Language Justice
May 5, 2021 8:40 AM Subscribe
As a Canadian federal government employee, I have become wildly familiar with all the manifestations of how two languages can be handled within the same meeting, both in person and now virtually. 90% of them are terrible for everyone, and the other 10% are only terrible for people who don't speak the dominant language. The last 10% are also the cheapest, so they tend to get chosen a lot of the time. Even the gold standard of professional simultaneous interpretation leaves a lot to be desired in terms of capturing nuance and not losing details, unfortunately.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:21 AM on May 5, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by jacquilynne at 9:21 AM on May 5, 2021 [4 favorites]
Even the gold standard of professional simultaneous interpretation leaves a lot to be desired in terms of capturing nuance and not losing details, unfortunately.
I've been part of the organizing committee for international summer schools where we had to provide simultaneous translation on science and technology topics for a number of days a few times.
I think the poor translators must have just dreaded our jobs. Even with four of them, none were able to go more than 20-40 minute stints and even then the struggle to do simultaneous translation for allophones giving English presentations in a second (or third or more) languages was agonizing to watch. They were visibly wring out by the second days and often exhausted by day 3.
We started planning shorter single day events and carefully choosing the presenters, which helped, but it still seemed a terrifically hard job.
posted by bonehead at 9:36 AM on May 5, 2021 [5 favorites]
I've been part of the organizing committee for international summer schools where we had to provide simultaneous translation on science and technology topics for a number of days a few times.
I think the poor translators must have just dreaded our jobs. Even with four of them, none were able to go more than 20-40 minute stints and even then the struggle to do simultaneous translation for allophones giving English presentations in a second (or third or more) languages was agonizing to watch. They were visibly wring out by the second days and often exhausted by day 3.
We started planning shorter single day events and carefully choosing the presenters, which helped, but it still seemed a terrifically hard job.
posted by bonehead at 9:36 AM on May 5, 2021 [5 favorites]
Mod note: A few comments deleted. Please don't come into a thread on ways to address an actual issue that affects real marginalized people with a series of jokey or brainstormy suggestions about artificial languages; it comes across as treating the topic as a joke or abstract thought exercise. Check the Guidelines, take context into account.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:38 AM on May 5, 2021 [10 favorites]
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:38 AM on May 5, 2021 [10 favorites]
This was an explicitly multi-lingual setting by the way, a type 4 in the author's categorization. No one was expected to be multi-lingual.
posted by bonehead at 9:40 AM on May 5, 2021
posted by bonehead at 9:40 AM on May 5, 2021
This is really interesting. As an academic who works in 1.5 languages, with a spouse who works in more than 3, I really like the idea. I'm also not sure how to implement this, personally. We can barely afford to pay an international speaker to travel for a talk, and we're pretty rich as institutions go. Professional interpreters are expensive, compared to academics in my field who work for "free." That pretty much everybody who attends conferences (with some exceptions, mostly young people from rich countries) speak English really well makes it hard to argue for professional translators. Which is unfair and frustrating. But, perhaps our field isn't really the target audience of this.
Encouraging people like me to pick the non-dominant language in multi-lingual spaces is great advice.
posted by eotvos at 10:11 AM on May 5, 2021 [2 favorites]
Encouraging people like me to pick the non-dominant language in multi-lingual spaces is great advice.
posted by eotvos at 10:11 AM on May 5, 2021 [2 favorites]
simultaneous interpretation leaves a lot to be desired
That's why it's called interpretation, not translation. In my experience, providing the interpreter with a list of terminology and an outline of what will be said is very much appreciated. Of course, that's not as helpful in unprepared talking.
posted by StickyCarpet at 10:19 AM on May 5, 2021 [4 favorites]
That's why it's called interpretation, not translation. In my experience, providing the interpreter with a list of terminology and an outline of what will be said is very much appreciated. Of course, that's not as helpful in unprepared talking.
posted by StickyCarpet at 10:19 AM on May 5, 2021 [4 favorites]
That pretty much everybody who attends conferences (with some exceptions, mostly young people from rich countries) speak English really well makes it hard to argue for professional translators.
One of the things I saw in one of the resources somewhere was the concept of self-interpretation. I thought that was pretty neat. I think the idea is that the speaker talks in the language they're most comfortable in, and then translates into the dominant language. I'm not sure how it fits with the perpetuating of existing power dynamics concern they raised. Benefits I can see include: speaker gets to say exactly what they mean. There might be other people present who understand that language, and they get to hear exactly what the speaker means.
posted by aniola at 11:12 AM on May 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
One of the things I saw in one of the resources somewhere was the concept of self-interpretation. I thought that was pretty neat. I think the idea is that the speaker talks in the language they're most comfortable in, and then translates into the dominant language. I'm not sure how it fits with the perpetuating of existing power dynamics concern they raised. Benefits I can see include: speaker gets to say exactly what they mean. There might be other people present who understand that language, and they get to hear exactly what the speaker means.
posted by aniola at 11:12 AM on May 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
I play a game with other players all over the world. In the game chat, everyone types in their own language and there's a button you can click to translate any post into your chosen language. It's not perfect, of course, but it's pretty great.
posted by bink at 11:24 AM on May 5, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by bink at 11:24 AM on May 5, 2021 [3 favorites]
bink, what game is that? That sounds like almost the perfect solution -- perfect, imho, being a button that translates all the posts into your own language so you don't have to go pushing buttons everywhere and can just read and interact more naturally.
posted by antinomia at 1:11 PM on May 5, 2021
posted by antinomia at 1:11 PM on May 5, 2021
As someone who's lived as a linguistic minority their entire life, I found this article surprisingly empty of any of the cultural considerations of what happens when a monoculture actively refuses to accomodate the basic needs of a minority.
It was very strange to see the words 'language justice' used when my province, Quebec, is poised to use the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian constitution to override the rights guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to push through restrictive language laws.
'Language justice' is far from an abstract concept dealing exclusively with communication in my part of the world, and in many others.
posted by jordantwodelta at 1:25 PM on May 5, 2021 [7 favorites]
It was very strange to see the words 'language justice' used when my province, Quebec, is poised to use the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian constitution to override the rights guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to push through restrictive language laws.
'Language justice' is far from an abstract concept dealing exclusively with communication in my part of the world, and in many others.
posted by jordantwodelta at 1:25 PM on May 5, 2021 [7 favorites]
I think the poor translators must have just dreaded our jobs. Even with four of them, none were able to go more than 20-40 minute stints and even then the struggle to do simultaneous translation for allophones giving English presentations in a second (or third or more) languages was agonizing to watch. They were visibly wring out by the second days and often exhausted by day 3.
I know what you mean (although I think you have called them by the wrong term — my understanding is that translators deal with the written and interpreters, the spoken. I have done both and translation is much, much easier). Interpreters in professional settings usually have short shifts — twenty minutes is pretty standard, I am told.
I am technically more or less bilingual; in a previous job in a fully bilingual organization, I always found a two- or three-day meeting in my second language was mentally exhausting. There were coworkers who were much more at ease in both languages than I, who could switch much more readily.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:48 PM on May 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
I know what you mean (although I think you have called them by the wrong term — my understanding is that translators deal with the written and interpreters, the spoken. I have done both and translation is much, much easier). Interpreters in professional settings usually have short shifts — twenty minutes is pretty standard, I am told.
I am technically more or less bilingual; in a previous job in a fully bilingual organization, I always found a two- or three-day meeting in my second language was mentally exhausting. There were coworkers who were much more at ease in both languages than I, who could switch much more readily.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:48 PM on May 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
what game is that?
Most MMO war games for mobile phones seem to have this feature now. The one I played most recently (about a year ago?) with a really good multilingual chat translator was World War Rising, but there's a ton of games that seem to be running on the same basic underlying engine/model just with different themed skins on top that seem to have this feature in their chats.
There's also often an option to earn some extra game resources every day by going through a bunch variants of sentences that have been translated into your native language and choosing the version of each that "sounds" best to your native ear (or that at least aren't nonsense due to untranslated foreign words with typos) so the translations have also been improving rapidly as the developers get massive amounts of crowdsourced proofreading for basically free.
I've been in games chats where 90+% of what everyone writes has read to me as idiomatically correct English and if it weren't for the little note indicating that their messages had been translated from Swedish, Russian, German, French, etc., I would have thought I was chatting with a group of fellow native English speakers. The translation software is getting a really good handle on common internet slang, abbreviations, figuring out typos, etc.
It's pretty amazing how quickly this has come along -- just a few years ago, the team selection process for new players in MMOs almost always had a language filter and team profles would prominently note what the team's official language was. But now instead of choosing from a list of English-speaking teams or Russian-speaking teams or whatever, you just choose whichever team's recruitment messages in the world chat most appeal to you and everyone can just... talk to each other.
Kinda blows my mind that all these advances in text translation technology are being pushed along by people around the world wanting to scream at each other about tile-hitting lol.
posted by Jacqueline at 2:10 AM on May 6, 2021 [4 favorites]
Most MMO war games for mobile phones seem to have this feature now. The one I played most recently (about a year ago?) with a really good multilingual chat translator was World War Rising, but there's a ton of games that seem to be running on the same basic underlying engine/model just with different themed skins on top that seem to have this feature in their chats.
There's also often an option to earn some extra game resources every day by going through a bunch variants of sentences that have been translated into your native language and choosing the version of each that "sounds" best to your native ear (or that at least aren't nonsense due to untranslated foreign words with typos) so the translations have also been improving rapidly as the developers get massive amounts of crowdsourced proofreading for basically free.
I've been in games chats where 90+% of what everyone writes has read to me as idiomatically correct English and if it weren't for the little note indicating that their messages had been translated from Swedish, Russian, German, French, etc., I would have thought I was chatting with a group of fellow native English speakers. The translation software is getting a really good handle on common internet slang, abbreviations, figuring out typos, etc.
It's pretty amazing how quickly this has come along -- just a few years ago, the team selection process for new players in MMOs almost always had a language filter and team profles would prominently note what the team's official language was. But now instead of choosing from a list of English-speaking teams or Russian-speaking teams or whatever, you just choose whichever team's recruitment messages in the world chat most appeal to you and everyone can just... talk to each other.
Kinda blows my mind that all these advances in text translation technology are being pushed along by people around the world wanting to scream at each other about tile-hitting lol.
posted by Jacqueline at 2:10 AM on May 6, 2021 [4 favorites]
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posted by Silvery Fish at 8:44 AM on May 5, 2021