Monthly Archive for October, 2009

Internationalized Domain Names Officialy Approved

Published on October 31, 2009 in English Language, Languages, Tips for Translators and Translation Buyers. 0 Comments

An Article from NY Times reports:

By the middle of next year, Internet surfers will be allowed to use Web addresses written completely in Chinese, Arabic, Korean and other languages using non-Latin alphabets, the organization overseeing Internet domain names announced Friday in a decision that could make the Web more accessible.

In an action billed as one of the biggest changes in the Web’s history, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — or Icann — voted Friday during its annual meeting, held in Seoul, to allow such scripts in Internet addresses.

The decision is a “historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, Icann’s president and chief executive. “We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.”

This change affects domain names — anything that comes after the dot, including .com, .cn or .jp. Domain names have been limited to 37 characters — 26 Latin letters, 10 digits and a hyphen. But starting next year, domain names can consist of characters in any language. In some Web addresses, non-Latin scripts are already used in the portion before the dot. Thus, Icann’s decision Friday makes it possible, for the first time, to write an entire Internet address in a non-Latin alphabet.

Initially, the new naming system will affect only Web addresses with “country codes,” the designators at the end of an address name, like .kr (for Korea) or .ru (for Russia). But eventually, it will be expanded to all types of Internet address names, Icann said.

Some security experts have warned that allowing internationalized domain names in languages like Arabic, Russian and Chinese could make it more difficult to fight cyberattacks, including malicious redirects and hacking. But Icann said it was ready for the challenge.

“I do not believe that there would be any appreciable difference,” Mr. Beckstrom said in an interview. “Yes, maybe some additional potential but at the same time, some new security benefits may come too. If you look at the global set of cybersecurity issues, I don’t see this as any significant new threat if you look at it on an isolated basis.”

The decision, reached after years of testing and debate, clears the way for Icann to begin accepting applications for non-Latin domain names Nov. 16. People will start seeing them in use around mid-2010, particularly in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts in which demand for the new “internationalized” domain name system has been among the strongest, Icann officials say.

Internet addresses in non-Latin scripts could lead to a sharp increase in the number of global Internet users, eventually allowing people around the globe to navigate much of the online world using their native language scripts, they said.

This is a boon especially for users who find it cumbersome to type in Latin characters to access Web pages. Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not based on the Latin alphabet.

Hong Jong-gil, an Internet industry analyst at Korea Investment and Securities in Seoul, said the new names would help children and old people who had not learned the Latin alphabet. But he did not foresee any major increase in the number of Internet users because Internet penetration has less to do with whether one has to type in English-alphabet domain names and more to do with “whether you can afford a PC and your community has broadband access.”

Agencies that help companies and individuals get Internet domains welcomed the Icann decision, noting it would be good for their own businesses.

“This is great news for us. This opens a new demand for domain names,” said Yang Eun-hee, an official at Gabia.com, an Internet domain agency. “There will be a rush among businesses to get new local-language Web addresses to protect their brand names. These days, a big company typically has dozens or hundreds of domains for their products, and it will be quite a cost to get all the new names.”

Observers agree that the change could make a difference for many businesses. “A lot of companies will end up having double domains — the existing one in English and a new one in the local script,“ said Choi Kyoung-jin, an analyst at Shinhan Investment. “A Korean domain name may be useful for Koreans but it’s not for foreign customers.”

Users who do not use the Latin alphabet can now reach Web sites by asking search engines to provide their links.

But a change in the domain name policy has become inevitable, Internet industry officials said. For example, there are so many .com Web addresses that it has become next to impossible to find an English word or an intelligible combination of two English words not already in use, they said.

“Today’s decision opens up a whole new Internet territory,” Ms. Yang said. “The Internet will become more multi-lingual than before.”

Crowdsourcing Translations: A Loss for Both Translators and Businesses

Published on October 28, 2009 in English Language, Tips for Translators and Translation Buyers. 0 Comments

The use of crowdsourcing to harness the power of the masses to translate web content has become all the rage at behemoth social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  In an attempt to make these sites accessible to a broader user base, the sites are asking users, rather than professional translators, to collaborate on the translation of site content.  Though it’s a noble goal to expand the reach of sites like Facebook to an international audience, turning to crowdsourcing for translations hurts translators and businesses alike.

LinkedIn, a social network that aims to promote and support professionals, recently polled those members who are professional translators in order to gauge their potential interest in translating the site “for fun” or in exchange for nothing more than a profile badge.  The site generated a great deal of controversy and managed to offend quite a few members, since LinkedIn was clearly looking for something for nothing.  What LinkedIn failed to realize is that asking translators to work for free further devalues a profession that already struggles for recognition.  In fact, many translators deleted their LinkedIn profiles following the incident, as they felt that their professional needs were no longer in line with the site’s priorities.

While the idea of tapping into the collective wisdom of a community has its merits – after all, translators reach out to each other all the time to debate issues in translation, terminology, etc. – websites must acknowledge that their image, content and reputation are at stake when they turn to anyone other than a professional to translate their content.  Interestingly enough, after receiving numerous user complaints about the quality of localized translations, Facebook did turn to professional translators to edit flubbed translations and improve the consistency of translated terms across the site.  Indeed, if websites insist on employing crowdsourcing to cut costs, they must acknowledge that at a bare minimum, professionals should be involved to provide quality control to avoid alienating their user base through poorly rendered content.

At the end of the day, there’s really no substitute for a professional; perhaps crowdsourcing will demonstrate that to companies the hard way.

English Words with a Spanish Pedigree

Published on October 22, 2009 in English Language, Languages and Spanish Language. 0 Comments

Over the centuries, Spanish has made a significant contribution to the English language.  When American settlers began exploring the west in the early 19th century, they crossed paths with an established Mexican culture that supplied the English language with a number of everyday words.  Merchants conducting trade in the Spanish-influenced Caribbean brought back not only goods but new words as well.  Novel foods introduced to us through exposure to Hispanic cultures have expanded both our menu options and our vocabulary.

Let’s explore some of the Spanish loan words that you probably use all the time but never gave a second thought as to their origins.

Chocolate – When the Spanish conquistadors took their first sip of xocolatl, a beverage made from the pods of the cacao tree, they knew the Aztecs were on to something.  The Spanish returned to Europe with their newfound chocolate, a word they derived from the Aztec language Nahuatl and later passed on to English.

Hurricane – With the constant threat of these severe storms looming over the tropics, it’s no surprise that the English word “hurricane” comes from huracán, a word picked up by the Spanish explorers from Taino, an indigenous language from the Caribbean.

Aficionado – Aficionado came into the English language from Spanish in the mid-1800s.  While the word was initially only used within the context of bullfighting, it later came to mean a “practitioner or enthusiast of any sport or activity.”

Rodeo – The word “rodeo” is derived from the Spanish verb rodear, which means “to surround.”  In the past, rodeo was used to refer to the pen where cattle were corralled and eventually to the informal events involving horses and livestock that took place there.  Related words like lasso, rancho, hacienda, bronco and even buckaroo passed to English from Spanish back in the days of the Wild West.

Tomato – This vegetable’s (or is it a fruit?) moniker comes from the Spanish word tomate, a corruption of the Nahuatl word “tomatl”.  A number of other fruits and vegetables that may grace your plate such as banana, papaya, jicama and potato have their roots, so to speak, in Spanish.

Will 90% of the world’s languages cease to exist?

Published on October 17, 2009 in English Language, Languages, Spanish Language, Tips for Translators and Translation Buyers. 2 Comments

A program in BBC radio reveals the following:

  • An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades.
  • In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world’s languages would have ceased to exist.
  • According to Ethnologue, a US organisation that compiles a global database of languages, 473 languages are currently classified as endangered.

What is lost when a language dies?

As globalisation sweeps around the world, it is perhaps natural that small communities come out of their isolation and seek interaction with the wider world. The number of languages may be an unhappy casualty, but why fight the tide?

“What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin people,” says French linguist Claude Hagege.

“It´s also the way they express their humour, their love, their life. It is a testimony of human communities which is extremely precious, because it expresses what other communities than ours in the modern industrialized world are able to express.”

For linguists like Claude Hagege, languages are not simply a collection of words. They are a living, breathing organisms holding the connections and associations that define a culture. When a language becomes extinct, the culture in which it lived is lost too.

Cross words

The value of language as a cultural artefact is difficult to dispute, but is it actually realistic to ask small communities to retain their culture?

One linguist, Professor Salikoko Mufwene, of the University of Chicago, has argued that the social and economic conditions among some groups of speakers “have changed to points of no return”.

As cultures evolve, he argues, groups often naturally shift their language use. Asking them to hold onto languages they no longer want is more for the linguists’ sake than for the communities themselves.

Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis, however, argues that the stakes are much higher. Because of the close links between language and identity, if people begin to think of their language as useless, they see their identity as such as well.

This leads to social disruption, depression, suicide and drug use, he says. And as parents no longer transmit language to their children, the connection between children and grandparents is broken and traditional values are lost.

“There is a social and cultural ache that remains, where people for generations realize they have lost something,” he says.

What no-one disputes is that the demise of languages is not always the fault of worldwide languages like our own.

An increasing number of communities are giving up their language by their own choice, says Claude Hagege. Many believe that their languages have no future and that their children will not acquire a professional qualification if they teach them tribal languages.

Babbling away

Perhaps all is not lost for those who want the smaller languages to survive. As the revival of Welsh in the UK and Mouri in New Zealand suggest, a language can be brought back from the brink.

Hebrew, says Claude Hagege, was a dead language at the beginning of the 19th century. It existed as a scholarly written language, but there was no way to say “I love you” and “pass the salt” – the French linguists’ criteria for detecting life.

But with the “strong will” of Israeli Jews, he says, the language was brought back into everyday use. Now it is undeniably a living breathing language once more.

Closer to home, Cornish intellectuals, inspired by the reintroduction of Hebrew, succeeded in bringing the seemingly dead Cornish language back into use in the 20th Century. In 2002 the government recognised it as a living minority language.

But for many dwindling languages on the periphery of global culture, supported by little but a few campaigning linguists, the size of the challenge can seem insurmountable.

“You’ve got smallest, weakest, least resourced communities trying to address the problem. And the larger communities are largely unaware of it,” says Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis.

“We would spend an awful lot of money to preserve a very old building, because it is part of our heritage. These languages and cultures are equally part of our heritage and merit preservation.”

Some Statistics

  • 6% of the worlds languages are spoken by 94% of the world’s population
  • The remaining 94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the population
  • The largest single language by population is Mandarin (845 million speakers) followed by Spanish (329 million speakers) and English (328 million speakers).
  • 133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people

SOURCE: Ethnologue

The Use of Neutral Spanish for the U.S. Hispanic Market

Published on October 14, 2009 in Latinos, Spanish Language, Spanish Translation and Tips for Translators. 2 Comments

There is little doubt about the growing influence of the Hispanic demographic in the United States.  According to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Latinos comprise 14.8% of the population for a total of 44.3 million people.  What’s more, Hispanics are projected to account for almost 25% of the total U.S. population by the year 2050.[1]  The incredible cultural and linguistic diversity of the U.S. Hispanic population presents a challenge for retailers and other businesses who want to reach out to the Latino segment and harness the economic potential within that group.  So, how does one effectively communicate with and market to an audience consisting of cultures from across the Spanish-speaking world?  The answer lies in the use of neutral Spanish.

When creating advertising campaigns, website content, or other materials geared toward the U.S. Hispanic audience, companies are wise to consider the use of neutral Spanish, which avoids regionalisms, colloquial language, and certain verb tenses and conjugations that hint at a particular dialect.  Translators and writers employing neutral Spanish seek to produce a text that is universally understood by Spanish speakers.  Given the dynamic nature of the Latino community, a translator should have contact with the Hispanic market in the U.S. in order to make the best decisions regarding word choice.

The use of neutral Spanish for Latino audiences is gaining traction in television and radio as well.  The rise in popularity of neutral Spanish on the airwaves signals a real change in how U.S. Hispanics view themselves as a unique community apart from their respective countries of origin.  Ilan Stavans, Professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College in Massachusetts, notes, “It is a widespread trend that is quite significant because it says much about how Latinos in the U.S. are consolidating their own identity.” [2]

Though neutral Spanish lacks an equivalent in the real world (think Received Pronunciation in the U.K. or Standard American English in the U.S.), erasing traces of a telltale accent from spoken Spanish or country-specific slang from the written word serves to avoid confusing or even offending the audience and goes a long way in appealing to the broad Hispanic demographic in the United States.

References:
[1] Hispanic Population of the United States, U.S. Census Bureau
[2] American Spanish?  Telemundo coaches “neutral” accents, Hispanic American Center for Economic Research (HACER)

 

British companies relying too much on the English Language

Published on October 13, 2009 in English Language, Spanish Language, Spanish Translation and Translation Buyers. 0 Comments

English may be the leading international business language and UK companies may still have a head start in the 53 Commonwealth countries where English is spoken, but the National Centre for Languages says that three-quarters of the world’s population speak no English and 94% of English speakers do so only as their second language. Chinese is the most widely-spoken language, followed by Spanish and then English.

When the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) asked almost 3,500 of its members for reasons why they did not export to Europe, 11% cited language barriers and 5% cultural barriers.

Isabella Moore, former president of the BCC and managing director of Leamington Spa-based Comtec Translations, says the survey showed that on average small businesses were losing up to £250,000 a year in orders due to a lack of language skills.

“You have a school of thought that you manage in English. But when you look at our export successes, we do best where English is spoken widely,” she says. “Then you look at countries like Spain and Italy, where we don’t do as well proportionately. Look at South America and it’s only a fraction of our overall export figures.”

Prof Foreman-Peck also found that British exporters are not benefiting from others’ willingness to learn English to the extent that they may believe. Analysis in the US found that online buyers with poor English were six times less likely to make a purchase than those with good English. The research also showed the customers were willing to pay more if the website was in their native language.

The BCC research found that the main reason why companies choose a particular export market is because they know there is
potential demand and feel able to secure sales, but 14% said they were attracted because of linguistic and cultural similarities to the UK.

However, businesses in the same survey did not see securing better language skills as a priority. Only 5% of the companies polled said they would welcome subsidised language training.

Similarly, demand for an “Export box” all-in-one starter package launched by UK Trade & Investment in June, which included translation services, has been slow.

The package included subsidised website translation and redesign to target a foreign-language market, a Google adwords campaign, logistics from Royal Mail and subsidised banking services from HSBC.

Mr Wheeldon says there were plenty of inquiries, but a “much smaller number” had actually then bought the service, which costs £3,000. “I knew that we were not great at exporting, but I didn’t appreciate the fear and anxiety and the time it takes for people to do it,” he says.

source: Telegraph.co.uk

 

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