for clients quite aside from other possible issues).

PROMT actually got it right and idiomatic. Should I be impressed? Repeats with other simple sentences showed that accuracy is a real crapshoot for all six engines, though True Believers in MT can serve the machine by suggesting improvements. I did my part by submitting improvements for sentences related to the ongoing Vatican scandals about abuse by priests.

Go Google! Nice to know there are so many ProZ translators depending on this great engine :-)

Full points to Big Bill & Co. this time. Two out of eight got it right. Hmmmmmmmm.

Now for something a wee bit more, taken from the Wikipedia entry on photovoltaics...

Our friendZ at Google say:

Now Big BillZ BoyZ get their chance:

O what a Brave New World, that has such technology in it :-) I think I'll stick to my specialties and use the Dragon if I feel the need for speed. I can dictate fresh faster than I can analyze and fix even the simplest "close calls" for correctness.

Of course, sentence-by-sentence, results will differ in reliability with every engine. But isn't it simply better to use the most reliable engine of all: BAT* with a good translator?

A recent LinkedIn discussion went on at length about quality metrics and other bla bla for MT. And there are various discussions of "best practice". Given enough beer or other intoxicating substances, I'm not averse to engaging in such discussions, and the ten-year-old in me who still likes to fiddle with things IT does take an academic interest in the subject of MT and productivity, but if I want real work and real quality (and yes, Renato, Kirtee, et alia there is such a thing, though its definition will vary by domain and be ever disputed... try telling a customer trying to understand a user manual that it doesn't exist or watch the faces in an audience as a translated speech is delivered in various versions, or send your marketing brochure for the UK to Bangladesh or Russia because rates are lower) I will find it with methods that stay far away from MT. Let the competition do otherwise. PLEASE.

* "brain-assisted translation", a concept once common in the days before the IT devoloution of the profession and still favored by a few high-earning dinosaurs