Arab members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are pushing for Arabic to be recognized as an official language, along with English, French and Spanish. The addition of Arabic would come with a heavy price tag due to the costs associated with translating, interpreting and printing.
As a Reuters article suggests, adding Arabic would most likely prompt proposals for Chinese and Russian as well, which would align WTO’s language policy to that of the United Nations.
“Well maybe Russian is a bit premature,” said one ambassador, referring to Moscow’s on-again off-again access process with the WTO.
Adding three languages would cost about 45 million Swiss francs ($43 million) a year, the ambassador said — no small amount given a total WTO budget in 2009 of 189 million francs.
Speaking of great online language resources, Wikilengua (a website devoted to Spanish language usage) has just launched a new oral linguistics atlas. Wikilengua defines itself as:
An open and participatory site for sharing practical information about the rules, usage and style of the Spanish language, and a medium for reflecting the diversity of a language spoken by hundreds of millions of people.
The oral atlas allows users worldwide to contribute sound recordings “to reflect a particular way of talking.” The Latin American Herald Tribune reports that “the purpose of the atlas is to let all Spanish-speakers contribute to compiling a record of the different ways the language is spoken, globally positioned on a map that uses Google Maps technology, to which new sound recordings can continually be added.”
In other words, an entirely new, interactive and global way to learn and participate in a language. This makes me think of potential applications in other fields, such as ethnomusicology (Bela Bartok must be rolling over in his grave…). What will the internet think of next?
One of our project managers was scouring the web and ran into a great source we’d like to recommend. It called “Ethnologue,” an online encyclopedic database that catalogs “all of the world’s 6,909 known living languages.”
In its Statistical Summaries section, you can browse languages by world area, language size, language family and country. “This section steps back from the detail to offer a summary view of the world language situation.”
Anyone who’s seen the box office hit Avatar and listened to the exotic-sounds of Pandora’s inhabitants might have wondered: where did that language come from?
“Na’vi,” as it’s called, is a constructed language (like Esperanto or Star Trek’s “Klingon.”) It was invented by University of Southern California professor Paul R. Frommer, commissioned by James Cameron to create a functioning language for the film. Frommer spent 4 years working on the grammar, vocab and sounds of the alien tongue, which currently contains a 1,000-word lexicon.
“The constraint, of course, is that the language I created had to be spoken by humans,” Frommer said. “I could have let my imagination run wild and come up with all sorts of weird sounds, but I was limited by what a human actor could actually do.”
“Cameron wanted something melodious and musical, something that would sound strange and alien but smooth and appealing.”
According to a LA Times article, the actors were less charmed—learning a truly alien language was one of the most difficult parts of their training.
To read more about the constructed Na’vi language in the LA Times, click here.
“Your interpreter is way more important than your weapon,” confides a U.S. army commander in a New York Times article about the interpreters who assist U.S. troops in Afghanistan. With a weapon, he says, you can only defend yourself. With an interpreter, you can command hundreds of Afghan soldiers.
Army personnel repeatedly report that interpreters are essential to the success of overseas missions, not only as a means of communication with local people, but as cultural guides. Winning over the local population is key to the success of a counterinsurgency mission.
But, although interpreters are vital members of the team and granted access to top secret information, they are not always treated as equals. They are often scorned or disrespected simply for being “different.”
Interpreters interviewed for the NYTimes article reported violations such as sexual harassment, insults and medical negligence, not to mention more subtle mistreatment. For example, many interpreters face threats of violence and death by their own Afghan community members for supporting American troops. Interpreters sometimes petition for U.S. residency to protect themselves and their families from these threats, but their requests are often ignored.
The author, Joshua Foust, posits the following in conclusion:
In winning hearts and minds, how we treat Afghans as individuals matters more than how many Taliban we kill or how many roads we build. If we cannot treat our military interpreters with basic respect, why should Afghan civilians trust us to help them remake their nation?
Broadway’s current revival of West Side Story had some of Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics translated to Spanish as an attempt for authenticity for some of the Puerto Rican characters. But this summer, the directors saw that the new lyrics weren’t paying off the way they had hoped.
In some pivotal moments, in fact, the meaning is lost altogether for English-speaking spectators.
Sitting together in tears on Maria’s bed, Anita delivers this message — as well as a rebuke to the interracial romance of Maria, who is Puerto Rican, and Tony, who is Polish-American — in the song “A Boy Like That,” toward the end of Act II:
A boy like that who’d kill your brother, Forget that boy and find another, One of your own kind, Stick to your own kind!
Director Arthur Laurents said that audiences were getting the general message, but weren’t jolted by it, which made subsequent scenes less poignant. After discussions with the producers and cast, the decision was made to change some of the lyrics back to English.
[Producer Jeffrey] Seller noted that, in postperformance conversations with friends and audience members, he was surprised by how many people had never seen “West Side Story,” with music by Leonard Bernstein, onstage or its film version and lacked a strong grasp of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” which was the basis for the plot.
“It means we have to work a little bit harder in making sure people understand the show better,” Mr. Seller said.
Not all is lost: “I feel pretty,” Maria’s opening number in Act II, remains mostly in Spanish with a few English lines thrown in for greater effect.
An online article on eCommerce discusses the importance of translating your website. It’s not a simple as you might think—and definitely not as easy as sticking your text into a machine translator and hoping for the best.
First, everyone needs to understand the value of hiring a human vs. machine translator. A human translator will pick up the idioms and intricacies of the target language in a way that a machine could never do. To use one example of an idiomatic translation, “never judge a book by its cover” would be most appropriately translated to French as “l’habit na fait pas le moine” (”the clothes don’t make the monk”).
The goal, especially in the advertisement world where words sell, is a natural-sounding and never literal translation.
The eCommerce article recommends rewriting and reducing content before having it professionally translated, not only to reduce costs but to reduce idioms as well.
Let’s take a look at a descriptive example:
Like they say, you can’t judge a book by its cover. This humble looking pocket knife has every feature short of the kitchen sink, including two cutting blades, a corkscrew, a can opener, and a global positioning system.
This product description (which I realize is not necessarily an example of a well-written paragraph) includes an idiom, a metaphor, and other figures of speech that would be hard to translate. Now, we rewrite it:
This folding knife has two cutting blades, a corkscrew, a can opener, and a global positioning system.
Having removed the idiom, the metaphor, and the term “pocket” which may not make sense in other languages, we have a matter-of-fact sentence that is ready to translate.
The article’s additional pieces of advice include: hire a professional translator, check the translation for errors (which a professional translation services should provide), hire a professional writer, and consider translation memory (also something a translation service should provide).
Note: the article cites some rather pricey costs for professional translation services. You’ll probably find better prices out there among the more competitive companies.
My best advice: discuss your options and goals with the translation service you choose from the very beginning. You can figure out how to cut corners from the start without having unknown costs spring up down the line, especially if you foresee lots of changes to your eCommerce website in the future.
A columnist of the Brownsville Herald delves into the origins of the Spanish language in two parts. Part I: How it came to be.
Geography plays a huge part in the diverse roots of the Spanish language. Many words were borrowed from the various ethnic groups that occupied the Iberian peninsula over time. And of course, each of those cultures spoke a language developed via a combination of other languages.
The Latin language came to the Iberian peninsula with the Roman invasion in 218 B.C., and was mixed with other languages used at the time.
That “language” soon developed into two versions: one was called “Latín clásico” and was spoken by Spain’s educated. The other was called “Latín vulgar” and was spoken by ordinary people. We find evidence of this in the literature of the time, the “Jarchas,” a type of “Cántigas de Amigos” poetry written 100 years before the “Poema del Mío Cid” (1140 AD). That combined the three languages alive in Spain at that time — Hebrew, Spanish or Castilian, and Arabic.
In “Poema del Mío Cid” we see an entirely new language that later became known as Castillian, or Spanish. From the classic Latin, Spanish derived words such as “alegre” (“alacrem”), “cueva” (“cava”), “frío” (“frigidum”), “leer” (“legere”), and hundreds of others.
Thousands of Spanish words are also derived from Arabic due to Islamic presence on the Iberian peninsula from 711 to 1492 A.D. One such example is “ojalá,” which is Spanish for “I hope” or “I wish that…”, from the Arabic phrase “God willing.”
So many people in Argentina mispronounce “Pepsi” as “Pecsi” that the company has responded by changing its name—an unprecedented campaign for the brand giant.
Given Spanish phonetics with an Argentine accent, “Pecsi” is easier to pronounce, and an estimated 25% of the country says it that way. Advertising Age writes:
The motive was clear: to get closer to consumers, by including those who weren’t pronouncing the name of the brand correctly but also by focusing on saving and standing by consumers’ sides in a time of crisis. In Argentina, drinking a Pepsi costs one peso less than drinking a Coke. The message: If you drink Pepsi, you save. If you drink Pecsi, you save as well.
So far, the campaign is has created a ton of buzz, and people are responding. The writers reporting on this story make a great point: not only does Pepsi recognize how consumers feel about the brand, it made a bold move to show it and get closer to the people.
The commenters on this article make some good points, too:
“jakesdxb” in Dubai: The visual identity should never change, no matter which market. What next? ‘Bebsi’ for Middle Eastern markets because that’s how it’s pronounced in Arabic?
“jms1027″ in Dallas: Brilliant and bold! Love marketers who aren’t afraid to slaughter sacred cows when it’s time to eat.
“franny” in Berlin: Well done Pepsi! I think it’s cool when a brand thinks differently and does something to really be in the side of the people.
Whether Pepsi’s campaign actually represents the will of the people or is just a great PR ploy is up to debate, but no one can argue that the idea has tapped into a cultural sensitivity that consumers really connect with.
Two Cherokee groups in North Carolina, the Cherokee Nation (CN) and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), worked together to translate modern words during a recent Language Revitalization Symposium.
Among other terms, the Cherokee representatives there came up with translations for “helicopter” and “purse,” from similar words in Cherokee. “Tsi-yu a-di-quo-lv-de-yo” is “plane that spins,” and “a-de-la di-ga-l(o)-do-di” is “where money is put.” If the translators could not decide on a common word between the two Cherokee groups’ dialects, they placed an “E” next to the Eastern Band’s preference and a “W” (for Western) next to the CN’s preference.
Jackson said the consortiums don’t always create Cherokee words for English words because an old Cherokee word that isn’t being used is sometimes rediscovered by the group.
“It may just be words we have not heard or forgotten. When you bring this many strong speakers together oftentimes there’s already a word. We might have known it and never pronounced or said it,” he said.
During the meeting, about 25 men and women told stories of how their parents or grandparents described objects, plants, places, events and people. They also shared how they pronounce words.
Keeping the language up-to-date is of importance to the Cherokee immersion school, where children learn all subjects in their native language. “Every time we are thinking of a word we always say ‘are the kids going to understand?” said one of the consortium members.
Speaking of great 
One of our project managers was scouring the web and ran into a great source we’d like to recommend. It called “
Anyone who’s seen the box office hit Avatar and listened to the exotic-sounds of Pandora’s inhabitants might have wondered: where did that language come from?
Broadway’s current revival of West Side Story had some of Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics translated to Spanish as an attempt for authenticity for some of the Puerto Rican characters. But this summer, the directors saw that the new lyrics weren’t paying off the way they had hoped.
Two Cherokee groups in North Carolina, the Cherokee Nation (CN) and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), worked together to translate modern words during a recent Language Revitalization Symposium.