Of Mesopotamia, cattle and interest (en anglais)

Pecuniary, adj

My acquaintance with German idioms and figures of speech began in one of the oldest restaurants in Berlin, when my German friends ordered an Eisbein for dinner (traditional German dish—boiled knuckle of pork with sauerkraut). I was amazed at such a funny name (the German word Eisbein means "ice leg") and I asked my friends about the origin of this name. To my disappointment nobody knew the origin and I was answered "It was always so." Only some years later did I find in a cooking book the information that people in old Germany made skates for ice skating from the knuckle bones (hence the name "ice leg"), because iron was too expensive to be used for recreation.

Pecuniary, adj

Peaceful Immigrants or Invading Hordes?

All three of these books are concerned with a crucial problem of translation: precisely how do we handle a vast technical vocabulary unexpectedly imported into a language not necessarily prepared to deal with it? This question applies most urgently to the integration of computer terminology into many of the world's languages, but as we shall see this is not the only possible example. The answer may turn out to be that there is no one method guaranteed to be fully practicable in all cases and that unless there is a pressing need for a culture to absorb such a vocabulary, no one standardized approach may be entirely successful.

Dear Colleagues:

This letter is intended as a query on a topic of interest to many translators. No claims or statements of any sort are being advanced—rather it is an attempt to articulate my own sense of puzzlement in public. May I therefore request your patient compassion as well as any corrections you may care to make.

We sometimes read of learned mathematicians presenting the final proof amidst welcoming applause that such an such an equation can never be solved. In this spirit, discovering the limits of one's ignorance can be as valuable as learning something new. Language does not at least yet lend itself to such exactitude as mathematics, but I cannot help wondering about a few things as I read of tomorrow's computer systems, impending global exchanges of electronic glossaries on all subjects, and remarkable new computer insights into the translating process. All of these are developments that will influence our lives and work in many ways. But are all of these events truly due to occur on as total a scale as projected, or could there just possibly be some key piece of the equation that doesn't mesh, leaving it unsolved in some final sense on both the philosophical and practical levels?

Saving Money Through Terminology Management

For several years now, LISA members have recognized the value that managing terminology brings to the localization industry. It’s the Terminology SIG’s job to make sure that terminology management remains a focus area for improvement, even if that means looking beyond the GILT industry itself. Because indeed it’s not just about translation. The message is simple, to quote IBM’s Globalizing your e-business web site: “Managing terminology wordss your corporate brand image, and makes your products easier to use, easier to translate, and easier to adapt to global markets.”

LISA and its Members have been talking about the merits of managing terminology for years. We've conducted enough surveys to prove that it’s “the best thing since sliced bread.” We've presented doomsday scenarios about the impact of not managing terminology that have converted skeptics to dedicated terminologists (if only for a fleeting moment). We've lobbied source language partners to stop creating the "garbage in, garbage out" mess.

Brazil is one of the world’s leaders in the development of deep water drilling technology. It is not rocket science but it comes quite close. The translation of oil industry documents can often be pretty dull fare. Those of us who do a lot of work in the field can testify to that. But every once in a while we are privileged to have a close look at Brazil’s deep water drilling technology. Take it from us, it is impressive. If you sit back a bit and let your imagination roam, you can come up with some pretty incredible images.

Abstract

At a recent conference in Montreal I felt vindicated to hear that I am not alone in my notion of the ideal use of terminology tools among translators. Lynne Bowkers, who teaches translation technology at the University of Ottawa, gave a talk on the discrepancy between the terminology components that many translation environment tools (aka CAT tools) offer and their actual and/or ideal use by translators.

Some Problems Related to Legal, Financial and Insurance Terminology

Until recently Polish-English translators had to do with Jan Stanisławski's The Great English-Polish and Polish-English Dictionary or The Kosciuszko Foundation English-Polish and Polish-English Dictionary, both of which were published in the late '50s or early '60s. For nearly forty years they were the largest source of reference, although not always a reliable one due to errors/omissions and a lapse of time. They had a dozen or so reprints but their content remained basically unchanged. My 1998 edition of the Stanisławski Dictionary has a new modern and colorful cover, but it does not contain a large number of new speciaL terms related to computers, Internet, modern technology, biotechnology, etc., as well as terms corresponding to the new Polish political, economic and legal environment after the fall of Communism in the late '80s.

Dictionaries are a serious and time-consuming matter with a lot of work to do before publishing and e-dictionaries cannot be an exception.

When I picked up this small dictionary of 31,000 entries, I wondered 'Why do we need a small dictionary when we have the benchmark large Országh?' The title explains it one way: it is a practical dictionary. The Preface mentions the other reason: it is a contemporary dictionary. Indeed, we all know that no matter how comprehensive a dictionary might be, it becomes obsolete by the time it emerges from the printer. An interesting phenomenon can be illustrated through the term ATM, for example.

Introduction

Translating English Terms into Spanish, French, and Portuguese

Publisher: Melhoramentos

ISBN 85-06-03123-0

1735 pages, 167,000 entries

Price in Brazil: R$ 125.00 (1 real ~ US$ 0.5)

for students from a Chinese background: The problem of translation

1. Introduction

This paper addresses some of the practical aspects of translation that the authors have experienced in the process of implementing a bilingual on-line lexicon currently being developed as part of an integrated multimedia language learning programme—the Virtual language Centre (VLC http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk). It identifies some of the difficulties involved in translating certain culture-specific items into Chinese, and points out some flaws in the existing English-Chinese bilingual dictionaries. Finally this paper offers examples of modification as adopted in the VLC on-line bilingual lexicon, as well as further considerations relating to the translation of other groups of words such as business and banking terms.

Language Reflecting Culture Through Vocabulary

Greek is a language with a rich vocabulary which includes a large number of cultural keywords; these keywords are words that reflect cultural values, beliefs, or even history. Such words are often very difficult to translate in another language and the translator has to explicitly render them by including footnotes, or explanations in parentheses, or by using the technique of adaptation to find corresponding terms in the foreign language that would evoke the same feelings in the target audience.

(Incomplete version)

Macros can be used to automatize repetitive, tedious and time-consuming jobs. "Windows Macros", i.e. third-party macros working in all programs and objects within the Microsoft Windows environment, have a much wider scope than Office Macros (please see http://www.proz.com/doc/657).
Suppose you have downloaded a lot of htm files from a 5-language glossary on the Web. Each htm file contains a lot of tags and text, but you are only interested in the 5 terms in 5 different languages. How can you get rid of the rest?

These terms, adaptation, transliteration and domestication might sound grand to the ears of the people who might come across them but they do refer to certain important concepts that a translator might have to face. There are certain languages which are more open to these concepts while some are less open. This may depend from language to language and there may not be any specific rules in these situations.

A Contrastive Study

Abstract: The debate on foreignization or domestication is still heated in Chinese translation circles. Analysis reveals that the terms used by Chinese scholars and Venuti look the same, but actually have different origins and meanings and are used in different contexts for different purposes. They are simply not discussing the same thing.

The Translation of Geographical Names

As it has been brilliantly stated by Verónica Albin1, 2 in previous issues of the Translation Journal, translating the names of geographical entities is like navigating in treacherous waters. Even with the most advanced information systems—such as satellite positioning (GPS) and up-to-date maps—if the skipper does not have experience, a shipwreck is not only probable, but likely. This has also been my experience when translating the names of cities, states, provinces, countries and other geographical terms from and into Spanish, English, and French

It seems self-evident that dictionary consultation constitutes an important stage in the process of translation. Dictionaries provide translators with valuable information. However, if we want our students to be efficient users of this reference material, we need to understand how they use these sources of vocabulary in their work. Taking these two statements as starting points, our paper reports on some of our research findings, in which we discuss the results of an empirical research project, conducted with translation students at University Jaume I (Castellon, Spain), in order to establish how they use different types of dictionaries. We comment on the main objectives of our research and findings regarding the types of dictionary used the frequency of use, the main reasons for consultation, etc. The conclusion is that our students do not take advantage of the different dictionaries available. In addition, the results suggest that they are not familiar with electronic dictionaries—CD-ROM dictionaries and online dictionaries.