Since August 5, Learning by Translating moved here.

Dal 5 Agosto, Learning by Translating si è trasferito a questo indirizzo.

Ilaria-Translations.com

The image I’m posting below is a screenshot from a Facebook application that has been machine-translated into Italian.

I found a translation particularly funny! It says: “Cerchi Sig. / Sig.ra DIRITTO?”. This is a word-for-word translation of “Are you looking for Mr. / Mrs. RIGHT?”. If you, like me, are a native speaker of Italian, or have a good knowledge of the language, you know that the English word “right” has several possible Italian translations:

• “Esatto”, “corretto”, “giusto” (“exact”, “correct”)
• “Giusto”, “opportuno” (“just”)
• “Diritto” (“right”, “ability”, like in “Women had to fight for the right to vote” => “Le donne dovettero/hanno dovuto lottare per il diritto al voto”)
• “Destra” (“right” as opposed to “left”, “sinistra” in Italian)
• Etc. (cf. Wordreference)

Given the context (informal) and the type of text (it is the title of an online test), a possible right translation of the sentence is “Cerchi il/la tipo/a giusto/a (per te)?”. I wouldn’t have translated “Mr. / Mrs.” with “Sig. / Sig.ra” (short forms for “Signore” => “Mister” and “Signora” => “Mistress”)  because, even if the sentence would be grammatically correct, “tipo/tipa” is a more natural translation, and “Sig. / Sig.ra” are used in formal contexts, as in letters (“Egregio Sig. XXX” => “Dear Mr. XXX”, “Gentile Sig.ra” => “Dear Madam”). Alternative translations might be “l’uomo / la donna” (“the man / woman”) or “il ragazzo / la ragazza” (“the boy / girl”), but I still prefer the first one.

This mistranslation reminded me of a video game included in Windows Vista, “Purble Place”. I have an Italian version of Vista, so the game is in Italian. I don’t know whether it was translated by a human translator or a machine, but when you get a character’s feature (and its colour) right in “Purble Shop”, a message saying “Colore destro“ appears.

You can clearly realize that it is a word-for-word translation of the English “right colour”. The right translation would be “colore giusto/esatto”. I don’t know the English version of the game, but I think that “3 caratteristiche giuste”  (“3 right features”) is correct. So, I suppose that the same word was translated in two different ways here, while the translation should have been the same in both cases.

You can find lots of other examples of Italian localization errors in the blog “Premere il tasto ANY”. The title is a deliberate mistranslation of the sentence “Press any key” (“Premere un tasto qualsiasi”).

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language that goes to his heart.” (Nelson Mandela) – thanks JLibbey!

“If I’m selling to you, I speak your language. If I’m buying, ‘dann muessen Sie Deutsch sprechen’ [then you must speak German]“ (Willy Brandt) – thanks JLibbey!

“Translators live off the differences between languages, all the while working toward eliminating them.” (Edmond Cary) – merci Hélène!

“A mio avviso, può, chi scrive, discettare [...] intorno ai problemi dell’idioma: è bene che la materia dell’arte sia conosciuta e analizzata (oltreché tentata, sperimentata) da chi se ne vale ad esprimersi. Il legno del falegname, la lega ferrosa del siderurgista” (Carlo Emilio Gadda)

“The translator must strive to adopt the very soul of his author” (Alexander Fraser Tytler)

“I do love translating: it is the pure pleasure of writing without the misery of inventing” (Nancy Mitford)

“La traduzione di una cosa è il nostro sogno di quella cosa” (Serena Vitale)

“Paris can’t be London or New York, it must be Paris; our hero must be Pierre, not Peter; he must drink an apéritif, not a cocktail, smoke Gauloises, not Kents; and walk down the rue du Bac, not Back Street. On the other hand, when he is introduced to a lday, he’ll sound silly if he says: ‘I am enchanted, Madame’“ (Robert Adams)

And now, a little Photoshop creation made by me! It features Tytler’s quote, but I wrote it using the plural form instead of the singular one. If you want to post it in your blog, feel free to do so!

4. Lexibar

Lexibar is a very useful tool that lets you add special characters to a text written in another language. It is a good alternative to using keyboard shortcuts (e.g. ALT + 0228 for the German ä, as in Läufer) or the Windows Character Map because it is language-specific. There would be no need to learn shortcuts by heart, and sometimes using the Character Map may be a little more “time-consuming” because you have to find the special character you want to insert among many others.

According to Lexicool.com:

Lexibar is a small toolbar which gives rapid access to special characters not always available on your keyboard.

Once you have installed lexibar, either click on the special characters to insert them directly into your word processor or drag and drop them (using the left-hand mouse button). If these methods do not function, you can copy the characters to the clipboard by double-clicking on them, then paste them into your document.

Lexibar is available, free of charge, in the following languages: Catalan, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish. You can download Lexibar here.

Last, but not least, now “Learning by Translating” has an Official Facebook page! Click here to view it and become a fan of my blog!

This is not really a “Learning by Translating” Special post because I received less translation quotes than expected. I actually expected more participation… maybe not everyone has a favourite translation quote?

Anyway, I’m starting my post with a quote that Chris (Textklick on Twitter) sent me:

Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes. (Günter Grass)

He also wrote me (in Italian) that he loves translating as much as he loves Italian food! Thanks for participating, Chris!

Now I’m posting some other translation quotes I’ve found online lately.

Translation is a bit like shoveling coal. You scoop it up and toss it into the furnace. Each lump is a word, and each shovelful is another sentence, and if your back is strong enough and you have the stamina to keep at it for eight or ten hours at a stretch, you can keep the fire hot. (Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions)

Simultaneous interpretation is like driving a car that has a steering wheel but no brakes and no reverse.(Preter Pyotr Avaliani)

Translators can be considered as busy matchmakers who praise as extremely desirable a half-veiled beauty. They arouse an irresistible yearning for the original. (Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Art and Antiquity)

All I require of a translator is that he or she be a more gifted writer than I am, and in at least two languages, one of them mine. (Kurt Vonnegut)

Jakob Grimm compared the task of the translator with that of a sailor: the latter mans a ship, directs it with full sails to the opposing shore, but then has to land ‘where there is different earth and where different air plays.’  (Birgit Stolt)

It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower – and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel. (Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry) 

I’ve just opened another blog category: LBT Specials.

The first special post I’d like to write is one on translation quotes. I know there is already a post on translation quotes, but this time I would like to write a post with LBT readers’ favourite translation quotes. If you wish to participate, don’t hesitate to send me an e-mail with your favourite quote(s) to ilaria.translations*@*live.com (remove the stars first!).

I will be posting all the quotes I receive next Sunday.

**********************************************************

Ho appena aperto una nuova categoria: LBT Specials.

Il primo special post che vorrei scrivere sarà dedicato alle citazioni sulla traduzione. Sì, lo so che ho già scritto un post a riguardo, ma questo sarà diverso: sarete voi lettori di “Learning by Translating” a “scriverlo”! Se desideri partecipare, manda pure un’e-mail con la/e tua/e citazione/i preferita/e sulla traduzione all’indirizzo ilaria.translations*@*live.com (rimuovi gli asterischi prima!).

Tutte le citazioni che riceverò saranno pubblicate domenica prossima.

You read right, another post about interpreting.

Last night I dreamt that I was shadowing a simultaneous interpretation from English into Italian! I was doing an actual reformulation, not a mere repetition of words! No, I wasn’t interpreting, just rephrasing what was being said in Italian. Maybe that dream is a reminder: practice.interpreting. I haven’t done interpreting practice in a while, I should catch up with it.

When I practice interpreting, I do it just for fun. I download podcasts and play them using VLC media player (if they’re too fast for my level, this software allows me to “slow them down”… it’s rare to find audio files that are slow enough for beginners like me). I record myself using either Audacity (you can also play the audio file you’re interpreting with it, and listen to the original and the interpreted versions after you’ve finished) or a digital audio recorder (before buying one, I used my cell phone’s audio recorder that allowed me to record up to 5 minutes at a time).

Ways in which I practice interpreting:

• Simultaneous interpreting (I think this is self explanatory enough)
• Consecutive interpreting (you take notes using a spiral-bound notepad and a pen/pencil while the speaker is speaking, then you translate after he/she finished his/her speech. You can’t note every single thing, because you don’t have the time to, and you have to pay a lot of attention to the speech. I noticed that the more I pay attention to taking notes, the more I get distracted. Interpreters must learn to split attention between two activities, and I think this doesn’t apply only to simultaneous interpreting, in which you listen and speak at the same time, but also to consecutive interpreting. Most interpreters use abbreviations or symbols while taking notes)
• Sentence-by-sentence interpreting (a kind of interpreting that is usually done in a liaison interpreting context. First there is the sentence in language A, then you interpret it into language B, then the language B speaker replies to the language A speaker, and you interpret what he said into language A, etc. It is not done simultaneously, but it is rather a form of consecutive interpreting without notes)
• Shadowing (like I wrote at the beginning of the post, it is an exercise in which you reformulate, or repeat, what a speaker says in the same language. You can also do it after a few seconds from the original utterance, trying to lag behind the original speaker as if you’re doing simultaneous interpreting)

(I know, I wrote that I’m more of a written translation person, but I’ve got bitten by the interpreting bug from the very first moment)

[...] Auslander a trentaquattro anni non aveva seri rimpianti riguardo alla sua vita. Malgrado tutti i suoi piccoli errori di calcolo, tutti i momentanei errori di giudizio che erano valsi unicamente a dimostrarle che le conveniva seguire i propri istinti, non c’era nulla che avesse infine realmente sconvolto il saldo equilibrio che aveva raggiunto. Abitava lo stesso appartamento nel Greenwich Village da una dozzina d’anni; aveva alcuni amici di cui si fidava e che non esigevano troppo da lei, né come tempo né dal punto di vista emotivo; il suo lavoro era un lavoro che le piaceva e nel quale eccelleva. Il lavoro in particolar modo era una vera fonte di piacere per lei; eppure non era il lavoro che si era prefissa di fare. Aveva cominciato come poeta, e non pensava di essere stata un cattivo poeta. Già allora riusciva a distinguere tra i veri poeti e quelli che giocavano a fare il poeta per il loro proprio divertimento. La poesia come autoanalisi o come catarsi non faceva per lei – non le bastava – e sapendo che non sarebbe mai stata uno dei pochi veri poeti, aveva rinunciato senza troppo dolore.
La decisione di affermarsi come traduttrice delle opere di altri e più bravi poeti era stata presa quasi a sua insaputa: aveva scoperto che stava andando in quella direzione da anni, quasi intenzionalmente. Fin dalla quinta elementare aveva scoperto di avere molta facilità con le lingue: le lezioni di ebraico che suo padre aveva insistito che lei prendesse erano uno scherzo, un piacere; aveva imparato da sé a leggere e scrivere in yiddish, che era la lingua che parlavano in casa sua. Alle medie aveva imparato il francese, ingoiando lunghe liste di vocaboli come se non avesse bramato altro durante la sua breve vita. A quell’età tutto questo le era sembrato normale; soltanto in seguito si era resa conto che la facilità per le lingue era considerata un talento, un dono speciale. A sedici anni, parlava correntemente il francese, l’ebraico, lo yiddish e lo spagnolo. A diciotto, vi aveva aggiunto il tedesco e l’italiano, e terminata l’università conosceva a fondo anche il portoghese, il romeno e il russo. La decisione di diventare traduttrice, se ne rendeva conto, era una sorta di compromesso tra le sue aspirazioni e le sue capacità, ma era un compromesso che la soddisfaceva.
Conosceva i suoi limiti. Questa, secondo Auslander, era la sua migliore qualità. Poiché non si faceva illusioni, non poteva soffrire di delusioni. Sapeva sempre quello che poteva aspettarsi da se stessa. [...]

Citazione tratta da M. Hermann, Auslander, trad. di Paola Forti. L’ho trovata qui.

Ho messo in grassetto le parti in cui mi rispecchio.

Per chi non lo sapesse, in passato scrivevo poesie per hobby (qualche giorno ne posterò qualcuna qui sul blog), sia in italiano che in inglese. Non ho mai preso in considerazione l’idea di fare la poetessa professionista, però. Sognavo di diventare insegnante di inglese, ma anche web designer. Ora sono decisamente per la traduttrice.

3. RSS Feed Reader

I read several blogs (about translation, languages and graphics design) and have a Google Reader account. Google Reader (it is not the only RSS feed reader though) helps me keep track of all the blogs I read. Every day there is always something new to read.

Until last year, I used to have a list of my favourite blogs on Firefox, then I discovered Google Reader. Now I can imagine how time consuming it was when I didn’t have an account there. I used to click on every single blog I had bookmarked to check if there were new posts on them. Having a feed reader saves time because, thanks to it, you can know when there is a new post on a blog. There is no need to visit the site  (you can add any site  with an RSS feed to your reader, not only blogs) most of the times: you can read the whole post on your feed reader. There are also other times (I think that depends on the blogging platform used) when the feed reader only shows part of the post, and a link you can click on if you’d like to read the whole post.

The video below is a simple tutorial on how to use Google Reader (very simple to use, in my opinion), but there are also links to other RSS feed readers you can use.

Even “Learning by Translating” can be read using a feed reader.

I found the video here. I tried to put it on my blog, but for some reason the code didn’t work.

Here’s my list of software, websites and tools I find useful while translating, making glossaries, doing my homework, etc. For this post, I got inspired by one posted on Translation Musings some time ago.

1. Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org Writer. Let’s start with a basic “tool”! I use both Word and Writer. In case you’re wondering why, it is because I have Windows Vista on my laptop, and older versions of Microsoft Word (I have Word 2002) or Microsoft Office in general don’t run on Vista. I also heard that in Word 2007 everything is arranged in a different way, and this discouraged me from buying it. “Why pay when I can have something similar for free?”, I thought when I heard of OpenOffice.org. I like Writer because it has a very interesting feature: you can save your file as a PDF, which is always useful when you would like to send a file written with a word processing software to someone else or to view it using a different computer… everything stays the same (there would be no problems in case you decide to use a font which is not a standard one like Times New Roman, for example), and this might not happen if you save the file as a .doc one. I wrote my degree thesis using Word because when I went to a photocopy and typing agency to ask some questions about the format of the thesis, they gave a me a leaflet with instructions to follow when writing it with Word (e.g. how wide the margins should be, acceptable font sizes, and so on).  

2. Mozilla Firefox. I started using it three years ago out of curiosity, but I realized that it is the best browser I’ve ever had! Unlike Internet Explorer (IE from now on), it doesn’t crash often (it is very stable). When I first tried it I found it innovative because it is very customizable (lots of add-ons, like themes and search tools are available here). Some add-ons I have installed include Wired-Marker (a tool for highlighting text on web pages, very useful!), abcTajpu (to insert non-ASCII letters when writing something) and the Delicious Bookmarks Add-On. You can add many search engines to Firefox (some of them are useful for students/translators: Wikipedia, Wordreference, Oxford Paravia ENG-ITA dictionary, De Mauro Paravia ITA synonyms and antonyms, Merriam-Webster, etc.). I use both the “standard” version of Firefox and a portable one (you can download it here), since I use three computers and so I have all my bookmarks saved in the portable version. 

(to be continued…)