This is a fun site - translations of High School the Musical in Spanish. But what’s more interesting to me is the preface that describes the translations…

Welcome to Breaking Free, a humble site for fans of the Disney Channel Original Movie High School Musical who are either Hispanic or studying Spanish in school. After hours of strategic paraphrases, syntactical experimentation, revisions, and verbal debugging, I am pleased to present a complete collection of all the songs from the movie translated into Spanish.

What makes these Spanish lyrics useful is that I did not translate the songs literally. The translations here are pro canendo (Latin: “for singing”) translations. Each one remains as faithful as possible to the meaning of the original lyrics while expressing that meaning in words that fit the rhythm and melody of the song. While some specific meaning is sacrificed, the loss is minimal and well worth the preservation of the musical quality.

Translation is not a static job. A good translation is not about a literal word for word English to Spanish change. You need to take into account context, subject and purpose. In this case, the purpose is to have singable and possibly rhyming / musical lyrics. Read more and enjoy the music.

 Harry Potter made the news again, this time with the most recent translation into Ukrainian. Not long ago, HP made the news because of the throngs of “netroot” fans doing mass unauthorized translations of this popular book. Now it’s making news because of a current and new translation was the first in the Russian states. Read more. And if you want to see photos from the release party, click here.

In an attempt to win over extra readers, the A-Ba-Ba-Ha-La-Ma-Ha publishing house once released “Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix” – the fifth installment in the famous series – considerably earlier than Russian publishers, which made the book an absolute bestseller in Ukraine. The same thing happened with the sixth novel.

But with the latest seventh and final installment, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” Ukrainian publishers literally beat everyone, having officially released the Ukrainian translation of the book on Sept. 25, which made it the very first translation of the book to be released in a foreign language in the whole world.

I just came across this 10+ year old interview that Madonna had when she was filming Evita in Budapest. Apparently Madonna sat down with a Hungarian reporter, and the reporter’s questions were posed in Hungarian, then translated into English for Madonna, whose replies were then translated back into Hungarian for the paper’s exclusive. Shortly thereafter, at the request of USA Today, Madonna’s comments were then retranslated from Hungarian back into English for the benefit of that paper’s readers. The results are humorous to say the least.

A few highlights:

Blikk: Madonna, Budapest says hello with arms that are spread-eagled. Did you have a visit here that was agreeable? Are you in good odor? You are the biggest fan of our young people who hear your musical productions and like to move their bodies in response.

Madonna: Thank you for saying these compliments [holds up hands]. Please stop with taking sensationalist photographs until I have removed my garments for all to see [laughs]. This is a joke I have made.

Blikk: Madonna, let’s cut toward the hunt: Are you a bold hussy-woman that feasts on men who are tops?

Madonna: Yes, yes, this is certainly something that brings to the surface my longings. In America it is not considered to be mentally ill when a woman advances on her prey in a discotheque setting with hardy cocktails present. And there is a more normal attitude toward leather play-toys that also makes my day.

Blikk: Is this how you met Carlos, your love-servant who is reputed? Did you know he was heaven-sent right off the stick? Or were you dating many other people in your bed at the same time?

Madonna: No, he was the only one I was dating in my bed then, so it is a scientific fact that the baby was made in my womb using him. But as regards these questions, enough! I am a woman and not a test-mouse! Carlos is an everyday person who is in the orbit of a star who is being muscle-trained by him, not a sex machine.

Read the entire interview.

How about trying to search for a subject across multiple languages? Google is trying out a new tools that does just this. It allows people to find results on websites in languages other than their primary native languages. What if I want to find out about “resort towns in Spain”? Google will then automatically translation my search term, scour the internet for websites in Spanish, and then give me the original and the translated results of my search. Or if you don’t speak English, you can search in your native language for “restaurante de los mariscos de Chicago” and it will tell you go check out Catch 35 - an excellent restaurant. Check it out.

Of course we need to forgive it for it’s machine based and imperfect translations. However, it’s a potentially useful and interesting tool.

This is so interesting to me. Translation is so important to communication, to our spirits, to living. This article says that they completed the first translation of the old and new testaments into Persian in over 100 years! No matter your religion, it has to be important to know that we have the ability to reach out to people all over the world with our messages.

“Today’s Persian Version” of the Bible has been completed and was officially dedicated in Istanbul, Turkey in August, enabling Persian-speaking people around the world to have a present-day translation of the Old and New Testaments.

The translation is significant because the last Persian translation of the Bible was done in the 1890s.

“This means that we now have a translation that is easy to understand and is in contemporary modern Persian language,” said the Rev. Kenneth Thomas, translation consultant for the new Bible and a former Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission co-worker in Iran.

Persian is the language of more than 100 million people worldwide, with the majority of them living in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

While most of our translations are professional and commercial in nature, we never forget translation is always about communication and often it is about art, poetry and connecting to other cultures. In this story, a college professor eloquently expresses how translation can be a bridge between worlds.

“I think of translation as a type of magic,” Chambers said to a crowd of about 40 ASU students, faculty and community members after reading aloud one of the stories in his volume.

Fulton and Chambers provided a unique perspective on literature, audience members said.

Asian language graduate student Brian Hurley said he found the readings and question-and-answer session interesting because “translators don’t get a ton of attention.”

“They exist in a strange gray area, and they function as a bridge,” Hurley said. “Dr. Chambers summed that up really well.”

Both professors said they carefully select their projects based on the writing style of the original author to make their function as a bridge easier.

“There is a kind of conjunction, a kind of merger of personalities when we translate,” Fulton said about a translator’s relationship with the original text’s author.

Chambers said he agreed that translating requires a certain likeness between the original author and translator. He looks for a text that “resonates,” he said.

“If you don’t feel that kind of affinity with the author, it’s difficult to translate, to even muster the will to translate,” Chambers said.

Now I’m not a cat person, and this post isn’t exactly about a professional translation device, but if you need to know what your cat is saying to you, this is for you. You hold this cute device next to your cat as it meows. The palm-sized gadget will then interpret what your cats meows and purrs really mean.

The problem with this device is that it may crush our lucrative cat interpretation business. I’m really upset about this. I mean, as a business owner, how can we compete with these cute pink hand-held devices? Read more.

The hand-held Meowlingual device is shaped like a cat, with stylish design lines and a compact size designed to fit easily in the palm of a hand… The Meowlingual has the microphone built into the handheld unit. The cat owner uses Meowlingual to, in effect, “interview” his or her feline companion from close range.

Meow Translation: The Translation function analyzes your cat’s meows to determine which of six emotions it is feeling. Meowlingual then provides a phrase matched to the emotion.

The six emotions and some sample phrases:

• Happy: I can’t keep my happiness bottled up!!!
• Angry or Afraid: You better watch it, I fight like a tiger!
• Needy: like it when you scratch my neck (hint hint).
• Satisfied: That’s Purrrrfect!
• Assertive/Showing Off: Hey, a little attention here please!
• Amorous: Can you introduce me to a nice kitty-cat?

And while we’re at it, I just came across this Cat Translation Dictionary which could come in handy for some…

miaowbu	Feed me.
meeow	Pet me.
mrooww	I love you

…It goes on from there. Click here for more of this handy dictionary.

This is an interesting article that basically says two things… 1) Providing materials in a communities makes sense from a business or from a mission point of view. 2) You need to provide professional translation or you are going to cause more problems that you help. I think the most telling two paragraphs are here:

A cursory survey of documents provided in Spanish by various agencies turned up many riddled with errors, from misspellings and grammar problems to literal renderings bordering on the incomprehensible.

Huszar thinks that written translation should be done by native speakers who have lived in a Spanish-speaking country and studied at the university level. Inaccurate translations or those using “Spanglish” only add to the distortion of the language, she says.

Read more.

How do The Dalles families who speak only Spanish get information on vital services from local public agencies? More or less imperfectly, it seems, especially when it comes to written text.Local strategies for providing information in Spanish run the gamut from manual translation work by paid, qualified staff to computer-assisted, on-the-fly translating.

And everything in between — or nothing at all.

“They’re not that good,” says Casa Loma resident Fanny Vazquez of the majority of translations done here. The young mother, who was raised in The Dalles and speaks both Spanish and English, often accompanies friends from her west-end apartment complex as an interpreter.

“Most of the Mexicans don’t even understand how they [translate] from English to Spanish,” she says. “[They think], ‘What are they talking about?’”

Still, whatever the challenges, methods, and flaws of the practice, many agencies are increasingly attempting to serve the growing Spanish-speaking community through translation.

“It just makes sense,” says Wasco County District Attorney Eric Nisley, who knows of no legal requirement outside of the court system to provide for interpretation or translation into a language other than English — except sign language and braille, as mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Still, he says, many organizations have made a policy decision to provide information in Spanish, finding that it gives them an economic advantage — or a service advantage in the case of public agencies.

f the local entities The Chronicle talked to, four — the Northern Wasco County People’s Utility District, the Northern Wasco County School District, Wasco Sherman Public Health, and the Wasco County Department of Youth Services — say they regularly provide written information in Spanish.

The summary of this recent study is this - global companies aren’t investing enough in communicating across language divides. This means communication errors from poor translations, language miscues or non-standardized use of terminology in the workplace. Read more.

Failure to pay attention to global communication in the form of local language and consistent terminology is hampering growth in all sizes of business. 

A study carried out by the Localisation Industry Standards Association and global information management provider SDL, which is best known for its translation and terminology management software, found that global business growth is hindered because decision makers have little knowledge of core technology such as content management, terminology management, and budgets associated with global communications.

Terminology management refers to the process of defining the important terms and phrases used within a company. It covers aspects such as how these are used in context, how they are written, and how they are translated so that they mean the same thing in multiple languages.

Even though respondents were aware of the importance of terminology management in driving brand consistency and aiding customer loyalty, few had implemented processes or software to manage it. 56% said the greatest benefit of terminology management would be consistant management of a global brand, while 32% identified the ability to deliver the right global content to the right people at the same time as its key focus.

The summary at the end of this article says it all, “machine translation has a long way to go in the accuracy realm”. Give it a try here. And the article is here.

Microsoft has launched a new translation service intended to complement Windows Live Search. Although the automatic translation service is currently on a separate page, it would appear that Microsoft intends to integrate Translator into the main Live Search page at some point. Such a move would bring Live Search up to speed with the other major search players, which already offer some form of translation service.

…As we’ve mentioned when we looked at other services, like those from Google, machine translation has a long way to go in the accuracy realm, but it’s not a bad way to get the overall gist of a document and Windows Live Translator’s side by side comparison features nicely compliment this approach.

But for fun I’ve decided to try to try some translations on our own. How about some Shakespeare, from English to Spanish and back to English again. The original was changed to…

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet

-became-

A rose by any other name would smell like candy

and

To be or not to be, –that is the question

-became-

To be or not to be, –that one is the question

and

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears

-became-

The friendly, Romans, countrymen, lend their ears to me

Nothing major, but these are simple, single sentence translations. Now try this with your HR policy.