I like making up new words and phrases for things as yet unnamed. But I’ve found it’s easier to come up with unnamed things than it is to name them. British author Ben Schott has solved this problem by making up simple English labels and then exotifying them by translating them into German. Thus, his Eisenbahnscheinbewegung, formed from the German for “railway illusion motion,” is “the false sensation of movement when, looking out from a stationary train, you see another train depart.”
Schott published a whole dictionary of his made-up words in 2013, calling it Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition. And I’ve got to hand it to him. Coming up with new German words is harder than it sounds. I thought it would be clever and use Google translate to make my own German invention for “foreign word creations.” So I coined Fremdwortschöpfungen . . . but then I searched the web and found out that that word already exists.
It would be easy to dismiss Schott’s creations as not-real words, but all new words started once as not-real in the minds of their creators. Of course, it’s a little harder adding to someone else’s language. But even that can be overcome if you have a third party with an audience, say, for instance, “General Hospital,” to help spread the word (so to speak).
If you’re more into expanding your vocabulary with actually-real foreign words—new to you, rather than new to humanity—there are resources for that, too. I’ve listed a few below to get you started. And who knows, after looking at some of these, you may be inspired to try your hand at making up, like Schott, some new foreign words of your own. You don’t really have to have an expert’s grasp of your target language. In fact, my experience learning languages has taught me that not knowing a language very well is extremely fertile ground for making things up.
Who holds the top spot as the most translated author (at least in the last 30 or so years)? Take a guess. I’ll bet you a shiny new nickel that you won’t get it right.
How about I give you some hints? If you thought it was Shakespeare, sorry (hint). In fact, translations of her (hint, hint) works outnumber the Bard’s by nearly 70%. The answer really is a mystery (hint, hint, hint). Got it? Give up?
Here you go: The holder of the top spot is none other than Agatha Christie.
Who says so? Well, the ranking is part of UNESCO’s Index Translationum, which has been collecting translation data since 1932. Since the online database dates from only 1979, it’s not exhaustive, but it does give us a good snapshot of more-recent translations.
So if Christie is in the top spot, and Shakespeare is number three, who else rounds out the top ten? Glad you asked.
Agatha Christie (British, English)
Jules Verne (French)
William Shakespeare (British, English)
Enid Blyton (British, English)
Barbara Cartland (British, English)
Danielle Steele (American, English)
Vladimir Lenin (Russian)
Hans Christian Anderson (Danish)
Stephen King (American, English)
Jacob Grimm (German, followed closely by Wilhelm, the other Brother Grimm)
Some of you are probably thinking, “Why isn’t the Apostle Paul on this list?” That’s because while the Bible is the most translated book in history, Paul’s contributions aren’t published as stand-alones. That leaves Paul well behind Christie, whose books number over 80. Fair enough.
Following are some other top-tens from the Index Translationum.
Top source languages:
English (at over 1.2 million books, English has more translations than the next 49 languages combined)
French
German
Russian
Italian
Spanish
Swedish
Japanese
Danish
Latin
____________________
Top target languages:
German
French
Spanish
English
Japanese
Dutch
Russian
Portuguese
Polish
Swedish
____________________
Top authors translated in China (I picked China because it has the most people in the world):
Dale Carnegie (American, English)
Hans Christian Andersen (Danish)
Jules Verne (French)
Maxim Gorky (Russian)
Alexandre Dumas (French)
Leo Tolstoy (Russian)
Arthur Conan Doyle (British, English)
Thomas Brezina (Australian, English)
Charles Dickens (British, English)
Victor Hugo (French)
____________________
Top authors translated in the US (because that’s where I live):
Rudolf Steiner (Austrian, German)
Jacob Grimm (German)
Wilhelm Grimm (German)
Georges Simenon (Belgian, French)
Hans Christian Anderson (Danish)
Pope John Paul II (Italian)
Plato (Greek)
Dana Meachen Rau (American, English, translated into Spanish)
Anton Chekov (Russian)
Bobbie Kalman (Hungarian-born American, English, translated into Spanish; French translations make her number one for Canada)
When we first moved to Taipei, we lived across the street from a park. One day, I was approached by three college-age students who asked me in English, “Do you know Jesus?”
“Yes,” I said.
“OK,” they replied. “But do you really know him?” This was a logical question, because while English has the one word for knowing someone, Chinese has two. The first would be the one in “I know who he is,” while the second means “I know him personally.”
I had the perfect response. Not only was I a Christian, but I was a missionary . . . and I’d been studying Chinese, too. So, I told them, somewhat smugly, in their language, “Yes, I know him. I’m a . . . bicycle.”
I wish I could say that the Chinese words for missionary and bicycle sound just alike, but they don’t. The first is chuan jiao shi, and the second is jiao ta che. I think I must have learned them on the same day, because they are forever confused in my mind. The young people in the park laughed with me and let me correct myself. “Chinese is hard,” they said. I didn’t argue.
Over the years, that encounter became a symbol to me for the good and bad times in Taiwan: Some days I was a missionary. Some days I was just a bicycle.
[T]he reason why I have Yeshua, my de-familiarized Christ, saying, “Far more can be mended than you know,” which I think is actually true to the New Testament, is that I want mending. Not flying free, not transformation, but humble, ordinary, everyday, get-you-back-on-your-feet mending, to be at the center of the Christian story.
When the book was being translated into Dutch, the translator sent me an email: “This word mend, I’ve looked it up in the dictionary, and it seems to be the same word you use for repairing bicycles. You must mean something else.”
I wrote back, “No. No. No. I want the bicycle-repair word.” What I absolutely want is to suggest that before it’s anything else, redemption is God mending the bicycle of our souls; God bringing out the puncture repair kit, re-inflating the tires, taking off the rust, making us roadworthy once more. Not so that we can take flight into ecstasy, but so that we can do the next needful mile of our lives.
We all need that kind of mending from God. I guess being a bicycle isn’t so far from being a Christian—and a missionary—after all.
Speaking of films, there is that Academy Awards thing tomorrow night. I’m predicting a sweep for Frozen in its nominated categories: best animated feature and best original song.
If you haven’t heard “Let It Go,” the nominated song from the Disney film, then you 1) haven’t seen the movie, 2) don’t spend much time on YouTube, and 3) don’t live with a seven-year-old who’s memorized all the lyrics.
And if you haven’t heard the original, then you probably haven’t heard the version dubbed into 25 languages. Even if you have heard it, it’s worth another listen.
The English version of “Let It Go” is sung by the Tony Award winning singer and actress Idina Menzel, who voices the movie’s character Elsa. She’s the one singing the English at the beginning of the multi-language video. But even though the rest of the song sounds as if it is sung by her, believe it or not, it isn’t.
So who in the world was tasked with finding all those talented songstresses? Look no further than Rick Dempsey, senior vice president of creative for Disney Character Voices International.
“In a lot of cases I think we fooled some people into thinking that it’s Idina in all those languages,” Dempsey told NPR. “And that, of course, is the goal, to ensure there is character consistency and the voices are all very similar around the world.”
But all that work isn’t a one-man show. Dempsey told The Hollywood Reporter, “We have 76 people around the world in 19 offices that oversee films in 55 languages. Our goal is to make every audience feel like Frozen was made in their country for their people.”
The Los Angeles Times reports that the array of voice talents in “Let It Go” include Gisela (Castilian and Catalan), Serena Autieri (Italian), Willemijn Verkaik (German, Dutch), Takako Matsu (Japanese), Carmen Sarahi (Latin American Spanish), Marsha Milan Londoh (Malay), and Anna Buturlina (Russian).
And the impressive work of Dempsey’s crew on Frozen didn’t end with the only 25 versions of the feature song. While most stories report that Frozen has been dubbed into 41 languages, a Disney UK tweet puts the total at 43.
Luis von Ahn, computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has a goal. It’s to translate the entire Web into every major language, for free. Sound impossible? Not to von Ahn. But he does see two obstacles: not enough bilinguals and not enough translator motivation.
So when it comes to translation, what can turn those obstacles from mountains into molehills? Von Ahn is working on an answer, and so is Chang Hu.
It Takes a Crowd
The Guatemalan-born von Ahn is best known for helping to invent CAPTCHAs. If you don’t know what a CAPTCHA is, it’s that image of distorted letters you see on a lot of Website forms. You’re required to type in those letters to prove that you’re a human, which keeps computer programs from fooling the system.
As he told the crowd at a TEDx Talk in 2011 (embedded below), Von Ahn estimates that each day, about 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed around the globe. With every CAPTCHA taking about 10 seconds to key in, that’s around 500,000 hours a day. Von Ahn wondered how he could redeem this “wasted” time and came up with reCAPTCHA.
Now owned by Google, reCAPTCHA replaces the often random characters of a CAPTCHA with actual words from books that are being digitized. The reason this is a good thing is because the text-scanning software used to digitize printed text can’t recognize every word, especially when dealing with books over 50 years old. But these hard-for-computers-to-read words aren’t hard for human’s at all. So when you’re typing in a CAPTCHA on one of over 350,000 sites using reCAPTCHA—including Facebook, Twitter, and Ticketmaster—you’re helping digitize books.
So what does this have to do with translation? Well, another of von Ahn’s projects, based on the same kind of crowd-sourced “human computing” as reCAPTCHA, is Duolingo. It’s a free language-learning site, currently teaching six languages. What makes Duolingo unique is that while you’re learning a language, you’re joining 10 million other users in translating text on the Web, because the phrases used by Duolingo come from real Websites.
For instance, after you learn some basic Spanish vocabulary, you’ll be able to test your skills by translating simple phrases to and from Spanish. And as you do so, you’ll be helping translate some English Websites into Spanish, or vice versa. Success earns you “skill points,” unlocking new lessons, while mistakes take away one of your hearts. Lose all of your hearts and you have to redo the level. As you learn more, you translate more-complex sentences, and, as your attempts are compared with those of others, useful, accurate translations are produced.
According to von Ahn, two great things about Duolingo are, “People really can learn a language with it, and they learn it about as well as the leading language-learning software,” and, “The translations that we get from people using the site, even though they’re just beginners . . . are as accurate as those of professional language translators.”
Oh, yeah, and did I mention it’s free? That’s possible because the sites that submit their text for translation are paying the tab—sites like Buzzfeed and CNN, which, von Ahn announced just a couple weeks ago, are the first to come on board.
Of course, even when there’s no monetary cost, not everyone wants to invest his time into the hours that are required for learning a language. If there could be a way for monolinguals to help out with just a few seconds—kind of like with the reCAPTCHAs—that might bring more people in.
Enter MonoTrans.
The Power of Widgets
MonoTrans (named MonoTrans2 in its newer version) is a process that combines machine translation with help from monolingual humans to produce accurate translations. A team from the University of Maryland’s Department of Computer Science, led by Chang Hu—a PhD candidate at UMD—proposed the process in 2010 to overcome the problem of not having enough bilingual translators to work on (a) texts in rare languages, and (b) huge amounts of text that would require enormous amounts of human effort.
MonoTrans starts with a computer translation of a passage, which is notorious for producing flawed (and often humorous) results. The output is then passed on to a person who speaks the target language. She then makes a guess as to the correct meaning and phrasing of the sentence, and her efforts are back-translated into the source language. Then a speaker of that language compares the results to the original passage, and the process between the two speakers is repeated until a satisfactory translation is produced. Along the way, the two monolinguals can help each other by including annotations, such as images and Web links, and multiple participants can vote on results.
While the process doesn’t necessarily take a large number of steps, it can be complicated and time consuming. MonoTrans2 addresses this problem by breaking the process into smaller, individual “microtasks,” so that many more people will take part in a translation, with each one handling only a small part of the whole process.
This new method was tested using children’s books at the International Children’s Digital Library. Visitors to the Website were presented with “widgets,” windows on a page that run a simple program. These widgets allowed users to edit or paraphrase a sentence, identify errors, or vote for the sentence they think is best.
The results of the trial show that using the MonoTrans Widgets in conjunction with Google Translate is a significant improvement over using Google Translate alone. And while this method also introduced some inherent problems, it indicates that the future of crowd-based computation by monolingual humans is very promising.
A Match Made in Cyberspace
Luis von Ahn coined the term human computation to describe using people to accomplish tasks that computers usually perform. Hu, in a blog post, sums up the relationship of human computation to translation in this way:
[H]uman computation presents a unique opportunity to significantly lower the threshold to do translation. At the same time, translation provides a set of interesting problems for human computation.
It sounds as if the relationship is something like a dance, with the dancers figuring out the steps as they go. Or maybe it’s more like a marriage, where both partners aid and challenge each other at the same time.
It’s a good union, and I’m glad there are people like von Ahn and Hu to serve as matchmakers.
As the online community continues to grow, more and more languages are coming online, and power players like Google and its subsidiary YouTube are speeding ahead to keep up. Here are some of the numbers that illustrate this:
“To reach 90% of the world’s internet users required at least 19 languages in 2009 and 2010. In 2012, marketers will need 21 languages to achieve that mark. To hit 95%, the number of languages required has jumped from 27 to 34. Finally, to reach 98%, the number rocketed from 37 to 48.”
And now YouTube has launched a new interface to help in translating its videos into over 300 languages. The first step is to upload a transcript or caption file. Then the next step is to use the translation feature in the YouTube Video Manager to create a translation or invite other online users to help out. For the 64 languages available using Google’s machine translation technology, YouTube will provide a “first draft” to jump start the process. The interface also allows for translation into the 300 plus languages available in the Google Translator Toolkit.
Those of you who have used Google’s translator in the past will know that the first draft of the translation may be a good starting point, but it will probably need quite a bit of tweaking. If you’re really brave, you can start with YouTube’s automatic captioning, which currently creates onscreen captions for English and Spanish, generating the text from the audio. (Access this feature by clicking the “cc” button at the bottom of the video viewer.) Google admits that all of this is a work in progress, and it often produces humorous results. Take a look at the video below to see Rhett and Link use YouTube for a modern take on the telephone (or gossip) game:
If you do need to create multi-language subtitles for a video project, and you find limitations in YouTube’s approach, take a look at dotSUB and Amara for more options.
A few days ago I wrote about odd English names for dishes in Chinese menus. Most of the humor comes from what you’d assume are innocent mistranslations. But it seems there has to be another explanation for how a Thai restaurant in New Zealand got it’s unfortunate name. When Fred Bennett hired a Thai chef for his new establishment, he asked him what he should call it. The chef told him the Thai words for “Welcome and Come Again,” or at least that what he said they meant. But after that chef left sometime later and Bennett hired a new one, he found out that what the sign on his restaurant actually said was “Go Away and Don’t Come Back.” Bennett has now renamed the restaurant “Victory Thai,” and it sounds as if he has a pretty good attitude about the whole thing. “I’d like to apologise to the Thai community if I have offended them, which I’m pretty sure I would have,” he said and passes on a lesson that all cross-cultural trekkers should heed: “That’s why it pays to research.”
As a followup to making Beijing more foreigner-friendly for the 2008 Olympics, the Chinese government has published a book to provide restaurants with standardized English translations for over 2,000 dishes. While the publication, titled Enjoy Culinary Delights: A Chinese Menu in English, should clear up some confusion, it will diminish the entertainment value of menus in China. Gone will be “red burned lion head,” which becomes “braised pork ball in brown sauce,” and “chicken without sex life” gives way to “spring chicken.” Other substitutions include “shrimp cooked in rice wine” for “drunken shrimp,” “ground pork with green soya noodles” for “ants climbing the tree,” and “stir fried prawns and chicken” for “gambolling dragon and praying phoenix.” These last two aren’t mistranslations, just examples of poetic Chinese names whose meanings aren’t immediately obvious to foreign readers. (Maybe restaurants should just keep these literal translations and follow up with an explanation.) But others, maybe the best ones, come from a less-than-stellar grasp of English, such as the menu item from the photo in this article, which translates what could be called “sesame seaweed” as “dish of sesame oil connected through one’s female relatives.” Of course, if “seaweed” doesn’t sound good to you, the second name might be more appealing.
I don’t remember any specific examples of funny menu items from our time in Taiwan, but this topic reminds me of a couple of canned drinks that were commonly available in convenience and grocery stores. Both were labeled with unfortunate English names. The first is a sports drink from Japan, called “Pocari Sweat,” and the other is a yellow citrus soda, simply named “P.”
For anyone who’d like to learn more about the unique names of traditional Chinese dishes—and the history and makeup of Chinese characters—I highly recommend Swallowing Clouds: A Playful Journey through Chinese Culture, Language, and Cuisine, by A. Zee. Using the names of foods, the stories behind them, and the stories behind the individual characters, Zee shows how the paths of culture, language, and cuisine intertwine. It will make your mouth water, and it will make menus come to life.
Clearing Customs 