Category Archives: Resources

A Very Important Update

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First off, I’d love to thank the large number of users and supporters that have recently joined Wikitranslation. I’m aware that I haven’t been providing many updates or shown much activity and that Edward has provided for much of the website’s content, but I’m still here.

After viewing activity for some time and reading translations, I have not recently found a certain translation. I would ask for a translation through the website, but this text is an exception. It is a widely known, highly regarded, work of musical poetry. In some cultures it is regarded with a sort of respectful reverence.

I am talking, of course, about the intro theme to the popular 90′s sitcom, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

So in an effort to extend this piece of literature throughout the world, I have taken the solemn duty of translating it into Spanish. Some may say this responsibility is not to be taken lightly, and I assure you that extensive work and research has been put into this.

So without further ado, “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” by Will Smith “en Español”:

”
Y me gustaría tomar un minuto apenas se sientan allí
Ahora bien, esta es la historia trata de cómo
Mi vida se volcó, al revés
En el oeste de Filadelfia, nacidos y criados
Voy a decir comó yo convirtió en el príncipe de un pueblo llamado Bel-Air
En el patio de recreo donde yo pasó la mayor parte de mis días
Y todos los disparos algunos de fuera de b-ball de la escuela
de refrigeración, maximizando, al todo fresco
Cuando una pareja de chicos, que estaban hacer no es bueno
Comenzaron hacer hacer problemas en la vecindad

Yo metío en una lucha poca y mi mama se asustó
Y ella dijo: “Usted está en movimiento con su tía y su tío en Bel-Air”

Yo llamó un taxi y cuando llegó cerca de la
Placa de matriculación dijo “fresco” y había un dado en el espejo
Si nada yo podría decir que este taxi era raro
Pero pensé que nah, olvídalo, “Yo holmes el Bel-Air!”
Me detuve a una casa cerca de siete o ocho
Y le grité al taxista “Yo, holmes que huelen más tarde!”
Miré a mi reino que finalmente yo era allí
Para sentarse en mi trono, como el príncipe de Bel-Air
”

-Brandon

Esperanto- the answer to language barriers?

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flag of esperantoThere are 6,909 known living languages in the world according to Ethnologue. As you might imagine, this makes communicating with foreigners pretty hard. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there was an animal called a Babel fish. Insert one into your ear, and BAM! you could understand any language in the universe. Unfortunately, current technology is nowhere near this good, even with Google Translate adding voice translations in the Android app.

A more realistic solution might to be to create a universal language. If everyone would learn this language, then the world would be more connected. Enter Esperanto, a constructed language created by Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof back in 1887. It’s the most successful constructed language created to date, boasting millions of speakers worldwide. The Esperanto Wikipedia has more than 143,00 articles. Esperanto has many strong points:

  • There’s actually a culture. There are many books and magazines written in Esperanto, and countless websites and blogs. This means that there’s a vibrant community to immerse yourself into, a key component of learning a language. This also highlights the fact that this language isn’t dying or abandoned.
  • It’s easy to learn. Studies by the Institute of Cybernetic Pedagogy at Paderborn have shown that French students who studied 150 hours of Esperanto reached the same level of proficiency as those who studied 2000 hours of German. Another surprising fact is that Esperanto only has 16 grammatical rules. English has many, many times that.
  • It’s for a good cause. Esperanto is a neutral language, not affiliated with any country. As such, when you converse with someone in Esperanto there is no feeling of “You have to learn MY language.”

Having said that, I don’t think Esperanto is the solution to our language barrier issues. I’ll counter each of the points I made above:

  • It’s not useful enough. Estimates put the number of speakers between 10,000 and 2 million. Look at the list of most spoken languages:
    most spoken languages in the world
    Learning one of these languages will allow you to communicate with many more people. And any of these languages also has a unique culture and interesting content.
  • It’s not really easy to learn. Esperanto is based on European languages. This means that if you are a native speaker of Korean, for example, you are unlikely to find Esperanto easy to pick up. Also, another point should be made- don’t choose a language to learn just because it’s simple. You should choose one because you enjoy it or because it is useful.
  • I’m not going to deny that Esperanto is for a good cause. However, you should balance this with a pragmatic look at if a just cause is one of your top priorities. There is nothing immoral about learning Spanish or Russian, or any other language.

Most people only have enough energy and time to learn one second language. Therefore, you should choose carefully. If you think Esperanto is a cool and beneficial language to learn, go ahead. There are many in the Esperanto community who will welcome you with open arms.

Translation Explained in 5 Languages

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I found this cool video which explains and provides an overview of translation, using machine translation to do so. Here is a more detailed explanation, written by the video producers:

A short piece that I put together with Scott Scharf and Scott Jaegar for Jay Yim’s “content” class at Northwestern. The text comes from the wikipedia definition of translation. This text is spoken by the AT&T speech synthesizer and then “translated” by some of the electronic translators available on the web. Translation was originally presented in quadraphonic surround sound with each of the four “voices” in its own audio speaker progressing through the permutations of electronic translation in its own unique order.

Translation from casey farina on Vimeo.

The 11 Hardest Words to Translate into English

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As a result of the fragmentation and splitting of the human race, every culture has an unique experience that nobody can understand unless they are part of that culture. This is why there are words in other languages that take a full sentence in English to convey the same meaning. Here are 11 of the hardest words to translate:

  1. Mamihlapinatapei (Yagan)

    2. A look shared by two people, each wishing that the other would initiate something that they both desire but which neither wants to begin. This word is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as most succint word.

  2. ???? (Kyoiku mama) (Japanese)

    3. A mother who endlessly pushes her children to study, even at the cost of emotional or physical health. Maybe Tiger Mom is the English word for this?

  3. Tartle (Scottish)

    4. Pausing while introducing someone because you can’t remember his name.

  4. Ilunga (Bantu)

    5. A person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time. We don’t have an equivalent expression in English because we don’t think about such a person.

  5. Schadenfreude (German)

    6. Deriving pleasure from another person’s misfortune. On the other hand, this type of person is easy to imagine, but nobody bothered to come up with a word for it.

  6. Tingo (Pascuense)

    7. To borrow objects from a friend’s house, one by one, until there’s nothing left. I wonder if they need to use this word a lot?

  7. Hyggelig (Danish)

    8. Dictionaries give the definiftion as ‘coziness’, but native speakers say it means much more. “It’s a matter of mentality,” one speaker said. “You can’t really give it an English equivalent because the English, or you Americans, don’t have the same mentality.” See here for a more detailed look: http://www.hackwriters.com/Denmark.htm

  8. L’appel du vide (French)

    9. The unexplainable desire to jump off the edge when you are on a cliff. We all get that feeling to do crazy things, so I’m glad there’s a word for it!

  9. Papakata (Maori)

    10. To have legs of different lengths.

  10. Sigurista (Tagalog)

    11. Someone who frets that not everything will go the right way. This person will not do something unless he is certain the desired outcome will be achieved. Somewhat similar to a perfectionist, but not quite.

  11. Vovohe Tahtsenaotse (Cheyenne)

    12. To prepare the mouth before speaking by moving or licking one’s lips. This is an useful word, I wish we had one similar in English. Come to think of it, we also need a word for licking our lips at the thought of dinner…

Translating Musicals

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If you think translating text is hard, imagine the extra work that comes with translating poems, songs, and musicals! You not only have to present the original text accurately, but now you have to keep the rhythm and rhyme scheme! I can’t imagine how one would even go about doing this, but luckily, Baptiste Deval explains step by step on Quora. The original can be found here: http://www.quora.com/When-a-musical-is-translated-how-do-they-manage-to-make-it-still-rhyme

Bringing a musical to a new country and a new language imply to do more than a translation: it is a work of adaptation, where rhyme is not the only challenge. You want to be able to translate cultural references that might not speak to your local audience, you want to respect the rhythm that was created by the original lyricist and composer, and of course, you want to respect the meaning of the original song!
However, you don’t need to stick to the exact same metaphors or vocabulary as the original lyrics: what you want is to convey an idea, a feeling etc… and most of the time, you need to get away from the original sentence in order to translate it correctly.

Typically, when translating a new song, I start with a rough translation of the lyrics. I look for the idioms and words that I don’t know, and quickly write a bad first version of the text (in French, in my case) to help me keep track of the general meaning of the song.
Then, I proceed sentence by sentence, letting words come to me. Sometimes, you will be surprise to see how good a basic translation works for one particular sentence, or that the sounds are true to the original rhyme.
Then, I explore the lexical fields, look for synonyms, and write all of my ideas: it’s not because I found a great translation to one sentence that I should stop here and not look for alternatives. I usually build a section around one or two sentences that I really like, but sometimes it simply cannot work and I would find a compromise.
Wordplays, metaphors and idioms can be the hardest to translate, as you might not have an interesting equivalent in your local language.
However, following this process, I usually find myself having almost 50% of the translation. And that’s where the hard work start.
At this point, finding solutions to the challenges I’m confronted with takes more efforts: I will come to the point where I sum up each stanza to its general idea and the way the author(s) have constructed the sentence. From this point, I will start finding all new words to give the same impression to the audience. You need to try (and miss) a lot until the point when you sorted out everything and you have full song!
You’re not quite done yet though: rehearsals and discussions with the director and the actors will lead you to adjust some of the lyrics before you have your dream translation!

As you can imagine, this is a lot of work, and success is not guaranteed (it really depends on the quality of the job that the translator did).

One World, Many Accents

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I was wasting time in the vast hinterland of the Internet when I came across this website: http://accent.gmu.edu/

It is a database of more than 1400 voices around the globe reading the same paragraph:

“Please call Stella.  Ask her to bring these things with her from the store:  Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob.  We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids.  She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.”

Everyone speaks with an accent and there is no “correct” one, but that doesn’t mean we can’t analyze different accents, or just listen to them for amusement. No offense to our dear Australian readers, but your English sounds very funny! Don’t worry, you can laugh at my accent if you want, it’s this one: http://accent.gmu.edu/searchsaa.php?function=detail&speakerid=137

You can select a voice by native language or by region. It then takes you to a page with a voice recording (requires Quicktime), a phonetic spelling of the reading, facts about the speaker, and generalizations. There’s a wealth of information in these pages. Who knew comparing accents could be so scientific? Here is the phonetic transcription for the way I speak:

 

Facts about the reader who read this:

  • Born in Wichita, Kansas, United States
  • 21 year old male
  • Other languages: Spanish
  • English learning method: naturalistic

Seriously, I could waste a lot of time exploring this. Here’s a breakdown of where WikiTranslation’s visitors come from (click for larger image):

I suppose most of us have an American accent, followed by Indian and then British. What’s your accent?

 

Translation/Language Resources

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Here are a few links and resources that I find very useful, feel free to suggest other sites in the comments.

Machine Translators

MyMemory- A free and searchable translation memory.

Google Translate- One of the best online machine translators.

Bing Translator- Another decent machine translator.

Tools

Google Translator Toolkit- An online editor that is designed to help translators work more efficiently.

WorldWide Lexicon- Software that lets you easily translate a blog or website using machine translation, crowdsourced translation, or professional translation.

Chinese Names- Get your name in Chinese!

Blogs

Naked Translations- An informative and humorous blog about a life as a French to English translator.

Translation Journal- A large collection of articles dating back to 1997!

Thoughts on Translation- A insightful blog about translation.

There’s Something About Translation- A blog about life as a freelance translator, and also tips and guides for the aspiring translator.

Community

Polyglot Club- A place where you can find a foreign pen pal.

How to Learn Any Language Forum- A forum where you can discuss how to learn languages.

English Forums- Learn English by chatting with different people through the forums or chat rooms.