Hacklog: Blogamundo — poking holes in the language barrier since approximately 1 month from now

The news gods sent me a story about translation in India… into English:

Language No Bar

The translations described (and languages) are of the literary variety:

There is a revival of sorts as far as the translation of Sanskrit and Urdu literature is concerned. There is a huge market as many do not understand the languages but want to enjoy the literature. For them English comes handy.

Interestingly, the translation described is mostly into Indian English (quite a distinct thing), and directed at an Indian audience.

India is probably the most linguistically diverse country on the planet; perhaps 1600 languages are spoken there. I would love to learn more about the patterns of translation within the subcontinent: does translation into English dominate? Into Hindi? Which other language pairs see heavy translation, and in which directions?

Any Indophiles out there on the webbernets have some pointers to info about such patterns?

(I can’t google right now… they’re gonna kick me out of this restaurant!)

ps. Speak of the devil, another article about translation in India, this time mentioning English versions of the late great Satyajit Ray’s work in Bengali. Zeitgeisty.

The National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities and Smithsonian Institution budget $2 million in funding to protect 6,000-7,000 declining languages. — NPR : A Plan to Save Thousands of Endangered Languages

(Not exactly sure how accurate those numbers are; most estimates of the number of languages in the world that I’ve cite around 6000 or 7000 as an upper bound; they can’t all be declining.

…Not that such bookkeeping nitpickery has any bearing on the importance and urgency of language preservation efforts.)

Well, I’m pretty certain this is the first time I’ve ever linked to the People’s Daily Online, but whatever:

People’s Daily Online — Ethnic minority languages head for the direction of informationization

Work on both spoken and written ethnic minority languages, which began in 1980s, has made big headway, note officials from the State Ethic Affairs Commission.

So far, China has made coded character set, keyboard, type matrix and other national standards for the Mongol script, Tibetan language, Uygur writing, Kazak writing, Kirgiz writing, Korean writing, Yi writing and Dai writing. In the latest edition of international standard multi-language coding, the coded character set of Mongol script, Tibetan language, Uygur writing, Kazak writing, Kirgiz writing, Yi writing and Dai writing were formally accepted. Much ethnic language and writing software can be used in Windows system. And the electronic publication system, office automatio (OA) system, and all forms of databases come to the fore in succession. The website and web page of ethnic language and writing are preliminary established. And there also are many good achievements in ethnic character and voice recognition, machine translation and so on.

So what I’m wondering is, what exactly are these standards? Please, somebody informed about such matters out there in Cyberia, tell me that they’re not an alternative to Unicode.

That would suck.

A lot.

PS. I think it’s State Ethnic Affairs, not “Ethic.” I.e., this thing: 中华人民共和国国家民族事务委员会. I tried Googling within that site for a couple of the Chinese names of languages mentioned in the article, like Tibetan (藏语) and Uyghur (维吾尔语), I got some results.

Bueller?

Have you ever run across a two-way web dictionary?

Take, for example, Yahoo’s English/Spanish dictionary.

It’s that “or” bit that I’m talking about: you don’t have to tell it that you’re looking for Spanish or English, you just type and hit enter.

I think this is better for translators than the alternative, which has an extra step, as you can see in this otherwise nifty Welsh dictionary:

The Yahoo approach is better because it’s faster. In the Welsh dictionary you have to choose your target language on every search (with a fiddly dropdown list, at that).

It turns out that cases where a single word is contained in both Spanish and English (borrowings, usually) have a simple solution: just show the results from both sides.

Here’s Yahoo’s results for “corral”. The word exists in Spanish and English, so they show (clickable) results in Spanish and English:

Spanish Matches
Showing:1-6 of 6 results

• corral
• corrales
• corraliza
• corralizas
• corralón
• corralones

English Matches
Showing:1-1 of 1 results

• corral

Simple is better.

Just a quick link to an interesting post at the Masked Translator :

Not Enough Information

I just finished a translation that was essentially the text from a stationary company’s catalog. It went on at length describing the new calendars, diaries, wallets and business card holders they’re coming out with for next season. The only thing they forgot to send the translator was pictures. This happens shockingly often.

…The reason those furniture assembly instruction sheets come with pictures on them is that you NEED the pictures to understand what the heck they’re talking about!

Some kinds of translation involve more than just words.