Now linguistic diversity can be found in translation.

We live in a global village, and its name is Babel.

As information and communication technologies unite the world into a global village, so the diversity of our global linguistic landscape creates new barriers.

The smaller the world becomes the larger the language barrier looms.

Europe is an excellent example in microcosm. Political and social cooperation draw the diverse peoples of Europe ever-closer together, but language often separates them. Fully one half of the European population is incapable of conversing in a second language.

The issue is even starker on the World Wide Web, where English has become the lingua franca. But that status quo is under threat as China and India ramp up their scientific and engineering expertise and simultaneously produce more and more essential information in their native languages. How can we help people communicate now, and how can we overcome the emerging language barriers of the future?

Smart answers

The SMART project believes it has the answer. SMART stands for Statistical Multilingual Analysis for Retrieval and Translation, and the project sought to make statistical methods a viable alternative to current paradigms. In just three years the project has made the technology a robust alternative.

Machine translation is not new. In fact it is one of the oldest problems in computer science. “It was one of the first problems tackled, with work starting in the 1950s,” notes Nicola Cancedda, researcher with Xerox and coordinator of the SMART project.

“Trained bilingual linguists would encode the rules of given languages into a computer program, and the software would use these rules to offer a best-guess at a particular translation.”

Statistical machine translation is not new either. It began in the early 1990s and lets a machine ‘learn’ translation between two languages by looking at thousands of real translations. SMART took that work further by producing robust technology that can match the state of the art in traditional methods. But their platform has not yet had the ‘fine-tuning’ applied to traditional techniques, and so SMART has opened the way to a very promising research path in statistical machine translation.

Inspirational in a network

Their work was inspired in large part by the efforts of the Pascal Network of Excellence (NoE), which sought to develop cooperative ties among Europe’s leading players in pattern analysis, statistical modelling and computational learning.

“Seven out of our ten partners come from the PASCAL NoE,” reveals Cancedda, “And the impetus for the SMART project came from PASCAL’s work. We sought to develop more effective statistical learning methods, apply them to machine translation, and then prove the platform through rigorously measured case studies.”

Those case studies focused on computer-aided translation (CAT) and cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). Computer-aided translation is used by professional translators, with the software suggesting possible translations for individual sentences in the target language.

“In our case study, the SMART platform increased words per hour by 5 to 40 percent. Most interestingly, the greatest improvement was seen among the slowest translators,” stresses Cancedda.

Enormous boost

This result alone represents an enormous boost in productivity and justifies the project’s work. But SMART went much, much further.

While CAT might have the largest commercial potential, the project’s work on CLIR will probably have the widest societal impact. CLIR takes place where people try to acquire information from a foreign language document. In the SMART case study, Slovene students, with varying competence in French, sought to extract information from the French Wikipedia.

In the project’s subsequent tests, students using SMART’s CLIR system could answer a significantly higher number of questions accurately than those students using currently available tools.

Another allied work effort saw SMART develop confidence estimation to accompany the statistical machine translation. The confidence estimate indicates the likely appropriateness of the translation.

“This is an essential element,” emphasises Cancedda, “Because software providing inaccurate translations is worse than no translation. A translator is better off working alone with his or her dictionary than reading and correcting inaccurate suggestions.”

What makes this work even more valuable is that it could be applied to existing software to make that software even more accurate. Confidence estimation was also an important, and exciting, technical challenge in itself. How do you teach a machine to assess itself?

Back to statistical methods

Again, statistical methods are applied, and the relevance and power of SMART’s confidence estimation varies enormously between different texts. The questions of context and specialist knowledge play a huge role.

Although these are early days in the technology’s development, it can already achieve up to 90 percent estimated confidence in some cases – nine out of ten machine translated sentences are relevant.

In any case, SMART also advanced new research to tackle the problem of context. “Imagine you have a million sentences on one topic, say software. In this case, you can easily use statistical machine learning to create a statistical machine translation software for that topic,” argues Cancedda.

But what if you only have several thousand sentences on another topic, for example airport computer security systems? “In this case, it is difficult to do statistical machine learning. You do not have a sufficiently large sample,” says Cancedda.

“So we developed a tool that can learn the bulk of its translation from one set of documents, and then be specialised to a particular topic with another, much smaller, set of documents. It is not perfect yet but early work shows that this approach could be very promising.”

Real-time learning

And finally, SMART’s last contribution to statistical machine translation is perhaps the most valuable, particularly in cases where only a small set of initial translations exists. SMART developed real-time learning tools that can ‘teach’ software new terms and translations.

“Normally, software is developed and that is the way it will stay for months or years. We have developed tools where the software learns all the time, so it becomes much, much better over time, and so much more valuable,” states Cancedda.

It is a packet of results for a three-year project with just a €3.5 million budget, €2.3 of it from the EU, but it illustrates the kind of focused research that can emerge from a Network of Excellence.

Now, elements of the SMART software will begin appearing in commercial products, notably those supplied by SMART partners Xerox and Amebis. Two open source machine translation systems developed in the STREP – the Sinuhe and the Max-Margin Based Translation (MMBT) systems – were released to the research community and are available for download from the project website.

In all, it means that our global village will be found, rather than lost, in translation.

The SMART (STREP) project received funding from the ICT strand of the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme for research.

“GALA 2009: The Language of Business. The Business of Language.” is our association’s first step towards creating a new “must do” industry-wide event. GALA is moving to emulate that which works well for the vast majority of successful trade associations. It is our goal to create an umbrella event that invites all segments of our industry into “the tent” so that we can learn and share and network with one another.

Our industry must move away from the current glut of far too many small overlapping and often repetitive meetings. Great meetings offer a broad palette of workshops, education, services and networking opportunities. Great meetings include the large and small players in the industry, and by their nature they bring larger and more diverse audiences to all of those partners in the industry.

It is ironic that our first step simply creates another meeting in an already overcrowded field; some observers have focused on that apparent contradiction. The simple truth is that you cannot get to step two without taking step one. I expect the GALA annual meeting will attract thousands of attendees several years down the road but you don’t just snap your fingers and put on a great event. You build it.

It is important to remember that this “new” event is the result of a long and involved survey and planning process on the part of GALA’s membership that came together in a 2007 document called the 2010 Plan. That document outlined core actions that our member companies determined were necessary for our association and our industry to grow. At the base of that plan is a belief that “a rising tide raises all ships” along with a desire from our membership to develop and manage our own industry events. We all know that we are still a low-visibility industry. We know that many thousands of potential end users would benefit from our products and services but they don’t know who we are or what we do. Great meetings not only allow us to communicate with each other, they allow us to tell our story to the world.

Our program committee of Aki Ito, Kim Harris, Hans Fenstermacher and Kevin Fountoukidis is focused solely on developing great workshops for this event. Our board and program committee are currently reviewing a remarkable group of potential keynote speakers. We recognize that modern associations address the needs of the entire person and we have made this meeting both user friendly and family friendly. It is a good thing for great meetings to also be fun. It is smart to be family friendly. And it is smart to be in a beautiful location that encourages networking and communication.

We are building something new here and I invite all of you to join us. I want you to be a participant but I hope you will also be an architect as you contribute your ideas as to how we will make GALA 2010 better, bigger and even more valuable to you individually. I hope to see you in Cancun.

Please visit our event Web site at www.language-of-business.org.

Best regards,

James F. Hollan III, CAE
Executive Director
Globalization and Localization Association

GALA is pleased to announce the dates for its first annual conference and exhibition.

GALA 2009: The language of business. The business of language.
14 – 16 September 2009
J. W. Marriott
Cancun, Mexico

We hope that you and your colleagues will plan to join us for GALA’s first major event.

Location: Cancun, Mexico
More Information: www.language-of-business.org

The new center is part of IBM’s strategy to set up similar centers in Europe and Asia that will offer document translation in multiple languages, an IBM spokeswoman said on Monday.

Besides having staff translate documents, such as e-mail messages, Web pages, and contracts, the center in Pune will also use technology developed by IBM’s research lab in India, and tools available in the market, to automate some of this translation work, she added.

The center will be part of IBM’s fourth delivery center for application services and consulting in Pune, inaugurated Monday. The new Pune center is spread over 180,000 square feet and will house close to 2,000 employees once fully staffed, IBM said.

IBM has been expanding fast in India, and at the end of December it had 73,000 staff in the country.

The IMTT Conference has become the most innovative training event in Latin America, offering the opportunity to share knowledge, network, and learn in an environment of collaboration.

Participate actively in our next meeting and join the industry experts for an enriching debate and take advantage of the best business and networking opportunities. This is your chance to get to know your future clients and vendors, promote your company, reinforce sales and increase your business. Get involved.

http://www.imtt.com.ar

He was angry.

Frustrated at the lack of coverage and the poor way critics treated many writers, O’Brien began the Review of Contemporary Fiction as a way to give visibility to lesser known writers. Later on he began the Dalkey Archive Press, a nonprofit publishing house that publishes and promotes literature from around the world.

“This all began because I wanted to vent. The problem with that, though, is sometimes, when you start venting, it becomes successful and then you become a part of the mainstream that you were protesting against,” he said. “So we have to constantly reinvent ourselves to keep our counter-culture roots.”

O’Brien, who travels the world looking for literary masterpieces to translate into English, was the speaker for the American Book Review reading series on Thursday at the University of Houston-Victoria. Although fighting a cold and suffering from jet lag from a Tokyo flight, O’Brien kept the audience captivated by discussing the changing face of the publishing world both here and abroad.

One of the biggest changes in publishing happened in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he said. American writers took precedence over foreign writers by critics and the major publishing houses began to change as the founders stepped down and corporations took over.

“Literature that they used to publish began to disappear, including drama, poetry, translations and experimental fiction,” O’Brien said. “This allowed small presses to publish authors they never thought they would, which was a great thing.”

But even with small presses picking up the slack, translated books only make up about 2.5 percent of the 250,000 books published each year in the U.S.

“In the last 30 years, the U.S. has isolated itself from world literature and that has political consequences,” he said. “Our position on art has become our political position. We got in a position where we just don’t know what the rest of the world is writing. And it’s not on the part of the readers, but it’s the media, publishers and book stores.”

The assumption by those institutions is that the American people are not interested in reading literature that has been translated from another language.

“There’s a whole new generation of French writers that are doing wonderful things but those books will probably never see the light of day in the U.S.,” he added.

With major publishing houses worried about the future of the industry as new technology changes how people read, translated books will be the first on the chopping block. Luckily, there is hope.

“It’s terrifying but it does leave room for small publishers to do wonderful things,” he said. “It’s an interesting time for the publishing world right now.”

With 14 federal marshals lining the courtroom, Eastern District of New York Judge John Gleeson warned the audience against emotional outbursts, but the verdict was met with near silence. With its pro se defendant, sensational charges and furtive peeks behind the closed doors of the secretive Satmar society, United States v. Weingarten has transfixed the Brooklyn legal community.

Following the announcement of the verdict, Weingarten, who appeared pro se, told the court, “As I said to the judge in the beginning, I need adjournment because I was unprepared and I was denied that.” Gleeson responded, “You have your objection, you have my ruling. I’ll see you [for sentencing] on April 3.”

The victim, surrounded by five marshals, sat in the front left aisle; six of Weingarten’s other seven children, who claim their father is innocent, sat in the front right. Afterwards, the victim compared being cross-examined by her father to “being molested again.”

Asked why she came to hear the verdict announced, she said, “Because I’ve been waiting my whole life for this, since I was 10 years old.” The other six children, who accuse their mother and the victim of molesting them, said their father has already selected an attorney who will begin representing him prior to sentencing, though they declined to name the attorney.

Weingarten faces up to 10 years on each count, which can run consecutively at the court’s discretion, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

WEINGARTEN’S DEFENSE

Weingarten had appeared in court defending himself against the charges for the past two weeks. In his closing arguments Tuesday, Weingarten focused on the inconsistencies in the government’s case.

After Weingarten’s daughter testified in graphic detail of years of molestation and sodomy at her father’s hands, and his ex-wife told the jury about the beatings that kept both her and her daughter from reporting the abuse, Weingarten declined to take the stand.

Instead, in Tuesday’s meandering and often indecipherable closings, he attempted to sow doubt by pointing out numerous minute contradictions in the testimony against him — the time of day a fight took place, the side of the bed the daughter slept in, whether she massaged his stomach before or after he allegedly forced her hand down his pants.

“Those such of things aren’t small and the slightest things,” Weingarten said in thickly accented English during his closing. “If two things contradict each other, we have no justice. It shows it’s a setup.

“Everything is contradicted, from top to bottom, from one place to another place.” Weingarten told the jury. “Nothing is true.”

Since the trial began, Eastern District of New York Judge John Gleeson’s courtroom has been filled to capacity with prosecutors, Chasidic Jews, reporters and off-duty courthouse personnel. U.S. Attorney Benton J. Campbell watched Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrea Goldbarg’s opening arguments. Judge Nicholas Garaufis watched her examine witnesses. Many of the court reporters and Yiddish translators assigned to the case, when not on duty, joined the audience. When asked if she was still on duty, one translator said she was merely “kibbitzing.”

JUDICIAL BALANCING ACT

Weingarten’s case landed in federal court because of the victim’s claims that her father transported her back and forth between New York, Israel and Belgium to facilitate the sexual abuse.

From the beginning, the case had tested Gleeson’s ability to balance the defendant’s right to a fair trial with a judge’s duty to follow the basic rules of evidence and trial practice.

With a pro se defendant, “Your choice is either to enforce [the rules], and make it really hard for this person to function without objection, or not enforce them and give them a kind of benefit,” said Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia Law School professor of criminal procedure.

That difficult balancing act has contributed to a “prevailing theme in the Supreme Court in recent decades of, yes, there is this right, and yes, it will be protected, but we’re not real happy with it,” Richman added. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled, for example, that judges may impose counsel at trial or deny pro se representation on appeal.

In defending his case, Weingarten — who has been identified in the press as a rabbi, though members of the Chasidic community confirmed that he is a “rebbe,” the Yiddish word for teacher — demonstrated why courts may resist pro se defendants.

At the outset, Gleeson repeatedly encouraged Weingarten to accept representation, advising him that an attorney would stand a much better chance of gaining an acquittal. Following Weingarten’s steadfast refusal, Gleeson spent the next two weeks trying to curtail the defendant’s digressions, his departures from the rules of evidence, his occasional chastising of witnesses and his frequent interruptions of the judge himself.

Gleeson, who is known for keeping attorneys on a short leash, employed a strategy of strong language imparted in soft tones.

“Stop interrupting me” and “move on, move on” delivered in a measured voice were the judge’s mantras throughout the case.

Gleeson might have seemed a tough draw for Weingarten. The judge worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York’s Eastern District, the same office prosecuting this case, for nearly a decade, ultimately as the chief of the criminal division, before joining the bench in 1994. He also has two daughters of his own.

As one veteran defense attorney predicted early in the trial, “Gleeson’s biggest challenge will be to not lose his temper.”

The judge, however, demonstrated deep reserves of patience, at least in front of the jury.

He generally allowed Weingarten wide breadth regarding the most common pitfalls for pro se defendants, such as hearsay issues and confusing questioning with testifying.

And his chastisements, though frequent, were generally gentle. When Weingarten became frustrated by a series of sustained objections while cross-examining his daughter, Gleeson calmly told him, “There are problems that go along with deciding to represent yourself. It’s hard.”

Indeed, the difficult balance between a fair trial and rewarding the defendant for refusing counsel was never more evident than during Weingarten’s cross-examination of his daughter.

Before a packed courtroom, Weingarten attempted to elicit seemingly minor inconsistencies in his daughter’s horrific story. Gleeson sat at the edge of his podium, just a few feet above the daughter’s right shoulder, giving her a visible sense of protection, while also requiring her to answer her father’s questions. She frequently turned and addressed the judge directly, asking if she had to answer a question, telling him she could not understand what her father meant.

At one point, when Weingarten angrily raised his voice, his daughter seemed to quizzically ask the judge, “Objection?” though no such objection was recorded in the transcript. In any case, Gleeson paused, then answered, “Sustained.”

MOMENTS OF FRUSTRATION

By the end of her two days on the stand, the daughter, now 27, seemed to have gained strength. When Weingarten, who tended to speak in the third person, asked her about “your father,” she said, “No, it was you, it was you who did that.”

During sidebars and when the jury was adjourned, the judge expressed his frustrations more freely.

On one such occasion, Weingarten asked for a sidebar after the prosecution’s direct examination of his ex-wife.

The ex-wife had testified about, among other things, the day her daughter revealed the years of abuse.

Weingarten complained that the Yiddish translator had been inaccurate.

Gleeson asked for an example, and Weingarten said that when his ex-wife testified that he had returned to the United Stated to visit his dying father, the translator had translated dying as merely “sick.”

“And you think that was the important part” of the testimony? Gleeson asked, in evident exasperation. “You can ask her about that on cross-examination,” he said, then brusquely walked out of the courtroom.

With his refusal to heed advice and orders, the defendant frustrated most everyone involved in the case, perhaps his legal advisors, Barry Rhodes and Alan Stutman, most of all.

In a heated discussion just before the jury entered the courtroom to hear Weingarten’s closings Tuesday, an angry Rhodes could be heard telling Weingarten, “That’s a little different than what you said before. But you know something? That’s not true either.”

On the third day, baby Rosa Maria Rivera died in a police cruiser on the way back to the hospital where her mother had already been turned away.

The cause of death: dehydration.

The baby’s mother, Ana Aldorondo, later said she was convinced that she and her child received substandard care because she could not speak English.

The tragedy, on Jan. 17, 1973, mobilized Hartford’s Latino community to make changes in the city’s health care system that improved the quality of care for the city’s Puerto Rican population.

But 36 years later, one thing has not changed.

At least 22,000 low-income Connecticut residents who do not speak English well still cannot be sure they will understand or be understood when they arrive at hospitals or clinics for care.

How much longer must we wait?

Two years ago, advocates for people with limited English proficiency thought the struggle to get Medicaid reimbursement for face-to-face medical interpreters was over when the legislature put $4.7 million in the state budget to pay for the services.

But still patients continued to rely on untrained hospital housekeepers, friends, relatives, even young children for interpretation while the state dragged its feet in releasing the money.

Now, Gov. M. Jodi Rell has cut funding for medical interpretation from the fiscal year 2009-2010 budget. It is, she says, one of the many hard choices the state must make in the face of a gaping budget hole that over the next two years is estimated at anywhere from $6 billion to $8 billion.

But cutting spending for medical interpretation won’t save money.

In fact, allowing people to leave a hospital or doctor’s office without understanding their diagnosis, what tests they need, how to take their medicine or how to change their diet probably costs Connecticut far more than the cost of paying qualified medical interpreters.

The cost to taxpayers for medical interpretation is small. Because 50 cents of every dollar paid through the Medicaid program is reimbursed by the federal government, the actual cost of providing the service is only $2.35 million a year for Connecticut taxpayers.

And in February, Congress upped the amount the federal government will pay for language services for children covered by Medicaid to 75 percent of the cost.

And what of the human cost?

Ask anybody at The Hispanic Health Council and they’ll tell you about clients whose health care has been compromised because they don’t speak English very well.

There was the woman from Peru who collapsed in her hospital room from a post-partum hemorrhage because a nurse did not understand her repeated complaints about excessive bleeding after childbirth.

There was the man from Brazil who made repeated visits to a public clinic seeking medication after a friend he had brought along to translate told him the doctor said he had a sexually transmitted disease. It turned out that the doctor told the man he did not have a disease, and thus needed no medicine.

Connecticut’s population has become so diverse that 65 different languages are spoken by low-income residents with limited English proficiency.

The state needs an effective, efficient, transparent and high-quality system that provides not only direct translation but cultural sensitivity. We may never know how many other deaths have occurred because of misunderstandings in the medical community. We do know that when people are unable to communicate with their doctors, serious and costly mistakes can occur.

Let’s not wait for another baby to die before we seriously commit to providing medical interpreters.

In a recent article, Don DePalma questions the assumption that corporate software users can always “get by” in English, particularly in the growing field of content management. He also explains that using localized content management programs can save foreign companies money in the long run.

“We always argue for buying localized software; that is, products whose interfaces and documentation have been translated, and whose features have been adapted to the business, cultural, or logistical needs of its target markets,” he emphasizes. “In an ideal world, you’ll find that the supplier for your U.S. headquarters’ CMS [Content Management System] also supports French, German, Japanese, and Russian variants, with the administrative interfaces and developer tools adapted for use in those markets.”

Indeed, people worldwide prefer to read, work, and – especially – buy in their own language. That’s why the localization process can help your company reach out to more consumers. Nova Translation, LTD. provides localization and other language services to major corporations in the USA and worldwide. Don’t hesitate to contact us for more information.

Here’s a great idea for patching up tense diplomatic relations: give an official gift marked “overload” or “overcharge.”

Excuse me, could you translate that please? Um, well, what the gift-giver had meant to offer was a button marked “reset.” And the gift-giver was none other than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was hoping to signal a new beginning for Russian-American relations with the symbolic present to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The error can actually be considered part spelling, part translation. The Russian word for “reset” is not that complicated: perezagruzka. But the brightly-colored button, which you can see here, was marked peregruzka, which means “overload” or “overcharge,” depending on the context.

Lavrov laughed and took the mistake in good fun, promising he would keep the button on his desk anyway. At least we can all hope he took the error lightly…

The example shows that even a one-word translation can be problematic if work is done carelessly. Accurate translation counts. Spelling counts. And proofreading counts!

At Nova Translation Inc., all of our translated documents are edited and proofread to assure a perfect result.  Let us show you how good translation should be!