Workforce Language Services

Several farm worker interest groups are petitioning the EPA to require manufacturers to translate their pesticide labels to Spanish. The groups’ goal is to increase protection for farm works that apply agricultural pesticides.

The EPA is currently debating the issue and calling for public comment in the decision-making process. The EPA says in a press release that they recognize the decision will affect all consumers, not just farm workers. Currently, the EPA requires translation of some words or phrases of agricultural pesticides, but does not require bilingual labeling on all products.

The EPA comments:

In response to the petition, EPA is considering whether to require bilingual labeling in English and Spanish  for all pesticides or for only certain types of pesticides, certain pesticide use sites, certain pesticide active ingredients, pesticides in certain toxicity categories, or certain parts of pesticide labels.

This decision will be up for public comment until June 28, 2011. Information on the petition and how to participate can be found here.

Here are 3 questions the EPA asks the general public to consider:

1. Language characteristics vary by culture, region, and other factors. How could EPA ensure that Spanish text on pesticide product labels would be understood by all potential Spanish-speaking users?
2. Labeling in Spanish could potentially be required for all pesticide products, for a subset of pesticide products, or for a portion of the product label. If the Agency concluded that translation of a portion or portions of the label were appropriate, which portions of the pesticide label would it be most beneficial to have in Spanish, and why? If the Agency were to limit the requirement for translation to only certain products, which products should be considered, and why? (Note: please see the sample label in the docket to consider the different sections of a pesticide label.
3. Are there languages other than Spanish and English that EPA should consider for inclusion on pesticide labels? Which languages? Please explain your reasoning for including a language other than Spanish or English on pesticide labels, and cite documents that would further bolster your suggestion.

Do you know what a translator does? How about an interpreter? If you have a general idea but want to see it for yourself, take a few minutes to watch the day in the life of two interpreters in Washington, DC. (ATA)

Pop songstress Rihanna recently caused a sensation after sporting a new tattoo on her neck: “rebelle fleur.” Grammatically-correct fans immediately pointed out that in French, adjectives usually follow the nouns they modify. “Rebellious flower” should read “fleur rebelle.”

In her own defense, Rihanna tweeted that “rebelle” was used as a noun and not an adjective. And in any case, it’s a poetic expression.

Other stars haven’t been lucky with tattoo translation either. Hayden Panettiere tattooed the Italian translation of “to live without regrets”: “Vivere senza rimipianti.” “Regrets” in Italian is correctly spelled “rimpianti.” (Oh, the irony!)

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.

FIFA’s rule no. 6 prohibits “Using offensive, insulting or abusive language and/or gestures.” So, how can FIFA referees make a call on this rule when they don’t understand what a soccer player is saying?

Alex Stone, a FIFA spokesman, acknowledged that with at least 17 languages spoken by the 32 teams in the World Cup, it is impossible for referees to understand all of them.

“It’s not the words, it’s what they’re doing,” he said. “It’s what they’re saying or how they’re behaving.”

Civility and aggressive vulgarity are universally understood.

Last Saturday, the U.S. vs U.K. game was refereed by a team of Brazilians, who listen carefully to words they “might not have learned in school.” Wayne Rooney in particular is known for his sharp mouth and high emotions, for which he has been ejected on more than one occasion.

“We have to learn what kind of words the players say,” Altemir Hausmann, a referee’s assistant, told Globo TV Sports in Brazil. “All players swear and we know we will hear a few.”

Click here to read the full NYTimes report on this particular factor in the World Cup games.

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.

It’s a sad day when an international presidential address, lauded for its poignancy and timely comments, is rendered unintelligible by an interpreter. This is what happened last week when Mexican president Felipe Calderon visited the White House and intended to express his disapproval of Arizona’s new immigration law.

The translation was so bad that the White House chose to ignore the official transcript provided. The Mexican delegate blamed their own translator.

For example, here’s how Calderon’s comments on the tough new immigration law in Arizona were rendered by his translator during the opening ceremony:

“We can do so with a community that will promote a dignified life and an orderly way for both our countries, who are, some of them, still living here in the shadows with such laws as the Arizona law that is placing our people to face discrimination.”

And here’s how those same comments appeared in the official transcript issued later Wednesday:

“I know that we share the interest in promoting dignified, legal and orderly living conditions to all migrant workers. Many of them, despite their significant contribution to the economy and to the society of the United States, still live in the shadows and, occasionally, as in Arizona, they even face discrimination.”

It seemed most unfortunate that the poor interpretation should happen just when the U.S. and Mexico are attempting to strengthen their neighborly ties to work together on controversial issues like immigration reform and drug trafficking.

Read the full story here in the Washington Post.

Instructions from your doctor can be confusing enough without adding a language barrier into the equation. So it’s not surprising that bad translations of prescription instructions can lead to dangerous results. What is surprising is that of the prescription companies that provide translations, many use machine-generated translations which only have a 50% accuracy rate.

“It’s something I experience in practice every day,” said Dr. Alejandro Clavier, who works at Esperanza Health Center in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood on the Southwest Side.

He gave an example of an anemic patient who showed no signs of improved iron levels after taking prescribed supplements. Clavier discovered the patient had been taking only one drop of the supplements instead of the amount that Clavier had prescribed. The patient had received confusing prescription instructions from the pharmacy.

Often misspellings or “Spanglish” in prescriptions can cause confusion, like “poca” (little) instead of “boca,” or “once a day” being misinterpreted as the Spanish “once” which means “eleven.”

Carmen Velasquez, director of the Alivio Medical Center in Pilsen where the majority of patients speak Spanish, believes a machine translation as substitute for a human being is an inappropriate solution.

“It’s health care. If you have the responsibility of human life, you better well know what you are doing and saying,” Velasquez said.

To read the full Chicago Tribune article, click here.

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.