This article at the New York Times describes Google’s efforts to create new Internet content in non-English languages:

Disaster relief workers from across the globe continue to arrive in Haiti in response to the devastating earthquake that hit the Caribbean nation last week. In addition to feet on the ground, the international community is also lending financial support — Europe has pledged more than US$500 million in relief funds and President Obama has offered US$100 million in aid. While there is no doubt that money and manpower are sorely needed, multilingual communication is also a must.
(more…)

Today I received a résumé that is an almost perfect example of what you should NOT do if you want to be more successful in your search for new customers:

• The author mentioned she had browsed our web page, yet the résumé was address “to whom it may concern”. If she had browsed our web page, she could easily have found the names of the partners of our company: sending your résumé to a specific person, instead than to nobody in particular, increases the chance that it will be read.

• The author said in the subject of her e-mail she was an English to Spanish translator, but she did not include that information in the header of the résumé. Without that information, it is impossible to see at a glance what exactly you do.

• The résumé was in Spanish, though it was sent to a company based in the United States. As it happens, I do read Spanish, but if I did not, the résumé would have been sent to a person unable to read it. Tailor the language of your résumé to the language or languages of the country you are sending it to.

• The résumé included work experience not relevant to our profession, such as teacher of English or education coordinator. Only include information that is relevant to the position you seek.

• The résumé listed first educational attainments, and only afterwards professional experience. Also, it was in chronological order, with older items first. Your résumé should follow the most commonly used format for your target country. For the USA, you should mention your professional experience first, your educational experience only later. Also, you should list your professional experience in reverse chronological order (most recent first).

• The résumé was much too long (seven pages). One page (two maximum for experienced professionals) is usually more than enough: busy people don’t want to wade through seven pages of repetitious information. Be short and to the point.

• The résumé listed as working language pairs both English into Spanish and Spanish into English. Unless you are truly bilingual (raised as bilingual from an early age), you should give as your target language only your own native language.

• While the résumé listed as working languages English and Spanish, under “Languages” it only gave French language courses. If a language is not among the languages you translate, do not mention it in your résumé.

• The résumé had a “hardware and software” section, which may be useful, but then included irrelevant information. Tell the CAT tools and other specialized tools you use (so, do include Trados, Acrobat professional and Auto-CAD, if you have them). Do not include programs that everybody is expected to have (Windows, Office), or outdated software (Adobe 4 when the current version is 9). If you do not use the latest version of some program, it is better to blur the issue a bit, by not mentioning the version number at all.

• The résumé had a three-page list of translations done. Much more useful is a brief summary that suggests the fields you have translated in (for example, “Translated for customer X medical documents and articles, as well as various magazine articles for customer Y”). A long list of translations is usually counterproductive for two reasons: a) it will not be read, and, b) it gives the impression to be a complete list of all the translations ever done, thus evidence of a relative lack of experience.

• Finally, the résumé had a list of further education courses, none of which had any relevance to translation (at first glance they seem all to be courses for teachers). If something does not add to your professional experience or attainments, do not include it. If you include something, explain why it makes you a better translator.

This résumé managed not to fall into a couple of frequent errors: it did not include personal information (such as date of birth or marital status), and it did not include a photograph (both no-no’s for a résumé aimed at a US prospect).

It is difficult enough to win new customers by sending out a good résumé. Sending one that hides your true accomplishments and looks amateurish further stacks the deck against you.

For more Dos and Don’ts about translators’ résumés, download my article “How Not to Get Hired”.

Modified reposting of entry by Tammi Coles in the Milengo Blog. Tammi is our Geeky Marketing Diva, and has a lot of experience in nonprofit advocacy. In her words, “coalitions and collaborations = conservation of effort = victory.”

Like you, Milengo staff worldwide heard the news about the earthquake in Haiti. As the reports and photographs poured in, the extent of the devastation became clear: full neighborhoods have been destroyed, government offices and services have crumbled, and basic access to food and potable water has degraded.

We have also witnessed an amazing public rally for support, including reports of initiatives from leading technology companies to mobilize their customers and employees in the efforts.

These reports started a conversation between Milengo CEO Renato Beninatto and Lexcelera CEO Lori Thicke about just what translators and localization service providers could provide to the effort.

We don’t have to look too far for ideas.

Pledge the efforts of your company
The folks at One Hour Translation put out a press release earlier today offering a simple, free translation of up to 250 words per each organization and individual affected by the earthquake. One document may not seem like much, but in an industry of over 40,000 companies, the potential impact on medical aid documentation and charity websites is enormous.

Offer your services as an individual translator
The French-based Translators Without Borders (founded by Lori) take it a step farther by offering translators the chance to answer the call of the humanitarian groups that need their time and effort. Their largest partner, Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders is already on the ground in Haiti, with over 1,000 patients already in their care and an inflatable hospital on its way. Whether the need is for training materials for volunteers or media announcements in multiple languages, your talents are welcome.

Spread the word one SMS and Tweet at a time
Messages on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter have made a considerable impact on Haitian relief efforts. @RenatoBeninatto sent out a message on Twitter regarding the efforts of Haitian-born singer Wyclef Jean to get donations for the work of his nonprofit, Yele.org, from U.S. residents. And CNet News reported that a similar SMS donation campaign driven by Verizon and the Red Cross raised $4 million USD within days, with each SMS a donation of just $10. The effort to both make a donation and spread the news virally is too simple to ignore.

Help Coordinate the Efforts
Doug Green from Translation Source, in Houston, TX, wants to make sure that our joint efforts are not so diluted. So, in order to make sure that language assistance has been properly mobilized, and that the language industry puts its best foot forward. He has created a Facebook group, a Twitter account, and an e-mail address to concentrate information:

Facebook: Interpreters and Translators for Haiti
Twitter: @IT4H
Gmail: [email protected]

Doug also tells us that Pacific Interpreters has already stepped forward and begun to donate all over the phone interpreting assistance for Haiti.

We hope to hear more on Twitter and on this blog more about what you, our colleagues in the translation industry, are doing to help. Add your comments, ideas, feedback and more below.

CSOFT announced TermWiki, a multilingual terminology management solution based on wiki technology. As a wiki, it is web-based, supports collaboration out of the box, and provides users with a familiar interface for managing a terminology database. The company hopes to overcome traditional objections to systematic term management. (more…)

“Behind the promotion of Western ideas of mental health and healing lie a variety of cultural assumptions about human nature. Westerners share, for instance, evolving beliefs about what type of life event is likely to make one psychologically traumatized, and we agree that venting emotions by talking is more healthy than stoic silence. We’ve come to agree that the human mind is rather fragile and that it is best to consider many emotional experiences and mental states as illnesses that require professional intervention. (The National Institute of Mental Health reports that a quarter of Americans have diagnosable mental illnesses each year.) The ideas we export often have at their heart a particularly American brand of hyperintrospection — a penchant for ‘psychologizing’ daily existence. These ideas remain deeply influenced by the Cartesian split between the mind and the body, the Freudian duality between the conscious and unconscious, as well as the many self-help philosophies and schools of therapy that have encouraged Americans to separate the health of the individual from the health of the group. These Western ideas of the mind are proving as seductive to the rest of the world as fast food and rap music, and we are spreading them with speed and vigor.”

If Western ideas about the mind so easily creep into the subconscious of the rest of the world, what other cultural mentalities will drift away with time and globalization?

After an attempted terrorist attack on a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day 2009, President Obama revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies had collected but then failed to piece together different threads of information about the suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Sound familiar? Just like the many warnings that were captured but went untranslated prior to 9/11, this latest incident highlights one of the U.S. government’s biggest counter-terrorism challenges – multilingual information management. (more…)

Several language service providers (LSPs) with technology credentials announced executive changes meant to buttress their business models, engineering prowess, or competitiveness. Four of them — Elanex, Lionbridge, SDL, and thebigword — compete in the translation management system (TMS) sector. (more…)

CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” just ran a segment (video also available) on the central African forest elephants. The segment profiles Andrea Turkalo’s two decades of observing these elephants, and categorizing their sounds and actions. Many of the sounds are at levels below the pitches that humans can hear.

The Elephant Listening Project is associated with the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. Cornell University researcher Katy Payne began the Elephant Listening Project. She’s building an “elephant dictionary” that might help researchers learn how many elephants there are in an area, how they interact, what they’re doing—and if they’re reproducing. Turkalo frequently travels to Cornell to present data and observations from her work in the field.

(© Andrea Turkalo)

The “elephant dictionary” itself is in its infancy and work continues. The good side effect of this is that at least this particular batch of elephants has escaped poachers due to the fact that others are watching them.

It’s the fake relative pronoun. A relative pronoun, obviously, is a word that begins a relative clause. In the sentence just previous to this one, the word is “that;” essentially, this pronoun melds two sentences, “a relative pronoun is a word” and “the word connects two relative clauses,” into one. Other such pronouns in modern English usage are who, whom, whose and which, as you no doubt know from grammar class.

Correctly, the opening example should be “the thing is that John doesn’t love me,” or merely the invisible “the thing is, John doesn’t love me.” Over the years, however, I’ve noticed people inserting an extra “is” in sentences like this because their brain tells them (assumedly) that something is missing from the more natural, more colloquial relative clause “, John doesn’t love me.” In many languages, one needs a relative pronoun at all times; it is not optional (C’est que John me n’aime plus) like it sometimes is in English. This option appears to cause confusion. Should there be something more? What if we just repeat “is”?

In the end I can’t pretend to know the motivation of the human brain, but I do find this phenomenon interesting. I predict that in the future, we may begin to see “is” labeled as a dialectical relative pronoun, much like the “what” found, for example, in archaic rural outposts of the UK: “The boy what eats more meat gets more dessert!”

As a side note, from the quick search I did on the internet, I did not see any research on this subject. I’m totally calling it, then.

2009 was filled with charitable acts by language service providers (LSPs), globalization software vendors (GSVs), and others in the language industry. While not all companies feel comfortable broadcasting their good deeds, the receiving organizations actually encourage them to trumpet their donations — it increases awareness of the services offered by the recipients, thus driving more more contributions and demand for those services.

We received notices from some of the organizations that benefited from their generosity, notes and press releases from some of the donors, and heard of still others at conferences and in briefings. What we found encouraging was the range of activities engaged in by language service and technology providers and practitioners. This year, we call out the wide range of mitzvahs performed by companies in the sector:

• Local outreach to help people and organizations with language needs. We heard from a variety of LSPs about their donation of free translation and interpreting to non-profit organizations in their areas, “free translation days” for members of various linguistic communities, and projects that ranged from tutoring at the local jail to bilingual facilitation of immigration meetings to job training.
• Translation to assist medical, social, and political causes. LSPs and associations organized or took part in a wide range of activities to help their favorite causes, including Ashoka, Action Contre la Faim, Chernobyl Children Project, Doctors without Borders, Handicap International, Medecins du monde, the Princeton University Language Project, and Project Aladdin.
• Donations in lieu of holiday cards. Many LSPs and GSVs eschewed the traditional snail-mailed holiday card and thus executed a double mitzvah — their web-delivered greeting cards had a smaller carbon footprint than paper cards, and they donated the money they saved on printing, envelopes, and postage to a range of organizations, including some fighting diseases such as malaria and AIDS, orphanages and homes for the elderly, animal shelters, centers for victims of domestic abuse, medical services for immigrants, UNICEF projects, and various eleemosynary foundations.

Many LSPs and GSVs regularly donate their services or cash to organizations with linguistic or cash needs — and have been doing so for years. Helping those in need is something that is worth celebrating. Happy New Year!

That’s how Mr. Karl-Johan Lönnroth, Director General of the Directorate General for Translation (DGT) at the European Commission, described the DGT’s attempt to really quantify the size of the language industry in Europe during one of its latest projects. LISA joined more than sixty representatives from around Europe to hear the results of the research commissioned from the Language Technology Centre and to engage in a (really big!) roundtable discussion about the results and where we need to go in the future.

Some may wonder why an organization with a name like Localization Industry Standards Association considers it part of its mission to track, analyze and communicate trends in the outsourced global product development industry. It’s very simple (as Smith Yewell, CEO of Welocalize encapsulates it):

Our challenge is to build an ecosystem that will bridge “the final mile” to turn globalization services into an always-on utility. Why? Because it’s up to all of us to deliver the multilingual information that more and more exists in a streaming environment to support devices that are always-on. And China is the best place to be to respond to this challenge because of its history, its demand and its talent.

Typically, of course, languages develop in context, just as they are learned in context. This did actually happen occasionally even in this constructed language, as Frommer explains in the Vanity Fair article.

To some extent, new language creeps into being all the time. This year, for example, “unfriend” was officially recognized in English. Language evolves with the times and technology.

And also with the subculture. I had the strange experience of growing up in a rural microculture of ten souls: me, my four siblings, and the five children we played with. Somehow we invented our own words to keep the peace, the most important of which sounded something like “ught.” If someone said this word, everyone else had to shut up and listen. If you “broke ught,” everyone else looked at you like you were evil (In retrospect, this sounds disturbingly like the conch in Lord of the Flies, but fortunately our microculture remained entrenched in the rules rather than fragmenting into anarchy. Maybe this was because of the ten, six of us were girls, and our parents were never that far away).

As someone who generally feels at ease in cultures not my own, I’m trying to weigh this, ask if it is true. On some level, I have to say that it is: culturally, things get lost in translation; I remember consistently being confused when I asked a foreigner if he wanted to do this or that, and his reply was “that’s Ok.” To his ear, this meant a polite yes; to mine, it meant a polite no.

But that’s simple lack of idiomatic translation. The idea that words mean less when they’re not in the language of your upbringing goes further. And I’m not sure I completely agree. I was perhaps more thrilled, not less, to be told affectionately “Je t’aime bien,” by a friend in France than I would be by a friend in the States saying the (more or less) equivalent “I love you, man.” A language not your own may still work its way deep into your heart. Sometimes it is merely by virtue of the fact that the person speaking the language is beloved; to hear “I love you” in any language, spoken with sincerity, is extremely moving as long as the translation is known. One watches the eyes, the voice, the intention, the kept promise, more than one watches the cultural diction. It’s amazing, really, how similar each culture’s facial expressions and moral tenants are (a frown is bad, a laugh is good, deception is bad, generosity is good).

And perhaps that’s this writer’s dilemma: doubting love (or anything) not because of language, but because of those unexpressed things, those nonverbals. Is an apparent lack of commitment real lack of commitment, or is it mere cultural rote? Does she doubt him because they don’t speak the same native language, or because he isn’t trustworthy?

This could apply to business as well as personal life, and the added obstacle here is our cultural delicacy — or indelicacy. We may be too PC to inquire into something we suspect might just be cultural difference, for example, and get cheated on a business deal. We may be too callous or xenophobic, and end up offending a potential business partner.

Whatever the case, language and culture continue to fascinate us and continue to demand education and better idiomatic translation, better localization. Making sure your actions match your words certainly doesn’t hurt in anyplace I’ve ever heard of, either.

The New York Times reports from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that a study of monkeys in Africa finds them putting conditional suffixes on sounds—or shall we say words? Klaus Zuberbühler and researchers previously identified sounds with meanings when studying Campbell’s monkeys in the Tai National Park of the Ivory Coast. They now have shown that the monkeys modify their sounds to communicate further refinements of the sound meanings.

Now, I know that some suffixes on sounds are a far cry from Shakespeare, but it’s fun to realize that these guys have been communicating quite well while we assumed, in our hubris, that such communication was ours alone.

Recent reports from the Iraq Programme of the Institute of War & Peace Reporting indicate a continuing language problem between Arabic-speaking Iraq and its Kurdish-speaking neighbors.

“Though they share the same country, Arabs and Kurds know little of each other’s history and even less today of each other’s languages,” writes Husam al-Saray, a journalist in Baghdad. “Their shared legacy of revolts against colonial Britain lies long forgotten amid a simmering internal conflict over land and resources.”

Under the Iraqi constitution Arabs and Kurds have equal rights as citizens. Both languages must be taught in all Iraqi schools. But few young Kurds speak Arabic, and even fewer young Arabs learn Kurdish.

Signs on roads and official buildings in each region tend to be either in Arabic or in Kurdish, rarely both. If a second language is used, it is usually English.

Journalist Najeeba Mohammed in Erbil reports the number of Kurds who can speak Arabic fluently is rapidly shrinking, and analysts say the next generation of Kurdish leaders could be compromised by their lack of fluent Arabic.

Some 44 of 21,635 schools in Kurdistan offer education in Arabic at present, according to government figures. Many private language academies have popped up in the region, and English courses appear to be the most popular.

For the whole story, see IRAQI CRISIS REPORT, No. 306: http://iwpr.net/iraq

Why, it’s using pre-Irish Independence (1922) placenames for Irish locations. I was able to find up-to-date weather information, including weather satellite maps for such places as “Kingstown” (Dún Laoghaire), “Maryborough” (Portlaoise), Philipstown (Daingean) and other distinctly er, royalist-sounding places.

Even “Queenstown” is there! That’s now called Cobh. It’s the place the Titanic called to before setting off on the final stage of its tragic journey in 1912. If only they had iPhones on board, they could not only have checked the Queenstown weather but they might have also seen the #icebergalert warning on Tweetie.

I cannot help but wonder where the Accuweather folks got this ancient data from. It’s a major localization and cultural error. Names of places in Ireland have all kinds of political as well as cultural and historic significance.

I wouldn’t mind, but there isn’t even a “Weather Conditions for Potato Famine Imminent” alarm. At least the Accuweather people could have been historically consistent with the feature set. Maybe Tom can add this one to his list for future articles!

Maziar Bahari is a Canadian Iranian journalist. He was interviewed by Jason Jones of “The Daily Show” when Jones was in Iran during the upheaval earlier this year. If you are not familiar with “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”, it is a US-based satirical look at the news. It should say enough about the show that it is aired on a network called “Comedy Central”.

After the interview, the segment was evidently not localized well enough. Or perhaps not at all, and someone watching it could not detect irony in another language. Whatever the reason, Bahari was arrested and jailed for espionage for 118 days. His account of this is in the Mediaiate.

Somes comedy—and always localization—is serious stuff.

The video shows just how easy this is. You click “translate” and the pop-up notification warns (as you can see if you hit pause on this video): “Word is about to send the document for translation over the Internet in unencrypted HTML format. It will be translated by the Microsoft Translator service…. Do you want to continue?”

Office 2010 is not being released for a few more months, but the beta was available until the end of October. Has anyone tried using this? If so, what are your opinions? And is the Microsoft Translator service this references the 2007 MT solution or has it evolved significantly?