Portsmouth Spinnaker Tower, courtesy of virtualtourist.com

Last month I spent a Saturday down in Portsmouth at the university’s Ninth Translation Conference, entitled ‘The Translator as Writer’. It’s incredible that I’ve never made it to the event before now, as I’ve always noticed the high calibre of speakers every year (a combination of practitioners and academics), and I’m pleased to say that having finally made it this year, the event lived up to my expectations.

It seemed to me that the event had a very similar theme to other translation conferences I’ve attended in the past 12 months: the translator beginning to take a more strategic and proactive role in the text (aka the product) production process and to bring other skills they offer to table in their role as intermediaries between cultures and as professional writers.

Here are some of my takeaways from the event:

Jody Byrne’s plenary lecture on technical translation:

* The traditional distinctions between the work of translators and writers are rapidly fading

* Technical translators have traditionally not been viewed as needing or possessing excellent writing skills in the same way as translators of more ‘creative’ types of text have been, but this is changing

* Customer expectations of technical translators are changing: technical expertise is often needed as well, with the translator assuming a greater role in the overall usability of a document.

Practical workshop by Fiona Harris on localising and editing press releases for the EU:

* EU press releases translated into English often need to be extensively edited and localised to ensure they are relevant to the everyday life of the people in the target country

* In the case of the UK, the press releases need to appeal to a British audience. For example, they are often adapted for a Eurosceptic press, in order to get the best coverage.

Luc van Doorslaer’s lecture on translation and journalism:

* Globalisation tends to emerase /emquestions of translation in the news media

* Fast communication needs do not pay attention to translation and will rather tend to make it invisible.

* Through this reduction in multilingual diversity, the world is often falsely conceived as being monolingual.

* National image-building in the media: do the media express or create cultural proximity? Reconstruction of a constructed reality?

Neil Bartlett’s inspirational keynote address on ‘Inspiration’:

* How can a translator facilitate the ‘breathing’ of a sentence?

Denise Merkle’s lecture on translating and expert writing in translator training:

* There are misconceptions among some translation students about what translation actually involves

* Many translation students have poor reading and writing skills, and tend to read less in general (I am still not convinced of this myself – is this measurable?)

* How do we define quality?:  a lot of LSPs focus mainly on their quality procedures in their promotional material. For example many make a lot of their Quality Assurance (QA) procedures and turnaround times, competitive rates etc., rather than selling the quality of the writing they are offering.

On the last point, I have since wondered how much of this was a sign of the times, where businesses in just about every line of work seem to be placing great emphasis on procedural aspects such as safety and reliability, sometimes over and above their actual product offering. I’m curious about why this might be. Do we live in such a complaint-fearing world that we feel we must set out these types of parameters to armour us against any risk of grievance? Are we not confident enough to place a bigger emphasis on selling the quality of the product we are offering, and to be able to defend it?

This is a bit of a rhetorical question, as I think most people would probably agree that we do!

More probing questions you may wish to consider are:

Have women’s voices got deeper in recent years?

Do women find it hard to carry authority in their voices?

Do women talk more than men?

Do men use language to put women down?

What is the ‘ideal’ female voice from an advertiser’s viewpoint?

Are there really big differences between men and women’s brains in terms of how they process language?

These were all questions discussed in this morning’s Woman’s Hour in an interview with Deborah Cameron, Professor of Language and Communication, University of Oxford, and Professor Sophie Scott from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, prior to a conference this Sunday at the Institute of Contemporary Arts entitled ‘Our Speaking Selves’.

The half-day conference sounds absolutely fascinating – particularly the bit where they demo how ’stuttering’ can be induced in normally fluent talkers, by playing their own speech back to them when they are reading aloud – but I won’t be able to make it, as I’ll be around the corner at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, where I’ll be co-presenting with Sarah Dillon at the ITI Conference (set to be equally fascinating!).

While there may be around 7,000 distinct languages in the world today, many of them descend from the same roots and therefore share many similar characteristics.

Romance languages, for example, comprise all languages that have descended from Latin, and today equate to 700 million native speakers across the globe.

And this goes at least some way towards explaining why over a third of Lingo24’s translation projects contain at least one Romance language, with French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian ranking among the most commonly requested translations.

When is a rare language not a rare language?

Among the rarer Romance languages we’ve been asked to translate include Catalan and Galician, although between them they still have around 15 million native speakers.

Then there is the often-overlooked Romance language that isn’t all that rare at all. Romanian – spoken by around 30 million people worldwide (the majority of whom live in Romania, might I add) – is the 34^th most commonly spoken language in the world.

However, there are an estimated 47 Romance languages and associated dialects spoken throughout Europe, from the Swiss vernacular Romansh, with around 36,000 native speakers, to the Walloon language, spoken by some 600,000 people, located largely in Belgium.

Just how close is this language family?

As all translators will know, it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to learn a second language. But with genetically-related languages such as Romance, there is often a certain degree of mutual intelligibility that aids understanding between the two languages.

The word ‘black’, for instance, can be ‘negre’ (Catalan), ‘noir’ (French), ‘negro’ (Galician/Spanish), ‘nero’ (Italian/Venetian), ‘neir’ (Piedmontese) or ‘negru’ (Romanian). And the word ‘shop’ can be ‘magazin’ (Romanian) or ‘magasin’ (French).

Of course, there are always the infamous false-friends that come along and ruin the show, such as ‘carte’ which could refer to a ‘book’ if you’re in Romania, or a map/card/ticket if you are in France.

Spanish and Portuguese, in particular, are similar to the point of having a significant degree of mutual intelligibility for speakers of these languages. And to make matters worse, they can look almost identical on paper to those who have had little exposure to either language.

And this caused Lingo24 a little bit of bother recently, after being asked to carry out an English to Spanish AND Portuguese translation.

After receiving the translated and fully proofread texts from us, the client asked if they could be reviewed again, as the translations seemed identical to each other!

However, this is not too uncommon, whereby we have to explain the subtle differences between two seemingly identical languages. But fortunately, most of our clients are only too happy to take the advice of an experienced translation company.

This can often mean explaining to clients the importance of using, for example, a Latin American Spanish translator over a Spanish translator. Although this news normally goes down rather well, given that it is generally cheaper to translate into Latin American Spanish than it is Spanish.

Similarly, we are often asked to translate between French and Canadian French, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese and even non-Romance languages such as UK and US English. The importance of localisation in a translation can never be understated, and this is a message that seems to be catching on across most industries.

Of course, whilst nobody can be held personally accountable for any similarities that exist between two Romance languages such as Spanish and Portuguese, it does serve as a timely reminder that, at a time when globalisation is one of the biggest business buzzwords, it certainly pays to be wary of the more subtle cultural and linguistic differences.

© Paul Sawers

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…

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.