Wiki Translation: free human translation

A site where people around the world can get together and translate for each other. In short, free human translation.

Source: WikiTranslation

The world's most difficult word to translate

The world's most difficult word to translate has been identified as "ilunga" from the Tshiluba language spoken in south-eastern DR Congo.

It came top of a list drawn up in consultation with 1,000 linguists.

Ilunga means "a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time".

It seems straightforward enough, but the 1,000 language experts identified it as the hardest word to translate.

In second place was shlimazl which is Yiddish for "a chronically unlucky person".

Third was Naa, used in the Kansai area of Japan to emphasise statements or agree with someone.

Although the definitions seem fairly precise, the problem is trying to convey the local references associated with such words, says Jurga Zilinskiene, head of Today Translations, which carried out the survey.

"Probably you can have a look at the dictionary and... find the meaning," she said. "But most importantly it's about cultural experiences and... cultural emphasis on words."

Source: BBC News

I, Translator

Published on: NYTimes

EVERYBODY has his own tale of terrible translation to tell — an incomprehensible restaurant menu in Croatia, a comically illiterate warning sign on a French beach. “Human-engineered” translation is just as inadequate in more important domains. In our courts and hospitals, in the military and security services, underpaid and overworked translators make muddles out of millions of vital interactions. Machine translation can certainly help in these cases. Its legendary bloopers are often no worse than the errors made by hard-pressed humans. Machine translation has proved helpful in more urgent situations as well. When Haiti was devastated by an earthquake in January, aid teams poured in to the shattered island, speaking dozens of languages — but not Haitian Creole. How could a trapped survivor with a cellphone get usable information to rescuers? If he had to wait for a Chinese or Turkish or an English interpreter to turn up he might be dead before being understood. Carnegie Mellon University instantly released its Haitian Creole spoken and text data, and a network of volunteer developers produced a rough-and-ready machine translation system for Haitian Creole in little more than a long weekend. It didn’t produce prose of great beauty. But it worked.The advantages and disadvantages of machine translation have been the subject of increasing debate among human translators lately because of the growing strides made in the last year by the newest major entrant in the field, Google Translate. But this debate actually began with the birth of machine translation itself. The need for crude machine translation goes back to the start of the cold war. The United States decided it had to scan every scrap of Russian coming out of the Soviet Union, and there just weren’t enough translators to keep up (just as there aren’t enough now to translate all the languages that the United States wants to monitor). The cold war coincided with the invention of computers, and “cracking Russian” was one of the first tasks these machines were set.