Google has recently added 10 more languages to its Translate service: the additions are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish
Jeff Chin, Product Manager at Google admits that “While our system is quite good, we know it’s not perfect. Machine translation is a hard problem, but it plays an important role in helping people access content they might otherwise be unable to read.”
However, I believe he forgot to say how entertaining this new tool is J. If there is nothing on TV on a Saturday night, you can play with Google translate and have a very fun evening. Romanian is my first language, so I was so happy that somebody finally has created such a tool… the funny thing started when I actually tried to tool…
I went to Google Translate page (http://translate.google.com/translate_t) and tried to translate into Romanian our company website: www.wintranslation.com.
Some of the text is just laughable… mostly because the machine usually try to translate word by word without bothering with the sentence structure, and other small details…
Here is an example:
English version: Medical translation
Documentation for medical devices, drug registration dossiers, user interface for medical software and documentation
Romanian translation: Traduceri medicale
Documentaţia pentru dispozitive medicale, de droguri înregistrarea dosarelor, pentru interfaţa de utilizator pentru software-ul şi documentaţia medicală
If you are not a Romanian speaker, won’t see any problem. You won’t know that’s just a text without any sense. What made me laugh mostly was the use of the word “drug” which is very clear in the English in this context. But the term used in the Romanian translation only refer to illegal drugs and not medications… It’s like we provide translation services for all kind of drugs…
Anyway, that’s a fun experience. You should try it sometime…
Have you ever received an email saying “Happy Holidays” even though you will not actually be celebrating anything? People love to share their happiness with others and sometimes they do not remember that the recipient might not be in the same situation. This is very common in multinational societies, like in Canada, where there are so many different nationalities living and working together.
Lots of companies update their websites when a big celebration approaches to make the site more appealing to visitors. For Christmas and Easter, there are Santa Clauses and bunnies everywhere… and in their enthusiasm, some forget that not all cultures celebrate these events or that some events are celebrated at different times for certain cultures. Some companies even update their foreign language websites…
It is nice to get an email wishing you all the best for Easter even if you do not celebrate it, but it is very strange to go to a website in your native language and see Easter bunnies everywhere if you do not celebrate Easter.
Easter is a Christian celebration, but not all Christians celebrate Easter at the same time. This year, the Catholic Easter was in March and the Orthodox Easter will be at the end of April. Why this difference? Because of the different calendars used by the churches to calculate the Easter dates.
Orthodox Churches use the Julian calendar named after Julius Caesar. This is usually referred to as the “Old Style” calendar and it was the official calendar from 45 B.C. to 1582 A.D, when it was replaced with the Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian calendar is the official calendar used around the world today.
The Julian calendar was accurate, but it was still not as precise as the Gregorian one. A year was considered to have 365 days and 6 hours instead of 365 days, 5 hours and 46 seconds. This difference may seem insignificant, but because of this difference, one day is lost every 128 years. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII of the Roman Catholic Church revised the Julian calendar, and so the Easter dates were changed. In time, the Gregorian calendar was adopted all over the world.
Countries with a large Orthodox population are mostly located in Eastern Europe: Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine, etc.
Everyday around the world, someone is celebrating something. Here are only a few of these holidays and their dates in 2008:
New Year’s Day: January 1st – This is the first day of the year in the Gregorian calendar and it’s celebrated in most countries around the World.
Eastern Orthodox New Year: January 14 – Most of the Orthodox churches have adopted the Gregorian calendar and celebrate the New Year on January 1st. However, for Orthodox churches of Georgia, Jerusalem, Russia, Macedonia and Serbia, the New Year falls on January 14.
Chinese New Year: In 2008, the Chinese New Year was on February 7. Next year, the Chinese New Year will be on January 26.
Vietnamese New Year (Tết Nguyên Đán): Celebrated on the same day as the Chinese New Year.
Iranian New Year (Norouz): March 20 in 2008 – The traditional Iranian New Year holiday marks the first day of spring.
Songkran – Thai New Year which is celebrated around April 13.
Orthodox Easter: April 27, 2008 – Celebrated by all Orthodox churches around the World.
Ramadam: September 1 to September 30, 2008 - A Muslim religious observance that takes place during the ninth month of the Islamic calendar.
Rosh Hashanah - commonly referred to as the Jewish New Year: In 2008, this celebration begins at sundown on Monday, September 29 and ends at nightfall on Wednesday October 1.
Yom Kippur - Day of Atonement: Celebrated ten days after Rosh Hashanah.
Christmas: December 25 – The holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus. It is celebrated in most Christian countries.
Orthodox Christmas: January 7 – Only Russian, Serbian, Macedonian and Georgian Orthodox churches celebrate Christmas in January
In three weeks from now I’ll be in
- you are not allowed to turn right on the red light - you’ll be losing your driving license if you do so;
- you are not allowed to use your cell phone in the car, you’ll need a headset
- it’s hard to find parking spots – you‘ll have to be very creative
- for US people: all the measurements are following the SI; the cars indicators are in km, not miles; the gas is in liters, not gallons; the weathear is in Celsius degrees, not Fahrenheit (those 55 degrees shown by all outside thermometers in
- don’t rent cars with stick if you never driven one before!
- Stop at crosswalks for pedestrians; if a pedestrian has his foot one the line, than he has priority
I was sure for a long time that Indesign is the best application when it comes to multilingual typesetting. I have discovered these days that Quark 7 might be better.
Typesetting should be something very easy to do - you only have to replace the English text in the source application with the foreign translation. Not a big deal, some will say. However, when the source files are done in Quark, this entire process might become a very time consuming task, and also not very accurate, open to lots of errors. This is because before Quark 7, it was impossible to have non Latin characters in editable format in Quark. The process preferred by some was to prepare outlined EPS file in Illustartor and embedded them in Quark. However, any small text revision would transform this simple task in a nightmare…
Our process was a little different, but still not the best one. The ideal will be to use a foreign version of Quark - the problem with this procedure is that the client won’t be able to open the editable files from his end in case they will like to change images, colours, etc.
Our process was to save the Quark file to version 4 and open it in Indesign.
Chinese, Russian, Telugu, Gujarati, Khmer, Somali, Amharic and lots of other languages that don’t use Latin alphabet can be typeset in Indesign without any problems.
However, we have discovered recently that languages like Hindi, or Singhalese can’t be can be typeset in Indesign. Or not all the Unicode fonts used to type those languages are supported very well by Indesign. We have found that Hindi text can be layout in QuarkXpress 7 (or Illustartor, if some very small artwork).
It’s enough to have only one character not displaying correctly and all the work is useless. A 10 minutes job can become a one day research process.
Everybody these days talks about Harry Potter; the books, the movies, the games… Harry Potter covers all online and off line media. And the most interesting fact about this phenomenon is that actually, before the movies and the games, people, children loved the book.
The books were also translated in 67 languages, and Latin and Ancient Greek are two of them. And also from British English to American English…
“Are any books immune from this kind of devolution from English to “American” English? Would we sit back and let publishers rewrite Charles Dickens or Shakespeare? I can see it now: “A Christmas Song,” “A Story of Two Cities,” “The Salesman of
By protecting our children from an occasional misunderstanding or trip to the dictionary, we are pretending that other cultures are, or should be, the same as ours.” Peter H. Gleick, The New York Times.
cooker - stove
roundabout - carousel
cine-camera - video camera
mummy - mommy
video recorder - VCR
jumper - sweater
comprehensive - public school
letter-box - mail slot
motorway - highway
multi-storey car park - multilevel parking garage
packet of crisps - bag of chips
trolley- cart
trainers - sneakers
jacket potato - baked potato
crumpets - English muffins
changing room - locker room
revision timetables - study schedules
So, should we translate from British English to American English, or not? It seems that the public do not like it too much, or at least when it’s about novels.
This is a request we are getting so often from our clients. And every time, our reply is the same: Would you like Simplified or Traditional Chinese translation? Do you need the translation for Mainland China, Hong Kong or maybe
Why so many questions? This is because Chinese people are using two different writing systems. Most of North American already knows that Cantonese and Mandarin are two different languages, but only a few know about the writing system.
So, if your document is intended for Mainland
However, if you are visiting
Why the difference? The Simplified system was introduced by the government of
What about Chinese people living in
QuarkXpress, the English version, doesn’t support very well some of the foreign languages. So if you want to typeset a label in a few languages – like, let’s say: French, Spanish, Korean, Chinese and Arabic, you’ll need to use different programs.
Quark works well with languages like Spanish and French and the Passport version even provides lots of interesting features for these two languages.
However, before version 7, which supports Unicode, it was impossible to have editable Chinese characters in Quark. There are special Chinese versions of Quark, but the files created in these versions can’t be opened in the English one.
So, the only solution for a multilingual label will be to have outlined EPS (Encapsulated Post Script) files for Korean, Chinese and Arabic. These files can be placed without any problems in the Quark document. However, it will be impossible to edit the text, to change the font or to make any adjustments.
The good thing is that you won’t need to install extra fonts on your computer, as the text will be outlined. Also, it doesn’t matter if you are using a Macintosh Quark or a PC – the EPS file can be imported everywhere. And, because an EPS is a vectorial file, its size can be modified without losing the quality.
The Chinese and Korean EPS files can be prepared in Illustrator. For Arabic, it’s a little more complicated as you’ll need a
We prefer to use professional foreign typesetters; they have the necessary tools and know what to do. However, sometimes I like to play around with alphabets, fonts and applications, so if I will need to prepare an Arabic EPS file, I will use my Indesign ME version; place the Arabic text there, outline the text in Indesign and only after this export the file as EPS.
I wanted to start this blog category with something really amazing; however, it seems that today nothing comes easy to me; maybe because is Friday or because my baby (my kitten, Monkey) is sick and I am very worried about him.
I find that always, when I don’t have anything to say, I prefer to make fun of others. This is such a lousy thing to do, but I enjoy it so much! It’s kind embarrassing to realize this, but I’ve decided to be very sincere in this blog.
Anyway, here is my story: a fried of mine, a Romanian graphic designer, asked me recently why he can’t typeset Arabic in Indesign CS2. He tried to copy and paste the text, to import the text, but nothing worked. Actually, he only has realized that the text isn’t placed correctly after a few hours of work. His frustration was very funny for me (even if I have to recognize I have done the same in my first day of work here).
That’s because he wasn’t aware of the basics of Arabic language or Arabic typesetting rules. Arabic isn’t like French, or Spanish, not even Chinese or Hindi, languages based on particular scripts. Arabic is a special language and a typesetter should know more than some basics before taking a job in this language, even if it is only one sentence.
None of the English DTP or image manipulation programs supports Arabic language. This also applies for other language, like Hebrew, Pastho, Urdu and Farsi. These are right to left languages. The text, the images a d also the pages should be flipped. Check some of our Arabic typesetting samples from this page to see the difference.
And even if you know all the basics and have Indesign ME version, or Arabic XTension for Quark, or any other Middle Eastern version of a program, it might be a good idea to check with some Arabic people if everything it’s right.
I was doing researches for our Latin language related web page and learnt a few interesting proverbs. Ï liked one a lot and I’ve selected it to be the title for our blog: “Verba Volant, scripta manet!”, which translates as “Words fly away, written things remain”. We would like this blog to be an extended, written connection between us and our customers, vendors, friends, or occasional website visitors. You are invited to reply to any of our posting, share with us your thoughts, comments, frustrations or achievements. Welcome to wintranslation.com first blog!
Thank you,
Felicia