Workforce Language Services

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.

When Roxana Soto and Ana Flores retired from careers in TV and print journalism and became mothers, they were both amazed at the misinformation and lack of resources for parents who wanted to raise their kids bilingually and biculturally. So, they started SpanglishBaby, an online community dedicated to raising bilingual children.

SpanglishBaby is more than a blog (although it does have excellent daily blog posts with expert advice). It’s committed to providing resources to answer any and every question that might arise. Sections include ‘Must Reads,’ ‘Daily Learning,’ ‘The Culture of Food,’ ‘Ask an Expert,’ and ‘La Tiendita,’ among others.

La Bloga writes about SpanglishBaby:

According to Soto, Spanglish Baby’s first year has been full of both challenges and surprises. Among the former she cites the typical trials of starting a blog: building consistent traffic and creating fresh and interesting content. A loyal readership has emerged over the past months and, to celebrate this and its successful first year, Soto and Flores completely redesigned the blog, allowing readers to navigate the site more easily and to have a more participatory role. They’ve also added five regular contributors who, according to the editors, provide fresh perspectives on bilingual parenting on a weekly basis.

Check it out here! www.spanglishbaby.com

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…

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.

Click here to watch WLS’s founder and president Jill Bishop eloquently explain our language and cultural training services at the Midwest Security & Police Conference/Expo. (Once you’re on the page, click on the video icon.)

Some talking points:

Hispanics make up around 15% of the U.S. population, and that number will triple by 2050. Is your organization prepared for the linguistic and cultural challenges?

In our “Spanish for Law Enforcement” trainings, WLS doesn’t focus on that grammar you learned back in 9th grade and have forgotten since. You’ll learn industry-specific terminology that you can use instantly on the job. We’ll help you anticipate challenges and find the appropriate solutions.

WLS offers onsite, customized trainings and workshops to help employers (from police departements to restaurants) prepare their employees for any linguistic or cultural situation that may come up in their industry.

As Jill says, “It’s all about the expressions you need to do your job better.”

A labor group surveyed restaurants in Chicago and found significant segregation between front-of-house workers (waiters, hosts) and back-of-house staff (busboys, dishwashers). The study “found that nearly 80 percent of whites work in the front, nearly two-thirds of Latinos in the back.”

To those of us who have worked in the restaurant business this doesn’t seem like news at all – the discrimination is all too prevalent.  Common all over Chicago’s pubs and steakhouses, we see that “taking the order or seating the clients is the girl next door or a suave older man, most likely white, while a cadre of young Mexican men construct the meal behind the scenes.”

Taking the issue to task, the Restaurant Opportunities Center of Chicago teamed with the Working Hands Legal Clinic to file a federal lawsuit against one Andersonville eatery, claiming that the establishment mistreated its kitchen staff. McCormick and Schmicks’ chain just settled a $1.1 claim from black employees who said they weren’t considered for hosts and servers.

But in the restaurants’ defense, aren’t they hiring based on a special skill set required for that position, not based on race? For example, knowledge of food and wine pairings or simply communicating a food order in English.

I would argue that while restaurants don’t always discriminate blatantly, they rarely train or promote their current back-of-house staff. Wouldn’t a restaurant get better long-term results from a staffer with a long employment history at the restaurant, happy to be promoted, than a new hire? Busboy to server would be the perfect transition, for example.

To read the full report in the Chicago Tribune, click here.

Motivos, a bilingual Latino youth magazine (by and for youth) out of Philadelphia, is more that just a publication. On a Friday night, when the last thing on most teens’ minds is work, a half a dozen of them are huddled around a table in a basement room of Benjamin Franklin High School, talking about fonts.

The magazine is a for-profit enterprise that has been operating out of the high school since 2008. Virtually all of it is written, edited and illustrated by 14- to 24-year-olds under the direction of founder Jenée Alicia Chizick. Chizick is passionate about educating and motivating the often under-served teens.

“When you’re not educated it’s harder to get into decision-making rooms,” Chizick told an audience during an author series at the community workshop Taller Puertorriqueño in North Kensington in November. “I wanted to make sure from the get-go that the students that the magazine employs were in the decision-making rooms, so part of the model is that those schools that subscribe in bulk to the magazine then can choose one or two students to serve on the advisory board.”

Schools see the magazine as a way to boost enrollment of underrepresented students. Amid the student-penned poems, cultural columns and relationship advice, readers encounter occasional articles supplied by a university admissions department.

Chizick has already inspired many students who now go to college and are seeing opportunities abound. “‘Everything that she does, she has a reason for it and she explains it,’ said Keisha Frazier, a Motivos contributor studying broadcast journalism at Temple. Frazier said traveling to the National Council of La Raza annual conference with Chizick a few years ago was a life-changing experience.”

Read the full profile here.