Thursday, December 23, 2021

'Heart language' Marion man plays a role in Bible translation - The Southern - Translation

122321-nws-gunn-1.jpg

Jay Gunn is the assistant director of discipleship for Wycliffe Associates, an international organization that translates the Bible into native languages.

Jay Gunn does not speak Cape Verdean Creole. Nor is he able to communicate in Dutch or in the native English-Creole spoken in Turks and Caicos.

In fact, he does not speak any tongues other than English, yet he has a hand in the translation of the Bible into these and 839 other languages.

Gunn, 43, is the assistant director of discipleship for Wycliffe Associates, a role which he says is a perfect fit, giving him an opportunity to serve and care for those around the world who are working on active translation projects.

Think of Gunn as a staff pastor for all of the other employees and volunteers of the not-for-profit organization.

“My primary role right now is to be a sort of chaplain for our team,” Gunn explained. “I am the one who just checks in with people, making sure they are being taken care of. To use a phrase from my days as a United Methodist pastor, my job is to ask them, ‘How is it with your soul?’”

Gunn used a Biblical example to describe his position.

People are also reading…

“In the Book of Exodus, it was the job of Aaron and Hur to help Moses hold up his hands so Israel would prevail. It’s my job to keep our guys’ hands in the air as they go and do what God has called us to do as an organization,” he said.

How Gunn landed in the role is a story in itself. Having worked as a conductor with Amtrak for eight years, he said in 2020 he could sense cutbacks and layoffs coming because of the pandemic. He saw an ad for a regional director position with Wycliffe Associates. The Orlando-based group was looking for someone to handle relationships with churches and translators in the Pacific Region. His application led to several conversations with administrators and leaders, who eventually invited Gunn and several other applicants to an in-person, multi-day interview in Florida.

Despite being in meetings with others competing for the same job, Gunn said he felt, not animosity toward the others, but rather a sense of shared mission.

Gunn shared his experience. “Through the beginning of the week, I had this thought that I just wanted to take care of these guys, but there was nothing in the organizational chart for that,” he said. “Then on Wednesday, Sam, who would be our director opened up and said he was creating a new position with the organization. He said, ‘We’ve been doing this for four years and I have this desire for someone to take care of my guys, to look out for them, sort of like a chaplain. Do you guys have any ideas?’ he asked. I had goosebumps and told him what I had been feeling.”

Wycliffe Associates had found their man and Gunn had found a new calling. Today, working remotely from his home in Marion, Gunn leads regularly scheduled staff devotional videos, making face-to-face check-ins over Zoom, leading team chapels and prayers as well as just checking in with people, providing support and encouragement and helping however he can. He said his role is ever-changing.

“One of the cool things is it’s always in process. We don’t know how it will look in the future,” he said. “Right now we are looking at how best to do the team care aspect of things.”

Gunn said the goal is to lend support to those placed internationally, who work with locals, training and helping them translate the Bible into their native tongues – what Gunn calls “heart languages.”

“Heart language is what people speak when they are at home, when they are with their families. It’s the language they dream in and they language they speak from the heart, whether or not it is the official language in their country,” he explained.

He said the work is overwhelming, but very rewarding.

“There are still thousands of languages that do not have a Bible. In my Midwestern American church context, I’ve never known life without the Bible. I can’t imagine those who do not have that,” he said. “To hear people read from the Bible in their own heart language for the first time, it is a feeling you never forget. It’s life-changing and I am excited to be part of that.”

Climate change is having an impact on the amount of snow we see in Illinois. Chief Meteorologist Matt Holiner takes a look at how things have changed so far and what we can expect in the future.

Adblock test (Why?)

Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

First Chinese-Arabic dictionary of TCM basic terms published - Global Times - Dictionary

TCM Photo: VCG

Photo: VCG


After years of effort, the first Chinese-Arabic Dictionary of Basic Terms and Specifications for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been published, breaking language barriers to help bring TCM culture to the Arabic world.

The dictionary was edited by Li Jinli, a professor at Qinghai Minzu University and vice president of the Hui Ethnic Medicine Research Institute, who spent more than two years translating and editing, the China News Service reported on Wednesday.

According to the report, the dictionary has eight sections that cover content such as professional terms in TCM, pathology, names of Chinese medicines and acupuncture. The dictionary boasts more than 6,000 entries.

Li told media that TCM is the quintessence of Chinese culture, recording the rich experience and theoretical knowledge of the Chinese people in their fight against disease over thousands of years. 

Li pointed out that over the years, various versions of the dictionary have mainly been translated into English, French, German, Russian and Japanese, while other languages have been left out in the cold for the most part. 

"Now some foreigners are attracted by the effectiveness of TCM, and our medicine's influence in international society has been increasing," a doctor at a TCM Department of a hospital in North China's Shanxi Province told the Global Times on Thursday.

The doctor added that he believes that translations of the dictionary will help people in other countries further understand TCM and therefore increase its effectiveness. 

"TCM can also be beneficial to Arabic people," he said.

Tan Qilong, head of the Hui Ethnic Medicine Research Institute, praised the dictionary for opening another window for TCM to reach the rest of the world and allow more people benefit from the curative effect of simple and convenient TCM.

The Chinese-English dictionary of TCM Basic Terms was published in 2008 and a Chinese-German version was published in 2017. These versions were edited with cooperation from overseas institutes.

The Chinese-German version was worked on by the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies and Technische Universität München and covers 6,526 entries. Each entry includes Chinese pinyin and corresponding terms in German, while entries are arranged according to the academic system of TCM.

Many doctors have said they believe that TCM can play a bigger role in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. During the outbreak in Guangzhou, South China's Guangdong Province, in May and June, among the 166 local cases in hospitals, 118 were treated solely with TCM therapy, accounting for 71 percent of total treatment. TCM helped 57 patients who were vulnerable to severe illness from experiencing such severe symptoms, Zhang Zhongde, deputy head of the COVID-19 Response Group led by the National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, said at a press conference held in December.

The international influence of TCM is expanding. International students from the China University of Petroleum attended classes about TCM culture at the TCM Cultural Base at the Traditional Chinese Medical Hospital in Qingdao, East China's Shandong Province, in April 2021.

Adblock test (Why?)

Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

The problem with machine translation: Beware the wisdom of the crowd - Tech Xplore - Translation

The problem with machine translation: beware the wisdom of the crowd
It pays to compare like with like. Credit: Shutterstock

According to collective intelligence evangelist and journalist James Surowiecki, groups are much better at making predictions than the individuals who belong to those groups, be they novices or leading experts.

To illustrate this theory, Surowiecki shares a story in his 2004 book, "The Wisdom of Crowds," about Sir Francis Galton, a British statistician who made an astonishing discovery while attending a country fair at the turn of the 20th century.

During the fair, there was a contest in which participants were asked to guess the weight of an ox. There were 787 entries, which Galton analyzed upon returning home.

He was surprised to find that the median of all the entries was not only more accurate than the individual estimates of the butchers and farmers, who were supposed to have a keen eye for this kind of estimating, but also that this median was just a single pound off the animal's exact weight.

Galton would go on to publish his findings in the journal Nature, explaining the idea of vox populi: the best decisions are often those made by large groups.

Strength in numbers

Let's compare Francis Galton's anecdote to university courses for professional translators, in which participants have the opportunity to share their insights and clever finds, which they dissect, discuss, and critique as a group.

They arrange the best solutions into a final version, an ensemble of each individual contributor's most inspired ideas. This translation, a team effort, will invariably be higher quality than participants' individual work, no matter how talented they might be.

By extension, we might ask ourselves: might machine translation, whose statistical model more or less mimics the collective intelligence formula, replace real-life human translators? In the era of artificial intelligence, might we leverage our strength in numbers to translate, as if the Internet were a massive classroom, an enormous group project, our very own dream team with millions of members, a place where every translated text could serve as inspiration?

While seemingly brilliant on paper, I must start by disappointing automation evangelists.

The Internet is full of specialists, but they are but a drop in an ocean of generalists who also have something to say about how a given text should be translated. AI tries its best to put the sources it identifies as reliable (say, major organizations or reputable companies) at the top. But instead of asking for the truth, it asks for the opinion of the entire planet, indeed anyone who has written and published anything online.

If we continue to use the country fair analogy, this would be like not only asking everyone on earth for their opinion, for better and for worse, it would almost be like if everyone were also guessing without even identifying the creature they're looking at, since computers can't assign meaning to the solutions they find. They would certainly have a statistical idea of what animal it is, based on the features the machine detects, but not an exact match.

So, in addition to guesses about cattle breeds, you could potentially also get guesses about every animal on Earth, from fleas to blue whales, with all of the inconsistencies that would cause.

Finally, and most importantly, collaborative human translations are always subject to a certain amount of shepherding, whether by the professor or presenter, who guides the group and makes the final call. In other words, a higher power sorts through the solutions from the critical mass of translators and provides the guardrails that keep the process on track. When using machine translation without human intervention, these guardrails aren't there.

Mr Shithole goes to jumpsuit

There are, of course, a few safeguards that keep machine translation in check. The words themselves are usually a good indicator of the likely meaning of a sentence. Next, there's the context, which neural technologies now account for, narrowing the range of possible words to certain large families.

In our cattle example, the search would be corralled by the most basic engines to include large barnyard animals and by the most sophisticated ones to just bovine breeds. Nevertheless, given the difference between a small Angus calf and a big Charolais bull, the margin of error could still be high.

It's no wonder, then, that otherwise fluent-sounding sentences might omit meaningful information or be peppered with offensive errors, words that crop up out of nowhere, or gender bias.

Sometimes, the meaning might be completely flipped: since translation engines are unable to "understand" what sentences mean, they opt for the statistically likeliest solution, which could be the opposite of what the original says.

In this study, the headline, "UK car industry in brace position ahead of Brexit deadline," was translated as "L'industrie automobile britannique en position de force avant l'échéance du Brexit." The original English sentence means the UK car industry is fearing the worst (and placing itself in a defensive position, like passengers on a plane before a crash). Conversely, the French translation says the opposite: that the UK car is in a position of power (en position de force).

In other words, proceed with caution, because no matter how fluent the suggested translation appears, these types of errors (incorrect terminology, omissions, mistranslations) abound in machine translation output.

My colleague Ben Karl has shared a few examples on his website, including one where Mexico's official tourism website (automatically) translated the name of the upscale beachside resort town of Tulum as "jumpsuit."

Another incredible gem: the name of the president of the People's Republic of China being elegantly translated from Burmese to English as Mr. Shithole.

Normalization and leveling out

Another issue with machine translation which people may be less aware of is a process known as normalization. If new translations are only ever made using existing ones, over time, the process can stifle inventiveness, creativity, and originality, as several scientific studies have demonstrated.

Scholars also talk about "algorithmic bias": where machines are more likely to suggest a given term the more it is used to translate a certain word. The result is that less frequent (and therefore more creative) translations are blotted out.

Machines don't try to make texts sound pretty or play with the poetry of the words—simply conveying the meaning will suffice. This leveling out, a sort of homogenisation, be it cultural, stylistic or ideological, can be a particular problem for literary texts, which by their very nature deviate from the norm and develop a distinct linguistic flavor.

An excellent article on leveling out by translator Françoise Wuilmart, written more than a decade before the emergence of neural machine translation, sounds particularly prescient today: "Leveling out hits at the very core of what makes literary translation so hard. To level out or 'normalize' a text is to dull or dampen it, flatten its natural relief, lob off its pointy bits, fill in its grooves, and iron out all the wrinkles that make it a literary text in the first place."

This is precisely what machine translation does, whether intentionally or not. The tecnhology creates a vicious circle that, over time, leads to language impoverishment: the machine produces increasingly standardized texts, which are then used as the input to train other engines, which further level out the texts, and so on.

Studies have shown that machine-translated texts are less lexically rich. Exposing ourselves to increasingly homogenous language means hobbling our ability to express ourselves, and therefore our thoughts.

Human expertise in indispensable

Everyone in the translation industry today recognizes that it is undergoing a technological shift. Machine translation is clearly being used more and more, and its raw output is becoming increasingly usable.

However, too many users forget that automatically translated content has the potential to be rife with all kinds of errors, and that mistakes can be lurking everywhere among seemingly fluent and coherent sentences.

Expert translation professionals are uniquely equipped to assess the quality of this raw output. Only real-life humans can decide whether to use machine translation or not, like photographers picking the best camera for the conditions or accountants choosing the data entry method best suited to how they work.

Translation, like all professions, can't escape a certain amount of automation. We could in fact be excited about this change, which can help professionals let their expertise shine, avoid repetitive tasks, and focus on where they can add the most value.

But caution is more important than ever, and indiscriminate use of machine translation should be avoided.

Real professionals will choose the best way to work with you depending on your priorities and the famous time—budget—quality trio. As your savvy linguistic and cultural consultants, they will be the key to ensuring flawless multilingual communication.

Like the butcher who actually won the contest at the country fair in Plymouth in 1906 would undoubtedly have said, human expertise is the only way you can be sure to hit the bullseye every single time.

Explore further

Chinese to English translating: Not human, but exceptional
Provided by The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.The Conversation

Citation: The problem with machine translation: Beware the wisdom of the crowd (2021, December 23) retrieved 23 December 2021 from https://ift.tt/3Fr0YxE

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

Adblock test (Why?)

Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Wednesday, December 22, 2021

LaTasha Barnes Dances With Tradition Through Lindy Hop : Rough Translation - NPR - Translation

Enlarge this image

Lindy Hop dancer LaTasha Barnes is upholding the traditions of the dance that originated in Harlem in the 1920s. Cassidy Araiza for NPR

Cassidy Araiza for NPR

When she thinks about being a tradition-bearer through dance, LaTasha Barnes goes back to her family.

Barnes grew up in a multigenerational household in Winterpock, Va. Her great-grandmother, Elizabeth Harris, was one of the few Black cooks to run her own kitchen in the city of Richmond. At home in the farmhouse, she'd often cook to the sounds of Louis Armstrong.

Enlarge this image

A family photo of Barnes's great grandmother, Elizabeth Harris. Cassidy Araiza for NPR

Cassidy Araiza for NPR

The way Barnes remembers her childhood, there was always music and dancing in the house. Cousins came to visit from Washington, D.C. and New York, bringing the latest dance trends. Barnes grew up watching her parents rehearse their entrances to the social clubs, where they would enter dance contests.

One Sunday afternoon, when she was about 4 years old, her great-grandmother took her hand and led her into a swing out. Barnes still remembers the feeling of being pushed and pulled by her great-grandmother's hand. It was the same "in and out motion" that she saw in the dancing that her aunts and uncles did at parties.

"It was a baseline groove that everybody had. And then I felt like I could see it in their individual movements as well," she said.

Enlarge this image

Barnes holds a family photo of her dancing with her father, Thomas Barnes. There was always music and dancing in her childhood. Cassidy Araiza for NPR

Cassidy Araiza for NPR

She now realizes that afternoon with her great-grandmother was the first time she danced Lindy Hop.

Lindy Hop is a jazz dance that originated in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s and has since gained a following across the world, with large communities in Sweden and South Korea. It's an African American social dance. To Barnes and her great-grandmother, it was just called "fast dancing."

By the time she was 31 years old, Barnes had become a world champion in House, a dance style that surfaced out of underground music clubs in Chicago and New York. As she developed her dance practice, she felt a growing need to understand the jazz roots of the street dances for which she was becoming well-known.

Loading...

"When I first re-encountered Lindy Hop, it was presented as this thing that white people do at weddings," Barnes says. "It wasn't presented as a Black cultural art form."

Barnes wanted to go beyond this perception. She went to the Library of Congress to watch reel-to-reel archival films and worked closely with knowledgeable Lindy Hoppers. This was the beginning of her journey to reconnect with the sense of movement she had experienced while dancing with her great-grandmother.

Her research and dedication led her to the originators of Lindy Hop. In 2016, she was invited to perform with the luminaries–affectionately called the "elders"–of Lindy Hop. Chester Whitmore, Barbara Billups, Sugar Sullivan, and Norma Miller, known as the "Queen of Swing," were all there. Barnes recalls a moment between dances when it suddenly seemed as if all the white dancers had left the room.

Enlarge this image

American Lindy Hop dancer Norma Miller and her long time dance partner, Billy Ricker, perform in Chicago circa 1940. Known as the "Queen of Swing", Miller later formed her own dance troupe. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

"And I became a magnet somehow. I was just sitting on the couch next to Miss Norma," she said. "And I looked up and she made a gesture. And all of them descended upon me."

It felt like a sign. There was a moment of recognition. And laughter.

"And Chester leaned over to me [and said], "Are you ready? 'Cause you know this is on you now," she said. "And from then on the level of responsibility absolutely shifted."

Barnes remembers this as the night she was declared a tradition-bearer of Lindy Hop by some of the dance's most important practitioners.

Enlarge this image

Barnes dances with students at Arizona State University in November. Caitlin O'Hara for NPR

Caitlin O'Hara for NPR

This past fall, Barnes joined the faculty of Arizona State University's School of Music, Dance and Theatre, where she mentors young dancers and teaches courses on Black American dance forms and what she calls "the jazz continuum."

When Barnes teaches and performs Lindy Hop today, she says she's reaching for the joy she felt dancing with her great-grandmother. It is in this spirit that she carries the responsibility of being a tradition-bearer of a nearly 100 year-old dance. That's what she brings to the dance floor, whether she's improvising with friends in the studio or performing onstage.

"Each time you make a connection and you make a move happen, just off the basis of being together, it ignites joy," she said. "And just this exchange of energy gives you something to hold onto and something to celebrate."

Loading...

A Lindy Hop Starter Pack

  • Here's some of LaTasha's favorite songs to dance to:
    • Chicken An' Dumplings (Live), by Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers
    • Lavender Coffin, by Lionel Hampton
    • Wailing Interval, by Duke Ellington
    • Sister Sadie, by Horace Silver
    • Harlem, Harlem, Harlem, by Charles Turner & Uptown Swing
    • You Can't Pull the Wool Over My Eyes, by Catherine Russell
    • Jersey Bounce, by Ella Fitzgerald
    • Pickin' the Cabbage, by Cab Calloway
  • Listen to Snatch & Grab It, by Julia Lee. 
  • Watch the spectacular Lindy Hop sequence in the 1941 film Hellzapoppin.
  • Watch Frankie Manning talk in 2006 about his life and career. 
  • Watch LaTasha and Felix Berghäll dance at the 2019 International Lindy Hop Championships. 
  • Learn more about the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program.

Listen to Rough Translation wherever you get your podcasts, including NPR One, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and RSS.

Adblock test (Why?)

Posted by at No comments:
Labels:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)