All Things Linguistic

lingthusiasm: Lingthusiasm Episode 49: How translators approach...

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 21:22:16 -0400

Lingthusiasm Episode 49: How translators approach a text

Before even starting to translate a work, a translator needs to make several important macro-level decisions, such as whether to more closely follow the literal structure of the text or to adapt more freely, especially if the original text does things that are unfamiliar to readers in the destination language but would be familiar to readers in the original language.

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the relationship of the translator and the text. We talk about the new, updated translation of Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley (affectionately known as the “bro” translation), reading the Tale of Genji in multiple translations, translating conlangs in fiction, and mistranslation on the Scots Wikipedia.

Announcements

We’re coming up on Lingthusiasm’s fourth anniversary! In celebration, we’re asking you to help people who would totally enjoy listening to fun conversations about linguistics, they just don’t realize it exists yet! Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, and we’ve seen a significant bump in listens each November when we ask you to help share the show, so we know this works. If you tag us @lingthusiasm on social media in your recommendation post, we will like/retweet/reshare/thank you as appropriate, or if you send a recommendation to a specific person, we won’t know about it but you can still feel a warm glow of satisfaction at helping out (and feel free to still tell us about it on social media if you’d like to be thanked!). Trying to think of what to say? One option is to pick a particular episode that you liked and share a link to that.

This month’s bonus episode was about honorifics, words like titles and forms of “you” that express when you’re trying to be extra polite to someone (and which can also be subverted to be rude or intimate). Get access to this and 43 other bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

This is also a good time to start thinking about linguistics merch and other potential gift ideas (paperback copies of Because Internet, anyone?), in time for them to arrive via the internet, if you’re ordering for the holiday season. Check out the Lingthusiasm merch store at lingthusiasm.com/merch.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

Lingthusiasm Episode 18: Translating the untranslatable

Beowulf, translation by Maria Dahvana Headley

A “Beowulf” for Our Moment (New Yorker)

Gretchen reads Beowulf (twitter thread)

The Sensualist: What makes “The Tale of Genji” so seductive (New Yorker)

Shadowscent, by P.M Freestone

How I made the Aramteskan language (Superlinguo)

Scots Wikipedia (Wikipedia article)

Wikipedia has a Google Translate problem (The Verge)

Gretchen’s twitter thread about Scots Wikipedia

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening, and stay tuned for a transcript of this episode on the Lingthusiasm website. To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content and lets you help decide on Lingthusiasm topics.

Lingthusiasm is on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.

Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles

A Teen Threw Scots Wiki Into Chaos and It Highlights a Massive Problem With Wikipedia

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 23:30:48 -0400

A Teen Threw Scots Wiki Into Chaos and It Highlights a Massive Problem With Wikipedia:

An overview article of the Scots Wikipedia saga, which provides useful context about how editing issues come to happen in smaller-language Wikipedias. Excerpt:

Back in 2013, a 12-year-old American with an enthusiasm for the Scots language decided to contribute to the Scots Wikipedia. For seven years, they edited tens of thousands of articles with little oversight. Then, a Reddit post blew everything up.
The problem here was the teen in question is not a native Scots speaker and was a prolific contributor for a small wiki. Several Wikipedia admins and editors familiar with the situation have reached out to Gizmodo, and by all accounts, the teen was acting in good faith and meant no harm. It’s the sort of earnest and naive attempt to help that sometimes ends up doing more harm than intended.
That hasn’t stopped the backlash. Sure, you might write off this teen as lacking common sense, but the question remains: How did a single person, a teenager at that, have this much free reign for such a long period of time over what is largely considered to be a reference platform? […]
Scots Wikipedia may be the latest, and perhaps most well-known example thus far, but multiple Wikipedia editors emailed Gizmodo to bring attention to other examples of smaller wiki projects facing similar problems.
Read the whole thing.

The many languages missing from the internet

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 21:47:03 -0400

The many languages missing from the internet:

An article in BBC Future about linguistic representation on the internet.

The Kaqchikel Mayan community from Guatemala includes more than half a million speakers. Miguel Ángel Oxlaj Kumez is part of it and was one of the organisers of the first Latin American Festival of Indigenous Languages on the Internet, held in 2019.
“When I get on the internet I find more than 90% of the content in English and hence a significant percentage in Spanish and other languages,” he says. “So what I have to do is to move to another language, and that favours the displacement of my own language.”
“It discredits my own language, because – as it is not on the internet – then it is not valid, then it does not work, therefore why am I going to continue learning it? Why am I going to teach it to my children if, when I turn on the internet or television, I cannot find it there?”
Oxlaj Kumez is working with other activists to create a version of Wikipedia in Kaqchikel Mayan, as well as a translated version of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser. His dream is to be able to have a “digital life in my own language, and when I decide to move to another language that it will be my decision”.
He is not the only one with that dream. In 2003, Unesco adopted a recommendation to promote the use of multilingualism online. Ever since, the organisation has been pushing for universality on the internet, with a special focus on indigenous languages.
Read the whole thing.

Wikipedia Is Helping Keep Welsh Alive Online

Fri, 09 Aug 2019 20:24:10 -0400

Wikipedia Is Helping Keep Welsh Alive Online:

An article in Slate about the role of Wikipedia in creating language tools. Excerpt:

Although Alexa still does not speak or understand Welsh, the Celtic language’s presence in tech has increased dramatically within a short period. Google announced in February that it had expanded its offerings in Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive to include Welsh. And Google Translate—infamous since 2009 for its Scymraeg, or scummy Welsh—has, according to the BBC, recently taken a great leap forward in terms of the accuracy and quality of its Welsh translations. Morlais and others attribute this in part to the fact that there are now more than 100,000 articles on the Welsh version of Wikipedia, known as Wicipedia.
Like other language editions, Wicipedia is a separate website with its own content, not simply a translation of English Wikipedia, a distinction that matters for both users and big tech companies. Back in 2017, Morlais observed, “There appears to be an indication that there is a link between the languages with the most Wikipedia articles or pages and the languages that are supported by the digital giants.” Google Translate and other technologies use artificial neural networks to learn from example, training themselves with language data from rich internet sources like Welsh Wikipedia.
The Welsh community is not alone in using wiki-technology to promote its language. This year’s Celtic Knot conference in Cornwall, England, included several indigenous languages with their own Wikipedia editions. The original idea, as the name suggests, was to focus on Celtic languages, including Irish, Scots, Breton, Welsh, and Cornish, which was declared extinct merely a decade ago. But as word got out about a Wikipedia minority language conference, others began to join, representing, for example, the Sámi language spoken in parts of Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia; the Berber family of languages spoken in Northern Africa; and the Basque and Catalan communities. (In his 2017 presentation, Morlais noted that Catalan was one of the few minority languages supported by Google search, an accomplishment he linked to the fact that Catalan already had more than 500,000 articles on its language edition of Wikipedia.)
Read the whole thing.

Wikipedia has a Google Translate problem

Wed, 08 May 2019 20:14:58 -0400

Wikipedia has a Google Translate problem:

An article in The Verge about the tricky intersection of Wikipedia and machine translation. Excerpt:

Wikipedia was founded with the aim of making knowledge freely available around the world — but right now, it’s mostly making it available in English. The English Wikipedia is the largest edition by far, with 5.5 million articles, and only 15 of the 301 editions have more than a million. The quality of those articles can vary drastically, with vital content often entirely missing. Two hundred and six editions are missing an article on the emotional state of happiness and just under half are missing an article on Homo sapiens.
It seems like the perfect problem for machine translation tools, and in January, Google partnered with the Wikimedia Foundation to solve it, incorporating Google Translate into the Foundation’s own content translation tool, which uses open-source translation software. But for the editors that work on non-English Wikipedia editions, the content translation tool has been more of a curse than a blessing, renewing debate over whether Wikipedia should be in the business of machine translation at all.
Available as a beta feature, the content translation tool lets editors generate a preview of a new article based on an automated translation from another edition. Used correctly, the tool can save valuable time for editors building out understaffed editions — but when it goes wrong, the results can be disastrous. One global administrator pointed to a particularly atrocious translation from English to Portuguese. What is “village pump” in the English version became “bomb the village” when put through machine translation into Portuguese. […]
Guilherme Morandini, an administrator on the Portuguese Wikipedia, often sees users open articles in the content translation tool and immediately publish to another language edition without any review. In his experience, the result is shoddy translation or outright nonsense, a disaster for the edition’s credibility as a source of information. Reached by The Verge, Morandini pointed to this article about Jusuf Nurkić as an example, machine translated into Portuguese from its English equivalent. The first line, “… é um Bósnio profissional que atualmente joga …” translates directly to “… is a professional Bosnian that currently plays …,” as opposed to the English version “… is a Bosnian professional basketball player.”
Read the whole thing.

datarep: Languages Analysis: Number of Wikipedia Articles -VS-...

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 19:40:12 -0500

datarep:

Languages Analysis: Number of Wikipedia Articles -VS- Native Speakers Population

A lot of those large green dots showing languages with a high ratio of Wikipedia articles per speaker are languages where people have been using automated tools to create Wikipedia articles (even though those articles are often very short). It might be interesting to combine the total number of articles with average article length to provide a more nuanced look at how well-represented various languages are on Wikipedia, but this is still an interesting visualization! (And one I definitely wish I’d had when writing this Wired article about underrepresented languages online.)

More from the graph’s creator about what the visuals mean:

Bubble size depends on the ratio “number of wikipedia articles”/“number native speakers”. For example in Swedish there are more wikipedia articles per native Swedish speaker than for English wikipedia articles per native English speaker. The color scaling function on bubbles it’s there to help viewers to distinguish between bubble sizes, but it doesn’t bring any extra information.
Languages from poor countries like Tigrigna from Ethiopia and Eritrea (Africa) are underrepresented in wikipedia. Interestingly languages from small European countries like Sweden, Netherlands, Scotland, Catalonia, Basque Country,… are among the highest in terms of wikipedia activity.

"Why do Greek, Czech, Hungarian, and Swedish, with their 8 to 13 million speakers, have Google..."

Thu, 29 Nov 2018 20:37:48 -0500

“

Why do Greek, Czech, Hungarian, and Swedish, with their 8 to 13 million speakers, have Google Translate support and robust Wikipedia presences, while languages the same size or larger, like Bhojpuri (51 million), Fula (24 million), Sylheti (11 million), Quechua (9 million), and Kirundi (9 million) languish in technological obscurity?

Swedish, Greek, Hungarian, and Czech have a wealth of language resources, created one human at a time over centuries. They’re the languages of entire nation-states, with national TV and radio recordings that can be used as the foundation for text-to-speech models. Their speakers have the kind of disposable income that makes media companies translate popular novels and subtitle foreign movies and TV shows. They’re found in countries that tech companies imagine their customers might be living in or might at least visit on holiday, meaning it’s worth localizing interfaces and adding them as translation options. They have regularized spelling systems and dictionaries that can be rolled into spellcheckers and predictive text models. They have highly literate speakers with internet access who can contribute to projects like Wikipedia. (Speakers who can even, in the case of Swedish, create a bot to automatically make basic Wikipedia articles for rivers, mountains, and other natural features.)

Language resources don’t just appear. People have to decide to create them, and those people need to be fed and watered and educated and housed and supported, whether that’s by governments or by companies or by the kind of personal wealth that lets individuals take on time-consuming intellectual hobbies. Creating parallel corpora and other language resources takes years, if it happens at all, and cost tens of millions of dollars per language.

”

- Gretchen McCulloch, The widely-spoken languages we still can’t translate online. (My latest article as Wired’s Resident Linguist.)

“Computers — they’re like boxes of infinity! And!...

Sat, 27 Jan 2018 18:30:29 -0500

“Computers — they’re like boxes of infinity! And! You keep the wikipedia in them!"

Of the many things I enjoyed in @sarahreesbrennan‘s IN OTHER LANDS, this quote just about slayed me, so I hereby present it to the internet without context

Digital tools help revitalize rare languages

Fri, 16 Jun 2017 19:55:09 -0400

Digital tools help revitalize rare languages:

I’m quoted in an episode of CBC Spark about digitally disadvantaged languages:

While the internet remains a challenge for many little-used language speakers, it is helping small groups get an online foothold. It’s much easier to publish a blog online or even self-publish a dictionary with online tools, Gretchen says.
But she adds that without a large online body of words, things like spell-check, which majority language-users take for granted, make things difficult.
“English still dominates, but things are getting flatter,” she says.

The story also features interviews with Khelsilem about Squamish revitalization online, such as a talk show podcast in Squamish, and with Osgur Ó Ciardha and Peadar Ó Caomhánaigh about Pop Up Gaeltacht, using social media to organize Irish-language meetups.

You can read the associated story or listen on the website now, or if you’d like to hear it on the radio proper, I’m told it’s airing on CBC Radio One Sunday afternoon at 1:05 pm local time in most parts of Canada and again on Wednesday June 21 at 2:05 pm. It’ll also be syndicated on Sirius XM 169 and on ABC (Australia).

Introducing 'Noongarpedia' – Australia's first Indigenous Wikipedia

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 18:30:18 -0400

Introducing 'Noongarpedia' – Australia's first Indigenous Wikipedia:

An interesting writeup in the Guardian of an interesting project, to create a Wikipedia in Noongar:

Wikipedia comes in 294 languages … and counting. It’s a drop in the bucket compared with the number of actual languages in the world (after all, Australia alone has more than 250 native languages), but alongside Google Translate (with 104 languages) it makes Wikipedia one of the most ambitious language projects today.
Where the English Wikipedia has more than 5m articles, there are hundreds of much smaller Wikipedias including Abkhazian, Cherokee, Norfolk and Fijian. Sitting in the site’s incubator program, along with 10 other languages, is Wikipedia’s first Indigenous Australian language, Noongar.
There are roughly 35,000 Noongar people today, according to the Noongar Boodjar Language Centre, making it one of the largest Indigenous groups in Australia. For thousands of years they’ve lived on Noongar boodjar (Noongar country), what is now known as the south-western corner of Western Australia and includes the capital city, Perth. Artefacts likely carried by early Noongar ancestors have been dated as far back as 30,000 years.
The Noongarpedia project began in 2014 by a team from the University of Western Australia led by school of Indigenous studies professor and Noongar elder Leonard Collard, with Curtin University’s John Hartley and the Miles Franklin award-winning novelist Kim Scott. Although not yet formally launched, the site is live and users can create an account and contribute by writing or editing articles
Its front page bears a welcome to country, an ancient spiritual greeting practised by many Indigenous Australian nations:
Kaya wanju gnullar NoongarPedia. Gnullar waarnkniy kwop kwop birdiyah wiern, maaman, yorga, koorlinga. Gnullar waarnkiny noonar yoorl koorliny waarnkiny nidja NoongarPedia. / Welcome to our Noongarpedia. We speak in good spirit of our ancestors, spirits, men, women and children. We hope you come and contribute to our Noongarpedia.
It is just one of many subtle but important departures from the larger Wikipedias. For example, Collard says inherent to English Wikipedia is an assumption that “all information is freely available to everybody”. Such a policy would conflict with Noongar knowledge convention and law which places restrictions on who can know what knowledge, so the Noongarpedia community is developing procedures to prevent general access to certain information.
A research associate, Jennifer Buchanan, says Wikipedia convention favours mainstream books, newspapers and scientific journals as creditable sources. For the Noongar people, while published works are also important, their elders are considered the greatest authority in knowledge and culture (meanwhile, inaccuracies about their people run rampant in the media and academic circles).
Read more.

The Noongarpedia is online at the Wikimedia Incubator and a list of all pages so far is here.

More about the process for contributing to or starting a Wikipedia in an underrepresented language can be found at bit.ly/lingwiki-colang4.