Well, it’s not my actual birthday, but instead the 1st birthday of this blog! Well, it was actually last Friday, so you’ll have to excuse my tardiness to my own party.

I actually feel like I’ve been blogging for longer than just 1 year, in a good way. It’s hard to imagine how I engaged in any self-reflection or tracked what I was learning and discovering in my career before I had a blog, or read blogs; blogging is so diverse (and time-consuming) that it has ended up being a major part of my job/life.  I guess the self-reflection and learning and discovery activities happened before somehow, but being able to share them and contextualise them in the form of a a blog makes the learning and opinon-forming process a lot more tangible.

Having ideas for my blog is not difficult, I think of them all the time. What’s harder is to express them in a coherent and meaningful way so that others might be able to relate to or comment on them. I really have to discipline myself to do this. But this is another part of the learning process, and what’s great about blogging is that you can learn from other bloggers.

I’m particularly struck by the fact that my original reasons for starting a blog have held true. Rather than being self-indulgent diary writing, blogging should be a way to offer something positive, your own viewpoint on a particular topic that is important to you. This is particularly relevant in terms of your career, especially when you are freelance like me and don’t have in-house colleagues to bounce ideas off.  This was my raison d’être in my first ever post:

With this in mind, and self-consciously trying to avoid being guilty of any ‘narcissistic shrieks’, I hope to be able to use for the following purposes:

a) express and invite opinion about developments in translation and linguistics
b) recommend authoritative links on other translation bloggers‘ sites, particularly with translation students in mind.

c) learn from others’ blogs
d) raise of the profile of translating and interpreting as a career
e) most importantly: publicize my profile as a freelance translator and seek opportunities

I recently read this article on Freelance Switch about blogging that reminded me why it’s all worth it, and this one and this one on Young Go Getter.

I’ve made some good progress within these quite general objectives. In particular, I’m flattered to report that my blog was recently listed in the Top 100 Language Blogs. Here’s to a good first year, and to the next year!

This seems to be a week for links on my blog, but I can’t resist posting yet another one to a fantastic article by Agnès Poirier on the decreasing number of Brits studying languages, and offers some observations as to why that might, or might not, be. Here’s a sample:

I don’t know what’s most irritating though: the abyssal linguistic ignorance of the British or their worn-out excuse to justify it, which always comes with a coy smile: “Our nation is simply not good at languages.” I have kept hearing it ever since I set foot in Britain, and I’ll happily throttle the next person who dares say it to me. Linguistic weakness is not a congenital disease; it’s not in your DNA any more than loving Château Haut-Brion 1989 is in mine. Being good at languages only requires political will, state intervention and cultural rigour. In Europe, learning two foreign languages is compulsory; if it wasn’t, we’d all live in a Tower of Babel and be at each other’s throats.

For what it’s worth, I couldn’t agree more.  This article should really be used as an addendum to the petition I told you about in June.

Stephen Fry’s ‘Fry’s English Delight’ is currently airing on BBC Radio 4 every Monday morning at 10am. The programme’s website can be found here, where you can listen to the latest edition at any time.  I’ve just listened to the first edition, which discusses the use of metaphor in the English language. Absolute word-nerd heaven…

Check out this insider’s guide to London written by Sarah Dillon on Brazen Careerist. Highly recommended.

By the way, in view of the UK’s current success in the Beijing Olympics, this Londoner is already getting very excited about the 2012 London Olympics!

Surprising news today from the US Census Bureau that Hispanics will account for 30% of the US population by 2050, a twofold increase. According BBC News:

White people of European descent will no longer make up a majority of the US population by the year 2042 - eight years sooner than previous estimates.

What will this mean for the evolution of English? The fascinating language-contact phenomenon of ‘Spanglish’ (the language, rather than the film of the same name) is already the subject of linguistic research and attempts have been made to capture it in dictionaries; perhaps with even more speakers in the future it will grow to be regarded by all as a modern language in its own right.

I read this interesting article on the Times Online this morning, taken from the Sunday Times. We all know August is the silly season for the media, and although this particular story isn’t ’silly’ in the traditional sense, it did strike me as a little bizarre (particularly in light of the daft reader comments that follow it). Apparently the standard of English native speaker linguists applying to the EU’s forthcoming recruitment campaign is so poor that the EU is having to recruit non-native speakers instead. I quote:

Brussels rules state that translators into English should have the language as their mother tongue. British standards are so poor, though, that the EU has taken emergency measures.

Potential recruits are being given remedial coaching to bring their abilities up to standard, while a Eurocrat has been dispatched to scour Britain full-time for anyone who can speak foreign languages well, and to encourage schoolchildren to study them.

The article appears to apportion some of the blame to the decreasing number of children studying languages at GCSE level. I wrote a post in June about a petition to the Prime Minister to save foreign language provision in UK secondary schools, but I would be surprised if the Government’s relatively recent (2004) decision to remove languages from the list of compulsory subjects at GCSE was having such a rapid effect.

I also think there must be more than meets the eye to this story; I can only surmise about the reasons for this seemingly dire situation, but perhaps the EU needs to target its recruitment campaigns at more highly qualified linguists in the UK. The prospect of working as a translator at the EU is a very much sought after ideal for modern language undergraduates who as yet may have little other knowledge about translation as a profession. I must say that whilst I was an undergraduate I had to do a great deal of individual research into what being a professional translator was really like. Many a day was spent in the Cardiff University careers centre reading up on translation as a career, but it wasn’t until I was halfway through my MA in Translation at Westminster University that I began to fully understand what my chosen career would involve, and that it wouldn’t necessarily have to involve moving to Brussels. The public perception of translation as a career is still largely that of a career in the EU after a short spell studying for a BA in languages, but this is a very narrow impression of the profession indeed.

Consequently, perhaps a large number of the applications are from enthusiastic but fundamentally untrained graduates who hanker after the ‘glamour’ of working at the EU, perhaps not fully appreciating the level of skill and precision required by the entrance tests. Moreover, I have never noticed a requirement in the EU recruitment campaign for any form of specific training in the field of translation (for example postgraduate studies such as the Chartered Institute of Linguists Diploma in Translation), and it is widely accepted these days that, unless they already have industry experience, most new entrants to the profession will need to undertake this type of training in order to reach an adequate standard.

The EU recruitment campaigns are also usually quite low-key in this country. If they want to target a different class of translator then perhaps they need to create more of a fanfare about their recruitment campaign, whilst also focussing on the professional associations such as the ITI and the universities that train translators to a professional level.

Over the past couple of days I’ve been reading about the (apparently inadvertently leaked news about  Google Translation Center, and have been wondering what it really entails for the translation industry. I first saw a notice about the ‘leak’ on ProZ.com, and then read about it on cnetnews.com, and also today on the  the International Writers’ newsletter.

This is a step in a new direction for the mighty Google, which is fast completing utter dominance of the  internet and follows their foray into machine translation with ‘Google Translate’. Google Translate received a fairly good reception when it was released, as being ‘not too bad’ as far as machine translation goes, if you need to get a very rough approximation of isolated sentences. It does surprise me that they’re now attempting to diversify into human translation, though. Perhaps they’ve seen the success of collaborative translation on open-source projects (by volunteer translators), and of subscription translator community sites such as ProZ and want a piece of the action.

But then, Google Translation Center doesn’t look like a translator community site, nor is there any mention of money changing hands, so I can’t help wondering what’s in it for them? Their stated aim is: “Google Translation Center is part of our effort to make information universally accessible through translation”, but surely, as a company as powerful and successful as theirs must have a profit-driven or market dominance-driven motive lurking behind everything it does, right?

According to Stephen Shankland:

“[...]the company also has technology called Cross Language Information Retrieval  (CLIR)  that builds            translation into its search engine.”

And:

“Google’s translation system uses a statistical model that works better the more it can compare the same text in two different languages. And Google evidently will track translation work in its database; according to the center’s introduction for translators, “our translation search feature matches your current translation with previous translations, so you don’t have to translate over and over again.”

Google is fervently interested in better machine translation. With it, it can use its search technology to link people with data around the world, regardless of language barriers, making its search engine significantly more powerful.”

Interesting stuff that may further enhance the way we search for information, not to mention the possibilities for a gigantic global translation memory. You can read Google’s own full explanation of what it’s all about here.

I’m going to be helping out at a brand new conference called ‘The Translator as Strategic Partner‘ on 22nd-23rd November this year. I know, I know we’re still only just entering summer, but the early bird catches the worm, as they say.

The conference is jointly sponsored by the ITI, the CIOL and ProZ, and the discussions will centre on the ‘practices and technologies of translation quality’.  I haven’t seen a conference with such a relevant and practical approach for ages, not to mention one with such distinguished speakers,  and I encourage people to register early to take advantage of the special offers (which include free membership of ProZ for 6 months). Check out the conference website here. Hopefully I’ll see you there!

Linguistic doom-mongers frequently lament the demise of the English language, complaining that standards are just not what they used to be, that kids these days simply don’t have a grasp of how to use language correctly, lack creativity, etc., etc. Human nature appears to have a natural tendency to assume that things gradually get worse, rather than better, but I don’t actually subscribe to that theory, especially where language is concerned. Language evolves, and trying to pin it down and prevent it from evolving is in my opinion a regressive, not to mention futile, gesture.

True enough, there are many examples of poor grammar and spelling around, enough for many eagle-eyed writers to write entire books about them. I enjoy spotting these mistakes and chuckling about them as much as the next person; I am a massive fan of Lynne Truss and have read and re-read her books like old friends, and I applaud anyone who heightens awareness of language and grammar amongst the general public. As Truss demonstrates in the title of her book Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a wrongly placed comma can completely mislead a reader. This is amusing for native speakers, but a major comprehension problem for a non-native reader of English, and it is of course something translators must always be careful to avoid.

However, there is a difference between the language we use in official publications and translations, and the language we use to communicate via instant, informal methods such as text messages, social networking sites and emails. Think about it: in speaking on the phone to friends and relatives, only the proudest people would claim to be able to hold conversations free from mistakes in word order, use of the possessive, tense etc., every single time they pick up the phone.  We must all accept that we are human, that instant communication methods require us to think on our feet; our brains simply don’t have time to focus on the message of what we’re saying and the grammar within it. We have moved far beyond the era of telegrams and communicating solely by posted letter and we have adapted accordingly, as humans are so adept at doing.

Whilst in spoken language we have recourse to intonation, volume and tone, to ensure the clarity of our message in place of grammar, you might argue that is what we’re attempting to do in emails and text messages as well. We use emoticons, capital letters, italics, amongst other tools, to try to express what it is we’re saying when we don’t have a lot of time in which to do it. I happen to think that this is not a bad thing; we are unable to claw back much time these days, we’re all terribly busy, that’s a given, so we are adapting to that with time-saving methods.

My favourite linguist, David Crystal, recently wrote a fascinating article for The Guardian on text speak, in which he argues that it actually represents a highly creative use of an evolving language. Moreover, he makes the important point that writers such as Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Walter Scott, DH Lawrence all used ‘deviant’ spelling in their novels, so it’s not something entirely new. A bit of trivia for you: ‘cos’ was first entered into the Oxford English Dictionary in 1828, and ‘wot’ in 1829.

Doom-mongers will be horrified to learn that there is now even a ‘text laureate’, but perhaps surprised that last year’s winner was in fact in her late 60s.

I’ve had a Blackberry for about 6 months now and it has changed my life. No joke. It has changed my life, but in ways that have been surprising. The amazing ease of viewing emails which appear instantaneously on its screen like text messages is notoriously mesmerizing and hard to ignore, but has allowed me real time-savings. Also, the line between my work and my life outside work has become blurred, since I am able to see any new emails I receive at just about any moment I choose, whether that moment is when I’m watching TV and there’s an ad break, when it’s late and I can’t be bothered to get up and switch on my PC, or best of all, whilst I’m in a queue or waiting for a train.

This may all sound like a horrific scenario for some people who delight at shutting down their email service when they log off their computers every evening, content that this will mean nobody will be able to ‘get them’.  But for those of us who show Generation Y tendencies towards non-stop communication and to having annoying short attention spans this is simply neat way of using ‘dead time’ effectively. Having got used to texting from a relatively young age, the impatient young upstarts that make up Generation Y are used to being contactable at most times and via multiple mediums. They are adept at organizing their time effectively in order to get the most out of their days; not content to just stand and wait like a lemon for another delayed train, or waste time on endless emails when they’re back in the office and have so many other things they need to do. They use ‘dead time’ as an opportunity to check their emails for anything that they could respond to now, rather than later.

Many people will also see Blackberries as inducing obsessive, addicted behaviour in their owners. But their owners/users can always, always choose when to use them; Blackberries can be set so that you don’t receive an irritating beep on receipt of a new email (and you therefore have to actually look at the thing to know about it), plus you can use filters to select the types of messages you DON’T want to receive when you’re out of the office.  Moreover, remember that you can turn them off.  Repeat after me “you - can - turn - them - off - you - have - the - power”.

More than that though, it’s about the user prioritizing their lives, and knowing when and when isn’t a good time to be engaging in a little cheeky email checking. A conversation with a loved one in which they are telling you something vitally important or highly personal is probably a good example of non-good time.

Penelope Trunk discussed self-discipline and Blackberries the other day. Actually, in doing so she called into question the idea of of work-life balance. This is a very interesting, and probably 100% accurate, view of 21st century careers. Speaking as a freelancer, ‘work-life balance’ is nothing but a myth. I don’t mean that to sound negative, far from it. Although the intersection between work and ‘life’ has become blurred, I see it more as being that my career is synced in with my life. My non-work life is busy and full too, but I don’t think of it as entirely separate to my career. There is a point in every day and weekend when I ignore my Blackberry altogether or turn it off; we all need a little down time. However, my career is inextricably part of my life, and vice versa. I don’t see how it could work any other way, and I don’t want it to. Rather than running my life, my Blackberry helps me control and manage the two intertwining strands of life and work as if they were one and allows me to maximize my time in order to spend it doing the things I love, rather than spending vital time at my desk checking emails.