The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the body in charge of developing and publishing international standards, has published a new standard on evaluation of translation output.
ISO 5060 is the result of four years of work conducted by the ISO/TC 37/SC 5 technical committee for translation, interpreting and related technology, and the 18th document of this kind published by the unit (with a further seven being currently under development). Numerous experts on translation and quality evaluation formed part of the working group, with participants from more than 30 countries contributing to the creation of this new standard.
ISO certification brings an array of benefits for companies deciding to pursue it: increased sales and revenue, heightened efficiency, and improved quality of operations are usually expected as a result of certifying against a selected standard. Language service providers (LSPs) and others recognize compliance with ISO norms as a competitive advantage, allowing them to position themselves among top players in the industry.
The new ISO 5060 standard was published in February 2024. It “is applicable to translation service providers […], including individual translators, translation companies or in-house translation services, their clients and other interested parties in the translation sector, such as translator education and training institutions.” Aimed at providing guidance for human evaluation of the translation output, ISO 5060 can be applied to workflows involving both human and machine translation with or without subsequent post-editing.
The standard combines hands-on advice with the strategic considerations and general principles for translation quality evaluation. It is built on the analytic approach that involves a “bilingual examination of target language content against source language content while classifying any errors with respect to translation evaluation specifications and for the purpose of reaching a quality rating.” Focus on the translation requirements and treating any deviation from it as an error allows for a high degree of inter-rater reliability (IRR; guaranteeing that the results of evaluation don’t differ significantly depending on evaluator) and evaluation objectivity.
“The standard enables the user to produce reliable, trustworthy translation quality data and is therefore something completely different than MT predictive quality estimation.” — Christopher Kurz, member of the ISO/TC 37/SC 5 committee
ISO 5060 introduces a framework of concepts related to the evaluation of translation quality, and provides a set of requirements for all steps of the evaluation process, covering the pre-evaluation, evaluation, and post-evaluation phases. Error typology that has been harmonized with the first level Multidimensional Quality Metrics Framework (MQM), as well as guidelines on severity, weight, or the approach to repeated errors, form an important part of the standard.
According to the proposed typology, errors can fall into one of seven main categories:
Terminology;
Accuracy;
Linguistic conventions;
Style;
Locale conventions;
Audience appropriateness; and
Design and markup.
Each of the categories contains several sub-categories and every error can be classified as Critical, Major, or Minor, depending on its severity.
Additionally, the standard outlines the competencies of evaluators, enumerating aspects such as: understanding of the source language, fluency in the target language, cultural ability, knowledge of the domain, as well as formal qualifications, among others.
Annexes provide readers with a set of questions to guide them through the process of analyzing the evaluation needs and to help them develop a translation evaluation strategy and system. Practical recommendations on sampling, a detailed explanation of the concepts of cohesion and coherence, as well as ready-to-go scorecard templates are also included.
The next revision of the standard is planned for 2029.
Interested parties can obtain a copy of the ISO 5060 standard and the other standards related to language services from the ISO website.
The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary, by Sarah Ogilvie (Knopf, 370 pp., $30)
Recently, I had a friend to lunch in New York and when I showed him my study, he was struck by the magnificent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary on my shelves, which is to say the 1961 corrected reissue of the 1933 first edition, the one Vivian Ridler printed on the university press, not lithographically. To run one’s fingers over the pages of the resplendent 13 volumes in their cream and blue wrappers, with their wonderfully tactile raised surfaces, is one of those pleasures that only proper books bestow, though to read the definitions, etymologies, and illustrative quotations is a rarer pleasure still.
No serious reader can be indifferent to the glories of the OED. Its wonderfully subtle, precise, comprehensive definitions, its illustrations setting forth the historical evolution of words, and its incomparable array of cited authors are marvels of scholarship. Delight in this most authoritative of dictionaries naturally leads to interest in James Murray, the OED’s founding editor and the many men and women who helped him to compile the Dictionary. Sarah Ogilvie’s The Dictionary People seeks to satisfy that interest. Does it succeed? It may complement but it certainly does not supersede the delightful biography that Murray’s granddaughter, K. M. Elisabeth Murray, wrote of the great lexicographer, Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (1977), which Anthony Burgess rightly praised as “one of the finest biographies of the twentieth century.” Nor does it come close to giving readers an understanding of the life of dictionary-making that Robert de Maria, Jr. gives his readers in Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Learning (1986). It is nothing as authoritative as Peter Gilliver’s The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (2016).
What does Ogilvie’s offer instead? She certainly serves up a crowded gallery of pen portraits of Murray and his coworkers. She sets scenes with a brisk, affecting vividness. She writes a bubbly narrative. Yet her grasp of lexicography can be wobbly.
The OED’s founding editor is a fascinating figure. The son of a tailor, Sir James Augustus Henry Murray (1832–1915), was born in Denholm, Scotland, and left school at the age of 14, but only after proving himself a prodigy with a passion for philology. He knew the letters of the English alphabet before the age of two and the Greek alphabet before the age of seven. He knew the Latin names of plants after mastering the rudiments of Latin. He also taught himself French, German, Italian, and classical Greek. Before beginning work on what would become the OED in 1879, he worked as a schoolmaster, a profession for which he had a genuine genius. He was also a devoted family man, siring no less than 11 children. It was his wife Ada who insisted that he move his office for the Dictionary out of the family house in the Banbury Road and into the back garden, where Murray built his famous Scriptorium, the cramped iron shed in which he and his helpers toiled for 30 years. After Murray’s death, the shed was demolished and Ada remarked on the terrible void it left for her and her children, so much of whose daily lives were intertwined with the repository of her husband’s herculean research.
Toward the end of his labors, Murray was ambivalent about whether he had chosen the right profession. “The greatest sacrifice the Dictionary entailed upon me, by far,” he confessed to his eldest son—who would graduate with a first from Balliol, write a scholarly book on chess, and become Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools—“was the constant companionship of my own children; and I doubt it was worth the sacrifice. I have tried as a husband and father, to do what should have been the work of a celibate and ascetic, a Dunstan or a Cuthbert; no wonder it has been a struggle. But has it been worth it?” That the philologist prevailed over the family man in Murray may have given him second thoughts, but it has been an enormous boon to the rest of us.
Though Ogilvie provides good portraits of the founders of the OED, Herbert Coleridge and Frederick Furnivall, as well as the editors Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and Charles Onions, she contrives to see too many of her figures—especially the more eccentric ones—as avatars of our own fashionable notions. Too many pages, for instance, are given over to an oddly gushing account of the career of “Michael Field,” the pseudonym for Katherine Brady and Edith Cooper, the rather absurd literary ladies who were for many years readers for the Dictionary. Moreover, Ogilvie sees most of the women involved in providing “slips” (the sheets of paper on which readers for the Dictionary supplied Murray with their illustrations of words) as proto-feminists, oppressed souls knocked about by unfairly patriarchal men. Whether North Oxford at the time, learned or otherwise, actually saw itself in such terms is not a question with which Ogilvie concerns herself. “Should women writers be read for the Dictionary?” she asks. “They were, of course,” she concedes, “though not in the quantity that male authors were.” That there were simply more male than female authors on which to draw does not somehow signify. For Ogilvie, despite this disparity, there ought to have been an equal number of male and female authors read. In her Whiggish history, the Dictionary People are too often dragooned into vindicating such silly prejudices.
Despite her soft spot for the Dictionary’s female readers, Ogilvie is constrained to dismiss poor Charlotte Yonge, author of the excellent Tractarian novel, The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), as “old fashioned.” Why? The novelist was “a devout worshipper in the parish church,” and her books contain “didactic messages about the duties of a Christian.” Murray, however, saw fit to quote from Yonge’s works 1,300 times, which shows the extent to which he was uninfected by Ogilvie’s faddish strictures.
Murray’s definition of “fad” is tell-tale here: “A crotchety rule of action; a peculiar notion as to the right way of doing something; a pet project, esp. of social or political reform, to which exaggerated importance is attributed; in wider sense, a crotchet, hobby, ‘craze.’” One cannot view this definition on the online site for the OED because, as the current editors explain: the “OED is undergoing a continuous programme of revision to modernize and improve definitions. This entry has not yet been fully revised.” In the OED’s second edition, edited by J. A. Simpson, the sentence regarding “social or political reform”—which so aptly skewers the whole progressive project—is predictably excised.
If the current editors are poised to bundle away what had been the provocative élan of the OED’s definitions under Murray’s tutelage, Ogilvie in her account of its helpers can be relentlessly informative about things most readers will already know. Speaking of Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, for instance, a frequent contributor to the Dictionary, Ogilvie tells her readers that he was also the editor of the National Dictionary of Biography, “which is still going strong today under the aegis of Oxford University Press.” Reading this, those charged with marketing the ODNB must despair of the efficacy of their efforts.
Admittedly, these might seem trifling foibles, but when Ogilvie writes of lexicography, a subject upon which she should be expected to have some reliable expertise, we can see that her misjudgments are more fundamental. “We think of the OED as a radical dictionary,” she writes, “because of its size, its scholarship, and its methods . . . But if you compare it with other languages, there was nothing about its creation in the mid-nineteenth century that had not been done before in Europe.” Yet no reasonably informed person would regard the OED as “radical:” its debt to Johnson’s great Dictionary, to name just one, is patent, as anyone can see who attends to its development of the Great Cham’s use of illustrative quotation or the frequency with which “[J]” appears throughout its pages. Secondly, most of the compilation of what would become the OED was started in the late nineteenth century, when Murray took over the reins, not in the mid-nineteenth century, though the London Philological Society might have broached the need for a new dictionary as early as 1857. Thirdly, there were no dictionaries in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century comparable to the OED, whether with respect to the realization of its historical principles or its wide-ranging quotations from classic authors. Gilliver cites the German scholar Franz Passow’s Greek dictionary of 1826 as an influence on the OED—especially his declaration in the introduction that genuinely historical dictionaries must capture “the life history of each individual word.” Yes, Murray and his editors followed Passow in embodying this “life history” in the OED; but an influence on a great work, however profound, is not necessarily comparable to the great work itself. We do not put Holinshed on the same level as Shakespeare.
Even worse, Ogilvie, who identifies herself on the book’s jacket as “a linguist and lexicographer,” claims that Johnson’s dictionary was “prescriptive”—as opposed to “descriptive”—which is to say that it defined words as they ought to be, not as they were. For Ogilvie, in other words, Johnson’s Dictionary was given over to “telling . . . readers what words should mean, and how they should be spelled, pronounced and used.” Of course, as all readers of Johnson’s Dictionary would know, this is a crude misrepresentation of his lexicographical work.
Henry Hitchens’s superb Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Johnson’s Dictionary (2005) presents a far more accurate understanding of Johnson’s approach to lexicography. Speaking of the Preface that Johnson wrote to his Dictionary, Hitchens says that “it is magisterial, noble, imperishable . . . no one has ever written so acutely and at the same time so personally about the problems of language and lexicography.” For Hitchens, “The experience of writing the Dictionary . . . transformed Johnson’s ideas about these subjects, and accordingly the Preface feels very different from the Plan of eight years before. Johnson is reconciled to the instability of language. He understands the importance of descriptive lexicography, and has renounced his own narrowly prescriptive notions.” And to substantiate his reading of this development of Johnson’s lexicographical career, Hitchens quotes the great man himself, who insists that “while our language is yet living, and variable by the caprice of every one that speaks it, . . . words are hourly shifting their relations, and can no more be ascertained in a dictionary than a grove, in the agitation of a storm, can be accurately delineated from its picture in the water.” Only a poet could have landed on so happy a metaphor to capture the irrepressible exuberance of language. It is also the poet of the vanity of human wishes in Johnson who charts the disillusionment he experienced in persevering with his great work:
When first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, the obscure recesses of northern learning, which I should enter and ransack, the treasures with which I expected every search into those neglected mines to reward my labour, and the triumph with which I should display my acquisitions to mankind. When I had thus enquired into the original of words, I resolved to show likewise my attention to things; to pierce deep into every science, to enquire the nature of every substance of which I inserted the name, to limit every idea by a definition strictly logical, and exhibit every production of art or nature in an accurate description, that my book might be in place of all other dictionaries whether appellative or technical. But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer.
Ogilvie’s voguish leanings notwithstanding, there are intriguing things in her book. For example, there is her description of the Sunday Tramps, who were formed and led by the godless Leslie Stephen. Like all good agnostics, he and his friends—mostly upper-middle-class professional men—spent their Sundays walking instead of attending church services. Murray defined the word agnostic as “one who holds that the true existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomenon is unknown and (so far as can be judged) unknowable.” Murray, a staunch Nonconformist, would never have been asked to join the Club—he was too devout—though his professional relationship with Stephen was fairly close. Ogilvie quotes an excerpt from the speech Murray gave on his seventieth birthday that could only have met with Stephen’s disdain: “The Dictionary is to me . . . the work that God has found for me and for which I now see that my sharpening of intellectual tools was done and it becomes to me a high and sacred devotion.”
Tidbits like these may not entirely save the book from its trendier proclivities but they do make it diverting, even moving.
COLOGNE, Germany, April 16, 2024--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Global leader in Language AI, DeepL, has released the findings of a comprehensive study conducted by Forrester Consulting. The full study showcases the significant business impact of DeepL’s AI translation solutions across industries—and makes a strong case for translation as one of the most strategic areas of AI implementation for companies looking to grow their revenue and enter new markets faster and at scale.
The commissioned study, "The Total Economic Impact™ of DeepL," evaluated the benefits, risks, costs, and flexibility for businesses using DeepL Translator. Forrester Consulting interviewed four companies across industries, including energy, financial services, legal services, and pharmaceuticals, to create a composite organization for analysis.
The study's results demonstrate that overall, the composite organization using DeepL achieved significant cost savings while substantially streamlining team efficiency. We believe the metrics in the study underscore the transformative impact of AI translation on international business success.
The study reported a myriad of business metrics for the composite organization, including:
A 90% decrease in internal document translation time
A 345% return on investment (ROI) over three years
A reduction in translation workloads by 50%
Workflow cost savings of €227,430 over three years
Efficiency savings of €2.8 million over three years
Ultimately, DeepL has empowered businesses to reduce their internal translation time and workload, which has freed up time for in-house staff—allowing them to focus on other tasks while maintaining high-quality translations. Additionally, DeepL has decreased the number of document translation tasks handled externally—leading to greater efficiency and cost savings.
Employees from the surveyed organizations highlighted the increased efficiency brought about by DeepL and its impact on their day-to-day workflows. A surveyed software application lead stated, "We save time resolving complaints with DeepL, which translates into cost reduction or profit realization. . . there is no time spent [manually trying to understand what has happened], we can now spend time on more diverse, value-added work and be more productive."
With its advanced Language AI technology and unparalleled translation accuracy, DeepL is revolutionizing the way businesses communicate on a global scale. To access the full Total Economic Impact™ study and to learn more about how AI translation can empower your business, visit DeepL’s official website.
About DeepL
DeepL is a global leader in Language AI. Since 2017, its flagship product, DeepL Translator, has delivered the world's most accurate AI translation quality as measured in blind tests, breaking down language barriers for businesses everywhere. DeepL Write, its AI writing assistant, elevates business text with phrasing, style, and grammatical suggestions that give users a creative boost in the writing process and transforming their communication. DeepL’s Language AI combines research and engineering expertise with that of leading linguists, curating tools that give businesses a competitive edge through accurate translation, revolutionized communication, and enterprise-level security. DeepL was founded by CEO Jarek Kutylowski and is supported by world-renowned investors including IVP, Benchmark, and b2venture.
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An Indigenous man couldn’t understand the court proceedings when he was charged with a crime in Texas. He was sentenced anyway.
By Sasha von Oldershausen
Sasha von Oldershausen
Sasha von Oldershausen is an associate editor who writes about news and politics.
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May 20240
The English expression “like a deer in the headlights” has no real equivalent in Spanish. Instead of its literal translation, “como un ciervo en los faros,” which would be lost on many Spanish speakers, you might instead use the phrasal verb “quedarse pasmado” (“to stay stunned”), which still fails to capture the momentary paralysis that accompanies the subject’s bewilderment. That’s how Fidel Gutierrez-Garcia looked when defense attorney Robert Garcia spoke to him in Spanish about his case, Garcia would later testify: “like a deer in the headlights.”
Gutierrez-Garcia, a pecan picker from a rural part of the Mexican state of Chihuahua, had been charged in Texas with possession with intent to distribute more than one hundred kilograms of marijuana—a felony, punishable by five to forty years in prison. On November 30, 2021, he and three other men were apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol officers while walking near Van Horn, 120 miles southeast of El Paso, carrying what the officers described as burlap sacks containing the drug. The agents transported the men and their bags to the Van Horn Border Patrol station for processing.
The next day, two agents responsible for recovering the marijuana interviewed the men. Unable to speak Spanish, the officers called an interpretation company to facilitate their conversation over the phone. Interpreter Christian Saenz later testified, at a motions hearing in March 2022, that he could tell Gutierrez-Garcia was not a native Spanish speaker. The defendant, Saenz said, told him that he spoke a Mayan language.
Gutierrez-Garcia’s mother tongue turned out to be Northern Tepehuan, spoken by some 10,000 Indigenous residents of northern Mexico. It belongs not to the Mayan family of languages but to the Uto-Aztecan family, which includes more than thirty languages spoken by Indigenous people as far north as Idaho and as far south as Nicaragua. Few linguists in the U.S. have made it their focus. One of them, Stefanie Ramos Bierge, occupies a postdoctoral position at the New York Botanical Garden, documenting ecological terms in the Uto-Aztecan language Wixárika. She described Northern Tepehuan as a fast-paced and melodic language that makes frequent use of palatalizations—when consonant sounds are softened by the tongue meeting the palate, as with the “s” in “measure.” Whereas typical English and Spanish sentences usually follow a subject-verb-object sequence, in Northern Tepehuan the object’s placement is not fixed, and often the speaker will leave out the subject entirely.
On the witness stand in March 2022, Saenz said Gutierrez-Garcia responded to his questions in Spanish, albeit with short replies, though the interpreter could not glean his level of comprehension. But when he translated Gutierrez-Garcia’s Miranda rights into Spanish, Saenz recalled, Gutierrez-Garcia said he did not understand.
The language barrier became increasingly problematic as the case progressed. The Western District of Texas appointed Robert Garcia—who spoke fluent Spanish—as Gutierrez-Garcia’s counsel. Garcia met with Gutierrez-Garcia at the detention center in Sierra Blanca, 85 miles southeast of El Paso, to discuss his plea. “He said very little,” Garcia testified during the motions hearing. Having withdrawn from the case in March 2022 because of health issues, he now appeared as a witness for the defense. (Garcia died later that month.) “I would talk to him for a while, and he would . . . just sort of nod his head. And then I’d ask him, ‘Do you understand what I am saying?’ He would nod his head.” Garcia continued: “I frankly got the impression right away that . . . he was nodding his head just to be polite more than anything else.”
Given the proximity of the Western District of Texas to the border with Mexico, language interpreters are in high demand. Typically, the court will supply defendants with one—if it can find an interpreter who speaks the defendant’s mother tongue. Luis Navarro, a federally certified Spanish-language interpreter for the Western District of Texas’s Pecos and Alpine divisions, spoke with Gutierrez-Garcia to determine whether he could effectively translate for him in court and found that he could not. “He does speak some Spanish, in the sense of ‘hello,’ ‘goodbye,’ ‘[my] name,’ and that’s it,” Navarro testified at the motions hearing. Navarro informed the court that he was unable to communicate with the client and tried to help locate an interpreter who could. But he was unable to enlist one fluent in Northern Tepehuan who was willing to take the case.
After Garcia withdrew as counsel, he was replaced by Shane O’Neal, a criminal defense attorney based in Alpine, an hour north of Big Bend National Park. O’Neal, who is proficient in Spanish, said he could gather some basic information from Gutierrez-Garcia: he had a wife and child, he lived with his father-in-law, he picked pecans for work. But O’Neal believed that the language barrier would compromise the case. He filed a motion to dismiss it on the grounds that his client did not understand Spanish well enough to comprehend the proceedings against him.
“It’s a bedrock principle of our Constitution,” O’Neal told me, “that people aren’t supposed to sit through this Kafkaesque proceeding, where they are in a courtroom and a lot of things are being said but they don’t understand what’s going on, and they’re not playing a meaningful role in making really important decisions that affect both how their case unfolds and what happens to their liberty.”
Brandon Beck, a law professor at Texas Tech University, who worked for eight years as an appellate attorney at the public defender’s office in the Northern District of Texas, compared the issue of language barriers in court to the way the government protects people who are legally “incompetent” from standing trial. “They can’t participate in their own defense,” he said.
Though the issues of competence and language proficiency are fundamentally different, the takeaway is the same: a defendant’s comprehension is essential to the due process of law. To demonstrate this point, O’Neal put Gutierrez-Garcia on the stand during the motions hearing. First demonstrating his client’s ability to understand and respond to basic Spanish, O’Neal asked him a series of simple questions—his name, his place of origin. Gutierrez-Garcia answered these in Spanish. When O’Neal then asked him questions about the crime he was accused of committing, Gutie-rrez-Garcia’s responses suggested that he understood his infraction. But as soon as O’Neal began asking questions related to the court proceedings, Gutierrez-Garcia’s comprehension seemed to hit a wall.
“Do you know what a witness is?” O’Neal asked.
“No,” Gutierrez-Garcia said.
“Do you know what a judge is?” O’Neal asked.
“Judge, yes,” Gutierrez-Garcia replied.
“What’s a judge?” O’Neal asked.
“Judge,” Gutierrez-Garcia said.
“Can you tell me who in the room is the judge?” O’Neal asked.
Gutierrez-Garcia replied, “No.”
During a recent press appearance in Eagle Pass, Donald Trump made one of his hallmark incendiary speeches, remarking on migrant traffic crossing the Texas-Mexico border. “We have languages coming into our country,” he said from the town 330 miles northwest of Brownsville. “We have nobody that even speaks those languages. They’re truly foreign languages. Nobody speaks them.” The remark drew plenty of criticism that noted the obvious: “It cannot be the case both that someone speaks a language and that no one speaks that language,” wrote a Washington Post columnist.
But in the sense that some of the rare languages spoken by migrants are barely spoken in the United States, Trump’s not wrong.“There are people who come here and no one speaks their languages,” said O’Neal.
For the few interpreters in the U.S. court system who are fluent in rare Indigenous languages, the task is a formidable one. For one, they must contend with the regular challenges of interpretation, making choices about what to prioritize—intonation, logic, sentence structure—within the overall transmission of meaning. They also face unique challenges in working with languages that lack cultural touchstones common to English and Spanish, said Dale Taylor, a Nebraska-based court-appointed interpreter of a Uto-Aztecan language called Tarahumara, spoken by some 70,000 in the state of Chihuahua. “They don’t understand a court system. They don’t understand a judicial system,” Taylor said of the Tarahumara people. “They don’t even have a word for a ‘law.’ ”
Bierge noted that the same can be said for Northern Tepehuan. “Legal terms are not going to be in the language,” she said. The only interpreter Garcia and Navarro were able to find—a missionary who had interpreted for two previous cases—declined to take on Gutierrez-Garcia’s case, citing the difficulty of explaining legal concepts to Northern Tepehuan speakers.
The work of the interpreter within these Indigenous languages requires creativity and contextualization. Using the example of a “term of probation,” Taylor said of Tarahumara, “there’s no word for ‘probation.’ So you have to say, ‘You’re going to be watched. It’s kind of like you’re going to be watched for five years.’ ”
Emiliana Cruz is a Mexico City–based linguistic anthropologist and an interpreter of Chatino, spoken by about 45,000 people in the state of Oaxaca. She said communicating legalese to clients in U.S. courts can be an arduous process, often requiring lengthy explanations of abstract concepts. “I often find that the judges roll their eyes like, ‘Okay, when are you going to be done talking?’ ” Cruz said. Some judges will assume that her clients’ ignorance of legal matters equates to stupidity.
Cruz’s two sisters, who’d also worked as interpreters, decided they didn’t want to continue; it was too emotionally taxing. “I do it because I feel that it is the only way someone can understand their rights in their own language,” Cruz said. “I think that is something fundamental for all of us, right?”
Emiliana Cruz, left, hiking with locals and experts in San Juan Quiahije, in Oaxaca, Mexico, to document the names of flora and fauna in the Chatino language, on July 4, 2014.Gibrán Morales
Gutierrez-Garcia’s motion to dismiss the case was denied. U.S. district judge David Counts, of the Western District of Texas, concluded that Gutierrez-Garcia had “a sufficient understanding of the Spanish language to proceed to trial with a Spanish interpreter.” While Counts acknowledged the defendant’s right to an interpreter competent in his primary language, he wrote that the issue ultimately required a balance of the defendant’s rights against the “economical administration of criminal law.”
Gutierrez-Garcia pleaded not guilty but sought to minimize his penalty by accepting responsibility for the crime in what is called a “stipulated bench trial.” There, the parties agreed that Gutierrez-Garcia had possessed marijuana with the intent to distribute it and that he reserved his right to an appeal, where he could challenge the district court’s finding that he was proficient in Spanish. He was sentenced to 24 months in prison.
In August 2022, O’Neal filed an appeal with the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which accounts for a high number of court hearings involving interpreters in the United States, and argued that the district court had abused its discretion. But a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit deferred to the district court’s decision. “True, there is evidence in the record that Gutierrez did sometimes struggle to understand legal concepts,” the opinion stated. It then framed Gutierrez-Garcia’s confusion as an issue not of language but of education. “The record indicates that Gutierrez never attended school.”
The circuit judges concluded that because Gutierrez-Garcia was able to acknowledge having committed the crime, “any deviations from ideal communication” were minor enough that they would not be considered fundamentally unfair. In other words, as long as Gutierrez-Garcia was able to admit responsibility, his lack of comprehension of the proceedings or the arguments being made about his sentencing were considered
unimportant.
Courts over the years have ruled that the right to an interpreter is necessitated by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which grant certain rights to those accused of crimes, including the right to know the charges and evidence against them. The Court Interpreters Act, enacted by Congress in 1978, turned those court decisions into statute law, stating that a court should use a certified interpreter provided that a defendant “speaks only or primarily a language other than the English language.”
“If we all agreed he couldn’t speak Spanish, and we all agreed there wasn’t an interpreter there for his particular Indigenous language,” said Beck, “then there is no way to have any of these proceedings without violating the Sixth Amendment and probably the Fifth Amendment . . . and the Court Interpreters Act.” Nevertheless Beck was unsurprised by the ruling. “The Fifth Circuit has evolved over time [into] a court that has a lot of emphasis on law and order,” he said. “The Fifth Circuit today is often unsympathetic to the plight of the criminal defendant.”
When Trump took office, in 2017, he had the opportunity to fill more than one hundred judicial vacancies, including seventeen across the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Six of the seventeen judges in the Fifth Circuit are Trump appointees. “Anytime one third of the court changes with one president—which should never happen—it’s going to shift the ideological perspective of the court,” Beck said.
All three of the judges on O’Neal’s appeal were Trump appointees, including Texas judge Don Willett, whom Trump also considered as a potential Supreme Court nominee.
Gutierrez-Garcia’s case was not the first, nor the last, of its kind to appear before the Fifth Circuit. In United States v.Herrera-Quinones (2022), the Western District of Texas court provided a Tepehuan man with an interpreter fluent in his native language before determining that the defendant’s Spanish was sufficient. The defense argued that the Tepehuan
interpreter should not have been dismissed. Its request for reversal by the Fifth Circuit was also denied.
In 2023 criminal defense attorney Matthew Kozik’s client Jose Manuel Ayala-Alas, a Tepehuan speaker who was provided with a Spanish interpreter, was sentenced to thirteen and a half years in prison for smuggling marijuana across the border, even after an expert testified that Ayala-Alas spoke Spanish at a second-grade level. “You have a federal court turning a blind eye to language issues,” said Kozik, who filed for an appeal and is awaiting a ruling. “This is not just some small-town Hudspeth County state court. This is a federal jurisdiction.”
As his last resort, O’Neal petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States to hear Gutierrez-Garcia’s case, invoking the Court Interpreters Act, as well as the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. The odds were against him. Fewer than one percent of the cases heard by the high court involve indigent criminal defendants. “These are people who are poor, who can’t afford to pay, who are utterly helpless, who are pitted against the most powerful institution in the world—the United States of America,” Beck said.
Gutierrez-Garcia served eighteen months in federal prison. His current whereabouts are unknown; O’Neal has been unable to contact him. In January the Supreme Court responded that O’Neal’s petition had been denied. He had expected the result but was disappointed. Still, he takes solace in the fact that it won’t change Gutierrez-Garcia’s fate significantly. By the time of the high court’s action, he had already served his time.
Thisarticleoriginally appeared in the May 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “When a Defendant Gets Lost in Translation.” Subscribe today.
Manga enthusiasts worldwide are witnessing a renaissance in access to officially licensed content, marking a shift away from reliance on scanlation groups. This transformation not only broadens readers' choices but also supports the industry by offering legal avenues for manga consumption. Here, we explore ten official manga apps tailored for English readers, each offering unique features and a diverse selection of titles. 1. K MANGA
Image Courtesy: K MANGA Official X (Formerly Twitter) Account
Kodansha's entry into the market, K MANGA, delivers simulpubs of popular titles straight from Japan. Despite initial scepticism regarding its credit-based unlocking system, K MANGA boasts over 400 available titles, including beloved series like Attack on Titan. 2. Mangamo
Image Courtesy: Mangamo Official Website
Offering a global platform for manga lovers, Mangamo impresses with its extensive library and partnerships with major publishers like Kodansha. Its subscription model and daily free chapters entice readers to explore diverse genres. 3. WebComics
Image Courtesy: WebComics Official X (Formerly Twitter) Account
With a focus on romance and diverse storytelling, WebComics provides a vibrant space for readers and creators alike. Its mobile-exclusive content and support for budding artists set it apart in the manga app landscape. 4. Manga Up!
Image Courtesy: Manga Up! Official Website
Square Enix's venture into manga distribution showcases a rich selection of titles, including exclusives and translations of fan-favorite series. The app's coin-based payment model ensures accessibility for global audiences. 5. MANGA Plus by SHUEISHA
Image Courtesy: MANGA Plus by SHUEISHA Official X (Formerly Twitter) Account
As the global counterpart to Japan's Shonen Jump+, MANGA Plus offers a treasure trove of serialized works from Shueisha. Its free access to select chapters and simulpubs reflects the publisher's commitment to engaging international fans. 6. INKR
Image Courtesy: INKR Official Website
Emerging from the ashes of piracy, INKR Comics champions legal manga distribution while empowering creators. Its subscription model supports a wide range of content, fostering a sustainable ecosystem for manga enthusiasts and artists alike. 7.Shonen JumpManga & Comics
Image Courtesy: Shonen Jump Official X (Formerly Twitter) Account
Boasting a vast library of over 15,000 titles, Shonen Jump caters to fans across several countries with its subscription-based model. The app's free trial and offline reading feature enhance the user experience. 8. BOOK☆WALKER
Image Courtesy: BOOK☆WALKER Official X (Formerly Twitter) Account
Kadokawa's online bookstore has evolved into a hub for manga and light novels, offering a diverse array of titles to English readers. Its commitment to expansion and frequent sales make it a go-to destination for digital manga. 9. Viz Manga
Image Courtesy: Viz Media Official Website
With a focus on promoting legal manga consumption, Viz Media's subscription service offers access to simulpubs and an extensive archive of titles. Affordable pricing and exclusive series entice fans to support their favourite creators. 10.CrunchyrollManga
Image Courtesy: TOI
Known for its streaming platform, Crunchyroll extends its reach to manga enthusiasts worldwide. Offering a unique library and access to its vast anime collection, Crunchyroll stands out as a comprehensive entertainment destination.
The proliferation of official manga apps signifies a positive shift in the industry, providing fans with legal, convenient and diverse avenues to explore their favourite stories. As readers continue to embrace these platforms, they not only support their beloved creators but also contribute to the growth and sustainability of the manga ecosystem.
Amazon is listing the fourth compiled book volume of Tomoyuki Maru's Only My Undesirable Translation Talent Can Change the World ("Honyaku" no Sainō de Ore dake ga Sekai wo Kaihen Dekiru Ken: Hazure Sainō "Honyaku" de Kizukeba Sekai Saikyō ni Nattemashita) manga — the adaptation of Hakuto Aono's light novel series of the same title — as its final volume. The volume will release on June 12.
Square Enix's Manga UP! Global publishes the manga digitally and describes the story:
Noah is the eldest son from a noble family known for their magical prowess. As such, his father expects him to possess a Talent for elemental attack magic. But during his appraisal, it was revealed that not only couldn't he use magic, but he had a particularly useless Talent—"Translation.” Yet, no one could have guessed that this astonishing ability has the power to change the world!
The manga launched on Square Enix's Gangan Online in May 2022. Square Enix shipped the third compiled book volume in Japan on December 12.
Aono launched the original light novel series on the Shōsetsuka ni Narō (Let's Become Novelists) website in June 2021. Kadokawa published the novels' first volume with illustration by Hajime Kanadome in March 2022.
Maru launched The Legendary Dragon-armored Knight Wants to Live a Normal Life in the Countryside (Densetsu no Ryūsō Kishi wa Inaka de Futsū ni Kurashitai: SSS-Rank Irai no Shitauke Yamemasu!), the manga adaptation of Tuck's light novel series of the same title, on Gangan Online in November 2019, and the series ended in September 2021. Manga UP! Global publishes the manga digitally in English. The manga is also available on Kadokawa's BookWalker Global Store.
Source: Amazon
Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. One or more of the companies mentioned in this article are part of the Kadokawa Group of Companies.
The picture soon caught the attention of the netizens
The Indian Railways is getting slammed on social media after a picture of a board on the Hatia-Ernakulam Express showed the name "Hatia" translated as "Kolapathakam" (murderer) in Malayalam surfaced. The photo of the board went viral on the internet, prompting widespread criticism.
The Senior Divisional Commercial Manager (Sr DCM) of Ranchi Division told Business Today that the mistake occurred due to confusion with the Hindi word "Hatya", which means "murder". He confirmed that the incorrect nameplate was rectified promptly after the mistake was highlighted.
Passengers were understandably alarmed when they saw the new name displayed on station boards and tickets. Facing ridicule online, railway authorities swiftly covered up the incorrect Malayalam translation with yellow paint.
An X user posted a photo of the board with the caption, "Shhhh, nobody tell them".
The Hatia-Ernakulam Express connects the cities of Hatia in Ranchi and Ernakulam weekly.
A user commented, "Too much dependence on Google Translate".
Another user wrote, "Must have Google translated 'Hatya'"
The third user remarked, "Lost in translation (literally)".
Meanwhile, a video circulating online has captured the frustrations of many train passengers in India. The clip shows a woman on the 22969 OKHA BSBS Super Fast Express (Okha to Banaras) train expressing her concerns about overcrowding to a Travelling Ticket Examiner (TTE).
In the video, the woman expresses her concern for safety and the lack of personal space due to the excessive number of passengers. She questions the TTE about how women can feel secure in such conditions.
