Translating for an Audience
Sometimes understanding who you’re translating for is as important as understanding what you’re translating.
Consider:
Brochures, fliers and the Red Cross Web site have been translated into a handful of languages — instructions on how to give first aid, survive an earthquake and create a family emergency plan are all available in Spanish, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Vietnamese.
But the problem is with more than just information, says Mar Tobiasom, of the Snohomish County Red Cross. Some residents don’t know what a smoke alarm is, and for them, being reminded to change the battery isn’t helpful.
[Van Dinh-Kuno, executive director of the Refugee and Immigrant Forum of Snohomish County], agrees.
“Some of the people from the ESL [English as a second language] populations, they don’t even read and write in their own language,” she says, adding that agencies trying to reach non-English speakers should stick with short, direct messages.
Snohomish County News: Emergency teams focus on language gulf
The Emergency team’s director also makes this observation about the social aspects of translation:
“The foundation is, first, ID’ing those who can speak the languages, two is who is connected in the community, and three is how can we pull those pieces together and reach out to the community.”
It’s an interesting to try to picture how these sorts of restrictions port to the web, and specifically, to localization contexts.
(I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.)
3 comments.
Technorati tags: translation
This type of problem arises often when translating into a minority language, like Irish here in Ireland. Many Irish speakers read and write in the language very rarely and have only what you might call “kitchen Irish.”
So when translating (or even when authoring content from scratch) you need to choose very carefully how you handle those “big” words such as discrimination, performance management, bioenergy, quality assurance, global warming, and my recent favourite, database efficiency assessment methods. Sure, they do all have good translation equivalents and you can find those in dictionaries, but people out may not know them and may not have heard them before because such things are rarely discussed in Irish.
This, by the way, is a topic I touch on in my recent article in Multilingual on Irish localization, I hope you don’t mind the plug :-)
Hey there Michal,
Thanks for the link, looks quite interesting; haven’t read it yet though. And plugging articles here is not a problem, unless there’re about Viagra. ☺
(Er, I guess they could be articles about the translation of articles about Viagra… ferget it.)
I think this is where things like translation memory can actually be useful. If there’s an English → Irish translation out there somewhere with the phrase database efficiency assessment methods, it would be nice to see what other translators came up with. In a case like that, maybe someone came up with something that’s not terribly stiff and dictionary-ish in real usage.
Of course, it depends on the size of the translation memory; and when even when you’re looking at a big chunk of the web, like Google’s dictionary does, there’s no option for “small” language pairs like Irish ↔ English. It’s quite possible that there simply is no translation on the web for that phrase, in those languages.
Well, until you post yours!
A question which I find interesting: will the day come a few years down the road when we can assume that the “coverage” of parallel text on the web in “smaller” language pairs like English ↔ Irish will be as good as it is in a pair like English ↔ Spanish today?
Okay, you asked for it: database efficiency assessment methods = modhanna chun éifeachtacht bunachar sonraí a mheas. I’ve added the
lang="ga"attribute so anybody harvesting translations from the web now can pick it up ;-)