#193 Volume 32 Issue 1 January/February 2021

How did you get started in this industry?

I was lucky enough to be born in a multicultural family. Most of my “tribe” is fond of languages. My grandpa was an interpreter from German, English, and French into Russian. His brother spoke Hindi and Farsi. One of my great-grandmas was Polish, while another one was Armenian. I also have a Belorussian great-grandpa, to complete the picture. I grew up among antiquarian books and newspapers in foreign languages, so this passion for linguistics was inevitable, as I see now. I graduated in 2004, but, being an eager lifelong learner, I can never be satisfied with what has been achieved, that’s why I keep following my learning path. Courses and webinars at Washington University, Moscow State University, TAUS, and so on are an integral part of my life.

What language(s) do you speak?

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​French, English, Spanish, and Russian (native). Now I’m learning Russian sign language, but it’s not such a fast process.

Whose industry social feeds (twitter, blog, LinkedIn, Facebook) do you follow?

Social media is an amazing way to keep up to date, so I follow a lot of industry leaders and companies all over the world: MultiLingual, Nimdzi Insights, Anne-Marie Colliander Lind, Miguel Sepulveda, Danilo Monaco, Diego Cresceri, Carlos la Orden Tovar, and many others.

What do you like to do in your spare time?

I’m crazy about mountain skiing, traveling, reading, and collecting antiquarian books.

What industry organizations and activities do/did you participate in?

To begin with, I’m a member of Women in Localization and the Union of Translators of Russia. I’m a passionate conference-goer — conferences facilitate cooperation and communication between all participants of our industry and helps me keep up with the latest trends. And we have a lot of fun there! 2020 was especially eventful: I attended 12 inspiring conferences (Elia Together, TranSib Forum, and many game localization gatherings like DevGamm and Hamburg Mobile Summit). I was thrilled to bits to be invited as a speaker to five amazing events (such as LocWorld, BP Translation conference, and KTLC). Every year I feel really happy and honored to be among the jurors of Littera Scripta, an international youth translation contest.

Do you have any social feeds of your own? Twitter handle, blog?

I don’t have much time to be as active on social media as I’d like to be. However, I share useful information on LinkedIn and Facebook. When I speak at conferences, I share my infographics, tips and helpful links after every presentation.

Why do you read MultiLingual?

To tell the truth, I read all issues as soon as I receive them. This past year, Multilingual has been especially important — I should say vital for our industry — when we all were separated by the lockdown. Your magazine is like a tie uniting translators from all over the world. It encourages and inspires us; it makes us feel that we’re still alive and we are not alone with our problems. When I opened the November/December 2020 issue, I couldn’t believe I saw our project on the pages of my favorite magazine! I’ll keep it for my great grandchildren!

These days I spend most of time following new natural language processing papers.

What do you like to do in your spare time?

I listen to a lot of podcasts in Chinese in a wide range of topics, like physics, the economy, and psychology.

Do you have any social feeds of your own? Twitter handle, blog?

Not yet. I just started writing about AI for the language industry. Perhaps you’ll see articles of mine soon!

Why do you read MultiLingual?

MultiLingual is the go-to magazine for the industry. Who doesn’t read it? 

Industry News

Ann Friedman attends the ribbon cutting at Planet Word.

Sherry Simon

Especially Constance Garnett. She is one of the few names that people know as a translator, and they know her name because they criticize her, naturally. But this is unfair. Certainly one could improve upon her translations, but it is unfair not to take in the historical circumstances during which she was translating, and how quickly she was obliged to do it, and with how little help.

You have discussed the use of the term multilingual as insufficient in describing cities.

The way I see the word multilingual used, like multicultural, is often in a descriptive way to talk about how many. When you talk about New York as multilingual, often that description implies how many languages. Of course this description is appropriate – New York has over 200 languages. But what does it tell you about what you hear on city streets? What does it tell you about how people interact with one another? Where are the spaces where people speak these languages? How important are these languages? How often are they spoken? How often are they translated into English? How often is English translated into them?

If you are a migrant, you will translate yourself constantly into the major language. That is what you must do in order to survive as an immigrant, to integrate into your new society. You translate yourself into. You are not going to find the major culture translating itself into you. That is a very strong dissonance, the weights of those directions.

And that applies all across thinking about translation: the cultural weight of those directions, whether you are translating up or down, out or in.

Can you talk about the concept of counter-translation?

The way I use it is in the context of these cities that have been translated over, as in languages that have been effectively suppressed and eliminated and murdered. If you talk about Yiddish in Eastern Europe: Yiddish no longer exists in eastern Europe because the people who spoke that language were murdered. So that is a suffocation or elimination of language.

But what happens in those cases is that after a period of time, or in a period of post-trauma, or post-violence, something happens where those languages can
acquire a new voice.

One example involves the First Languages in Canada. I give an example of the National Gallery in Canada, which is the flagship symbolic art institution of the country. A couple of years ago, it re-did its entire collection of art to include First Nations art as the founding art of the nation – not as some ethnological art that you have to look for in another museum, but an art that was fully integrated into the history of the country.

What the museum did to consolidate this was to use First Nations’ languages as part of the labeling of the art. You usually see labels communicate information about the art as a neutral conveyor of information. But in this case, the labels themselves were written in First Nations’ languages. To me, this was another example of counter-translation: here were languages that were revived through translation. Altogether, there is a whole movement of re-translation into First Nations languages that had been suppressed for centuries. These kinds of reversals, I find satisfying because they are desirable reversals. That is what I mean by counter-translation.

The newly-minted Entertainment Globalization Association (EGA) has set its sights on publicizing the role of localization in the entertainment industry.

The goal is to create “better awareness that this industry even exists,” with people who are “creating the original IP,” said Chris Fetner, who is heading up the organization as managing director. For example, writers and directors may know that translation and globalization happen; that movies get dubbed in some markets, but for the most part, said Fetner, the effect is like a duck seeming to glide effortlessly over the surface of the water. Nobody sees the legs kicking furiously under the surface to propel the duck forward. Fetner said he thinks directors would likely be shocked if they knew how little time voice actors in dubbing studios were given with scripts, for instance.

“For a long time, [localization has] been treated like a utility, and it’s done it a disservice as an art form,” said Fetner. EGA’s goal is to ensure faithful representation in whatever language a film is translated into — and this might mean a little more time than the localization providers are currently given.

Chris Fetner

When Fetner left Netflix this fall, he reached out to the vendors he’d worked with, and they expressed regret they would no longer be working together. Some asked if he’d do consulting. Fetner said he told them, “if you feel like there’s work to be, let’s all work together with everybody,” and from these conversations, the EGA was conceived. It was “spearheaded by the founding companies,” who were asking “what would it look like if everyone worked together in the industry,” said Fetner. Additionally, with Fetner available, they had a managing director who was willing to work on the issues.

Fetner has plans to reach out to writer’s and director’s guilds, as well as similar organizations, in an effort to “add value” by inviting them to work more directly with localization.

Together At Home

February 24-26, 2021
Online
Elia,

https://elia-association.org/event/together-2021

GALA Connected 2021

March 23-25, 2021
Online
Globalization & Localization Association

https://www.gala-global.org/events/conferences

Elia’s Focus on Executives

May 6-7, 2021
Rhodes, Greece
Elia

https://languages-media.com/

UTICamp 2021

July 19-25, 2021
Dnipro, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ukraine
Ukrainian Translation Industry Camp

https://utic.eu

ongree Language Technology GmbH is a software manufacturer based in the south of Germany. They specialize in the field of computer linguistics, and support companies of any size in the process of content optimization. They mainly concentrate on the work of technical writers and corporate authors who generate source content. Since they integrate the Congree Linguistic Engine, which performs a morphological analysis, their Language Check is only available for a small selection of languages (English, German, French, and Spanish). For Italian and Japanese, Congree offers a basic Language Check that is not as sophisticated as for the main languages. The other components are language-independent and can be used for all languages.

hy do you work in localization? For translators, this answer may be more obvious. Translation itself is an often-underappreci-ated job; the general assumption is most people do it for love, not money. Translators themselves tend to be smart enough to have their pick of industries: a legal translator could have easily become a lawyer; marketing localizers are perfectly capable of writing source language blogs and slogans. According to a 2020 Common Sense Advisory report, 42% of global translators and interpreters came to the industry from another profession and more than half originally studied something else. Greek translator Christos Flo-ros, for example, majored in political science, but says, “My love of languages made me choose this industry.”

t’s the start of 2021 — a time to look back and a time to look ahead. This time of year, we all love a good list. Whether it’s a retrospective on things that have happened in the previous 12 months, or predictions about what’s going to happen in the coming year, they are staple of articles far and wide, and this one will be no exception!

elcome to this first edition of “Rules of the Trade.” I’m very excited to have the opportunity to share insights into the challenges facing professionals managing multilingual communications in highly regulated industries. In this series I will share with you what I’ve learned in my 21 years working alongside language services and tech customers in the financial, legal, IR, CRO, and pharmaceutical sectors.

y now you should have heard the big news — San Francisco-based AI company OpenAI announced their new-generation language model GPT-3. You may wonder why it is a big deal. Well, read this:

“I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a ‘feeling brain.’ But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!”

rtificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic in recent years. It’s no stranger in the language industry either — most of us are very familiar with the term machine translation (MT). We take MT as the primary link between localization and AI. However, is MT equal to AI? Of course not! MT is a very niche field inside of AI. Figure 1 shows how MT connects to AI, as well as a few other terms you might have heard of.

hat is the future of the localization industry? To understand where we’re headed, it is helpful to consider how we got here. When I started working in localization 14 years ago, things were a lot different. We worked on multi-month, behemoth projects. Success was measured by how “good” the translation was, as defined by its linguistic quality and technical compliance. Localization was totally divorced from business outcomes. It was like the old medical joke, “the operation was successful, but the patient died.”

n the megabucks world of high tech, software and hardware vendors vie to capture the attention and spending of business buyers and consumers. Over the last few years their battleground has been artificial intelligence, with frequent announcements from mega-tech platform suppliers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft about the smartest algorithm or the fastest AI computer. It seems likely that the battle for the smartest-fastest-biggest AI solution will segue into the practical arena of “easiest,” with the democratization of artificial intelligence and incorporation into every electronic device you use. Language technology companies are applying AI on a smaller scale to improve their operations and efficiency, and language service providers (LSPs) across the spectrum are following suit.

rowth and investment are assets that usually go hand in hand with good practices and successful businesses. While we invest in people, workflows, workspace, and technology, the translation industry seems to march on a relentless pace. In addition to precious in-house and outsourced human talent, language providers looking to get ahead of the pack need to constantly monitor ever-evolving new technology, apps, tools, their upgrades, plug-ins, and associated features.

The Ever-Evolving Technology of MT

Evolving from being considered a threat and a hindrance to translators, the latest machine translation technology has become an asset to the industry and the entire business world

achine translation (MT) has come a long way from its humble beginnings in the post-war era to becoming an integral part of the 21st century business environment. So what are the current and future trends as we head into 2021? And how is dynamic learning — adaptive neural machine translation— transforming the way professional translators work? We have asked these questions to professional translators to find out how MT has developed over the years and where to apply it best.

IRA is a proprietary project management and issue tracking tool developed by Atlassian. This software was originally designed to be a bug tracking tool, but in the last two decades, it has evolved into a family of products that can help manage the work of all kinds of teams.

his reader is the fifth installment of MultiLingual’s encyclopedia-in-a-nutshell relating to localization standards. It does not purport to address everything around standards, and was last updated in late 2020. To be informative and of practical use, there must be a focus. This focus is being provided via two limitations. First, we are looking at standards that affect multilingual transformations of content, and at general content life cycle standards only, ad hoc and as far as they have bearing on multilingual transformations. Second, we are looking only at technical standards that are targeting actual technical interoperability — file or data formats and/or communication protocols. Abstract metadata, quality or service level standards are discussed only marginally, and only as long as they have bearing on real machine-to-machine interoperability in localization.

year after its emergence, the world is still trying to find ways to quell the COVID-19 pandemic. Different industries look at the problem from a unique perspective — something that is also true for the translation industry. As the pandemic spread across the globe, the translation industry looked at how language and language technology could address a global crisis of information. Thus, the Translation Initiative for COVID-19 (TICO-19) was born. TICO-19 is an initiative that launched at the onset of the crisis and saw translators, technologists, and researchers from Translators without Borders (TWB), Amazon, Appen, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Facebook, George Mason University, Google, John Hopkins University, Microsoft, and Translated joining forces, using language technology to make COVID-19 information available in as many languages as possible.

Takeaway

It was January of 2010. A 7.0 magnitude earthquake had devastated Haiti. Since only 5% of the Haitian population was fluent in French, aid communication needed to be in Haitian Creole. This was a huge task. After this experience, Lori Thicke, who had founded the French organization Traducteurs sans Frontières, realized the world needed a larger, US-based organization to head up linguistic crisis response efforts. An organizational meeting of Translators without Borders (TWB) was held at a LocWorld in Seattle the following autumn.