Workforce Language Services

It’s not news that monolingualism is the norm in the United States; fewer than 20% of Americans speak more than one language. In a recent article, CIASeeks Anyone, Anyone Who Can Speak 2 Languages, Jeremy Hsu notes that the lack of second- and third-language speakers in the US - especially of those languages of interest to the CIA and Foreign Service - has prompted government agencies to recruit college students based on language learning potential, rather than on actual skills. A new government program is in development to help agencies like the CIA, who are looking to increase its pool of speakers of languages such as Arabic, Dari, Pashtu, Persian, Urdu and Russian. The challenge? Figuring out how to predict which students hold the most promise. Studies of multilingual speakers are providing insight:

“Another surprise came from studies of Spanish-speaking immigrants, because neither age nor language proficiency seemed to predict how quickly the immigrants picked up English. Instead, the fastest learners showed both the greatest motivation to learn and a willingness to use English at every opportunity despite being bad at it (at first).”

Hsu also notes that it’s not just government agencies who are recruiting multilingual speakers, but US-based corporations who understand that, in the era of globalization, linguistic and cultural competence go a long way.>A bit of motivation and the willingness to put your foot in your mouth from time to time can be a powerful combination in developing the language skills your country - and perhaps your next job - depend on. And if it helps you order a drink or ask for directions on your next international vacation, that’s not a bad thing, either!

People all over the world are learning English to increase business opportunities and get better jobs, and China now holds the top place with over 300 million English speakers.

The problem, of course, is that proper English is not often used due to a shortage in trained teachers. Mike Kraft, CEO of Lingo Media Corporation, has a solution: a free, avatar-based program called speak2me.cn that helps correct users’ pronunciation and provides real-life learning scenarios that students can repeat as many times as they like.

This avatar speaks English properly and, through voice recognition software, “listens” to students repeat her words and sentences then makes them verbalize over again until they get it right. There is scoring, contests and prizes.

Students can tap into hundreds of tailor-made modules — about shopping, studying, working, traveling or socializing — that help them practice their pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar.

The program is free to users but uses advertising and product placement to pay for operations. The site now has 1 million users.

Entrepreneurs like Kraft are smart to tap into the Chinese market. Apart from English speakers, China also boasts the largest number of internet users, with 328 million people online.

Read the full report here in the National Post.

In our last post we mentioned that Latin America is now the fastest growing Twitter population in the world. We found a tech blog that breaks down the trend and gives us more data about who the users are.

Although based on a relatively small sample pool, we now have a better idea of which Latin American countries use Twitter the most. Amazingly, of the 93 million Twitter users around the world, 15 million are Latin American! Just in the past year, the Latin American Twitter population grew 305%.

Some other fun facts:

• Brazil (20.5%) and Venezuela (19%) are in the second and third place respectively in terms of Twitter users, after Indonesia.
• The Asian region ranked second with a growth of 243%
• The portrait of a typical user of twitter is: male (75%), between 21 and 30 years (56%), blogger (83%), linked to the world of Internet and new technologies (72%), using the tool because of professional interests (52%).

What does all this new social media technology mean for worldwide communication? We’re only beginning to find out. As one corporate communication strategist states, “Even many who now use Twitter did not understand it until they started to follow people with similar interests, participate in discussions and feel the value of such contacts. Twitter is one of those applications that rather than we try to explain, are understood only by the experience.”

Read the full blog post about Twitter in Latin America here.

Latin Americans are the fastest growing population of Twitter users in the world, and are engaging in all forms of social media. Marketers who are attempting to access the potentially huge Hispanic market in the U.S. have a tough choice now: Spanish or English?

Andy Checo of Hispanic PR Chat gives his insight into this area. His main idea is this: language is ultimately irrelevant. Companies need to be “in-culture” in order to relate to their target audiences, no matter what the language.

He recommends using English if the majority of your target audience wouldn’t get the cultural message in Spanish. “We all know that if your audience is an acculturate Hispanic they will be able to relate to the bachata group Aventura as they would to Damien Rice, but can your non-Hispanic audience relate to Aventura?”

Use Spanish if your target audience is communicating in Spanish. “Are people commenting in Spanish? Asking you questions in Spanish? If so, why would you choose to communicate back in English?”

Spanglish is also an option, but again, it depends on the needs of your particular audience. Just listen to them!

Read Checo’s full advice post as originally posted on his website here, or reposted on hispanicPRblog here.

As a translation manager, I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about mistranslations—everything from the shocking result of companies incorrectly punctuating ‘n’ in ‘año’ (that makes ‘year’ into ‘anus’ in Spanish), from the urban legend about Chevrolet’s “Nova” brand car, the car the wouldn’t go.

At the link below you’ll find a laughable list of translation and localization blunders. If you value your company’s message and want the same idea to come across in another language and culture, a little investigation goes a long way!

Here are just a few examples:

• Coca-Cola tried marketing its domestically successful two liter bottle in Spain. It finally withdrew the bottle from the Spanish market when it discovered that the refrigerator compartments were too small to hold the liter size. (eBook “How to Localize Products for Success in Foreign Markets” by Silk Road Communications.)
• A major soapmaker test marketed a soap name in 50 countries, and what it found was enough to make them change the name. The proposed name meant “dainty” in most European languages, “song” in Gaelic, “aloof” in Flemish, “horse” in one African language, “dim-witted” in Persian, “crazy” in Korean, and was obscene in Slavic languages” (Silk Road Communications eBook)
• When Pepsi began marketing it’s products in China, they were using a slogan that read “Pepsi Brings You Back to Life”. Translated into Chinese however, the slogan meant, “Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Grave” (Business Link West Yorkshire website, www.blwy.co.uk)

Click here to read the full list.

While WLS adamantly and singularly advocates human translation (that is, translation done by a professionally trained person, not processed by a computer), there is a case to be made for machine translation in select circumstances. A NYTimes editorial disputes the advantages and limitations, looking at Google Translate in particular.

When Haiti was devastated by an earthquake in January, aid teams poured in to the shattered island, speaking dozens of languages — but not Haitian Creole. How could a trapped survivor with a cellphone get usable information to rescuers? If he had to wait for a Chinese or Turkish or an English interpreter to turn up he might be dead before being understood. Carnegie Mellon University instantly released its Haitian Creole spoken and text data, and a network of volunteer developers produced a rough-and-ready machine translation system for Haitian Creole in little more than a long weekend. It didn’t produce prose of great beauty. But it worked.

But the editorial’s author David Bellos concludes that beyond emergency or wartime scenarios, machine translation doesn’t have much hope. No Google translation should ever be accepted as a “correct translation.” “Google Translate gives only an expression consisting of the most probable equivalent phrases as computed by its analysis of an astronomically large set of paired sentences trawled from the Web.”

And where do those probable equivalent phrases come from? Human translators!

The data comes in large part from the documentation of international organizations. Thousands of human translators working for the United Nations and the European Union and so forth have spent millions of hours producing precisely those pairings that Google Translate is now able to cherry-pick. The human translations have to come first for Google Translate to have anything to work with.

So, we must give credit where it is due. Credit to the astonishing advances in machine translation technology since Cold War spy games, and even more credit to the hardworking human minds that transform language and culture without having to manually compute a lexicon.

Click here to read the full editorial.

On Sesame Street, neighbors work their problems out with smiles under cloudless skies. Kids learn the letters of the alphabet and sing songs, and in the tradition of the 40+ year old TV show, they learn that their world is diverse—and that’s okay.

The question, then, is how to bring these same messages to a world divided, where neighbors do not work out their problems with smiles, much less in the same neighborhood: Israel and Palestine. We post this great NYTimes Magazine article (although published last year) here as a very interesting read as well as a case study for localization in a controversial environment.

This season’s episodes of “Shara’a Simsim,” the Palestinian version of the global “Sesame Street” franchise, were filmed in a satellite campus of Al-Quds University, a ramshackle four-story concrete structure that houses the school’s media department and a small local television station. The building sits in an upscale neighborhood on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Ramallah, not far from the edge of the Israeli settlement Psagot. Like many structures on the West Bank, the Al-Quds building seems to be simultaneously under construction and decaying into a ruin. Some walls are pocked with bullet holes, from when the Israeli Army occupied the building for 19 days in 2001, during the second intifada. In another life, the building was a hotel, and the balconies out front where TV crews and students take smoking breaks overlook the crumbling shell of its swimming pool.

Read on…

The Huffington Post dedicates 2,000 words to the celebration of translation as an art form. Let’s shout it from the rooftop! They interview Edith Grossman, one of the art form’s most renowned practitioners, who expounds on this truth in her book Why Translation Matters.

If you only speak English and have read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels or Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, you’ve probably read Grossman’s translations. She is highly regarded for her work, and in steady demand.

The art, Grossman and others will say, is more than finding the appropriate word. Translation is about words and music, fidelity and feel, the balance between getting too caught up in the literal meaning and improvising so freely that the author’s voice is lost entirely.

In “Why Translation Matters,” Grossman writes of taking on the opening phrase of the first chapter of “Don Quixote,” among the most famous words in Spanish literature: “En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme,” which in an earlier English-language edition was translated into, “In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind.”

It may surprise you to know that only 3% of books released in the U.S. are translated from other languages, compared to numbers in the double digits in Western Europe. This probably says a lot about our worldview in general, but in terms of literature specifically, we’re really missing out! And thus, the added importance of literary translators, who function as cultural bridges and messengers.

“It seems that the American public is allergic to certain kinds of books. When people sense somehow that the book is a translation, they think, in a subliminal sort of way, that they don’t need to read it,” says Daniel Halpern, editorial director of Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins that commissioned Grossman for the “Don Quixote” translation.

But, is it the American public who’s lazy, or book publishers? Many don’t want to get involved because of the extra work. Read more opinions about the state of literary translation in the U.S. in the full article, here.

Google has refined its translation tool to a point that “can make the language barrier go away,” as one of the principal scientists of the company’s machine translation team said. Now handling 52 languages, Google is yet again a visionary in an area most internet/computer companies have ignored over the years.

Remember those funny Babelfish translations you’d get at the dawn of the internet age, the computer translator that would give you “They are a small potentiometer, short circuits and a beer of malzes of the tea” for “I’m a little tea pot, short and stout”? Google has made those roundabout interpretations all but extinct.

How does machine translation work? And what makes Google’s so good?

Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges in artificial intelligence. For decades, computer scientists tried using a rules-based approach — teaching the computer the linguistic rules of two languages and giving it the necessary dictionaries.

But in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts.

It turns out that this technique, which requires huge amounts of data and lots of computing horsepower, is right up Google’s alley.

Let’s be clear, no computer translation program will ever be able to capture the linguistic and cultural nuances beyond  the text. Only a thinking human can interpret text that way, and as we’d always prefer, a professional one with lots of experience. Google recognizes this too, but for anyone needing a quick translation of a news article, Google translations certainly will capture the “essence” of the story.

The New York Times reports: click here.

A “cesta” (”basket,” in English) is a lending circle in which 6 to 12 individuals contribute a monthly sum of money, and the pooled funds serve as a credit line for the members involved. It’s a model that’s well known in Latin America, but cestas are only now beginning to pop up in the U.S.

An organization called the Mission Asset Fund (MAF) is helping cestas in California link to the credit market, so that the peer-to-peer groups can establish credit histories. In San Francisco, 44% of households have no credit history at all, and more than half of Latino adults don’t have bank accounts.

“This data is very discouraging,” says MAF executive director José Quiñonez. “But we decided, really our whole approach has been, to try and view the community from a positive perspective, to appreciate what they have, not what they lack, and to build on what they have.”

The cesta banking model has been called a breakthrough, and one that non-profits can replicate.  Members must act democratically to decide how much to contribute, and who has priority to withdraw their credit. Groups are usually founded among family members or circles of friends where there is a high level of trust. “The pressure to obey the agreed rules, however informal, is more social than legal.” The goal for most members is to get out of credit card debt with other lenders, and expand business operations.

To read more about cestas and how they’re growing in Latino communities around the U.S., click here.