Saturday, May 29, 2021
Epic dictionary re-defines Ancient Greek including the words which made the Victorians blush - India Education Diary - Dictionary
Friday, May 28, 2021
Questionnaire Design and Translation - Pew Research Center - Translation
In key ways, writing surveys to assess foreign public opinion parallels how Pew Research Center approaches questionnaire design for U.S. projects. In both cases, Center staff carefully consider question wording, when to ask open- vs. close-ended questions, question order and measuring change over time, all of which can be read about here.
That said, designing questions for domestic and cross-national studies does differ in important ways. Cross-national questionnaires are developed with an eye toward comparability across dozens of languages and cultures. For example, the 2019 Global Attitudes survey instrument was translated into more than 45 languages across 34 countries.
Translation is a multi-step process. For questions asked on earlier surveys, the Center relies on translations used in previous questionnaires in order to maintain comparability of survey data over time. For new questions, Pew Research Center staff begin by submitting the questions to professional linguists. The linguists evaluate each question for ease of translation and make recommendations to guide proper translation. New questions, along with the linguists’ recommendations, are then submitted to local research organizations, which translate the items into the appropriate language(s). Once translations are complete, they are again reviewed by professional linguists, who provide feedback to the translators. Pew Research Center staff are consulted regarding any serious debates about translation, and the Center issues final approval of the translated survey instrument prior to fieldwork. Throughout the translation process, Pew Research Center strives for questions that are comparable at the level of meaning, not simply literal translations of the original English versions.
In addition to being shaped by the translation process, the final cross-national survey instrument that is used in the field is influenced by cultural and political sensitivities. These are more than a matter of politeness. Especially in countries where surveys are administered by interviewers going door-to-door, asking about taboo subjects can expose interviewers and entire research firms to legal or even physical harm. Safeguarding the safety of our local partners is a paramount concern. Pew Research Center has omitted questions due to political sensitivities, such as items about political parties in certain countries. In other countries, the degree of sensitivity associated with a given subject makes it impractical to even field a survey. If the quality of survey data would be compromised if respondents felt uncomfortable or not free to express their opinions, either because of pressure from the authorities or for other reasons, the Center will choose not to field a survey in a given country. These decisions are based on careful assessment of conditions under which face-to-face surveys can be conducted in and in consultation with country experts and local polling organizations.
Here's How to Prepare Your Website for Localization - Built In - Translation
Most companies put off localizing their websites until the initial version is finalized. But multilingual websites are growing increasingly common as companies try to reach international consumers — and local ones who don’t use English as their primary language.
Localization is a term of art for the practice of translating a website from one language into secondary languages. Spencer Frasher, who works for Lokalise, a startup that specializes in enabling website translations, said the first step developers should take when approaching web translations is to think about the goals they are trying to achieve.
“I don’t think anybody undertakes all this just to do it,” Frasher said. “A lot of the customers we talked to, they’re trying to improve rankings and SEO, for instance.”
“I don’t think anybody undertakes all this just to do it.”
According to SEOblog, translating a website into different languages is a good way to improve overall SEO. If a visitor comes across a site that doesn’t support their language, they may choose to browse elsewhere instead. This makes translation especially important for companies trying to market products toward particular global markets, or whose products have proved popular among customers who use a different language.
Web developers may also pursue localization due to external pressures, such as government contractor sites needing to provide multilingual support, or pressure from competing websites that are providing better language support for customers.
A company’s reasons for localization can inform their methods for achieving it, such as whether to use human or machine translations.
Start Preparing for Localization During the Design Phase
It’s easier to localize a website if planning for the translations starts early.
“Ideally, developers should initially create applications with localization in mind,” said Ilya Bodrov-Krukowski, the lead for content and documentation at Lokalise. “But it’s not always the case, unfortunately.”
Translations don’t just change the words on a page — they can affect the page’s layout as well, especially if additional languages weren’t part of the design process from the beginning. It’s best to create the initial design with translations in mind, and even better to target the design to the exact secondary languages.
That’s because languages can be quite different. Translating a website into languages that use block characters, such as Chinese, requires different space adjustments than translating into languages such as German, which have long words consisting of many characters. Not accounting for this difference can lead to layout issues.
“It could create trouble because it doesn’t fit in the button properly, or maybe starts pushing against the padding in the CSS in a strange way, or creates unexpected line breaks,” Frasher said.
“Ideally, developers should initially create applications with localization in mind.”
It’s easier to prepare for the necessary layout adjustments when developers know the languages a site needs to be translated into before the design phase. Designers can play with the length and sizes of words to adjust how pages handle them.
But it’s not necessary to have all translations complete before designing — there are tools available that can mimic the look of different languages, allowing designers to use them as filler while laying out pages with different languages.
These pseudo-localization tools adjust the widths of text elements to match the look of different languages. For instance, Shopify’s pseudo-localization tool adds 42 percent more characters in French and 112 percent more characters in Spanish, compared to English.
When it’s not clear what languages a website will eventually be translated into, developers can focus on making the website as responsive as possible. Responsive pages are much more forgiving of layout changes and can more easily absorb word size variations.
Automated Tools Can Help With Extraction
The next step in the localization process is extracting out all text that needs translation. It’s easily the most work-intensive step for developers, because extraction involves locating and compiling a list of all the original text from a website. Extraction tools are available to help with the process, but planning ahead before coding up the website can still save developers plenty of time, even when using these tools.
For instance, the Angular i18n tool offers a package for Angular projects that looks for special “internationalization” tags within a website’s HTML — these tags serve as markers for the extraction tool, guiding it to the places on the document that needs translation.
The tool cuts down on a great deal of the manual work developers would otherwise have to do, but using it correctly requires labeling all the relevant text with the internationalization tag during development. Text elements that don’t have tags will get skipped.
“When I cut the text from the page, I might cut some part of the tag, which is going to result in a page that looks incorrect.”
Sometimes, parts of the page structure can be corrupted when using the extraction tools — for example, structural parts of the HTML might get cut off. This happens when extraction tools make parsing errors and cut an extra character or two off that isn’t part of the text.
“All the text on the websites are displayed to us in HTML tags,” Bodrov-Krukowski said. “And when I cut the text from the page, I might cut some part of the tag, which is going to result in a page that looks incorrect.”
The best way to catch these problems is by setting up automated tests to alert developers whenever this happens, so that developers can make corrections to make the page functional again.
“If we don’t have any automatic tests at all, developers are quite hesitant to change anything,” Bodrov-Krukowski said. “Because if it works, and then I change something, everything is going to break… But if I have tests that can be run very fast, then I’m going to be much more confident in my changes.”
Provide Translators With Additional Context
Lokalise was founded in 2016, but localization wasn’t the startup’s initial direction. Originally, developers were working on an entirely different project and needed to translate their website into other languages to reach more customers. But the team found using Excel spreadsheets to track translations cumbersome, and there wasn’t a good existing alternative.
“In Excel spreadsheets, they were creating translation keys along with the actual translations,” Bodrov-Krukowski said. “But it was really hard to keep track of everything that was happening. For example, if a translator changed some keys, we need some way to understand exactly what was changed, who changed it and where it was changed.”
On Excel, developers would put the phrases that needed translating — the “keys” — into the spreadsheet, and translators would write corresponding translations next to them. But it became difficult to track when changes were made, especially if teams had multiple translators working on the project. It also became difficult to organize all the translation keys as the website grew.
“It was really hard to keep track of everything that was happening.”
“For larger websites, we may have hundreds or even thousands of translation keys,” Bodrov-Krukowski said. “And if we support maybe two languages at the same time, that gives us thousands and thousands of translations.”
In addition to organizing translation keys, Lokalise has found it’s important to provide additional context to translators. Especially for highly technical industries, developers can add examples and glossaries, so translators know exactly what the phrases they are translating means. It’s also helpful to upload screenshots so translators can have visual context to better translate text that might be referring to images on a page.
Machine vs Human Translations Depend on the Project
There are currently two ways to translate — using machine translations or human translators — and each has pros and cons.
“It really depends on what the customer wants to achieve,” Bodrov-Krukowski said. “For smaller companies, maybe it makes sense to use machine translations to quickly gain more audience or expand their applications to different countries.”
But even the best machine translations tend to make more mistakes than good human translators. Machine translations work best on smaller and simpler texts, Bodrov-Krukowski said, but they aren’t able to use context as well to figure out complex texts, and also don’t perform as well within industries that use more specific technical terms.
“For smaller companies, maybe it makes sense to use machine translations to quickly gain more audience or expand their applications to different countries.”
The advantage of machine translations is that they are cheap and have almost instantaneous turnaround. Some companies use a hybrid approach, running initial machine translations, followed by human translators to proofread and edit the translations.
In the future, this approach might make more sense, because translations are largely not performed on long texts, but instead shorter snippets.
“A lot of people think about downloading huge blocks of texts and sending them to some other place to get them translated,” Frasher said. “Certainly, there is a use case for that, but increasingly the pace of innovation, the pace of development, and the pace of launching is so fast that it’s more and more just 10 words, or 15 words.”
A mixed machine and human translation method may be able to handle fragmented translations better, helping translation keep pace with development cycles. But while tools exist to aid developers in translating site content, they still require a lot of overhead — it’s still too early to expect news sites across the world to have options in your chosen language.
What does Chupapi Muñañyo mean on TikTok? The phrase translated - PopBuzz - Translation
27 May 2021, 13:04
Here's what Chupapi Munyayo/Muñañyo means and where it originally started on TikTok.
Social media has long been a place where completely made up words and phrases can change the entire game and go viral within a second. Remember the Twitter era when Sco Pa Tu Manaa and Bomboclaat were all over the timeline? Or more recently, when Cheugy became a thing on TikTok?
Now there's a new phrase picking up steam on TikTok: Chupapi Muñañyo.
The phrase is pretty common in prank videos where someone sneaks up behind a stranger and says it out loud in their ear. But what does it mean? Where did it come from? And who started it?
What does Chupapi Muñañyo mean on TikTok?
What does Chupapi Munyayo or Chupapi Muñañyo translate to in English?
There's an Urban Dictionary definition from January 2021 that says it translates to "suck my dick papa, oh! come on!". The entry breaks down the words within the phrase, saying that 'chupa' derives from a Spanish word that means 'to suck a dick', while 'papi' means 'father or papa' and 'munyayo' apparently means 'come on'.
However, there's a lot of debate over whether that's actually the definition. KnowYourMeme points out that 'Munyayo' and 'Muñañyo' "don't appear to have any direct translations from Spanish or any other language, suggesting it is gibberish".
The apparent creator of the word, @jaykindafunny8, even posted a video explaining how to spell it, in which he basically just combined the two popular spellings on TikTok to create 'muñañyo'.
Essentially, Chupapi Munyayo or Chupapi Muñañyo doesn't mean anything. It's just made up.
READ MORE: TikTok slang: A complete guide to the meanings behind each phrase
Who created the Chupapi Muñañyo phrase?
The earliest known use of the phase on TikTok was way back in July 2020. TikToker @jaykindafunny8 shared a video of himself going through a drive-thru, ordering an ice cream and smacking it on his forehead before driving away. In one of those clips, he says the word 'muñañyo'.
A few months later, he posted a prank TikTok where he sneaks up behind random people on the street and scares them by shouting "muñañyo" and then repeating the full phrase when they turn around to ask what's going on.
His entire TikTok account is now full of videos of the same prank.
Jay now has over 16 million followers on the app, and his #muñañyo videos get millions of views each time he shares them. The #muñañyo hashtag has now also garnered over 3.7 billion views as of May 2021 – although, most of those are Jay's videos.
READ MORE: What is the Hey Lol trend on TikTok? The meaning explained
Taps aff and let's go tonto: Scots dictionary gets update - The Times - Dictionary
The sun is finally shining in Scotland and the tradition that accompanies the warm(ish) weather has been added to the Scots language dictionary.
Taps aff, which refers to the temperature being high enough that some brave people will strip to the waist, is one of nine new words or phrases that will appear in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, a 4,000 page digital publication which brings together all the intricacies of the language.
It will be joined by wee shame, which is considered a topic or object of pity; tonto, which describes a wild or crazy state; and scary biscuits, an expression of mock fear. Other new words include wabsteid, the Scots form for website; clusterbourach, a reference to a disaster or
What's New in Machine Translation with TextShuttle CTO Samuel Läubli - Slator - Translation
Samuel Läubli, Partner and CTO at TextShuttle, joins SlatorPod to talk about the ins and outs of a language technology provider, the current state of machine translation, and his experience as a researcher and an entrepreneur.
The CTO touches on his background in Computational Linguistics and decision to go back to the academe in 2016 to learn more about the then-emerging neural models for machine translation. He gives his take on the current state of machine translation, particularly weaknesses around sentence-by-sentence structure and limited control.
Samuel discusses his thesis, which tackles three key challenges in MT for professionals: quality, presentation, and adaptability. The conversation turns philosophical as Samuel debates whether machine translation can become truly creative without artificial general intelligence — or if it will always be considered imitation.
Advertisement
He then walks listeners through TextShuttle’s business model as well as the key problems the company solves for clients, ranging from producing MT systems to helping with configurations, workflows, and training translators.
Simon also shares his insights on the future of MT, unpredictable as it may be, and TextShuttle’s initiatives with controllability and the adaptive machine translation paradigm.
First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, in a tech-centered episode.
This week, RSI platform Interactio announced that it had raised USD 30m in series A funding, led by VCs Eight Roads Ventures and Storm Ventures.
Esther delves into Straker’s 100-page annual report, which showed the Australia-listed LSP’s 13% revenue growth to USD 22.6m for the 12 months to March 31, 2021. Straker shares jumped more than 14% the day results were announced.
The duo also discusses Akorbi, another fast-growing language service provider (LSP), which recently acquired the low-code process automation platform RunMyProcess from Fujitsu — a surprising move by the company as they expand to business software unrelated to translation.
Slator 2021 Language Industry Market Report
Data and Research, Slator reports
80-pages. Market Size by Vertical, Geo, Intention. Expert-in-Loop Model. M&A. Frontier Tech. Hybrid Future. Outlook 2021-2025.
Heading to Japan, Florian goes over Honyaku Center’s 2020 financial results, which saw revenues decline 14% to USD 91m and operating income nearly halved to USD 3.8m.
Florian closes the Pod full circle with more machine translation news: a research paper presented by Bering Lab about IntelliCAT, an MT post-editing and interactive translation model; and, out of big tech, Microsoft Document Translation, a recent addition to their enterprise MT offerings.
Subscribe to SlatorPod on Youtube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts.
Stream Slator webinars, workshops, and conferences on the Slator Video-on-Demand channel.
City to offer neighborhood specific translation services on Election Day — Queens Daily Eagle - Queens Daily Eagle - Translation
The NYC Civic Engagement Commission will offer translation services in 11 additional languages next month. Eagle file photo by David Brand
By Jacob Kaye
The New York City Civic Engagement Commission will provide translation services in an additional 11 languages at polling sites for next month’s primary election.
On top of the Spanish translation services that will be offered at every polling site in the city, the commission has selected a handful of sites to feature either Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, Mandarin, French, Haitian Creole, Italian, Korean, Polish, Russian, Urdu or Yiddish translation services.
The services will be offered on the final two days of early voting – June 19 and 20 – and then again on Election Day on Tuesday, June 22.
The need for specific language translation services was calculated by the commission using the most recent U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and data from the city’s Board of Elections, according to the CEC.
All voters have the right to bring an interpreter with them to the voting booth, regardless of the translation services offered at the polling site. Employers or union representatives may not act as translators.
In Queens, the following locations are offering site specific translation services during the final two days of early voting:
Middle Village: Board of Elections - Queens Voting Machine Facility Annex – Italian and Polish
Forest Hills: Helen Marshall Cultural Center at Queens Borough Hall – Polish and Russian
Laurelton: Holy Trinity Parish Church – French and Haitian
Kew Gardens Hills: Queens College – Urdu and Russian
Rego Park: Rego Center Community Room – Polish and Russian
Arverne: Rockaway YMCA – Polish and Russian
The following locations are offering site specific translation services on Election Day:
Astoria: PS 85-Judge Charles Vallone – Italian
Ridgewood: PS 88-Seneca – Polish
Maspeth: Holy Cross Church – Polish
Queens Village: PS 34-John Harvard – Haitian Creole
Rego Park: PS 175-Lynn Gross Discovery School – Russian
Rego Park: JHS 157-Stephen A Halsey – Russian
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)