Articles on translation & linguistics for Quicksilver Translate
The Global Online Education Market (eLearning) is expected to reach US$ 585.48 Billion by 2027. This is primarily due to the introduction of more flexible, remote-learning processes in both the corporate and education sectors. Not surprisingly, translation for eLearning is also one of the fastest growing markets in the language services sector.
Multilingual training and education is key to breaking down language barriers and ensuring your knowledge reaches a diverse international audience. Localisation and translation for eLearning materials will maximise your reach, its impact and your ROI (Return on Investment)... Read more
Considering Ethics and Translation (Mar '24)
There are, of course, commonly accepted ethical standards that apply to any professional activity: such as not taking a job that you are not qualified to do, not charging more than you originally quoted, or keeping to a previously agreed deadline.
With regard to professional ethics and translation, maintaining your client’s confidentiality is fundamental. Translators may be working on legal documents which are not yet in the public sphere; or the specifications of a patented product or medicine that has not yet been released. Translators might also consider the ethics of translating a document at all... Read more
Typesetting in Arabic (Oct '23)
Did you know we offer translation and typesetting in multiple scripts? These include Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, and of course, Arabic.
There are about 313 million Arabic speakers worldwide, making it the fifth most-spoken language behind Mandarin, Spanish, English and Hindi. The population in North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East — known collectively as the Arab world — numbers 475 million. So this market should not be overlooked when localising your products, services, and communications... Read more
Why AI can’t do high-quality translation (Sep '23)
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, a linguist and machine translation pioneer in the early 1950s, listed three requirements for “machine intelligence”: The ability to manipulate language; having background knowledge about the world; and reasoning and computing abilities, all at the level of a high school graduate.
He added that achieving these prerequisites “would be incomparably greater than that required for putting man on Venus.”... Read more
In the 21st century, English is, almost exclusively, the language of science. As a result, the majority of scientific research — over 90% — is published in English. In many non-English speaking countries, the number of papers published in English vastly outnumbers the number of publications in the native language.
A recent study led by Tatsuya Amano, a researcher at the University of Queensland, has tried to quantify the disadvantage this poses to scientists and researchers publishing scientific research, who are not native English speakers... Read more
Transcreation is the process of adapting text or a message from one language and culture to another, while maintaining the impact and intention of the original. It’s a term that’s been formed by combining ‘translation’ and ‘creation’.
A successfully transcreated project should carry the same implications and evoke the same emotions in the target language, and to the target audience, as the original did in the source language... Read more
How to be a Successful Transcreator (Dec '22)
As well as linguistic expertise, a successful transcreator needs creativity, copy-writing skills and a comprehensive cultural understanding of the target market.
One author has defined transcreation as a “holistic” process of “re-interpretation of the original work suited to the readers/audience of the target language which requires the translator to come up with new conceptual, linguistic and cultural constructs to make up for the lack (or inadequacy) of existing ones.” (Gaballo, 2012)... Read more
Starting your Transcreation Project (Dec '22)
First of all, discuss the scope of the project with your Language Service Provider (LSP). The first question should be, does your project need transcreation or would a creative translation suffice? A press release, for example, needs to sound ‘local’ but sometimes doesn’t require full transcreation.
Also, do you need the entire project transcreated, or just the key messages? For example, we highly recommend transcreating a punchy slogan, taglines and key messaging... Read more
Preparing Layouts for Translation (DTP) (Jan '22)
When creating the layout of a product catalogue or marketing brochure, most companies outsource to a design agency, unless they have their own in-house design department. In either case the focus is almost always a monolingual one.
Understandably the idea is to produce a nice-looking document for publication in the original language; and very little consideration is given to the possibility that the document might be translated into one or more languages. However, translating this kind of document has a significant impact on the layout of the document... Read more
The coronavirus pandemic is not the world’s first! Nor, sadly, will it be the last. So what lessons can we learn from the epidemics, and pandemics, that came before?
The Bubonic Plague spread throughout Europe in the 14th century, it was commonly known as the ‘Black Death’. It likely originated in Central Asia (possibly Mongolia) and by 1347 it reached mainland Europe... Read more
Some interesting facts about Quarantine (Mar '20)
The idea of isolating the sick is very old. Hippocrates (460-370 BCE), known as the father of modern medicine, discussed the concept of quarantine in his three-volume work on epidemics. This is especially interesting when you consider that during Hippocrates’ life the accepted theory was that disease spread from miasmas. Physicians believed miasmas were bad air (or night air) emanating from rotting organic material in the ground... Read more
With the news that Facebook has now fully transitioned to a neural-network based A.I system (Neural Machine Translation), many people are asking whether this is the end of days for Statistical TM.
“Of the 1.6 billion people who actively use Facebook, more than half…don’t speak English at all. Most of them don’t speak each other’s language,” said Alan Packer, Engineering Director and head of the Language Technology team at Facebook... Read more