As a non-native speaker of Spanish, it’s a given that certain words will occasionally throw me for a loop during the course of a conversation. What I don’t generally expect is that those words will be from my own language! A number of words such as chequear (to check) and frizar (to freeze) have passed seamlessly from English to the domain of Spanglish; however, the meanings of other words and phrases have morphed substantially, creating confusion among native English speakers.

Here’s a brief list of English words with alter egos in Spanish that I’ve encountered here in Argentina. Try to imagine the words being spoken with a Spanish accent to get the full effect.

un shopping…..a mall

zapping…..channel surfing

el living…..the living room

un lunch…..a buffet of hors d’oeuvres and finger foods/sandwiches

un tupper…..a Tupperware container or any plastic food storage container

un after office…..a happy hour

un ticket…..a receipt

un country..…a gated community

un jogging…..a pair of sweatpants, sweats or a tracksuit

tuning…..customization (usually in reference to cars)

un brushing…..a blow-out (hair)

un slip…..men’s bikini briefs

Have you ever been stumped by an English word or phrase that’s been adopted by the Spanish language?

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Every second counts in an emergency. In everyday life, a language barrier can produce frustrating or even comical results, but in critical situations, first responders can’t rely on pantomime or guessing games to determine crucial information about non-English speaking patients’ status or medical history. Doctors at clinics and hospitals frequently use staff medical interpreters, telephone language line services, and in some cases, video medical interpretation systems to help them interact with non-English speaking patients, but emergency personnel in the field rarely have access to these language aids.

A language barrier at the scene of an emergency poses several difficulties. First of all, when emergency personnel encounter a non-English speaking victim, they automatically lose precious time in assessing the patient because of the lack of fluid communication. Even if the patient speaks some English, the likelihood exists that a first responder will misinterpret information, as a person suffering a medical emergency will probably have more difficulty than normal communicating in a second language due to the stress of the situation. Misinformation about the patient’s status could actually be more harmful than no information at all.

Interested users can now download an app version of Google Translate—one of the web’s most ubiquitous machine translation tools—that functions on Apple’s mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. In all, 64 languages are supported by the app. In addition, a speech-to-text function is supported for 17 languages, allowing for quicker and more efficient input of text to be translated, and users can listen to translations spoken aloud for 24 languages.

Machine translation may be used in a pinch until qualified interpreters can be brought to the scene or the patient can be provided professionally translated medical information, but such apps must not be considered a substitute for a professional translator or interpreter. As previously discussed on this blog [see “When Never to Use Google Translate”], machine translation has its faults and should never be the sole resource for medical translation or interpretation in life-or-death situations. Inaccurate translations delivered by an app in an emergency situation can actually do more harm than good to the patient. Ideally, instead of fiddling with their smartphones, emergency personnel (paramedics, police, etc.) should be completely free from the worry of interpreting what the patient has to say so they can focus on doing their job: administering first aid.

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Sometimes even seasoned, professional translators come up short in the hunt for a tricky term. Here are five resources available on the Internet where you can search for translations of terms or discuss terminology with fellow translators. Remember: Seek, and ye shall find.

ProZ.com

ProZ.com offers a searchable database of personal glossaries and an archive of questions previously posed by fellow translators. If your search there yields no clues, take advantage of KudoZ, a forum that allows you to pose a question to colleagues in your language pair who can lend a helping hand when the proper translation of a term seems to elude you.

WordReference.com

In addition to this site’s extensive dictionary offerings, WordReference also features an excellent forum that translators can turn to with questions. The forums there are quite active, but if an answer doesn’t seem forthcoming, the moderators often chime in and help.

TranslatorsCafé.com

With a similar set-up to that of ProZ.com, TranslatorsCafé provides a forum for translators to discuss challenging terminology with colleagues. TCTerms allows you to take advantage of collective wisdom when you’re really feeling stumped.

Linguee.com

Although Linguee lacks the interactive/conversational features of the other sites, it’s still a valuable term-search resource for translators. Linguee, the combination of a dictionary and translation search engine, hunts for a match to your query from among assorted texts culled from professionally translated websites and sources in the public domain such as EU documents and patent specifications. Unlike the results provided by a machine translation tool such as Google Translate, every entry that appears in the Linguee dictionary has been translated by humans.

Twitter

Sometimes contributors can be slow to respond in a translation-specific forum, which is why Twitter can be a valuable resource when you’re in a real pinch. Thousands of translators participate in the conversation on Twitter, so if you’ve taken the time to get to know some of them, you can pose questions to colleagues and receive responses, sometimes in mere seconds!

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English, Spanish and Portuguese comprise three of the top five languages on the Web. Let’s take a look at some statistics reflecting these languages’ influence on the Internet.

English

• Number of native English-speaking users on the Web: 565.0 million (as of May 31, 2011)
  % of English-speaking Internet users with respect to total population of English speakers: 43.4%
• User growth from 2000 to 2011: 301.4%
• Percentage of total Internet users: 26.8% (Overall ranking among top 10 languages: #1)
• % of websites available in English (as of December 31, 2011): 56.6%

Spanish

• Number of native Spanish-speaking users on the Web: 165.0 million (as of May 31, 2011)
• % of Spanish-speaking Internet users with respect to total population of Spanish speakers: 39.0%
• User growth from 2000 to 2011: 807.4%
• Percentage of total Internet users: 7.8% (Overall ranking among top 10 languages: #3)
• % of websites available in Spanish (as of December 31, 2011): 4.6%

Portuguese

• Number of native Portuguese-speaking users on the Web: 82.6 million (as of May 31, 2011)
• % of Portuguese-speaking Internet users with respect to total population of Portuguese speakers: 32.5%
• User growth from 2000 to 2011: 990.1%
• Percentage of total Internet users: 3.9% (Overall ranking among top 10 languages: #5)
• % of websites available in Portuguese (as of December 31, 2011): 2.0%

A quick analysis of the numbers points to the following facts that translation buyers should be aware of:

» Figures show that there’s still a great deal of room for growth among all three languages, in terms of the number of users and the amount of content available. Although English leads the charge as the “language of the Web,” not even half of all English speakers are on the ‘net, and Spanish and Portuguese lag even farther behind. As the economic outlook continues to improve in Latin America and Brazil, user growth among speakers of Spanish and Portuguese should be particularly strong.

» Despite an explosion in the number of Internet users among the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking populations over the last decade, access to content in those languages remains severely limited. Those businesses looking for a competitive edge will invest in translations of their web content into Spanish and/or Portuguese.

Statistical data courtesy of Internet World Stats and Wikipedia

More information on the English Language
More information on the Spanish Language
More information on the Portuguese Language

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Even in the realm of words, 2011 has been a revolutionary year.

Indeed, some words that originated in the spontaneous and unorthodox social media have been finally accepted by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which is by far the most formal dictionary of the English language.

So, slangy words like LOL and OMG are now enjoying the same privileges as businesslike initials that were accepted a long time ago, like FYI and ASAP. That is what I call a linguistic democracy.

The list of words recently accepted by OED, as of December, contains compound nouns that certainly reflect our current times. Take for instance “abatement notice,” “adaptive expectations,” “adult child,” “cyber-bully,” “worried well,” and “zero emission.”

Under the form cyber, the dictionary even listed “cyberfriend,” “cyberlover” and “cybersnob.” All these sorts of sidereal words explain the acceptance of another word also quite alien like “abhuman,” which means partially human. Then, next to “adultlike,” there is this other intriguing word “adulticide,” which I wrongly assumed as related to the killing of adults, by that I mean humans, but the dictionary defines it as “an agent used to kill the adult forms of a pest or parasite.”

This year’s linguistic openness has apparently brought 400 new words into the OED. As its chief editor John Simpson proudly announces, there are over 102,000 new and revised entries “and counting” since March 2000.

More spicy words like “sexting” and “mankini” have also been recently added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. However, I could not find them when I searched the online version of the OED.

What I did find is the addition of more Spanish words.

So, along with words already widely accepted in the English language, such as bonanza, corral, mucho, patio, sombrero, and torero (which my computer does not underline as I write them), new words have been added, like “abundante cautela” (extreme caution), “abuela” (grandmother) and “abuelo” (grandfather).

Curiously, two more words have been included only in their female form, such as “abuelita” (dear grandmother) and “gordita” (little fat woman).

Believe it or not, “gordita” is an affectionate nickname quite common in Latin American countries. Why? Well, food is not a stigma when hunger remains a social issue.

Among the 400 new entries of 2011, we also can find old words with new meanings. That is the case of “bruising,” “charger,” “speculate” and “warrant.”

I wonder when “occupy” will join this list of new senses. Without a doubt, this verb has lost all naivety after Occupy Wall Street and its different variations appeared this year in the urban American landscape.

By the way, there is a rural version of this movement in my own country. As I am writing this column, thousands of farmers in northern Peru are occupying a series of lakes in the Andes, at more than 12,000 feet above sea level, to defend their rights to water against a mining project.

Yes, 2011 has been a turbulent year with plenty of raised fists and even pepper sprays. But while claims and chants might come and go, some new words and meanings are here to stay.

Alessia Leathers is a Peruvian journalist and a published writer. She moved to Cape Coral in 2003.

Source: http://www.news-press.com/article/20111225/NEWS0101/312250030/Found-translation-2011-year-word-acceptance-slang-social-media?odyssey=mod%7cnewswell%7ctext%7c%7cs

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Just in case you need more proof that most machine translation tools don’t quite cut the mustard, the latest attempt by social media giant Facebook to incorporate machine translation (MT) into its platform fails miserably with most languages.

In an effort to help pages connect better with their fan base—often found scattered across the globe—Facebook recently introduced machine translation, powered by Bing. With just one click, users can get an automatic translation of status updates and comments. Facebook plans to roll out this feature to all profiles (not just pages) in the near future.

There’s just one problem: most of the translations are unintelligible. Posts on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are rife with slang, and Bing’s machine translation tool simply isn’t up to task. An analysis of Bing’s performance by the site Lexiophiles shows that Bing only gets it right about 50% of the time, leaving users confused and, at worst, possibly misled by faulty translations. Interestingly, out of the ten languages tested, posts translated from Spanish to English fared worst of all, with less than 10% of the rendered text considered intelligible.

For greater accuracy, Facebook will also be implementing a feature that allows bilingual users to offer an alternative translation. If other users endorse the accuracy of the crowdsourced translation, it will take the place of Bing’s original translation the next time the “Translate” option is clicked. Page administrators will be able to manage crowdsourced translations through a “manage translations” link below the posts on pages they control.

One of the great arguments in favor of MT has always been that it can at least offer users a gist of the conversation when no other means of translation is available. It seems that, at least for now, Bing’s tool doesn’t even offer that to Facebook’s users.

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Transpanish is pleased to announce a new page describing the company’s manual translation services. As the business world continues to diversify, so do the customer bases and workforces of many companies, necessitating the translation of employee handbooks, technical manuals, and guides into other languages. We offer companies Spanish-English and English-Spanish translations of manuals, handbooks, and other types of technical materials.

Manuals and other technical documentation can be quite complex, and they require skill to be successfully translated. We promise the same high quality, accuracy and reliability with our manual translations that you’ve come to expect from all of the translations provided by Transpanish. Take a look at our page about manual translations for more details about this service.

If you’re in need of a handbook or manual translation, visit our Manual Translation webpage. Would you like a project quote? Simply click on the “Free Translation Quote” tab above.

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Professionals specializing in court interpretation and translation provide an extremely important service during criminal justice proceedings. However, despite these professionals’ best efforts, controversy over the interpretation of testimony or translation of legal documents frequently arises in court cases.

Mark Cohen, a New York defense attorney with Spanish fluency, remarked that interpreters encounter occasional difficulties when interpreting for people who come from a different region of the Spanish-speaking world. For example, Mr. Cohen noted that when a South American interpreter assists a client from, for instance, the Spanish Caribbean, the interpreter might struggle with slang words or phrasing unique to that region. To avoid this problem, it is advisable to secure the services of a court interpreter who hails from the same region as the person requiring language assistance, whenever possible.

Defense attorney Arnold J. Levine noted that a question that crops up during jury selection is whether potential jurors can put aside their personal knowledge of a foreign language and accept the interpretation and/or translation presented by the language professionals involved in the case. Jurors who come to doubt the accuracy of a court interpreter’s performance can have disastrous effects on a trial – including the declaration of a mistrial.

Read more at the New York Times’ City Room Blog.

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The correct use of the apostrophe in English is problematic for both natives and English-language learners alike. Refresh your understanding of the rules of apostrophe use with the following simple explanations.

Apostrophes are used to form contractions, the shortened form of one or two words created by omitting letters. The apostrophe takes the place of the missing letters.

can’t = cannot

it’s = it is

don’t = do not

could’ve = could have

‘til = until

Apostrophes also indicate possession. To form possessives, follow these rules:

Add  ’s to the singular form:

the boy’s book

Katie’s cat

Chris’s coat (Chris’ coat is also acceptable in this case.)

Add  ’s to the plural forms that do not end in -s:

the children’s toys

the mice’s tails

Add ’ to plural nouns that end in -s:

the two dogs’ bones

my sisters’ husbands

Add ’s to the last noun to indicate joint possession of an object:

Mike and Jenny’s house

Apostrophes denote the plurals of lowercase letters. When a letter appears in lowercase, form the plural by adding ’s after the letter. Capitalized letters, numbers and symbols do not need apostrophes.

Non-native Spanish speakers have trouble trilling their r’s.

Mind your p’s and q’s.

The man claimed he saw three UFOs.

Disco was popular in the 1970s.

When NOT to use an apostrophe

Apostrophes should never be used with possessive pronouns such as its and hers because these words already indicate possession.

wrong: The team won it’s third title.

correct: The team won its third title.

Avoid randomly using apostrophes with plural nouns.

wrong: He rode six miles’ into town.

correct: He rode six miles into town.

Do you frequently make mistakes with apostrophes in your writing? Here are a couple of tips to use when proofreading:

• If you have a habit of leaving off apostrophes, check the words that end in -s or -es to see if they need an apostrophe.
• If you are guilty of using too many apostrophes, check each apostrophe to see if you can justify it with one of the rules mentioned above.

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