Do You Want Poetry or Gobbledygook in Your Multilanguage Translations?
What is plain language use in one language can become poetry – or gobbledygook - in another. Gossip, arrows, airplanes, and time can fly. But preferably not in the same sentence.
Advertising text relies heavily on ambiguities and metaphor, which need to be translated on two levels - linguistic and cultural. Humans excel at sorting through ambiguities in their own language to get to what the writer intended to say. Machine translation software simply can’t do that.
Meaning depends on context
The computer is supposed to "understand" what the source text means, and computers have never been good at this, maybe for the simple reason that nobody really knows what understanding is.
Meaning often depends on context. If we come across a sentence such as Time flies like an arrow in a soap opera or during a philosophical debate, we wouldn't hesitate to construe it as a statement about the nature of time.
The same sentence, when uttered in a science fiction movie about entities called time flies -- a type of fly that flies across time -- would become a statement about what these time flies like (they just happen to like arrows).
Continue reading "Do You Want Poetry or Gobbledygook in Your Multilanguage Translations?" »
Japanese Have Fun With Engrish
SRF Global Translations' translators of Japanese see a certain amount of playfulness, that we in the West seem to have lost, in how the Japanese deal with language, especially foreign language. The website www.engrish.com contains a wealth of funny instances of English called to serve in Japanese advertising, with products that target the locals. "Engrish," says the site, "can be simply defined as the humorous English mistakes that appear in Japanese advertising and product design."
Does calling a brand of moist tissues "My Wet" mean that advertisers and marketing specialists in Japan have chosen to ignore the importance of accurate, and culturally sensitive translation? Of course not.
Japanese Text: Ornamentation, Not Information Sells Better
Anyone who has studied the phenomenon will explain that many Japanese marketeers use English text as an element of design, not to convey information. Apparently, merchandise packaging that displays strange alphabetic pictures on it sells better with the Japanese public.
Continue reading "Japanese Have Fun With Engrish" »
Media Coverage of SRF Global's Ethics Crisis Blog
SRF Global Translation's Ethics Crisis blog is off to a flying start with media coverage covering the launch:
Adrants
"Covering the broad topic of business ethics, the blog will report on global business ethics issues and offer readers the ability to anonymously confess unethical things they have done in business as well as rate the severity of other's confessions. For SRF Global Translation customer, the blog also serves as a means through which customers can obtain a quote, upload files for translation, adhere to various compliance issues under Sarbanes-Oxley, gain unifies management of multilanguage project management and pay online for these services."
CEO Bloggers"The cleverest tack I've seen lately is one taken by the Ethics Crisis blog. It's the marketing companion to a business called SRF Global Translations. (The blog appears to be the company's Web site, as well.)"
MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog"The best part of the site is the "ethics confessions": Readers are invited to anonymously confess the most unethical thing they've ever done in business, and to comment on and rate the confessions of others on a scale of one to five from "always acceptable" to "never acceptable."
Micropersuasion
Welcome to Ethics Crisis Blog
Welcome! This is SRF Global Translations new Ethics Crisis Blog, written by well-known blogger B.L. Ochman.
SRF Global Translations specializes in mindful, nuanced multilanguage translation of ethics compliance materials for multinational companies.
Ethics Crisis Blog will cover global business ethics issues, with a bit of a twist. Please subscribe to the Ethics Crisis Blog's RSS feed so you can read and rate the ethics confessions, which are already getting juicy.
Thank You,
Sloan Friedman, President
SRF Global Translations
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