Theme: translation/localization
In Class Activities
Activity 1: Values
Looking at this list of values, it really is hard to pick one, and since I can only pick one, I’m picking optimism. When I think optimism, I think of being an optimistic person – a person who has a positive attitude towards life and always thinks on the brighter side. I find this important because I truly believe that positive thinking makes a difference in how life feels at the moment. When I find myself becoming negative or pessimistic, it just feels like the whole world is against me. It feels like I will reach my breaking point at any moment; however, when I’m in an optimistic mindset, it feels like there are endless possibilities out there, good vibes all around, and like nothing can stop me. [insert song lyric: nothing can stop me, I’m all the way up] When I’m optimistic, I tend to be a cheery, bubbly person, and the close people in my life can vouch for that. I laugh and smile a lot, and it influences my surroundings. Close friends have told me that I’m optimistic and a positive person, and when I hear that, it makes me smile. They value that part of me because it is one of the things I bring to the table. Positivity to me is not only just the immediate surroundings but can be the future as well. When I applied for internships, I tried to remain as optimistic as possible. Sure, when the rejections came in, it brought me down, and there was a point where I thought “What’s the point?” However, when I let go of those bad feelings and went back to a happy place, opportunities started coming my way. Optimism is a value I believe in and will continue to be my aspiration through life.
Activity 2: Ads (jewelry commercials) and Values
- PANDORA for Australia & New Zealand: Love, Family, Relationships, Generosity, Thoughtfulness, Warmth, Commitment
- US: Passion, Commitment, Love, Loyalty, Relationships, Attractiveness
- Poland: Passion, Commitment, Playfulness, Daring, Pursuit, Power
- India: Family, Relationships, Love, Collectivism, Respect, Inclusiveness
- Japan: Magical, Fairytale, Uniqueness, Lonely
- China: Passion for work, Dedication, Work ethic, Self-Control, Wisdom, Feminist, Empathy, Independence, Self-Appreciation, Confidence
- Italy: Independence, Strength, Dedication, Role expectation, On a mission, Individuality
At Home Exercise: Machine Translation
For the machine translation exercise, I’m choosing a poem that’s in Bahasa Indonesia. I just want to preface that my Indonesian translation is a little bit rusty.
The word for word translation by Google Translate is correct. However, the meaning is totally gone, and when you read the English translation, it doesn’t make any sense. The poem contains two metaphors that didn’t translate over from Bahasa Indonesia to English.
This poem is about love and how one wants to express that love. As I mentioned there are two metaphors in this poem; those metaphors demonstrate how one wants to express their love. Google Translate didn’t get that at all. Let me use the first verse of the poem as an example. The actual translation should be “I want to love you simply; with words that the wood did not have a chance to utter to the flame that turned it into ash.”
The translation can be improved if it took into consideration the meaning it’s trying to convey. It needs to not just look at each word but try to understand what is being conveyed. This is something that would be hard to do with a machine because you would have to teach a machine how to understand context, emotion, and empathy.
I don’t think an MT machine would ever be able to get a correct translation because it requires knowledge of context as well as an understanding about human emotion. As much programming as there is today, it will require complex AI that is currently not available and may never become available.
Quotes
David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (p. 159)
“The observation was generalized into a theory: insofar as the formal properties of different languages are different from one another, each of the world’s languages gives access to a different mental world.”
I don’t know much about the history of language or research into language, but this is intriguing to read that there is a theory regarding how languages can give insight to different cultures. As Bellos later adds in that paragraph sees the diversity of languages a treasure chest giving insight to different ways of thinking.
David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (p. 166)
“The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.”
Growing up, my parents always expressed how knowing more than one language can be useful especially when it comes to finding jobs. They valued multilingualism and enrolled my brothers and I into Mandarin school many times. Unfortunately, the Mandarin never stuck because we had no one to practice speaking Mandarin with. However, I am grateful that I can understand and speak Bahasa Indonesia.
David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (p. 169)
“What distinguishes translating up and translating down is this: translations toward the more general and more prestigious tongue are characteristically highly adaptive, erasing most of the traces of the text’s foreign origin; whereas translations down tend to leave a visible residue of the source, because in those circumstances foreignness itself carries prestige.”
This is an interesting way to describe translation from one language to another. I never thought of translation as one language having prestige over another, but Bellos’ explanation is clear and helps me understand this concept.
David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (p. 205)
“A truly dominant language that has a great army and a well-filled treasury behind it…is the one tongue from which you do not ever need to translate.”
Again, this is something I never really considered. Very interesting!
Aykin, Practical Issues and Guidelines for International Information Display (p. 23)
“The lack of a one-to-one relationship between countries, languages, and scripts means that designers must consider both language and country as potential determinants of design.”
This is something I haven’t considered because there are countries that have multiple languages or dialects of languages such as China and Indonesia, and these languages need to be taken into consideration when designing locally.
Exploration
Cultural Substitution
As I mentioned earlier, I am not super familiar with the history of language and translations. Bellos mentioned cultural substitution, so I wanted to learn more about it. I found a presentation that is a case study on cultural substitution from English to Thai.
https://prezi.com/y1smbucukvvg/an-analysis-of-cultural-substitution-in-english-to-thai-tran/
What was done was a comparison on translated texts between the original English text and the translated Thai text on various topics to find any instances of cultural substitution. One cultural substitution example was God in the English text was changed to The Lord Buddha in the Thai text. Types of cultural substitutions found in the translations were based on religion, people (names), objects, places, measurements and time, food, idioms, animals, and proverbs. It’s interesting that these substitutions were made to fit the Thai culture instead of just using literal translations.
Pivot Languages
I also never heard of pivot languages before. I never knew that this is a method used to translate which is using a “bridge” language to translate from the original language to a third language. I found this blog post questioning the pivot language approach.
http://blog.taus.net/is-the-pivot-language-approach-ever-a-good-option-part-i
Notes
Fun fact: Bellos gave an example of Ruyl using pisang (what Bellos says is Malay) as his substitute for fig tree for Sumatrans (located in western Indonesia). In Bahasa Indonesia (similar to Malay), pisang just means banana.
Who knew that a literary goal or a way to see success is to have your work if done in a minor language translated into English. It is fascinating that English is such a dominant language. When I went to Europe, it was easy to find English translations. Interestingly enough some German shops in heavy tourist areas had translations into Mandarin.
Professional Inspiration
Be mindful of different types of translations and when to use which!
Hannah's Process Book 