One of the things I admire with Google is their effort to localize their websites. It dates back to 2001 when they started the “Google in Your Language” project. This project has encouraged thousands of volunteers from different countries to translate Google pages into their native languages. Because of their conscientious effort Google is now available in more than 100 languages.

Google in Your Language project wasn’t an easy task but Google is serious in reaching all markets worldwide and perfect their international approach to search. There’s notable efforts from Google to reach the Arabic speakers, the South Koreans, the Chinese, the Indians, the Russians, the Brazilians, the New Zealand People, and the Japanese users. This is to ensure that everyone has access to each Google product and tool.

Aside from Google in different languages, they also offer this machine-translation service for free. The service is called Google Translate which so far can translate between 34 languages and is user-friendly. Google Translate can be accessed in the product main page or in Google Language Tools.

What the user just needs to do when he has seen a foreign text in one of the websites he is visiting and he’s curious to know what it means, is copy the foreign text and paste it in the Google Translate box. He’ll then select the language of the original text in the box and choose what language it will be translated to, say English, in the second box. Then he’ll click the translate button. The translated text will appear on the left column. A sample of translated text in Google Translate which is very accurate

Users can also ask Google to translate a webpage by just pasting the URL of that page. And choose from what language to what language it will be translated.

Another cool thing in the Google Translate page is that this page is not limited to perform text or web translations. It can also do Translated Search, where two types of search results appear on the same page. (Left column has search results for the original language, while the right has translated search results.) It also has a Dictionary in different languages and translation, a gadget that users can embed in their websites to offer their visitors option for translation, and the Google Toolbar which users can customized in any of the 34 languages supported.

Conclusion:

Google Language Tools just proves how Google helps improve the Web by giving everyone’s access to it through translating languages. It is arguable though if Google has a hidden agenda on doing this translating effort. Are they sincere on breaking the language barrier? Or do they just want to increase their search market and earn more from it. What do you think?

If your business is heavily web-based, then you’re surely already aware of the Internet’s potential for reaching an international audience and for reaching it quickly via on-line advertising. To cater for your international customers, you’ll probably have your web site translated into the major languages spoken in the markets you are targeting. For many people, this part is relatively straightforward: you submit your copy to the translator, who will provide you a quote based on the volume of text and any other special requirements you may have, such as checking the translated text of web forms once they’re on line. But have you considered how you’re going to handle the translation of your on-line advertising material?

If done properly, translating on-line advertising material differs from ordinary translation in some important ways. Firstly, a significant part of the material to be translated will actually be the keywords that you bid on or purchase rather than the ad copy itself. Translating keywords effectively is somewhat different to translating paragraphs of text for reasons we’ll see below. A good ad translator must also work differently to a colleague dealing with ordinary text when it comes to the ad text itself.

The latter point may seem the more obvious but is worth expanding on. The advertising scheme that you are using will generally have restrictions imposed on them such as the maximum lengths of titles and other lines of the ad. The text of your ads was probably chosen to sound catchy rather than because a particular literal meaning was important. So to translate an on-line ad, it may be more effective to use an approximate translation that sounds catchy and adheres to the length restrictions. As an example of the kind of decisions the translator can make, there is a word in Spanish that can be used to translate “summer holidays” (“veraneo”) which is actually shorter than the general word for “holidays” (“vacaciones”). If the translator knows that your business or campaign is specifically dealing with summer holidays (and a good translator will always take the time to understand your business), they can use the shorter word which may be crucial when translating an ad title with a 25-character limit.

The problems involved in translating advertising keywords may be less obvious. But think first about the process you went through to choose your keywords. You probably starting by picking some phrases that characterize your business. You may then have expanded this list by considering synonyms, possibly using a tool such as Google Trends to find the most likely synonyms that a user would search for. You would also have considered which combinations of these synonyms were most likely in English. For example, in British English, the words “hire”, “rent” and “let” have similar meanings, but “hire” is often associated with vehicles or industrial machines, “rent” with residential property and “let” with commercial property. Subconsciously, your choice of possible keywords was probably influenced by the grammar of English and the grammar of web searches. For example, you would probably chose “van hire” rather than “vans hire” or “van hires”, neither of which are usually grammatical in English. If you were running a holiday company, you might choose “minibreaks Paris” rather than “minibreaks in Paris”, because you know people tend to omit short function words like ‘in’ in web searches.

When it comes to translating these keywords, you might naively think that you can look up translations of each individual word and do a search and replace on the list of keywords. Unfortunately, this will usually not be effective for several reasons. Where there are synonyms such as “hire”, “rent”, “let” in English, the foreign language probably won’t have exactly the same number of synonyms with a direct mapping between them. (In Spanish, for example, the two verbs “alquilar” and “rentar” can both apply to either vehicles or property.) So in the foreign language, you may need to consider combinations of words that you didn’t consider in English, and some combinations may not be viable.

Some of the grammatical restrictions that affected your keyword selection in English may not apply in the foreign language. For example, in English the phrase “vans hire” is generally ungrammatical. But in French, Italian and Spanish (and indeed many other languages), the phrase would be common and grammatical with either singular or plural, leading to more keyword combinations to consider bidding on. And in these and other Latin-based languages, compounds are usually formed by inserting the word for “of” between the content words (e.g. “de” in Spanish and French, “di” in Italian). But in web searches, this word may optionally be omitted, so that in Spanish, for example, a Spaniard looking for “car hire” may search (among other things) for either “alquiler DE coches” or simply “alquiler coches”.

Most subtly of all, the grammar of web searches actually differs from language to language. Some of my own research suggests, for example, that Spanish speakers are more likely to include the word “de” between content words than French speakers, and that Spanish speakers are more likely to pluralize words in their searches.

Finally, recall that some on-line advertising systems offer a keyword tool which will suggest alternatives for you to bid on giving a starting list. You should also speak to your translator to see if they can assist you in choosing between the list of suggestions and advising you on their meanings where necessary.

A TRANSLATION always represents an original text (or “Source Text”, or “text of Departure”); in this, it involves a certain degree of equivalence, although the concept of strict equivalence between the languages is now exceeded in Translation Studies. The concept of translation refitting since long on dichotomies such as “fidelity” versus “freedom”, “fidelity to the letter” versus “fidelity to the Spirit”, etc.

The translation takes account of a number of parameters (context, grammar, etc.), in order to make it understandable to people with no knowledge of the source language and not having the same culture or the same knowledge2. Translate involves controlling the source language but also the target language (or recipient), which is usually the mother tongue. The good translator has more than language skills: it must be able to analyze the text, and himself to possess the qualities of writing. To translate the texts scientific and technical, it must also possess a strong technical knowledge and master the jargon in the two languages.

The translation is still essentially human, but of computer tools of automatic translation appear (computer-assisted translation).

The discipline that is interested in the translation is called the translation process.

Role of the translation and languages in the circulation of ideas and information

In space and in time, the intensity of the intercultural communication and exchanges exogamous depends in large part on the quantity and quality of information translated from one language to the other, but history has shown that the movement and the “notoriety” of ideas are not to be confused quantitatively with the more widely spoken languages. In particular, the number of speakers of a language spoken is not a good predictor of the ability of a message created in this language (or circulating in this language) to then be translated and to circulate in the world; according to the linguist David Crystal,” which explains that a language becomes a global language has little to do with the number of people who speak, but much more with “who” these speakers speak “. The network of bilingual speakers and translators6 therefore has a great importance from this point of view.

Since the nineteenth century and with the globalization and the regulation of “intellectual property right” and translation, a number of languages and cultures are more or less well “translated”, or even go off more quickly than previously or are already dead or forgotten (a dead language like Latin may continue to be translated).

Some authors describe the emergence of a new Network and Global System of languages, where English plays a role become preponderant and central. The hegemony culturo-linguistics of the English could however be little by little contained by the improvement and the generalization of the automatic translation software on the Internet and by the novel approach wikimédienne which encourages and facilitates “Translations and exchanges inter-linguistic in Wikipedia and its projects-brothers (in 287 languages as possible at the end of 2013, whose languages say “dead” and Esperanto, with several major projects Bilateral language).

Analyze the relative situation of the languages of the world is long remained impossible due to a lack of relevant data, note Mark Davis (Chairman and co-founder of the Unicode Consortium that produces standards for the encoding of characters for all computers and mobile interfaces of the planet using the writing), while the one senses yet the importance of the structure of this network; it is long remained impossible to study quantitatively the structure of the global network of exchanges between languages but this becomes more easy thanks to the constitution of large open databases of “sites” of global trade such as Wikipedia or Twitter and while it knows better and better the proportion of languages spoken on the Internet.

In 2014, an international team American-French has used the science of networks to create the maps to visualize how information and ideas are circulating in the world (according to the language of the original message, according to the average GDP of the countries where the language is spoken15), depending on the language of the first translations and those who will convey the information or according to the Medium (book, Wikipedia, Twitter). To compile this “Map” These researchers have studied on the one hand the data available on the Literary Translation (based on 2.2 million translations of books published in more than 1000 languages) and on the other hand the two major global networks of exchanges by the language11,16 that are:

The tweets bilingual (from the study of 550 million tweets, 17 million users in 73 languages, selected for the study), which has been possible thanks to the open database and because it allows you to associate a tweet to a language and the person who Tweet to one or several communities linguisitiques; of different language versions of Wikipedia pages (without taking into account the work of the robots in Wikipedia), including the database is open (DBPedia)

The analysis of these data shows that:

There is an important prioritization of languages of “interfacage” in this network, with nuances according the media studied.

Without surprise, English is the most important and effective in terms of interface between other languages to disseminate an idea or information in the world (it is in the network mapped the hub the more central). Secondarily, particularly in

Methods of translation vs techniques of translation

What a difference there is between a method and a technique of translation? Well, it is very simple: the method of translation concerns the whole of the text to be translated, while the technique of translation will vary on a case by case basis in the interior of the same text, in function of the verbal elements ad hoc basis to translate. The classical taxonomy of processes of translation goes back to the year 1958, and that is to J.-P. Vinay and J. Darbelnet that it must. It has seven categories:

1. The Borrowing

Borrowing is a translation process to use a word or expression in the source text in the target text. The loan note generally in italics. It is in fact to reproduce such what an expression of the original text. In this sense, it is a technique of translation that does not translate…

Example: The gaucho was wearing a sombrero black and a bombacha worn by the time.

2. The layer

When a translator uses the lexical layer, it creates or uses a neologism in the target language by adopting the structure of the source language.

Example: the German handball translated to Spanish handball, or English skyscraper translated into French skyscrapers.

3. The literal translation

is what is conventionally called the Translation métaphrastique, or métaphrase. It is a translation word-for-word leading to a text in the target language, both correct and idiomatic. According Vinay and Darbelnet, the literal translation is only possible between languages for the benefit of a large cultural proximity. It is acceptable only if the translated text keeps the same syntax, the same meaning and the same style as the original text.

Example: What time is it? ⇒ What time is it?

4. The transposition

transposition is to move from a grammatical category to another without that for as much the meaning of the text does not change. This technique introduced a change of grammatical structure.

Example: The President thinks that ⇒ according to the President

5. The Modulation

Modulation is to change the shape of the text by a modification semantics or perspective.

Example: Tal vez tengas razón ⇒ hast thou not perhaps not wrong.

6. Equivalence

The equivalence is a translation process by which a reality equivalent is rendered by an expression entirely different. This technique can be used to translate the names of institutions, the interjections, expressions, all made or proverbs.

Example: once bitten, twice shy ⇒ él that se quemó con leche ve the vaca y llora.

7. The Adaptation

Adaptation, also called cultural substitution or cultural equivalent, is to replace a cultural element of the original text by another, more suited to the culture of the target language. This will make the text more familiar and understandable.

Example: baseball ⇒ football

from the 1960s, different authors (Michel Ballard, Hélène Chuquet, Michel Paillard, etc.) have reported other translation procedures such as the explication (on provides clarifications in the text of the target language), the collocation (the use of a suite of words usually used together in the target language) and the compensation (do not make a reference or a connotation in a part of the text and compensate in making it appear later).