Translation News

[جمال الأحمر]

Dear Brother: Nabil Al zugheiby
Salam 3alaikom

I'm honored by your participation in my humble page.

Excuse me for the delay; I was absent for a long time.

Thank you for your encouragement.

I believe that: "Not East, Nor West: Islam is the Best"

Yours
Jamal al-Ahmar

[جمال الأحمر]

Gained In Translation:
Bringing Asian Poetry To The English Language
THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

By DONALD RICHIE
Sunday, May 10, 2009

WRITTEN ON THE SKY: Poems From the Japanese,
translated by Kenneth Rexroth.
New York: New Directions, 2009, 90 pp., $12.95 (paper)

SONGS, MOON AND WIND: Poems From the Chinese,
translated by Kenneth Rexroth, selected by Eliot Weinberger.
New York: New Directions, 2009, 90 pp., $12.95 (paper)


Translation from one language to another, particularly that of poetry, remains problematic. As one of the finest of the translators from Japanese to English, the late Edward Seidensticker, once said: "Translation is a series of impossible decisions."

Ideally, he added, the translators should be like a counterfeiter in that his aim is to imitate the original down to the last detail. If he makes George Washington more handsome than George Washington is on the dollar bill, he is not a good counterfeiter.

But there is more to translation than accuracy and this is where the more impossible decisions come in.
Another fine translator from the Japanese, Charles Terry, has with both wit and a touch of misogyny said that translations are like women: If they are faithful, they are not beautiful; if they are beautiful, they are not faithful.

Then there is a certain incompatibility that translators must keep in mind. Seidensticker mentions one of them. "There is a rather tentative air about Japanese that disappears when the sentence is put into even 'literal' English."

What then to do amid these various impossibilities? An early solution (and I am here quoting Susan Sontag in an uncollected 2003 essay) was that of Saint Jerome, busy with the Bible back in 395. You keep the sense but alter the form by suiting your own language. "I," says Jerome, "have not deemed it necessary to render word for word but I have reproduced the general style and emphasis."

Whether this would result in a superior translation or not, it does avoid some of the impossibilities, though it can also lead to the mere paraphrasing said to be typical of certain types of Japanese-French rendering. At the same time it would clearly indicate that translators should know their own language best.

Indeed, it has been sometimes asked if all that much knowledge of the language being translated from is necessary. If Yeats could make fine translations from the classic dramatists knowing very little Greek, how much Japanese do you need to know to properly translate it?

The question is not absurd, but the answer must depend upon the nature of what is being translated. Much is done using an under translation (usually prepared by someone else) and the result can be sturdy and useful. I myself use this method in preparing film dialogue-titles. But then I am not translating that most difficult of forms — poetry.

One who successfully did just this is the American poet-translator Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), one of the first to explore Japanese poetic forms and himself a literary figure of note. He was leader of what became the San Francisco Renaissance; he introduced Ginsberg to Snyder, and Ferlinghetti named him as one of his own mentors.

TIME once referred to Rexroth as "the father of the Beats" to which he made the admirably succinct reply: "An entomologist is not a bug."

From 1955 he began his study of Japanese and Chinese poetry, an activity that up to 1976 lead to a number of collections, and now to these new selections. I knew him back then and sometimes heard him talk about his methods. He worked with under-translators (all of them scrupulously named in these new editions) and on this work he based his own, always with care, with study and with much discussion.

Rexroth's means would have satisfied St. Jerome's demands for general style and emphasis. He once explained how he did it. "The basic line of good verse is cadenced . . . built around the natural breath structures of speech." This results in a rare naturalness. Here are several examples.

From Ki no Tsurayuki: "Out in the marsh reeds / A bird cries out in sorrow, / As though it had recalled / Something better forgotten."
From Enomoto Seifu-jo: "Everyone is asleep / There is nothing to come between / the moon and me."

And from Oshima Ryota: "No one spoke, / the host, the guest, / the white chrysanthemums."

What Rexroth gives us is the poem, his reaction to it, and how it sounds. Difficulties remain, and impossible decisions loom, but at least we have these verses. They parallel their originals, mirroring their inherent qualities. They model themselves in the mode of their new language and are faithful in their fashion.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-b...0090510dr.html

[جمال الأحمر]

TED Embraces Social Translation
Ethan Zuckerman
May 14, 2009 4:46 PM

My friends at TED have launched an exciting new project today, the TED Open Translation Project. It's a powerful system to allow the "social translation" of their video content. This tool demonstrates the state of the art in social translation on the web today, and I think there are a lot of lessons in the tool and thinking behind it for anyone who hopes to make the polyglot internet more comprehensible, and for anyone thinking about online cooperation.

I'm aware that most people think of translation as roughly as interesting as developing Linux device drivers - necessary, but far from sexy. My hope is to convince you that translation is one of the keys in helping the internet reach it's potential and to get you at least a tenth as excited about this new tool and approach as I am.

For the past couple of years, TED has shared an amazing set of videos, talks delivered at the TED conferences in California, the UK, and Tanzania. These talks are some of the most fascinating and thought-provoking video content available on the web - many smart people have discovered TED talks and promptly lost a week or more gorging themselves on intellectual candy.

(A personal top five, for those who've not taken a deep dive into the videos that are available. I'm not going to argue that these are the "best" talks given at TED, but they are the ones that have had the most influence on me and my work:

- Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Nigerian minister of finance, on the debate on trade and aid in Africa, framed in deeply personal terms, as she talks about her family's struggles during the Biafran war.

- Swedish doctor and scientist Hans Rosling uses statistics and visualization to rethink international development over the course of decades and centuries.

- Majora Carter on the importance of environmental issues to urban communities, and the connection between community development and the green movement.

- Oxford development economist Paul Collier explains his brilliant book, "The Bottom Billion" in eighteen minutes.

- Nigerian author Chris Abani on humanity, cruelty, compassion and storytelling. I'm not sure I've ever seen a talk swing between humor and brutality as rapidly and powerfully as Chris does in this talk. When he finished giving it live, I left the theatre because I didn't want to hear anything else that day.)

For the past couple of years, these talks have been available to anyone with a good internet connection and the time to download them -- but they're only helpful to people who speak English, the language the talks were delivered in. TED, and specifically June Cohen, the director of TED Media, recognized that there's huge international demand for TED's content around the world - take a look at TedToChina, a fan site that offers summaries of TED talks in Chinese.

Translation is supposed to be difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Professional translators routinely charge between $0.20 and $0.40 per word - translating this blogposts into one other language would cost over $500 at market rates. The cost of machine translation has fallen from cheap to free, with powerful systems incorporated into Google and other search engines.. but the results are far from perfect, and tend to miss the nuance of complex texts. Very few of us choose to read blogs - even on topics we enjoy and follow - via machine translation because the experience is so awkward.

But maybe translation doesn't need to be so difficult and expensive. Maybe it's something that interested, talented people will do for free, if given the right opportunities and incentives. That idea inspired the Global Voices community to launch Lingua, our project to translate Global Voices content into over twenty languages. In 2006, we discovered that Portnoy Zheng, an amazing Taiwanese blogger, was translating Global Voices stories into Chinese, and inviting other translators to help with his efforts.

We were thrilled, and started pointing Chinese-speaking readers to Portnoy's efforts. Other groups, starting with the Francophones, proposed that volunteer translation of Global Voices content into other languages become an official feature of our community, and beginning in 2007, we've integrated volunteer translations into our site - under many of the headlines on the main site, you'll see "zh", "fr", "mg" or another two-letter language code. Click on that code, and you'll find yourself on a translation of that post.

There's a growing movement to make "social translation" - translation of online information by users around the world, motivated more by community recognition and appreciation than by money - a mainstream approach to making the web more accessible to all readers. The movement has been led by the open source software community, and projects like Dwayne Bailey's pootle toolkit, a set of tools that make it easier to localize open-source software. (Dwayne launched translate.org.za, a project that makes key software available in South Africa's eleven official languages.) Inspiring projects in the space include WorldWide Lexicon, an open platform to allow cooperative translation of any website; Meedan, an online community that uses social translation as well as machine translation to build dialog between Arabic and English speakers, and dotsub, a powerful video subtitling and translation tool that invites anyone to become a subtitler or translator.

Cohen and her team looked closely at the tools and teams building the social translation movement and built a new community that learned from the successes and failures of other projects in the space. TED's tool is based on dotsub, with some very powerful new features added, and their model for recruiting, recognizing and rewarding translators is inspired in part by some of the work we've done at Global Voices. For visitors to the site, this means that you can browse videos by language, selecting one of the 32 talks available with Spanish subtitles, or the sole talk available in Kyrgyz.

Select a talk in one of its translated forms, and you'll get a subtitled video, a translated title and description of the talk. Featured in this description are the two people responsible for translating the talk, the lead translator and the reviewer - like Global Voices, TED is inviting translators to join the community, pairing new translators with trusted reviewers to evaluate the work and to offer any changes or suggestions. Another link on the page leads to an "interactive transcript" - this allows a viewer to select a point in the talk and fast-forward to see the slides and images that accompany the speaker's words.

Not only is this a fantastically cool way to navigate these talks, it leads to my favorite undocumented feature of the system, which Cohen calls "the Rosetta Stone". Pick a transcript of a talk in a language you speak. Then select subtitles in a language you don't speak. You can watch the talk in three languages - the English of the speaker's words, the Spanish of the transcript and the Turkish of the subtitles. (I suspect my wife, who speaks English and Hebrew well, and is learning Arabic, will addicted to this feature in the near future.)

(This ability to view the same text in many languages may turn out to be one of the most important aspects of the project in the long run. As TED translates hundreds of talks, they're creating "parallel corpora", the raw material for machine translation systems. This might be too small to build really strong Turkish to Vietnamese translation technology, but the idea of pulling corpora from tools like dot.sub is something that machine translation folks should be taking a close look at.)

The system is launching with 375 translations, representing 42 languages. Some extremely popular talks, like Al Gore's talk on climate change, are available in over twenty languages - others are available just in English and one other language. What's remarkable to me is how many of the talks were translated by volunteers - 200 of the first 300 translation posted, and June tells me that 450 volunteer translations are in the queue and will launch soon. She calculates that if TED had to pay for those translations, the 650 underway would have cost roughly $500,000. While that sum might be something sponsors, like Nokia, which is the lead sponsor for the translation project, might have been able to cover, June estimates the cost of translating all TED talks into 40 languages at over $13 million dollars. To achieve what TED really wants to accomplish - all talks in 300 languages - is over $100 million. It's simply not possible to take on a task of that size without trying a social translation approach.

Why are people queueing up to translate TED talks for free? The system June and TED have launched leverages some of the lessons we've learned about social translation:

- Translation can be fun, if the content's enjoyable. There aren't a lot of people lining up to translate UN internal memos for free (according to some estimates, transcripts of UN meetings can cost as much as $8000 an hour to produce, leading to an organization translation budget of $100 million per year.) But TED talks are fascinating to a wide audience, and some people are excited about investing the time to translate them.

- Choice matters. On Global Voices, we don't attempt to translate every story into every language - we let translators choose what stories they're interested in. We don't get a complete edition of our content, but we wouldn't have such great participation if we assigned specific stories to translators. My guess is that TED is seeing a similar phenomenon, and that translators will initially gravitate to a small set of highly popular talks, then start translating talks that meet their personal interests over time.

- Translators need recognition. On the TED site, translators are some of the most prominently featured people on the page - click through on the translator or reviewer's name, and you get a page featuring her photo, her work and recognizing her contributions. On Global Voices, we try to feature authors and translators equally - that model doesn't make as much sense for TED, where the speakers are often celebrities, but it's clear that TED is taking the translator's role very seriously and honoring the contributions.

- Community matters. Our translators have the same sort of internal communications systems that our authors do - they divide up tasks, consult each other for assistance and support, and generally function as a tight community. My guess is that language communities are going to emerge on TED in much the same way, and that the translator/review mechanism is going to be critically important for building support, friendships and communities.

- Not all rewards are (directly) financial. GV rewards its most productive translators with travel funding to help them attend our annual meetings. I wouldn't be surprised to see TED try something similar if they're able to secure the funding. And we've found that translators use their GV experience as evidence that they are competent professional translators and gain more professional translation work from their association with us - again, I'd expect to see something similar with TED. My guess is that prominent translators in the TED community will also become "go-to" guys and gals for TEDsters who are looking for contacts in Turkey or Poland.

I'm really excited about TED's project for two reasons. One is that it's great to see an organization I respect and admire adopting and improving on a strategy we've embraced at Global Voices. June and I had coffee in NYC a couple of weeks ago, and when she told me that the translations produced by volunteers were frequently better than those produced by professional translation agencies, I was so happy I gave her a high-five. It makes perfect sense to me - translators motivated by pride, community support and interest might well do a better job than those just collecting a paycheck.

I'm also thrilled because TED operates on a very large stage, and their embrace of social translation sends a message to organizations and projects around the world who are considering whether and how they tackle issues of language. Because translation is historically difficult and expensive, most organizations have simply avoided it, except when absolutely necessary.

The internet is huge, growing, and being built by people who speak hundreds of different languages. There are editions of Wikipedia in over 200 languages, and some scholars estimate that there's as much user content created in Chinese as there is in English. Unless we find scaleable, inexpensive ways to translate, we're each going to face an internet that's grows everyday, where we find less of the content understandable. Until we figure out better solutions to translation, we're fooling ourselves into believing we're more cosmopolitan and connected than we actually are.

Social translation isn't the only solution, and it won't solve the problem by itself. But it's a great first step, and TED deserves real congratulations in building this great tool and bringing this strategy to global prominence... and for it's commitment to the values of connection and bridging that underly their commitment to making this information available around the world.

I'm a professional translator and 'routinely charge' 6 cents a word. I wish I knew who was paying 40 or even 20. You'll forgive me if I'm not overly enthused by this project which is TAKING THE BREAD FROM MY MOUTH!

Posted by: Laurel Lyon on May 14, 2009 11:12 PM
This is so powerful. The collective "we" will ensure knowledge reaches everyone, regardless of any language barrier. How utopian. How wonderful.

Posted by: Poodle Pearl on May 15, 2009 6:27 AM
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http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009872.html

[جمال الأحمر]

TED Crowdsources Translation of Its Talks
By Kim Zetter
May 13, 2009

TED is turning to the crowd for help in opening its popular talks to a broader audience.

The Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, which turned a Swedish academic into a rock star and introduced the world to Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight, has launched a new project to translate its celebrated video talks. And it wants your help.

The $6,000 invitation-only conference for the elite digerati set began posting free videos of its talks online a few years ago. Since then the videos have been viewed more than 100 million times. But until now they’ve only been available in English.

After receiving repeated pleas to translate the talks, the organization is doing just that.

The Open Translation Project, launched Wednesday, combines crowd sourcing with smart language markup to provide translated and transcribed videos in multiple languages that can be indexed and searched by key words. The cool part is that users can click on any phrase in the transcript of a talk, and jump to that point in the video.

Some 300 translations have already been completed in 40 languages — from Arabic to Urdu. A handful of talks were translated into 20 languages by professional translators. But most were done by more than 200 volunteers around the world. Another 450 translations are in the works. A drop-down menu on the main TED Talks page allows you to sort videos by available languages.

“The entire goal and inspiration of the project is to be truly global and spread talks beyond the English world,” said June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media.

The videos are all in English with subtitles. A drop-down menu lists subtitle languages from which to choose. Next to the video a window displays a full transcript of the video to allow viewers to follow along with the talk or find the most salient points and skip ahead. Click a phrase in the transcript — such as the point where director JJ Abrams discusses his grandfather’s mystery box — and the video immediately jumps to that spot. Users can search for key words in a specific video or among all of the translated videos.

The transcripts also mean that key words in each video can now be indexed by outside search engines. Type the term “green rooftops” into Google, and among the links in your results page will probably be one that takes you directly to the point in Majora Carter’s talk where she discusses a green roof project in the Bronx.

Anyone can sign up to translate a video. But at least two fluent translators are required to work on each video for quality control and to discourage mischief-makers who might want to introduce inappropriate material into the translation.

“The second translator’s role is the editor’s role,” Cohen says. “Proofreading, checking for typos and questions of style to prevent the use of regional terms that won’t be widely understood.”

TED matches translators to work with one another, or groups can volunteer to work together. All translators are credited on the site.

TED provides guidelines and a professionally generated English transcript of the talk to each translator to ensure that translators don’t misinterpret a speaker’s words and that every translation starts from the same master transcript.

Nokia has sponsored the subtitle project, and dotSUB provided the platform that translators use to create the marked up transcripts.

Cohen says they’ve had interest from other groups and web sites that are interested in launching similar translation projects.

“Our hope is to pave the way and to provide an example a proof of concept for where we think the web is heading – in terms of the accessibility of video content through subtitling and through interactive transcripts to make online video documents radically more accessible,” says Cohen. “There’s a lot of ways it can go wrong. So we’re hoping to provide the proof that this can actually work and it can work beautifully and on a really large scale.”

Comments (2)

• Posted by: wyman13 | 05/13/09 | 4:28 pm
This is a great idea. Hope it catches on and thousands of useful, insightful, educational, documentary subjects are translated into many languages to share with hundreds of millions of non (native) English speakers. Think of the lives saved/changed/improved, for example, if the young boys and girls being brainwashed at madrasses in Pakistan and elsewhere instead learned about math and science and history and other cultures and misc subjects that s/how educated them to get jobs instead of their being trained for nothing but to hate those who haven’t memorized their particular religious reference book. Heck, think how good it would be if our own US schools encouraged our students to watch educational videos on their computers as homework during some of the time they might otherwise be sitting in front their computers or tvs playing video games and getting fat on junk food and not exercising? Seriously, look at what is going on in the Swat area now and also what Obama is trying to do to reform heath care. Educational videos can change the world if they are seen by enough people and those people act on the good info provided in them. We’ve spent long enough “dumbing down.” Lets use vids like this to “smarten up” the world, including our own children and adults. Force those in the US who live in gov’t housing and who use food stamps/WIC/EBT (ie, taxpayer handouts) and who get unemployment benefits to watch educational vids on diet, nutrition, exercise, etc.


• Posted by: jackprosser | 05/14/09 | 3:39 pm
We created something similar with Social Translator org and the whole aim was to provide translation and especially video translation to the masses. Although we focused on YouTube and popular translation with what we believed to be the first instance of such a concept. But it seems that since our launch many more project were either in the pipeline and are now becoming more and more prominent. Especially within the academic world this seems to be a trend that is both exciting and has the potential for a lot of growth. I’m very impressed with the TED approach and this should be start of the web truly becoming readable and watchable by all. I’ve always loved the TED talks and hopefully everyone can enjoy them too now.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/...-of-its-talks/

[أحمد الفهد]

أخي العزيز الأستاذ جمال الأحمر،
تحية أخوية وبعد،
هذا الموضوع الأخير الذي جاء في آخر مشاركتين لك، هو موضوع ترجمة أحاديث وحوارات في أشِرطة الفيديو لـ "TED" و "GV" إلى مئات اللغات بهذه الطريقة المبتكرة، مثير حقاً للاهتمام وذلك لأنه:
- عبقري في الحصول على ترجمات مجانية كانت ستكلف ملايين الدولارات.
- يطرح مفاهيم جديدة في الترجمة تشبه مفهوم الـ (Open Source) في البرمجيات ومفهوم (Social Translation) والحقيقة أني أسمع به لأول مرة.
- أنظر حتى إلى مرونة وطواعية الاشتقاق في الإنجليزية وهناك الكثير من ذلك في المقالين الأخيرين وخاصة عنوان المقال الأخير وعبارة (Crowdsources).
هنا الكثير لما يمكن للمترجمين والأساتذة في واتا أن يناقشوه، وليتني كنت امتلك الوقت لترجمة الموضوع إلى العربية – وليت متطوعين يفعلون- وربما افعل ذات يوم وأعود لهذا الموضوع وطرحه للنقاش إن لم يفعل أي من الزملاء.
كما أني قد أزور الموقعين المعنيين لأخذ فكرة عنهما.
شكراً لك أخي الكريم، كانت قراءة ممتعة في هذا الصباح الباكر.
أحمد الفهد

[جمال الأحمر]

أخي الفاضل؛ الأستاذ أحمد الفهد

السلام عليكم

1- أسعدتني وشرفتني زيارتكم لصفحتي هذه المتواضعة...

2- وأشكركم على اطلاعكم المفصل على الموضوع، وتعقيبكم عليه بما يثريه.

3- أوافقكم على أن الموضوع يحتاج إلى متابعة، فعالم الشابكة بحور لا تخلو من لآلئ...

4- في مدونتي المتواضعة الخاصة بالترجمة، برمجت شريطين إخباريين يوافياني بأخبار الترجمة تلقائيا من الشابكة،،،فحاولت نشر كل خبر جديد يأتياني به،،،ولكني لم أتمكن من إيرادها جميعا لقلة وقتي،،،لذلك عمدت إلى فكرة قالها الأولون "ما لا يدرك كله، لا يترك جله"...

5- أحييك على تفانيك في مجال برامج الترجمة...

تقبل مني تحية أندلسية...السلام عليكم