Language aptitude tests

The Nautilus blog published a piece on 17 April by contributor Michael Erard under the headline Secret Military Test, Coming Soon to Your Spanish Class.

Despite the silly headline the article (subheaded A powerful, precise language aptitude test is entering civilian life) raises a number of interesting issues.

On 'Eurish'

On 13 April, FT language columnist Michael Skapinker published a pice on 'Eurish', aka European English, entitled Eurish has developed a grammar of its own.

Translator Stephen Reynolds responded promptly with a letter published under the heading
Keep Eurish out of serious written communication. He concludes:

So here is a message for all those European business people who are smart enough to improve their English by reading the FT: keep talking in Eurish by all means, but if you have anything important to write, do so in your own language and find a serious professional translator to produce the English version.

'Picker', an ideal summer job for t&t students

On 10 April 2014 in an article entitled Shedding light on dark stores, FT columnist Emma Jacobs cast the spotlight on some negative aspects of dotcom centres and similar industrial factilities also known as 'dark stores' and the work performed by 'pickers'.

On a more positive note, the article reminded me of the time I spent as a picker on a short-term summer contract when a student. It also reminded me how often I recommended this type of job as a useful part-time or summer job for translation and terminology students for the simple reason that few jobs give young people better exposure to and physical contact with an incredible variety of products, parts and components along with a practical understanding of the importance of consistent terminology, catalogueing and similar tasks.

Acheteurs / communicants, vers une meilleure compréhension ?

Ne pas manquer l'article de Gérard Bourgois intitulé Acheteurs / Communicants, vers une meilleure compréhension ?

Accord de bonnes pratiques sur les relations donneurs d’ordres / fournisseurs, visant à aboutir à une « relation mutuellement exigeante pour une création de valeur partagée ».

Accord de bonnes pratiques basé sur cinq principes :

1. L’identification de compétences distinctives chez le prestataire, pour ne pas se limiter au seul critère financier.
2. La visibilité réciproque des politiques d’achat du donneur d’ordres et de sous-traitance de la part du fournisseur.
3. La transparence sur les processus de consultation et de sélection et leur respect par le prestataire.
4. La capacité d’innovation du prestataire qui sait favoriser la co-conception avec son client.
5. Une diversification d’activité du prestataire pour éviter sa dépendance économique vis-à-vis d’un seul donneur d’ordres.

101 Things a Translator Needs to Know -- Coming soon!

Coming soon!
101 things a translator needs to know... pithy advice from some of the best minds in the business.

101 things a translator needs to know -- scheduled for publication in April 2014 -- is a collection of tips from some of the most dynamic translators working in the industry today.

For samples, see here.
For information on the people behind 101 things a translator needs to know, see here.

MT update, take #2

Hard on the heels of my update of 9 March, here's another that takes a different tack and suggests that things might be moving faster -- or not -- than David Grunwald suspects.

Take a look at the article entitled: A world of seamless and immediate language translation gets closer on the The Posse List, a blog that "pretty much everything across the legal employment field".

Quote:

We are going to have much, much, much more on this in March. In late February the founder of The Posse List will be meeting again with IBM  Research’s Cognitive Systems team  and Watson team at the Mobile World Congress with language translation at the top of agenda, and then attending a “global imperialism of English” workshop in Paris.

Coming back myself on the opposite tack, it is also true that it must be at least forty years since we first heard claims that under certain circumstances a certain MT system could translate a certain language pair with an accuracy of 90%. In the Posse List article the claim reads:

Despite its simplicity, the method is surprisingly effective:  they achieved an almost 90% precision for translation of words between English and Spanish. (Check the article to get the full context.) 

As one colleague pointed out, if you're getting ten words out of every hundred wrong and occasionally one of those words is a negative -- a simple word like 'no' or any equivalent -- (and not to mention any of a myriad of other mysteries of language), then you're not doing very well at all.
As another suggests, what do you say to a cook who says "well 90% of the dishes I serve are delicious and no more than 10% are likely to cause nausea, colic or occasionally even death"?

MT update, take #1

Machine translation specialist David Grunwald has posted a ten-point update of the state of the art on the TAUS blog.
Recommended reading.