If I had been presented with the choice between one week on holidays in Hawaii or attending the FIT2017 Translation Congress, I would have chosen the latter, no hesitation. I did not have to go far, I live there. It was a deliiiightful moment, a chance to step out of the box, and widen my horizons...
The 2017 Congress highlighted the impacts of technology, globalisation policy and economic change on the delivery of language services, with specific streams for indigenous and sign language, interpreting in conflict zones, community interpreting and translation. Attending it was a valuable opportunity to meet Translation and Interpreting professionals, service providers, practitioners, academics, students, journalists, agencies, software makers and policy makers, accreditation bodies, and buyers of services.
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Dr Henry Lu, FIT President, opened the ceremony |
'The ever-globalised world is now more connected than ever. Thankfully, predictions such as demise of translation industry or universal monolingualism have failed to become reality. Instead, communications are ever more nuanced and individualised. Translators, interpreters and terminologists are therefore occupying even more central and quintessential roles in this multicultural, multidisciplinary, multimodal and multi-centric world we are living in.
The collaborative and even synergistic relationship between Man and Machine was firmly established when FIT Congress last met in Berlin in 2014.
FIT 2017 World Congress promises to deliver a thought-provoking and challenging programme centred around the 2D’s - Disruption and Diversification - on the banks of the Brisbane river, the capital of the dynamic and of course always sunny state of Queensland'
Welcome to country and acknowledgement of the traditional land owners
A smoke ceremony was performed in the great Australian tradition.
Then, the floor was given to Aboriginal translation services.
It was like working in the army and hearing from the front line - one interpreter recounted the tale of a man wrongly accused of murder, imprisonned for 5 years as a result: all of this could have been prevented, should the man had had access to an adequat interpreting service; we heard about people not understanding 'consent forms' in hospitals; death threat to one Aboriginal Interpreter present here after a disappointing court hearings, from the part of a client, issues with moities rules (family allegiances when your family could represent 500 people, or 10 000 people for one interpreter present here), the lack of confidence in intimidating settings, getting in the way of performance, the variety of languages: one interpreters said she grew up in a household where English was her 6th language. The women present were saving lives, and yet, they talked about what some members of their community call a 'shame job'. Translating is reaching out but can also been regarded as a form of compromise, not everyone wants to compromise with who tells you what to do or judges you in what you regard your country in a different language than yours. We were reminded as a preambule that last century's integration policies had meant
'not being able to speak in your own language'.
This has profound impacts.
The last word from the Aboriginal Women Translators here present was: if Aboriginal Australian languages were taught at school, there would be much less divide.
I agree with that all the more we were presented statistics later on during the conference from a distinguished American scholar saying that after Grade 8, only 12% of students are enrolled in a foreign language course in Australia (44% in the US). My own children learned Chinese in their early primary school years, and I welcomed this as a good way to expand their semiotic boundaries, but I wished we could have had the choice of them being exposed (I say exposed because Aboriginal languages are very complex and difficult to learn) to the language from people whose semiotic boundaries are even further stretched and even more connected with our context, especially when it comes to 'connexion to land' so relevant to understand the environment today.
M. Cronin later on, talked about sustainability and lectured us on the need to expand our subjectivity, or go across semiologies, in order to comprehend our relation with nature, nature and environment ... he explained that the big challenges of our time may require translators' skills :)
A lot of talk have been going on about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the fact that our profession is soon going to be obsolete. Quite frankly, I have heard it for 20 years now, back to a time when I witness mining companies would sign big contracts including a clause demanding that specific documentation should be translated, then would buy a 'full of magical promises' piece of software, give it to 'a secretary' and ask her to 'execute' (is there a TRANSLATE BUTTON, no... nobody knew quite well WHAT the software could and would really achieve), translation budget had been misjudged, and 'expensive' humans had to take over the task. Today, there is still no remarkable TRANSLATE button, but automatic translations have improved dramatically, we are entering Industry 4.0, the fourth Industrial Revolution, but we are still not quite yet there ... a date has been coined for SINGULARITY (AI being able to outperform humans) : 2045
we are now what is called PRE-SINGULARITY WORLD, all we can do is get ready for it: for now, it is/will not be computers replacing translators, but a few translation software, digitally-savy translators replacing translators. For all those who think, thanks God I am not a translator, don't laugh too quickly, because when translators will lose their job, you are likely to lose yours as well... AI will sweep many professions across the board, all we can do is GET READY.
What did I learn ?
'Digitalisation makes us lose context'
(I won't expand on this, I leave it with you)
(I won't expand on this, I leave it with you)
'Humans comprehend context and that is our advantage'
(this was illustrated for me earlier on by a video showing an aboriginal translator's mother, a teacher who was teaching school kids to write the letter M, explaining metaphorically they were like two aunt hills - this is CONTEXT for you, I hope we don't lose her mother's skills)
Will we be replaced before pre-singularity world? ...
the answer given was 'no' but I was not reassured. The answer was 'no if we need high grade translations' ... and this is less obvious to me that it is what is going to happen.
How do we treat content now?
When we heard a young and distinguished american journalist speaking later on, she explained how fact-checkers were being made redundant, along with many other warrants of quality work in journalism, translations were googled up for journalistic purposes, she even said 'if you are over 30, you probably remember a time of information quality in journalism' ... Likewise, as a technical content translator practitionner, I have seem numerous times clients 'trying to save money' in asking for 'a quick translation', giving no access to images in the text, no direct/timely access to content writer, no translation reviews (good translators have revisors), no documentation layout final check, and getting away with it. Are their customers happy with that? They don't really ask them... they do it because they can. As for the literary world, it is not only Harry Potter's translators - you'll admit, a canon of children literature - who had been bullied to translate around the clock at an unsustainable level, I was sad to learn that the same regime had applied with the latest Ferrante's novels - Ferrante has been described as the new Tolstoi and I thoroughly enjoyed reading four of her novels. A PhD recipient presented translation errors or disgressions in her translator's work (it has been translated from Italian into English), but admitted at the end, after someone asked the question: 16 000 pages had been translated in 24 months by a translator holding a full-time job!!!
This said, it was nice to see that some companies take localisation seriously. I was happy to listen to the presentation of the Cocklear Institute Localisation Manager, a great world changing Australian invention, and was delighted by their practice. All managers are translators themselves, they identify text that may be difficult for translation, understand the need of cultural translation (she pointed out to the removal of a picture showing a woman computing with bare arms & exposed for the Middle East markets), allow 30% more space on pages for localisation needs, and their 3 months localisation cycle includes all necessary checks, including Product Manager, and Customer Service Manager controls in Regional offices.
They recognize that the scalable part does not apply to some human skill-sets, the need to be compliant with regulators (allowing products to be sold), and last but not least, the company mission to foster trust, the need to convey the company's integrity.
Why should you localise properly?
I like the 'Hearing the Customer'
So is it the end of quality content?
Not sure ... as we will realise that when we consume content, we actually consume electricity, mineral resources, and as our mobile phones are about to consume more and more electricity as we become more and more demanding, we may NEED to become one day discerning as to WHAT to consume (Cronin) and since we'll subsequently have to think more before we open a web page, we may not lose so much time with low quality content: quality may come back (me) (wishful tinking).
Likewise, a time will come when machines will help us to translate better (postediting versus human from scratch). I have done quite a bit of that since January 2017 and I find Machine Translation (MT) a big help depending on texts and languages. I am now able to feed terminology to my own customized TM (Translation Memory) which can be project based, client based, subject based, my own customised TM can sit in a Clould and be shared simultaneously by same lang translators located around the globe - I attended an advanced SDL workshop on Wednesday to learn how to navigate Lang Clouds, access Forums for Multiterms, how to use Glossary converters, how to find stimulating practitionners blogs or Software Users' Community full of useful technical tips, find out how I could personnalise my translation editor with relevant App plugs, etc... and even learn to do things like +D18&D19&*|*&F24... to further customize - we did it for a student/UNSW translation software lecturer attending the course, who needed to created 40 caracter long strings to address subtitle translation requirements.
As was illustrated by an FIT organiser, for now, AI is about 'feeding the baby' ... and she did not say, until the baby takes over, but this aplies to AI in general.
This is our new world
Translators are AI-complete
It was thought that chess players were AI-complete, but they not quite: computers do beat chess players now but they still can't do a transaltor's job :))!
Why? ... because some language is GENERAL (rather than domain specific) and DYNAMIC (rather than frozen) and current MT systems can't even handle culture-laden content across constrasting locales, ambiguity and cohesion not resolved by sentence level co-text and domain identification.
Lastly, an MT system would not be able to justify its choices relative to project specifications.
This means that, translators who focus on high grade translation that involves general, dynamic language and requires cultural adjustments will have plenty of work righ up until the beginning of the singularity.
What about Quality control?
There are three translation grades:
- High: High accuracy, high target-text fluency
- Medium: High accuracy, low-target-text fluency
- Low: Low accuracy (regardless of target-text fluency)
The problem with translation machine processing is that you can suddenly have high target-text fluency, and low accuracy, something that will be much harder to pick up if your proof reading is mostly the target text.
At the moment, FIT is working on the promising
QT21-Project (www.fit-ift.org) including
harmonisation of MQM & DQF,
MQM definition = Multidimensional Quality Metrics from DFKI (Berlin)
(Standard Errors categories)
DQF definition = Dynamic Quality Framework from TAUS (Amsterdam)
Some holistic automatic metrics such as BLU can also be useful.
basic research in MT (FIT not included in this aspect)
and informative analytic evaluation of MT quality versus HT (Human translation).
I was delighted that the work of two of my present and former colleagues had been selected on the research display panels. Their finding was that while translating, proof-reading and peer-reviewing a STEM document, the quality of the source text is a key factor for an experienced translator more than for an amateur one.
Interpreters seem to agree
A prominent US scholar came to talk to us about interpreting for Heath care and his studies showed that the best value they could buy to achieve quality and patient safety, thus avoiding the common pitfalls of using so-called blingual doctors, family members, or people who happen to speak a second lang, with the risk of omissions (key phrases uttured by clinician but not interpreted), additions, substitution, editorialisation (interpreter providing views as interpreter) and false fluency (non existant phrases) was to train in-house translators equiped with 100 hours of training after having tried everythig else. He was in charge of advocating best practices in hospitals and he concluded: INTERPRETERS AND TRANSLATORS SAVE LIVES.
Listening to another presentation on justice interpreting, knowing that the consequences of the breakdown of accurate interpreting in courts is the miscarriage of justice, the loss of confidence in the courts, delays, social and economic costs, I think this is a great model that could be extended to other areas such as Tribunals and Small Courts interpreting. At the moment, I have former colleagues interpreting for a ratio 76 Aud for her / 176 Aud charged to the client by agencies for 90mn on-site interpreting. I myself once had to drive to Toowoomba for 4 hours for such assignment, was once not briefed in advance about a client who had tuberculosis and in her case, she has to pay for babysitting, parking and superannuation ... of course, vicarious trauma is not acknowledged nor adressed, ... not a very desirable deal, neither for me, neither for the government, it seems to me (?).
I also attended a presentation by the Red Cross and here the role of an interpreter was extended as such - Red Cross front line interpreter's own words :
'Role of Interpreter: Bridge between delegates and authorities / detainees that creates conducive atmosphere ...'. The Red Cross chooses to employ people who work in second and third language only for security reasons. In Iraq, 216 (or 260, I am not sure I heard well) interpreters were killed on the ground of treason.
Further readings
The artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evoltion (MacSci), Tayor, Timothy
Geontology: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Povinelli, Elizabeth A.
Are we Smart Enough to Know How Smart Anmals Are?, de Waal, Frans
The Posthuman, Braidotti, Rosi
Eco-translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (New Perspectives in Tras;atins and Interpreting Studies), Cronin, Michael
Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, Zuckerman, Ethan
Finally, after taking a glance at the Conference Interpreting booth, I took a pair of headphones and listened to the simultaneous translation performance... I raised my thumb up to the French Interpreter as I was giving back my headphones, I was in awe, I wish more people could appreciate what she was able to do. I also have to acknowledge the intellectual and physical performance of the deaf interpreters. I attended one of their seminars - there was a good representation of this stream of colleagues, translating, in case you don't know, many languages - and this particular seminar was emphasizing soft skills as desirable attributes to successful interpreting.
This is only a tiny section of what was in offer during the conference, so other people will have other stories to tell, but here is a photo of our beautiful Brisbane river sights taken by an attendee and shared on the Conference FIT2017 App which enabled the Conference to be paper free and enabled us to connect with each other, browse the program in timely manner and not being caught by last minute room number changes, fix meetings with each other at different venues of common interest. Our ecosystem represented 800 participants!!! Brisbane you are doing great, and a special thank to dear Tea D., former German conference interpreter and translator, for whom the sky is the limit, and who largely contributed to its success, a translator made Brisbane a great city this week!
