“

Progress always involves risk; you can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first base.

”

—Federick Wilcox

Amy Sommer

Project Manager

Amy joined the McElroy Translation Project Management Office on a contract basis in March of this year. Since jumping on board, she has enjoyed the opportunity to participate in managing into-foreign-language projects ranging from legal and technical jobs to software content, as well as the chance to work with the bevy of interesting people who make McElroy magic happen!

Amy’s interest in translation began at the University of Texas at Austin where she received BAs in both French and Government, with a minor in Spanish. Since moving to Austin in 2000, Amy has been active with a handful of organizations and nonprofits centered on immigrants’ rights. She has enjoyed offering volunteer translation services to various Austin-area nonprofit agencies and organizations, translating documents both into and from Spanish and French. During her time as an undergraduate, she was fortunate enough to study abroad in Lyon, France and Buenos Aires, Argentina, further reinforcing her passions for foreign language and cultures. While in Argentina, she conducted in-depth research on the economic crisis that country faced in 2000 and 2001, and became involved with a neighborhood assembly that sought to provide for the community’s basic needs in times of economic crisis.

After graduating from UT in 2004, she began work as an Employment Specialist at Caritas of Austin, facilitating job placement and job training for refugees from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. She later worked at the agency as a Refugee Resettlement Specialist, coordinating pre-arrival services and basic needs provision for refugee clients. She also served on the Translation & Interpretation Committee while at the agency. Her experiences working with refugees were invaluable and have formed the foundation of her goal to work long term in the human rights arena. Despite her strong connection to working with refugees in Austin, she was compelled to return to Argentina, and thus moved back to Buenos Aires in April of 2007. While there, she volunteered with a development NGO called RESPONDE. RESPONDE’s mission is to address the phenomenon of disappearing villages in the interior of Argentina; through various successful and innovative economic and social development projects, the organization promotes opportunities for Argentines to remain and thrive in their native villages, preserving the unique, cherished traditions and cultures that would otherwise be lost at the hand of widespread development challenges in the region. Also during this time, Amy took root as a project manager at a localization company in the neighborhood of San Telmo, Buenos Aires. While there, she discovered a unique venue in which to simultaneously apply her passions for language services, organization, communication, and project design and implementation. Though she reveled in her return to the captivating country of Argentina and found a strong connection with the localization arena there, it was time to return to the States to be near her family, and so she landed back in Austin in January of this year.

Though she harbors dual passions for working in the translation industry and working with refugees, the latter eventually won her over in her decision to seek a Master of Arts in International Affairs with a focus in Governance and Rights; in September of this year, she will begin the MA program at The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs, located in Greenwich Village, NYC. While there, she will pursue a regional focus in Africa, and plans eventually to work with a multilateral organization that fosters policy and action geared toward serving refugees and mitigating human rights crises. McElroy Translation was lucky to cross paths with Amy. Her gifts and talents have been an asset, and we wish her success in her noble endeavors.

Point/Counterpoint: Two Approaches to Project Management for the Translation/Localization Industry

Tina Wuelfing Cargile, PMP & Erin Vang, PMP

Tina Wuelfing Cargile and Erin Vang had never met each other when they began collaborating on a presentation for the Translation World Conference in Montreal in March of 2008. They had both submitted proposals on project management, and when they were asked to share a session, they decided to present a debate, because their original proposals took essentially opposite positions. While working out their game plan together, they found that their views both converged and diverged, and it soon became apparent that the challenge would not be how to fill the hour but how to pare down their many ideas to fit into the hour.

Both are seasoned project managers and PMPs (Project Management Professionals, certified by the Project Management Institute), both have music in their career histories, both rely on caffeine to get through days that are too long and too busy, and that's about all they have in common. Tina works in sales for a localization vendor, and Erin works in R&D for a software company. Their professional responsibilities could not be more different, yet both are considered localization project managers! They decided to compare their perspectives on many facets of localization project management in a series of point/counterpoint columns for Multilingual Computing.

Get both sides of this here.

Hindi

McElroy is continuing this series of interviews that highlight some of the characteristics of languages used in doing business globally. This month, we look at Hindi.

What are some pitfalls specific to Hindi to avoid that a client should be aware of when translating into this language?
When clients send documents over for translation, there are some translators who charge by the target word. Hindi expands to about 1.5 times the English in which case the client is stuck with having to pay much more than what was anticipated.

Clients should now make sure the latest Unicode fonts are used or at least fonts that are easy to install. Mangal [Unicode font] is available in all computers with Windows XP. So there is no need to install the font. Other commonly used fonts are Krutidev and Shusha. Some translators are still using very old fonts that do not lend themselves to web publishing, etc.

For the sake of reducing their costs, clients are now sending their jobs to those translators who are charging the least or to those in native countries. This sometimes works well, but many times clients who do not know the language are fooled by very low-quality translation work.

In those cases, clients should make sure the document is edited by an experienced translator. The integrity of many agencies/translators in India is questionable. I recently had to edit a document that was translated by someone in India, and I was shocked at the extremely poor quality of work. The client only wanted me to give it a cursory look as they did not want to spend any more money on the task, but that document had to be rewritten completely because of the extent of mistakes in every line.

What are characteristics of Hindi that are unique or different from English and/or other languages?
Hindi is written in the Devanagari script. Because the Devanagari script contains more letters than the English alphabet, sometimes it is necessary to use two or even three English letters to represent one Devanagari letter.

The first eleven letters are all vowels, and then there are forty consonants.

All vowels come in two versions in the script: a full vowel and vowel sign. The vowel sign is much simpler than the full vowel. It is used when a vowel follows a consonant. If a vowel follows another vowel, or if a words starts with a vowel, the full vowel is used. There are no pronunciation differences between full vowels and vowel signs, however.

Hindi uses the same punctuation marks as English, except for the full stop which is represented by a vertical line.

In Hindi, objects have genders. For instance, a book is feminine, a room is masculine, a table is feminine, and a house is masculine.

Hindi uses a different word order than English. The main differences are that verbs are placed at the end of the sentence (as in German) and that Hindi uses postpositions instead of prepositions. Postpositions are like prepositions except that they are written after the noun.

How do these characteristics make it important to use properly qualified, professional translators?
Since grammar is quite difficult with two genders, laypeople make mistakes in that regard.

There are many dialects of Hindi spoken in India. Unless the person translating is a professional, the dialect they use will be distinct, which will sound wrong to a Hindi-speaking person from another area. For instance, people in Mumbai speak with a different accent compared to people in Delhi, and so on.

Most translators know that names of companies, abbreviations, etc., are usually retained in English when translating documents. But a layperson will just go ahead and translate everything without considering the end reader and the accepted norms in translation.

Do you know examples where translation or localization mistakes have occurred with Hindi, such as problems with text expansion, date/time formats, counting errors, character encoding, etc., or mistakes with the translation itself? Perhaps you’ve been asked to review a translation that did not seem to be the work of a properly qualified, professional translator.
I have had many experiences when I have been sent documents to edit which were so obviously done by laypeople based on the sheer number of spelling errors.

Another problem is the way in which names have been translated. For instance, when a person in remote India is translating documents for North America, they translate names like Brookline to read as “brook–lean.” A name like Keefe will read “keefee.”

Sometimes companies get their documents translated by Hindi speakers living in the United States. The documents are translated in such pure language that even a Hindi speaker would need a dictionary to understand most of it. Only a qualified translator knows how to translate for different end users.

In another case, the English source document had given a name of a person and his address for sending in completed forms. The entire bit was translated into Hindi including the name and the full address. If a person just wrote out that name and address and sent it to the United States, how would it reach the person concerned? 

Relate an example or two of times you found a website page or form difficult to use because it was poorly localized. How might a business lose money, prestige, or incur legal risk due to this bad translation?
I was once asked to test a Hindi survey online. Many of the Hindi characters were displaying as junk characters and the button that read as “back” would go forward, and so on. It had to be completely redone. I spent a considerable amount of time taking screen shots of each page and preparing a corresponding Word document explaining what needed to be done.

Supposing this site had been live, the company would definitely have gotten a bad name for having such a faulty survey showing them to be unconcerned about quality.

In India, the date is written in the dd/mm/yyyy format as opposed to the mm/dd/yyyy format followed in the United States. I have seen cases where a lot of confusion was caused because the translator had put the date in the Indian format with June 11, 1973 written as 11/6/1973.

Lack of proper editing before turning in translations can cause a lot of damage. I have seen instances where translators would translate 1 million dollars as 1 million rupees. That is only 25,000 dollars. The meaning changes so quickly when a mistake in translation occurs.

If possible, provide one example of a particular phrase or concept that only a properly qualified, professional translator would be able to correctly communicate.
The text below is a sentence that I translated some time back, and I feel that a layperson would not be effectively able to translate it in a clear and precise manner. There are many such examples of text that a layperson might translate in a very roundabout manner that would be confusing to the end reader.

“Having read and understood the foregoing, I voluntarily agree to and consent for The Gallup Organization to perform the processing activities described above for the purposes of the Pioneer India Employee Engagement Survey, 2007, and I consent to my data being processed in the United States.” 

Report from Localization World in Berlin

Bob Donaldson, Vice President Strategy

I recently had the pleasure of representing McElroy Translation at Localization World 2008 in Berlin. “LocWorld” is the leading conference for localization and translation professionals and is held twice annually, once in Europe and once in North America. This is the second year in a row that the European conference was in Berlin, and it was another success. This year’s theme was “Innovating Localization Business Models,” and I presented a case study based on our localization of the TeamMate™ suite for PricewaterhouseCoopers. We helped them transition to a managed professional approach to localization from an ad hoc internal approach, thus resulting in more predictable release dates, better cost control and more consistent use of terminology. (Contact us directly if you would like more details on our innovative approach to this type of business problem.)

One great aspect of LocWorld is the ample opportunity for networking. I particularly enjoyed meeting Serge Gladkoff of Logrus International (Russia) at the opening reception and learning a little about their alliances. I had some very positive discussions with Mark Tapling (Language Weaver), Pierre Blais (MultiCorpora), Kirti Vashee (Asia Online), Robinson Kelly (Clay Tablet Technologies), and Istvan Lengyel (Kilgray), and had the opportunity to become reacquainted with friends and colleagues too numerous to mention by name. It is fortunate indeed that in an industry where “everyone knows everyone,” so many of the “regulars” at a conference like this are truly interesting people.

I also participated in my first GALA membership meeting. I gained a new appreciation for the hard (and often thankless) work that GALA board members put in on behalf of the association.

The content of the conference was indeed focused on innovation. The exhibit floor had a strong technology flavor, with “independence” (in light of the SDL/Idiom merger) looming large. Several of the technology offerings have been greatly improved over the past year. Technology was also prominent in the presentation tracks, which included “Translation Automation” and “Localization Process.” A panel discussion on “Content Disruption” discussed the impact of technology-driven trends such as social networking sites, blogs, and user-generated video. Perhaps the most thought-provoking presentation of the conference, however, was the keynote by Idris Mootee (CEO of Idea Couture). The author of several books on business strategy, he issued a strong call for innovation in the localization industry, citing “cognitive inertia” as the most common barrier to innovation (in any industry). In his view, leaders too often rely so heavily on “what we have always done” that they fail to notice disruptive change in the external environments until it overwhelms them. His presentation seemed to me to sum up the opportunity and challenges facing both language services clients and vendors alike. Meanwhile, Don De Palma of Common Sense Advisory seemed to stretch the concept of innovation to new lengths. Not content to limit his comments to localization or even globalization, he discussed instead the “intergalactic impact of language.”

Here at McElroy Translation, we have embraced these industry challenges and begun to offer our customers creative “language problem solving” services to help them sort through options and maximize the value of their investments in language services. We are also investing in technology to streamline operations and have recently announced technology partnerships with Asia Online and Clay Tablet. This conference reinforced the importance of having a technology strategy and the steps we have taken toward that thus far.