I'd Rather Be Writing » translation

The Urge to Correct: Frustrations with Language Translation and Misuse

Tom Johnson — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:04:33 +0000

Hezy Asher

The following is a guest post by Hezy Asher, a technical writer at Quest Software Israel.

VITO CORLEONE: I want you to use all your powers. And all your skills. I don’t want his mother to see him this way.

[Removes blanket revealing Sonny's mangled face.]

VITO CORLEONE: Look how they massacred my boy.

I was barely 14 years old when I saw Godfather I for the first time, almost three decades ago. I can recall the exact month (March 1980), and the cinema (which no longer exists) where I first saw this movie, but who knows how many times I’ve seen it since. If I were pezzonovante enough to be asked for a list of my all-time favorite movies, Godfather will undoubtedly be given the poll position, no matter how many years have elapsed since my irrevocable youth.

Why, then, does the highly emotional scene described above make me now only want to shout “perdoname, Don Vito, but one cannot massacre a single person, only slaughter!”? I guess the old Don cannot be blamed for his English mistake at this particular moment. It’s not you, Vito dear, it’s me. Being picky has become my profession, or to put it plainly, I have become a technical writer.

Yes, methought I heard a voice cry: Enjoy movies and books no more! You have made it your business to rebuke other people’s language, to indicate their faintest English fallacies, to let them feel how negligent they were when they left that redundant comma, the nail for want of which the document kingdom was irretrievably lost. Now you are doomed not to enjoy watching a movie or a TV program, or even reading a book, without noticing the language mistakes constantly made by the ignorant masses!

When living in a non English-speaking country, whose tribal lingua franca happens to be your mother tongue, the curse is even worse: you have to smother your mouth lest a horrible cry sneaks out whenever another horrific translation mistake pops out.

When I became a translator myself, back in 1993, I realized that examples of mistranslations are ubiquitous. The disrespect for the profession of the translator, and the resulting low payment, pushed me to the technical writing profession, which has enormously exacerbated my picking complex.

“And that recommendation, with the exaggerated estimate of my ability with which he prefaced it, was, if you will believe me, Watson, the very first thing which ever made me feel that a profession might be made out of what had up to that time been the merest hobby. At the moment, however, I was too much concerned at the sudden illness of my host to think of anything else.” (The Adventure of Gloria Scott”, from “The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes”).

Oh, how I adore the greatest sleuth of all time, whose adventures have thrilled me for hours on end, making me feel infinitely obliged to his creator, the master storyteller Arthur Conan Doyle. Familiar as I am with his other writings, I still find Holmes the most enjoyable and enduring character Doyle has ever devised. At the moment, however, I am too much concerned with Doyle’s excessive use of “which” when he should have written “that”. I have even noticed a bloomer in Holmes’s stories, when Doyle wrote “insure” instead of “ensure”, but I was generous enough to let it off as a typing mistake.

“I think I’m gonna be sad,
I think it’s today, yeah.
The girl that’s driving me mad
Is going away.

She’s got a ticket to ride,
She’s got a ticket to ride,
She’s got a ticket to ride,
But she don’t care.”

(Ticket to Ride” – The Beatles)

“The girl that’s driving me mad”? “She don’t care”? Really, John and Paul, you should have known better. It was you (along with George, may his soul rest in peace) who made me become so interested in the English language, a page with your lyrics being my only friend through teenage nights while I was desperately trying to understand the meaning of your elevated songs. Manys the time you left me really frustrated (how was I supposed to know back then that “meet the wife” mentioned in “Good Morning” was a popular English TV program broadcast at 5 PM?); now I’m also troubled by your use of language.

Yes, my fate is definitely sealed; I am doomed to a picking existence, forever oscillating between the Scylla of poor English usage and the Charybdis of mistranslations. And to make things worse, my eye, so fast at catching other people’s mistakes, becomes so slow when I have to save myself from blundering, thereby making me an easy pray for the chief nourishment of every tech writer’s life: finding mistakes made by another hapless writer.

Hezy Asher is a lone technical writer at Quest Software Israel, as well as a freelance translator. Since 1993, he has translated several books, as well as many movies and documents, from Dutch and English to Hebrew and from Hebrew to English, and has worked as a technical writer at several hi-tech companies.

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Does Translation Mean You Should Omit Illustrations?

Tom Johnson — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 14:27:27 +0000

One can hardly dismiss the power of visuals. One of the oldest truisms in communication is that a picture is worth a 1,000 words. Instead of lengthy text, we praise infographics, diagrams, workflows, and other visual illustrations that communicate ideas. (See this collection of New York Times infographics.)

In Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century, Robert Horn’s main premise is that the combination of text with visuals creates a powerful form of communication.

The other day a colleague, a graphic designer, told me she doesn’t read text on web pages; she moves right to the visual, she said – proudly.

In short, large blocks of text suck. Visuals rock. (See Nation Shudders At Large Block of Text.)

The Problem

Despite this triumph of visual communication, when it comes to technical documents that need translation, visual communication is problematic. If you’re translating the document into 10 languages, every screenshot you use requires translation as well. One screenshot becomes ten. Ten screenshots become 100. One hundred screenshots become 1,000.

And not only do the screenshots need translation, you need access to other operating systems, you need the ability to maneuver around in other languages to produce the scenarios to get the screenshots, and so on. For example, try reproducing an error message screenshot in 10 languages.

Let’s say you forego screenshots and instead stick with illustrations only. Although it’s possible to communicate basic ideas through wordless shapes, you may end up with the equivalent of Pictionary scribbles. Conversely, if you remove illustrations and other visuals, you end up with a text-heavy encyclopedia.

As such, it seems that technical communicators have the following options:

Pursue a costly route of image-based text, which may result in attractive but expensive and time-consuming documents.
Strip out all images and deliver text-heavy documents, which users may despise.
Deliver documents with mysterious and perplexing wordless shape diagrams.

An Alternative

Let’s explore an alternative to this conundrum. If you’ve ever assembled something from Ikea, no doubt you’ve marvelled at the wordless instructions that move you from step to step. There are no multi-lingual instruction manuals with Ikea products — just one global picture booklet.

Holly Harkness explains that the model works “because Ikea builds simplicity into their products from the get-go” (The wordless manual). In other words, wordless manuals work because the products are so easy to assemble, they don’t require words.

Recently while assembling an Ikea bookshelf, my wife struggled to understand this particular Ikea picture:

Who should you call, the local Ikea store, or Ikea headquarters?

She kept calling headquarters when she should have called the local store, apparently. Upon returning the bookshelf with its defective parts to the local store, the sales clerk asked why she didn’t call the store first. My wife had called — but to headquarters, not the local store.

I doubt the wordless picture model that Ikea adopts could work for all forms of documentation, especially software documentation. But certainly Ikea shows us that it’s possible to use wordless visuals to communicate an idea.

(By the way, you can browse Ikea’s manuals online here.)

Ikea’s Secret?

One hunch I have about Ikea’s visual technique is that they use a lot of small pictures in sequence, rather than several large diagrams (see this example).

In the Ikea model, you see about 20 smaller pictures to follow, rather than one or two large diagram-like pictures. Why? Without words, you’re forced to simplify the process you’re representing. The way you simplify an image is by breaking it into smaller images.

Perhaps the way to incorporate illustrations in documents that require translation is to chunk up the illustrations into simpler images that almost anyone can follow. You may end up with more images, but as a whole the images in sequence can help tell the same story that the single image would tell. (Note: I’m referring to illustrations, not screenshots.)

The Principle of Small Multiples

My hunch about why Ikea’s technique works ties in with a principle I read about in Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information (a classic to have on any coffee table). Tufte says one principle of visual information is to show a series of small multiples:

Small multiples, whether tabular or pictorial, move to the heart of visual reasoning–to see, distinguish, choose (even among children’s shirts). Their multiplied smallness enforces local comparisons within our eyespan, relying on an active eye to select and make contrasts rather than on bygone memories of images scattered over pages and pages (p.33).

In other words, small multiples force you to compare between the images. In that comparison, you can derive some meaning. The differences tell a story.

To illustrate, Tufte includes the following image, called Color Coordination, which has been redrawn in Tufte’s book from Yumi Takahashi and Ilkuyo Shibukawa.

Color Coordination, an example from Edward Tufte's Envisioning Information. This image shows the idea of color coordination through small multiples.

My Own Examples

In my own documentation, I’ve started to move to wordless pictures in sequence as well. Without understanding the context at all, what do you make of the following images? What story are they trying to tell?

By breaking up a single image, which might have been adorned with various callouts and labels, into a sequence of simple images, with slight variety between the images to tell the story, I hopefully communicate an idea without words. This image can be used in documentation in any language, without requiring translation.

Additionally, below each image I could use captions to elaborate on the meaning of the illustration. In the case above, my images are showing the idea of a layered calendar, similar to Google’s calendar. You have multiple calendars available, and you can turn the calendars on or off to determine what events show on the main calendar view.

Unless I included a lot of labels and callouts, this image wouldn’t work as a single image. But by breaking it into a series of images — small multiples -- the meaning is clear, even without words.

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Showing Youtube Captions by Default in Another Language

Tom Johnson — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 05:17:27 +0000

I’ve been researching how to translate screencasts. Here’s one problem to overcome: Even if you use youtube’s caption system, if you embed the translated videos on a web page, will users have to select both their language and captions? Normally, we want the video to display these automatically if we’re embedding the video a page that we have translated.

It turns out that by adding some parameters from the Youtube Embedded Player Parameters Reference, you can set the language for the video as well as force-display the captions.

Here’s an example. (I just chose this video because it happens to be translated into about a dozen languages, not because of the content.)

Deutsch

French

Italian

English

Here’s how you enable captions to display by default in another language:

1. Go to youtube and find the video you want to embed. Make sure the video has captions translated into the language you want.

2. In the site footer, select the language you want youtube to display in. This will change all the site language to the one you select.

3. Click the embed button and grab the embed code. The embed code will contain a parameter specifying the site language you selected. For example, in the following embed code for the Italian video, it includes hl=it_IT. That means the language for the video is Italian. For the Deutsch video, it’s hl=de_DE.

Here’s that code in context. It’s on line 2.

4. To force the captions to display by default, add cc_load_policy=1 in the embed code, as shown in the code above on line 2.

That’s all you have to do. Now the video will display captions by default in the language you specified.

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Translating with the New Madcap Lingo V2

Tom Johnson — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:38:14 +0000

This article is a guest post by Daniel Ng. Daniel is part of a small team with an in-house translator. They translate their own English Flare help projects to Simplified Chinese with Madcap Lingo and have been using Madcap Lingo since version 1.

Madcap Lingo -- A Fully Integrated Translation Memory and Authoring Solution

Madcap Lingo is Madcap’s offering in the XML-based translation authoring solution space. As a translation memory system, Madcap Lingo helps translators speed up and simplify the translation process of Madcap Flare/Blaze projects into another language. Established translation tools include SDL Trados, Transit, Wordfast, and Alchemy Catalyst. Measured against these, Lingo is relatively young.

Translations are stored in a SQL Server Express database. Translation memory goes beyond saving time; it improves accuracy of future translations by retaining a history of used segments. The more you translate with translation memory, the easier and better it becomes progressively. If you have been doing regular translation work of your Flare/Blaze documentation or outsourced translation work, you owe it to yourself to give Madcap Lingo a try at least.

Version 1, released in late 2007, was notable for its Google translate integration, the ability to translate strings/callouts embedded in Capture screenshots, “diffing” of past projects, and simplified translation tracking.

This release is important because it overcomes some of the immediate shortcomings of the earlier release, such as the following:

Lack of any translation memory editor (segments would be uploaded into a non-user-editable black box)
Inability to handle partially translated projects (resulting in occasional crashes and minor stability issues)
Limitations to Madcap Flare/Blaze/Mimic project file types (not handling other non-Madcap Software projects)

More file type support

This version follows in the current trend of future Madcap releases by unveiling brand-new DITA file support. I did not try this, due to our inability to source DITA files at the time.

At last, you can now start “Microsoft Word-only” translation projects, and you don’t even need Flare at all. All you have to do is choose the Word document you want translated. Use your translation memory, Google translate, or translate it manually. When you’re done, export it back out to Word. The exported Word document is remarkably pristine, with styles, text boxes, formatting structures, and tables very much intact.

In a bit of mischief, I embedded objects such as textboxes, words in frames, and formatted WordArt objects. I was expecting a crash of sorts and that Lingo would limp, sputter, and give up. It didn’t. Interestingly, only the formatted WordArt objects did not translate. Amazing. For translators without any other specialist translation tools, this ultimately means you can finally leverage your effort in Madcap Lingo’s translation database.

Madcap Lingo -- Exporting back to Word

In any case, most day-to-day translation efforts start small, as simple Word documents. After all, in any company, with multiple Engineering, HR, and Marketing groups, Microsoft Word is remarkably flexible for creating technical documentation, labels, greeting cards, marketing collateral, reports, and brochures, all of which are “translation candidates” at some point.

This makes it a much more compelling option for companies or freelancers seriously considering a more versatile translation memory tool.

Nevertheless, comparisons are inevitable. Madcap Lingo’s third party file support is comparatively limited. It doesn’t translate PowerPoint files, InDesign projects, Visio diagrams, PhotoShop files, SQL Databases, C# resource files, or WordPress blogs (not that anyone else does!), but still it’s a big step.

Since its still a version 2 release, its not too far fetched to imagine that support could include even more file types in future versions. The current version translates XML files.

Alignment and fuzzy matches

Another big feature in version 2 is alignment. For partially translated projects, the new segment alignment lets you match, move translation segments around, and then upload them into translation memory. Already translated part of a project in Flare? Create a new alignment project, and soon you’ll be swapping segments, moving, joining, and splitting segments.

The new alignment toolbar in Madcap Lingo

With shortcuts and multiple selections, the entire process is quick and easy. Initial fuzzy match processing of segments that Madcap Lingo does beforehand is quite commendable as well.

Version 2 improves on overall stability, especially when you can now open partially translated documents and projects. Anyone with earlier versions who has ever attempted manual alignments with partially translated sources may understand some of the frustration.

Lingo in a Beta state was not prepped for real production work yet.

Translation memory editor

And finally, you can now edit all those uploaded segments in the translation database.

Uploading segments in the translation database

To put things in perspective, a medium-sized Flare translation project can easily generate close to 10,000 segments, as it did for one of ours.

The designers thoughtfully placed a Search button so that when terminology standards are established, you can simply search, edit, and replace suggestions in memory immediately through the new editor. Although standard in common translation enterprises, if you don’t have one, Madcap Lingo now gives you a quick start in setting one up.

All the standard v1 features remain unchanged in Lingo. As this post was made based on a beta pre-release version of the product, there were some minor issues, which will probably be removed by the time of release. Nonetheless, this new release offers technical communicators a much stronger case for employing a specialized translation tool in technical publications if you haven’t considered one before.

As time of this post, Madcap Lingo version 2 (not the pre-release version) is now available to download from the Madcap Software site and should be worth your consideration.

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User Assistance: Will Write for Metamucil

Tom Johnson — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:33:58 +0000

Will Write for Metamucil: User Assistance