Five useful dictionary tricks

You’ve probably ditched your paper dictionary, but do you know how to use OS X’s built-in one? This week’s video shows you how.

Transcript

Whether you need to know what a word means or just how to spell it, the days of leafing through hefty paper dictionaries are gone. But few Mac users really know how to make the most of OS X’s built-in Dictionary app. Today I’ll show you five tricks for doing just that.

1. Use pop-up definitions

A useful, and chronically underused, OS X feature is systemwide pop-up definitions. In most Mac applications—including Safari, Mail, Pages, TextEdit, Twitter, you name it—just position your cursor over the word you want to define and press Command-Control-D. A pop-up window appears containing the definition, synonyms, and any relevant Wikipedia entry.

Click the header for Dictionary, Thesaurus, Apple, or Wikipedia to open Dictionary to the relevant page.

2. Use contextual menus

Say you’ve forgotten the Command-Control-D shortcut already. Are you out of luck? Of course not. In most applications, you can instead select a word and Control-click (or right-click). A contextual menu appears. Select Look Up in Dictionary (or Look Up) and the definition appears.

See: MAC World

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Numbers of children speaking Welsh more than double those of working age or pensioners

Source: Wales Online

The Welsh Government said today the figures were “encouraging”, but campaign organisation Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg said the government remained a “barrier” to progress. Despite the larger number of Welsh-speaking children, the figures showed there is a clear lag between teenage boys learning Welsh and girls.

See: Wales online

Should there be room for translation errors?

Local translators in a recent meeting refuted the harsh criticism directed at some of their colleagues for their blunders, which have created quite a stir among local readers and undermined their trust in translators, by stressing that it’s impossible to produce flawless translated versions, as translating is a process in which translators contemplate and convey the original author’ s ideas through their own lens.

The latest blunders by reputable translators include “bo mat vi ung thu tu cung” (Dad died from uterus cancer) in Cao Viet Dung’s translated version of the “Les Particules élémentaires” (The Elementary Particles), a novel by French author Michel Houellebecq.

Up to 264 errors of various types and levels of seriousness were also detected in Dung’s translation of “L’Ignorance” (The Ignorance) by Milan Kundera. Here Dung, who studied his postgraduate course in France, translated “philtre” (love-potion) into “cai phin” (coffee filter).

Dung’s translation of “La Carte et le Territoire” (The Map and the Territory) by Michel Houellebecq was also reclaimed early last year due to prevalent translation errors.

He ‘earned’ last year’s “Trai Coc Xanh” (Green Amberella), a ‘prize’ given away by Tuoi Tre Cuoi for outrageous art works and events.

Similarly, Tran Tien Cao Dang’s translation of “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien also fell into ‘translation traps’ numerous times. An example is his translation of “Dr. Scholl foot powder” (which means the foot powder branded Dr. Scholl) into “Dr. Scholl’s foot powder”.

See: tuoitrenews

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Italian political slang dictionary

Source: The Telegraph

Slang: What Aussies call other Aussies

Source: Australian Geographic

It was inevitable that the first British settlers in Australia developed a new vocabulary to describe their alien surroundings, given that everything in Australia was so different from all they had known.

Prison slang crept into general use, indigenous language was incorporated, and new words coined – much to the alarm of the anglophile establishment.

The English-born ‘Sterlings’ looked down their noses at the Australian-born folk. They called them ‘Cornstalks’, because the new generation were taller than their forebears. The name stuck, and so did the custom of giving regional names to our fellow Aussies.

We ‘Sandgropers’, or Western Australians, once used the term ‘Wise Men from the East’ in reference to visitors from the other side – especially the ones who enjoyed telling us how we could improve.

The names for Victorians have a bit of a sting to them: Victoria was called the Cabbage Patch because of its small size, hence ‘Cabbage Patchers’ hailed from the garden state. ‘Gum Sucker’ was formerly applied to all colonials for their pastime of sucking the sweet gum from some species of wattle. How it came to refer solely to Victorians is a mystery.

Tasmanians, too, suffered prejudice, and ‘Taswegian’ was once used almost derisively to describe the mob who in kinder moments were called ‘Apple Islanders’. Those Taswegians were once also known as ‘Barracoutas’, after the creature that supported fishing families and was a staple during the starvation years. The name is rarely heard now, and the ’couta, too, have almost vanished.

See: Australian Geographic

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Web marketing for translators (part two)

Source: Translator T.O.

Daniel Freedman, web strategist for LinguaLinx, concludes his two part series by discussing how translators can best use the Web to establish themselves as professionals who solve business problems.

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In the first part of this series, I provoked some lively discussion with the provocative suggestion that translators should reject much of the conventional wisdom about web marketing.

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The advice was to de-emphasize Facebook, Twitter and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). My contention was that if you are a translator, your attention should be focused instead on just two key things:

1. Establishing yourself as a translation expert
2. Making sure you have a website that proves your expert status

More.

See: Translator T.O.

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The Interpreter: Your Best Company when Internationalising

Source: Wired into Words

Regarding our last post, Internationalisation: Taking Action, today we will focus on the spoken side of the language requirements that may come up during this process, that is, interpreting.

Thanks to the interpreter’s work, the hard task of internationalising a company in a non-English speaking country may be smoother, as we are guaranteed a fluid communication despite not having a good command of the target country’s language. We all know about the importance of communication in every field of life, even more in a marketing field where exportation is desired.

Apart from all the written documentation that will need translation during this process, interpreting, i.e. spoken translation, plays a significant role in spoken communications carried out during the internationalisation process. We can’t forget that, thanks to the Internet revolution, many communications could be carried out via e-mail; however, there will always be topics and situations that would require a human presence, whether it is by phone, by videoconference or a physical presence in the country we wish to do business.

We must take into account then, that the interpreter will appear after studying whether the project is viable or not, therefore, when entering a foreign market. More.

See: Wired into Words

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German dialect in Texas is one of a kind, and dying out

Source: BBC

The first German settlers arrived in Texas over 150 years ago and successfully passed on their native language throughout the generations – until now.

German was the main language used in schools, churches and businesses around the hill country between Austin and San Antonio. But two world wars and the resulting drop in the standing of German meant that the fifth and sixth generation of immigrants did not pass it on to their children.

Still the biggest ancestry group in the US, according to Census data, a large majority of German-Americans never learned the language of their ancestors.

Hans Boas, a linguistic and German professor at the University of Texas, has made it his mission to record as many speakers of German in the Lone Star State as he can before the last generation of Texas Germans passes away.

Mr Boas has recorded 800 hours of interviews with over 400 German descendants in Texas and archived them at the Texas German Dialect Project. He says the dialect, created from various regional German origins and a mix of English, is one of a kind. More.

See: BBC

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What’s the best way to teach languages?

Source: The Guardian

How do students best pick up languages? Martin Williams talks to academics, teachers and multi-lingual speakers to find out about the science of learning a language

a report by the British Academy this year found there was a growing deficit in foreign language skills. Increasingly, children are choosing not to study languages beyond the compulsory stage – and only 9% of pupils who take French GCSE progress with it to A-level.

“We’re failing to inspire people,” says Alex. “I had a mix of good and bad teachers – the most inspirational ones just focused on giving you the confidence to speak. Then I’d pursue it outside the classroom: I would watch films, find out new words and read things.”

Language pedagogy has come a long way since the days when repetitive grammar-translation methods were regarded as the only way to learn. Today, task-based approaches are widespread in British schools, emphasising communication and the practical uses of language.

For Christelle Bernard, a French and Spanish teacher at St Gemma’s High School in Belfast, these methods of teaching allow her to cast aside the textbook whenever she can. “You need a little bit of grammar, but my approach is much more topic based with as little grammar as possible,” she explains.

Her task-based teaching embraces ideas which range from lessons using computers, to audio-visual and kinesthetic learning. She explains: “For instance, if I’m teaching pets, I’ll bring in soft toys to use in the lessons.” More.

See: The Guardian

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Preserving Arabic is national, moral duty: Mohammed

Source: Khaleej Times

There is an urgent need to develop modern educational tools for Arabic language by leveraging advanced technologies and communication methods that suit the younger generations and their interests. This was affirmed in a report compiled by the Committee for Modernising Arabic Teaching submitted to His Highness Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, on Monday.

On receiving the report entitled Arabic for Life, Shaikh Mohammed stressed that Arabic is the “language of the life we live, it reflects us in various situations, it is not an extinct part of history that does not fit the present”.

He affirmed that conservation of Arabic is a national, religious and moral imperative which is not confined to one country, but extends to all Arab and Islamic nations.

See: Khaleej Times

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LanguageTwin: a new way for language students to practice what they’ve learned

Source: Thech Crunch

Learning a language is never easy. One thing that’s usually missing in the way students learn a new language is the ability to use their new skills while talking to a native speaker. LanguageTwin, a startup I met at the Willamette Angel Conference in Corvallis, Ore., last week, aims to do just that. The service brings together language learners for peer-to-peer interactions to give students the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned in the classroom while having a conversation or acting out real-life scenarios.

It’s worth noting that this is not a freemium service. LanguageTwin only plans to work with colleges and K-12 schools right now and will charge these schools a $25-$35 fee per term (or a slightly discounted price per year). The idea here is that the service will pair students from two different countries and then allow them to talk to each other over video chat. Right now, the team is focusing on students who want to learn Spanish (with French, German, Mandarin and other languages on the roadmap) and has run a number of tests with 5,000 students from over 100 universities in the U.S., Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Panama, Chile, Costa Rica and a number of other countries.

As the name implies, the original idea behind LanguageTwin was to assign a “twin” to every student in the system. Say you are learning Spanish. LanguageTwin would set you up with a student in a Spanish-speaking country who is trying to learn English. The problem with this, as the founders told me, is that it’s not easy to coordinate the schedules of two students living in different parts of the world, and students shouldn’t be penalized if their twin decides to forget about a meeting or turns out to be flaky. The system the team now uses is more flexible than the original scheme and allows users to find new ‘twins’ every time they use the system. More.

See: Thech Crunch

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The Blagger’s Guide To: Children’s books in translation

Source: The Independent

Once upon a time, two bookish parents – one German-American and one French – went looking for the books that they had loved when they were little, in order to read them to their own children. But no English translations existed, so Adam Freudenheim and Stephanie Seegmuller set up a new imprint and published the books themselves. The result is Pushkin Children’s Books.

The new imprint has already published The Story of the Blue Planet by Andri Snaer Magnason, an eco-fable with a Roald Dahl-ish dark twist. The book is set on a happy blue planet that has no grown-ups on it, until one arrives on a rocket ship promising to make life much more fun “with flying powder and coated skin so that no one ever has to bathe again”. The book won the inaugural Icelandic Literary Prize, has been published in 12 languages, was turned into a play, and has sold 100,000 copies in Iceland alone. The next book, to be published on 4 June, will be Oksa Pollock by Anne Plichota, about a 13-year-old girl with magical powers. It is the first of a series of five books, already translated into 26 languages and dubbed, inevitably, “the French Harry Potter”, but this is the first time it has been published in English. The film rights have just been acquired by the production team behind Twilight, so it’s coming soon to a 12-year-old near you. Pushkin Children’s Books will also publish Kim Fupz Aakeson and Niels Bo Bojesen’s adventures of Vitello, a mischievous little Danish boy, which are described as “subtly subversive”.

See: The Independent

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Apply now for Glendon’s online Master of Conference Interpreting

Source: The Interpreter Diaries

Last week, I reminded readers that the clock was ticking for submitting applications to the Master’s programs in conference interpreting scheduled to start in the fall. The deadline for applications to the MIC at the University of La Laguna is today, so if you haven’t submitted your paperwork by now, you’re probably too late.

However, it’s not too late to apply to the other training program that is near and dear to my heart: the Master of Conference Interpreting (MCI) at York University (Glendon College) in Toronto. They’ll be taking applications until June 5^th, so you have still some time to think about whether your future lies at Glendon.

The first thing any prospective candidate needs to know about the MCI at Glendon is that the first year is given entirely online, which means that you don’t have to move to Toronto to study. You can follow all the Year One courses from the comfort of your own home, wherever that may be in the world. So if you are interested in becoming an interpreter but are not in the position to move to pursue your studies, this may be the training course for you. Continue reading →

See: The Interpreter Diaries

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Regaining control of your e-mail: filtering

Source: Thoughts On Translation

Time management is such a huge and subjective topic that I’m not sure I can write just one blog post about it. So I thought I would break the idea down into specific tips that might be easier to digest. Here’s one: take back control of your e-mail by mercilessly unsubscribing and filtering, so that you (try to) limit your inbox to messages that you need to read as soon as you receive them.

All of us receive countless notification e-mails every day: someone added you as a LinkedIn contact; someone mentioned you on Twitter; Groupon has a great offer for you; someone in your neighborhood needs a dog sitter. You may not want to stop receiving these e-mails entirely, but you need to stop them from interrupting your actual work. So, do this: the next time you read an e-mail and delete it without taking any further action, make a change. If you’re no longer interested in receiving that type of e-mail at all, unsubscribe. If you want to keep receiving it but you don’t need to read it right away, create a filter. I use the Gmail interface to read my domain name e-mail, and I make heavy use of the “Bypass the inbox” filtering feature. So let’s say that I signed up for an e-newsletter from a potential client because I want to learn more about their business. The first time I receive an e-mail from them:

-I click on the dropdown arrow on the right side of the message window, next to the Reply arrow
-Then I select “Filter messages like this”
-I enter the aspect that I want to filter on (sender, subject line, etc.), then click “Create filter with this search”
-Then I select or create a folder for those e-mails to go to; for example “Marketing research”
-Then, most importantly, I tick the “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” box.  […]

See: Thoughts On Translation

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I think I should charge more. How to raise my rates?

Source: Want Words TV

In this short video Marta Stelmaszak gives a few tips on how to raise your rates.

See: Want Words TV

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New study on the Irish experience of terminology for the European Union

Source: TermCoord

A new study, Terminology for the European Union. The Irish Experience: The GA IATE Project, compiled by Fiontar, DCU and published by Cló Iar-Chonnacht, is now available to the public. This bi-lingual (Irish and English) publication offers a comprehensive overview of the work of terminology accomplished through the GA IATE Project.

This initiative was established in 2007 by the Irish government, in collaboration with Fiontar, the Department of Arts, Heritage and Gaeltacht and the European Institutions, following the accession of Irish as an official EU language. Continue reading →

See: TermCoord

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Ten things to try before quitting freelancing

Life can be hard and tempt us to quit freelancing for a more secure job.

But in some cases, we only need to re-think our job under a different perpective while considering new strategies, ideas and options to market oursleves better (or understand how to improve our business skills). Here are ten things we could try.

1-The no-website website

2-Ask an entrepreneur

3-Get a makeover

4-Attend an industry event

5-Volunteer

6-Attend a copywriting course

7-Create a video blog

8-Co-work

9-Take care of your followers and clients

10-Organize a party

See: Sara Colombo

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Automated Translation (part IV and last)

Source: Comleon

I was fortunate enough to attend a demonstration of Portage, the statistical automatic translation project led by the National Research Council of Canada, and I was genuinely surprised by what I saw. Even if the translations weren’t directly publishable, they were a long way from the pitiful results arrived at a few years ago.

However, this initiative is not quite representative of what an automatic translation program can do, since it benefitted from highly favourable conditions.

In the previous post, we examined the criteria for producing a high-quality automated translation. Let’s now look at how things work in less ideal situations.

Volume and matching of available references (corpus)
To achieve its outstanding results, the Portage development team had access to over 100 million words from debates (English-French) of the Parliament of Canada. To give you an idea of the volume of text that this represents, imagine a 1,600-metre high (six storey) pile of paperbacks! This much text would require 200 years of work by an experienced translator, without a single vacation…

It is practically impossible to have this kind of volume in a specialized field. Even the Government of Canada, the leading user of translations in Canada, rarely has such a high quantity of text in a specific sector.

Quality of the corpus
Parliamentary debates in Canada are translated by hand-picked translators who go through an exceptional revision process. Their translations are submitted to very thorough and meticulous review. Unfortunately, in other situations, it’s a whole other story. More.

See: Comleon

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Translation should introduce Iranian works to world

Source: IBNA

During the session on Reverse Translation held on Thursday May 9 at the main hall of the House of Literati at TIBF, Dr Zarei Najafdari said the translation movement has been inaugurated for years; translation helps us get in touch with the world of science. Translation was supposed to be a two-sided path for familiarizing others with our literature, but it stopped on one side and gradually was accepted as a one-way translation to Persian.

He added: “Our knowledge especially in human sciences is much more developed and we have to introduce it to the world through translation. Last year the necessity for reverse translation was proposed and some works were presented to Frankfurt and Italian book fairs. Reverse translations should focus on texts that have something new to offer and should also be tangible for target audiences.”

The next speaker Samiei Guilani began his speech by criticizing the term ‘reverse translation’ as it connotes that Persian language has been a target language. We should find a better term for it and also determine our goals and expectations, he added. More.

See: IBNA

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Ten great science fiction Spanish translators (source in Spanish)

This article lists and acknowledges the work of ten great science fiction translators into Spanish.

1. Luis Domènech
2. Matilde Horne
3. Rafael Marín Trechera
4. Pedro Jorge Romero
5. Marcial Souto
6. Cristina Macía
7. Domingo Santos
8. José María Faraldo
9. Rubén Masera
10. Manuel Figueroa

See: Blog de Jack Moreno

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