Why It’s Important to Know the Name of the Translator Working on Your Project

August 15, 2012 By 1 Comment

Depending upon the complexity of the translation project, the scarcity of professional translators available for a particular language, or the laws governing your business, it’s entirely possible that only a limited pool of resources can complete your translation project. That’s why when you request it, we provide you with the name of the translation professional who is working on your project.

At In Every Language, we pioneered offering this level of transparency in the language services industry because it saves our clients time and money. Plus, it gives you a truer picture of who is working on your translation project. Most translation providers do not openly share this information and we view our position as a point of integrity.

Because we have so much confidence in the translation professionals on our team, we’ll even go a step further and allow you to speak directly with the translator assigned to your project when needed. We’ve found this step improves the efficiency and effectiveness of in country review because your reviewer can speak directly with the translator assigned to your project.

Plus, if you are operating in the United States and your project contains intellectual property (software, technology, engineering schematics, manufacturing specifications, inventions or medical technology), deemed export rules prevent the release of intellectual property to a translator working outside of the U.S. in a sanctioned country such as Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Burma or Syria (please consult your attorney for legal advice specific to your industry).

Filed Under: best practices, client education, code of ethics, corporate translation, CSR, customer service, in-country review, independent contractors, localisation, localization, professionalism, project management, quality assurance, quality control, social responsibility, standards of practice, translating, translation, translators, transparency

Project management for languages of limited diffusion

January 12, 2012 By 4 Comments

Congolese interpreter Mozart Kapend often works from English into French, Swahili, and Lingala.

I’m in Chicago O’Hare as I write this, waiting for my flight and thinking about the Ethiopian family I was stuck behind in security this morning. There was a mother and father, three children with two, as my grandmother would put it, “still on the hip.” I’m watching them go through, the youngest child clinging to his mother’s neck, crying, as security tries to pry him away so they can run him through the body scanner without her. The eldest child, a girl, is crying as security pats her down. Lines of American business travelers stand behind them, moaning and groaning about the extended wait. Meanwhile, the middle child is standing in the body scanner bewilderedly while a TSA officer pantomimes the position, extending her arms above her head. I stand there and think that this child looks like she’s standing like a criminal in a lineup, that if I were from another country, if I were a child, if I didn’t speak the language, I would be so confused. I would think what a crazy, crazy place, this America.

I sincerely doubt anyone else who saw this was thinking about translation. Security – or lack thereof is now simply part of airport culture. Yes, airports have their own certain culture. There’s the larger macro-culture of flying in the States, and then the micro-culture that varies a tad from airport to airport. And as any with culture, there are unspoken rules and everyone is aware when they’re broken. The rule-breakers are generally people who have never flown before, like the woman who’s wearing too much jewelry at the security checkpoint, wrestling with her watch and earrings while the baggage to be scanned piles up on the belt behind her. Or the vacationer who doesn’t understand why she can’t pack a jumbo can of aerosol hairspray in her carry-on. We frequent travelers expect them to know these rules, even though they’re never truly stated. My mother has never flown before. When I start to lose patience with these people, I think of her and of how I would like for her to be treated when she finally flies the friendly skies.

Culture is assumed. Oftentimes, it’s not even possible to identify. This time, I’m flying back from San Francisco, where they call all women “miss.” “Would you like some coffee, miss?”  “Hello, miss. What can I get you?”  As a fully-grown adult, this is hard to stomach—being called something I associate with a child. A Southerner, I’m used to hearing children referred to as “miss” and adults as “ma’am” and all this “miss”-ing instantly puts me on guard, makes me feel condescended to. A little word, said in one part of the country to be polite, and it affects the kind of relationship I have with the person saying it.

We’re aware of this. As translators and localizers, we’re so aware of this, we make our living from the awareness and clients trust us because of this. We constantly think of culture in our work for the clients’ end translation, but how much do we weigh culture as part of the process to help ourselves?  When we take culture into consideration in our work, do we think about anything beyond the final product?

Three years ago, I was on another flight with one of my project managers (PM’s). She was reading Culture and Customs of Somalia by Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi (Greenwood Press, 2001). Suddenly, she leans across the aisle and says, “Terena, you’ve got to read this.” We’d been having an issue, see, with our Somali interpreters. We couldn’t get them to fill out their paperwork. They’d call in, wanting to apply as a vendor; you’d conduct a preliminary interview; the candidate would sound experienced, qualified, promising. Then we’d never receive their application or resume. Or we would get it, but then they would never sign their contract or submit their mandatory tax documents. At the time, Somali was one of the languages we had the largest number of call-in applicants for, but the fewest number of contractors actually available for work. In addition, when a Somali interpreter or translator would complete the submission process, we’d usually lose them in a year. The call would come, an interpreter accusing us of not paying him for his work when he had ignored multiple requests for our office to send an invoice. Eventually—sometimes months later—an invoice would come, which was promptly paid, but in the meantime, the linguist would stop returning calls or accepting assignments.

It made no sense to us why someone would go to the effort of applying, then not take the final step of completing a confidentiality form. Or worse yet, why someone would do the work, then never ask for his money. But as I read what my PM pointed out, it all became clear. “[M]ost Somalis,” Diriye Abdullahi writes, “work and deal in a paperless economy in which business transactions and money transfers worth thousands of dollars are enacted with words” (p 159).

Maybe this is because Somali as a language didn’t even have a unified script until 1972, having previously fluctuated between Arabic, Latin, and unique writing styles (p 72). Even then, the unified language wasn’t mandatory in schools until 1980 (p 73), so today’s generation of translators pretty much grew up without a standard script.

In addition to the writing difficulties – or perhaps because of them — common law — or heer – is the norm in Somalia. When Italian colonials arrived on the scene in the ninetieth century, infractions of heer, “a set of laws, seldom written, that members of a clan or neighboring clans decide to respect” are brought before the guurti – our council of elders (p 142). Somalis rebelled against the centralized imposition of laws and rules enforced by the Italians and this community system is still used to socially govern today. So when a project manager slaps Somali translators with paperwork and other formalities, 200 years of colonialism fight back. To them, oral agreements are what’s binding.

Sitting on that plane, my PM and I realized our project management issue wasn’t an issue anymore. It was a cultural misunderstanding with a solution. Now when new, Somali applicants contact us, we apologize as we send them our forms, saying, “I know this amount of paperwork isn’t customary in your culture. But in our country, the government—and our clients—require that we keep certain records. We want to create a relationship of trust with you, but situations beyond our control mean that we do need these back first please.” Or something like that. We also developed a suggested template for invoicing that we send with assignments for translation, reiterating that the invoice is necessary for our tax records and required by the government, again, with apologies. We align ourselves with them – also burdened by the amount of paperwork that a litigious America has pressed upon us — instead of being the ones pressing.

Like saying “miss” instead of “ma’am,” this small shift in perspective made all the difference. Our Somali availability grew, not just by adding new translators to our list, but also by retaining relationships with the translators we already worked with much longer than before. Mai-Mai (Maay-Maay) availability increased as well, since the Somali Bantu have a similar relationship with legalities and paperwork as the Somali.

A friend of mine who works in refugee resettlement says when you do what we do, you assume some pretty odd stereotypes. While the Sudanese don’t say much, the Congolese want to have a long chat about your family members’ health before they can get down to business. Having entered the professional translation industry from that angle myself, I have to agree. Working in refugee resettlement really gets you thinking about how bereft the language services industry is when it comes to non-FIGS (French, Italian, German, Spanish) languages. In addition to FIGS, another acronym tossed around in resettlement circles is LLD, or languages of limited diffusion. I also hear the phrase “languages other than Spanish” (LOS) quite frequently.

Whatever you call them, these are the languages every translation company offers, but that few companies in our industry really handle a lot of. If you’re a multi-language vendor and you don’t offer Spanish, there’s probably something wrong. But if you don’t offer Karen, no one will be surprised. For those LLS’s provided, it’s not really the LSP doing the work. When you get to investigating some company’s language lists, you find out they just have one Malay person, that their Lingala guy actually subcontracts through another LSP, or that their Chin translator can’t handle anything specialized, only general texts. This isn’t false advertising per se, it’s just how our industry unfortunately works. Technically, they do offer these languages. And if you asked them, they probably would love to take on more contractors for these pairs. But by and large, when it comes to growing and maintaining LLD databases, our industry doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

Congolese interpreter Mozart Kapend often works from English into French, Swahili, and Lingala.

Having worked in refugee resettlement, I see a vast and wide disparity between the people who speak these languages and the people who sell them. Lori Thicke of Translators without Borders has often spoken of the need to train African translators. Wordfast works through Translators without Borders to grant free licenses to those who volunteer. But having worked almost exclusively with Africans for years, having interpreted for them, with them, and beside them, I can say beyond the shadow of a doubt that regardless of what we do to attract LLD translators, if we as an industry do not make efforts to understand their culture and their lives, they will never become career contractors.

We lost a Nepali interpreter last summer to Kroger. Kroger, for those of you outside the Eastern United States, is a supermarket chain with locations in 31 states. This man was fully trained and had been working as a translator/interpreter for two years. Now he bags groceries for a living. He makes far less a year than he could have made a year if he had only marketed himself, but as the income was steady, this decision was the one he felt was best for his family. Culturally, he is the breadwinner and Kroger could promise him a regular income in advance. Turns out, he only had two clients so he just worked once or twice a week because he didn’t know how to attract more. We pleaded for him to join the American Translators Association, to get a profile on ProZ, anything, but like many non-Americans, he had a hard time with the whole “self-marketing” concept. To an enterprising American, it may seem like he didn’t really want to translate or interpret, like he didn’t really want to work, but the Nepalese culture is exceptionally laid back and it’s nearly impossible for a Nepali to show assertiveness or aggression.

It’s not just the Nepalese, either, who have issues with self-promotion. I’ve gone to business mixers where French people lined up against the wall, not knowing how to go into the room and make contacts. I’ve walked up to Argentineans at conferences, said, “Hi, I’m Terena” and had them just look at me. This, too, is cultural. In a room full of strangers, a Southerner is destined to make friends, whereas many aren’t, too locked into what I call subway — or airport — mode.

For project management, what this means is that the best translator for the job could literally be at Kroger. Now, I’m not saying we should all hit the Korean barbecue restaurant the next time we need Korean. Heaven forbid, we should ever stoop so low in seeking new talent. In fact, I’ll tell you right now – will beg with you in fact – never go to the Korean barbecue joint for Korean translation. Be prepared, though, for your average LLD translator to work another job, regardless of the country he is in. The fully-marketed, fully-available Kinyarwanda translator is rare. Plan for limited availability. Because even if you’re working with a full-time translator, odds are she’s contracting with a gazillion other LSP’s as well because, being the only Kinyarwanda translator who’s learned how to market, everyone thinks she’s the only one around. She’s going to be busy, whether her side work is in the industry or not. Allow more time.

You should also allow more time for anyone living in a developing country. Even FIGS languages can run into LLD issues if you’re working with a minority dialect of them. Think French for Cameroon, Portuguese for Cape Verde, English for Liberia. In addition to allowing extra time, it’s good to have a back-up plan.

Louisville, Ky, where I live, has had three major power outages in the last three years. In the most recent one, I was fortunate enough to have my power restored within 30 hours. After Hurricane Ike, I had to wait 12 days. If you’re an American, not having electricity messes with your mind. People do things they normally would never do, like break bread with complete strangers. One family down the block — Revolutionary War reenactors with lots of campfire equipment – started throwing dinner parties every night. We would sit in the front yard and sing folk songs, drink spruce beer, play whist. The loss of power temporarily changed our culture, which had previously kept people on the same street too buried in their Blackberries to spend time together. Despite the periodic failures though, power outages have fortunately stopped being a standard way of life in the United States. In developing countries, though, they still are.

When weighing culture into project management, you also have to weigh in the factors that create it. As a result, depending on the country, we project extra time for delivery because you never do know when the power will go out. Sometimes, depending on the size of the project, we ask our translators to deliver in stages. Regardless of the stage they’re at, we ask that they stop working every so many hours to email us what they have, translation memory included. Our project managers are then able to reassign the remainder, if needed, to keep the project on schedule despite the translator losing electricity.

This is also an area where collaborative translation could thrive. Were you to pair a developing world translator with a developed country counterpart, the other translator could continue and the LLD translator could revise after he came back online. If the power doesn’t go out, you’re able to deliver early to your client, and if it does, there’s no loss. Either way, you’re prepared.

Preparation is really what it’s about. I heard at a conference once that 70% of project management work should take place before translation even begins – that PM’s should be that ready for a client’s incoming job. Perhaps some of that 70% should be spent looking into the translator’s culture and determining what factors could go wrong. There’s not a lot of talk in the translation industry about what those factors are. Like I said before, we tend to focus on the FIGS, and not languages other than Spanish. A lot of this is because of a lack of training opportunities available for project managers on culture’s role in the translation process. Heck, for some LLD cultures, there’s little information out there period, much less information tailor-made for our profession. It’s one of the issues that plagues machine translation and makes it harder to develop algorithms for accurately translating obscure languages like Kalabari. Rule based systems require linguistic study of a language that hasn’t been studied; behavior based ones require a compendium which doesn’t yet exist.

These languages are almost infinite in their variety; even my name, Terena, is a minority language spoken in Brazil. As it’s an agrarian tongue in nature, I know one phrase: Pú’i-ti hó′openo ne kûre (Pigs are fat animals). But what does this clever knowledge tell us for project management? That localizing anything modern into this language may be near to impossible. Translation techniques like adaptation and lacunas must be used. I must admit, since it’s the same as my name, I feel a personal responsibility to learn Terena, but the urge quickly dies. There are so many languages out there, so many cultures. To study them all would be impossible.

So how does the project manager cope?  Unless you’ve countless hours for perusing the CIA World Factboook (www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/), a quicker summary will have to do. This is where the world of refugee resettlement can help our own. Our clients may be corporations, but as health information and software programs stretch out into Africa and elsewhere, localization is needed just as badly for the LLD’s as it originally was for the FIGS.

There is a divide between the professional translation world and that of refugee resettlement. We have the client connection; they have the cultural one. In fact, refugee resettlement agencies are so culturally in tune, weekly cultural orientations — called CO’s for short — are part of the mandatory classes required by the US government for all inbound arrivals. That family in the airport was clearly newly arrived, having to go through security in O’Hare after clearing customs on their way over. Give it a year or two and whatever agency that’s resettling them will have lots to share on Ethiopia, I’m sure, if they haven’t become experts already. Personally, with an introduction to our country as formidable as the one they received, I wouldn’t be surprised if the children don’t become translators, forever seeking subliminal ways to cross that divide.

It’s not often that the professional translation world crosses paths with the ad hoc one and let’s face it—for the most part, refugee resettlement translators and interpreters by and large are ad hocs. But when it comes to incorporating minority culture into our work processes, we’re the ones with the most to learn. Case workers are pros. Becoming aware of – if not active with – your local Church World Service or Catholic Charities will give you deeper insight into what your LOS translators are facing. Because while they may speak 2,000 languages in Africa, none of them are Spanish. Nothing against Spanish – in our world, it’s bread and butter – but if you want to specialize or even routinely offer LLD’s you have to understand the people who speak them.

In their book Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong (Sourcebooks Inc, 2003), sociologists Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow write about how “travelers…tend to accept [cultural] obstacles stoically, reasoning (rightly) that things are just done differently in foreign cultures. For some reason, when it comes to the French, North Americans drop this reflex” (9). They go on to explain that it’s because so many American and Canadian aspects of life mirror those of the French that we often forget that they’re exactly that: French. We do not have this excuse with languages of limited diffusion. We can not hide behind their cultures being parallel universes to our own. We must look for different ways of doing.

So now the question is, if you were to drop your assumptions about how project management is supposed to go, if you were to lose the culture of being a PM itself and think about the culture of the translator, what would change?  How would you go about your process differently? And how would your client’s translation improve with it?

(This blog entry was originally published as an article in the October/November issue of MultiLingual Magazine.)

Filed Under: articles, best practices, cultural competency, culture, immigrants, L10n, localisation, localization, project management, quality assurance, quality control, translation

Managing Interpreting for Domestic Violence Cases

August 17, 2011 By 2 Comments

Let’s face it: in-country review isn’t typically done for interpreting. To be honest, the turnaround time alone makes it impossible. I mean, what are you going to do?  Record a simultaneous interpreter at work, email the mp3 to Spain, then have the attendees wait while someone reviews it?  Not only is that a logistics nightmare, it’s also ludicrous. In the language services world, if translation is polished, with its myriad of project management protocols, then time alone dictates that interpreting is the quintessential quick and dirty.

 

Trick is, though, while interpreting has to be quick, it doesn’t have to be dirty. Qualified, skilled interpreters are consistently looking for ways to clean up their work. In the United States, medical interpreting certification is a new example of this. Healthcare interpreters who previously led a splintered existence in the fringes, picking up training where they could find it and fighting to differentiate themselves from ad hocs, can now get nationally-recognized certification from the Certification Commission for Healthcare Interpreters (CCHI). US legal interpreting has all but moved beyond the state-level, with federal court certification in place and the Consortium for Language Access in the Courts — formerly the Consortium for State Court Interpreter Certification — now at 40 member states. And other interpreting specializations are starting to crop up and define themselves as well. California now has a trade association specifically for workers’ compensation interpreters, and in Kentucky, domestic violence (dv) interpreters are also finding their voice.

 

Through the Immigrant and Refugee Women Project, four partners (In Every Language, Pure Language Services, the Kentucky Domestic Violence Association (KDVA), and the Kentucky Association of Sexual Assault Programs) are currently in the process of cleaning up domestic violence interpreting, developing the nation’s first certification for dv interpreters. Out of the many steps taken in this process, the one that surprised me most was in-country review.

 

Which country, you ask?  The United States.

 

In Kentucky, where we’ve started the project, limited-English proficient (LEP) victims tend to speak Spanish, Russian, Swahili, French, and Arabic; of these, Spanish is most requested, with victims primarily coming from Mexico and Cuba. There are 15 dv shelters statewide, the bulk of which also assist rape and sexual assault victims. In addition to both individual and group counseling sessions, interpreting must be performed for rape kit administration, new client intake and processing, and residential meetings. Domestic violence is the leading cause of homelessness among American women and children, so dv interpreters also work at economic success meetings and interpret for various community programs — such as insurance providers and public transit — that serve the impoverished. In addition to this, there’s all the legal work that needs to be done as court-appointed interpreters may not always be available: emergency protective order (EPO) and/or domestic violence order (DVO) filings and hearings, divorce filings, custody hearings, criminal proceedings, and arbitration meetings. Needless to say, that’s a large vocabulary range for any interpreter.

 

There’s a lot of high-stress vocabulary and the way interpreters use these vocabulary words can truly change people’s lives. Latina women are less likely to seek help for dealing with domestic violence than any other US group and many immigrants, regardless of ethnicity, are hesitant to report dv because often their abusers threaten them with deportation, hide their visas, etc. In fact, the issues immigrant victims face are so unique that the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project has developed a separate Power and Control Wheel just for them. (The Power and Control Wheel is used to help victims pin-point instances when they have been abused. For more information, please visit www.theduluthmodel.org/wheelgallery.php.)  With issues this unique, the lexicon that interpreters use must be unique as well.

 

When In Every Language first started interpreting at The Center for Women and Families, Kentucky’s largest dv and rape crisis shelter, The Center met language needs through both bilingual advocates and ad hoc interpreters from a local, refugee-resettlement agency. A few handouts had already been translated — some by the advocates, some by the KDVA or similar groups. Because of the myriad of subjects interpreted and the vulnerable nature of the LEP’s we would work with, consistency was key.

 

In building this consistency, we approached interpreting for The Center as though it were a translation project. Since certification for dv interpreting is still in development, we had a lot of freedom in how to determine the best quality control steps for our client. If The Center had been a translation client, our first step would have been to have created a translation memory (TM) out of their existing translations. So that’s what we did. We created a TM for interpreters.

 

Words like love and power, although they seem simple at first, take on entirely different constructs in domestic violence situations. Depending on the second language, there may even be more than one word. Love can come in many forms, and so can abusers. Human relationships are complex and abuse often comes from a partner or a family member, so the word an interpreter uses may change depending on a lot of different factors. Even the word abuse itself becomes problematic as in American English we assume the damage is physical or sexual when we hear the word “abuse” by itself. But abuse can also be emotional or verbal. So when interpreting into English, sometimes an adjective has to be added. Sometimes clarification with the victim must be sought.

 

So, after running The Center’s existing corpora through TM software, we checked it in-house. The employee who worked on the project was a state-court-qualified, practicing dv interpreter who speaks both English and Spanish natively. She pulled out any terms that had been mistranslated in the provided materials, but didn’t look for replacements at this point. After an initial read-through with the client, we decided the TM was good to get interpreters up and running, but that for long-term use, some tweaking should be done. The state certification project would also need a glossary that was a lot more extensive. We needed to add in additional terms that didn’t appear in the translated literature, like “police report” and “courtroom,” and come to an agreement on translations for the terms that had been deleted in round one. The Commonwealth of Kentucky courts have a legal glossary available for interpreters, but a victim’s education level and country of origin often change the translations used in a dv construct. Just as with any other client, in constructing The Center’s TM, we couldn’t fully rely on TM’s created for others. So round one left us with 82 terms — some polished, some not — and many more to add.

 

As with any good translation project, developing a TM for interpreting requires client collaboration. We assembled a team that took in our interpreting quality control staff, The Center’s bilingual advocates and management, and a state-court-certified freelance interpreter who interprets in dv settings almost daily. Whereas our initial TM reviewer had spoken Spanish from Spain, this new group also spoke Spanish from Colombia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Spanish-speaking  areas of the United States, such as Miami. One of the advocates involved was also a former dv interpreter officially-qualified by the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services.

 

For round two, the first thing we did was get interpreter-feedback on the TM. They were using it in the field, so they knew best what worked and what didn’t. In this way, they were their own in-country reviewers. They hadn’t developed the TM, so they were third-party and they were working with the actual victims, so they knew any dialectical or on-site changes that would need to be made. Interpreter criticism came in two forms: some terms were missing, which we knew, and some terms needed to be changed. Instead of simply making these changes, though, we had our interpreters make notes as to why the changes were needed and then reviewed those notes in-house. Anything that looked purely subjective was passed over, so as not to burden our client, and all the others were passed on.

 

Center management and advocates then studied the implications of the words. Remember, love is not always love. Some words, like “gun,” had to change because of how they’re specifically used in dv interpreting. For example, arma was the original word in the TM. The interpreter wanted to change it to pistola (pistol) or revólver (revolver) in order to be more precise. The Center, though, wanted to leave it as arma because when the word gun is used, advocates are generally referring to firearms. In fact, a section of Kentucky’s EPO prohibits respondents from purchasing or attempting to purchase a firearm, using that word specifically. This includes all kinds of weapons – rifles, shotguns, crossbows — but not necessarily handguns. Pistola and revólver only describe handguns. Like with the word “abuse,” we have a schema as to what the word “gun” entails. “Abuse” in American English is physical; a “gun” is a handgun. But in the world of domestic violence, these words take on different meanings.

 

Another example is “docket.” This was a term our interpreter had added, not changed. For “docket,” the Kentucky courts prefer legal interpreters use lista de comparecientes. When we sent the TM over to The Center, though, advocates preferred ordén del día (agenda), a much simpler alternative. In fact, when it comes to legal terminology overall, Center advocates prefer to de-legalese as much as they can. Reporting domestic violence and seeking help can be overwhelming even if you speak English. Add a language barrier between you and the services meant to help you, and the legal processes involved grow even more difficult. As Center advocate Robin Valenzuela puts it, “Legal jargon can be overwhelming and intimidating for our clients—especially if their education level is lower. I also accompany those terms with a lot of explanation as to what they mean. Remember, our purpose is different than that of a strictly legal interpreter. We want the client to understand more than we care about implementing legal jargon.”

 

These examples speak as to the differences between dv interpreting and interpreting in other settings. One example, though, really speaks to the heart of what domestic violence is and to the power of the words we used: “to be forced.” “To be,” in Spanish, can be one of two words – ser or estar – depending on the context. In high school Spanish, my teacher made it quick and dirty for us students by saying that ser is permanent, whereas estar is temporary. She also said estar describes you, whereas ser is something that you are. Ser is also used in passive voice constructions, whereas estar is more active. So is it ser forzada or estar forzada?  How deep does the violence go?  Does having been abused describe you or does it define you?  Did things just happen or is there somewhere the responsibility lies?

 

Our words have meaning and we must be careful with them. In the end, the back and forth stopped and our team came to an agreement on which ones to use. Our “in-country review” almost complete, a 131-term TM was distributed at a KDVA training for dv interpreters working state-wide. Interpreters from all sections of the state workshoped the glossary to make sure we hadn’t overlooked any terms or translations that might not be essential in Louisville but that were essential in other parts of Kentucky.  In the end, no changes were made, but the TM was transformed into a training piece intended to help dv interpreters consider the larger picture wrapped around small words. The TM may be completed and circulated, but we are still learning. Interpreting, as I mentioned before, is the quintessential quick. Words come in one part of you and out another and it takes training to make memory. There is no time to check against your resources; the TM must be part of you. Ser.

 

(This blog entry was originally published as an article in the June issue of MultiLingual Magazine.)

Filed Under: Center for Women and Families, client education, community interpreting, consecutive interpreting, courts, cultural competency, domestic violence, DV, ICR, immigrants, In Every Language, in-country review, interpreters, interpreting, KDVA, Kentucky, Ky, language access, language services, legal interpreting, Louisville, medical interpreting, project management, quality assurance, quality control, rape crisis, refugees, respect, role boundaries, simultaneous interpreting, social change, social service interpreting, Spanish, standards of practice, TM, translation memory, women

Suggestions for Successful Japanese In-Country Review

April 15, 2011 By 2 Comments
I don’t know much about Japanese culture. I feign to say I know nothing, as I once read Memoirs of a Geisha, but I don’t really think that counts. It’s a shame, because from everything I’ve heard, Japan is a great place — steeped in tradition, elegance, and art. What I do know about, though, is translation. I know how to make sure a document’s prepped for the best translation possible, I know how to select the right team of translators to do it, and I know how to manage quality control and assurance so that the translation reads as well as it does in the original. The processes involved are relatively foolproof and tend to be adaptable across languages. But when it comes to Japanese, though, something — anything — everything almost always goes wrong. And it’s not just me. Most of my colleagues will tell you that into Japanese translation is hands down the most difficult work we do. In the world of Japanese translation, no news is not good news. Feedback is often vague. And in-country review (ICR)? Well, let’s face it, in-country review of a Japanese translation is a royal pain in the oshiri.
All multi-language vendors (MLV) have faced it: A painstakingly prepared translation is delivered to your client, who then sends it off for ICR. Ideally, the reviewer speaks English, in order to compare the translation to the original, but sometimes he doesn’t. Weeks pass, even months, and then it comes — sometimes long after the bill has already been paid and the files moved off the hard drive. The in-country reviewer isn’t pleased. “The translation is bad,” he says, and oftentimes says no more than that.
It’s frustrating. You write for details — was it word choice, was it grammar, did you accidently translate into Korean? Nothing comes. Meanwhile, you sit in your office, panicked your company’s reputation will crash around you, all because some guy in Japan doesn’t know how to elaborate.
Of course, this is how you see it if you know nothing about Japan. But if you do know something about Japan, you see how the same culture that gives us geishas, calligraphy, and plum wine also contributes to poor in-country review. Or what we call poor ICR in our Anglo-Saxon construct, that is. When we start looking at ICR as a cultural process and not a linguistic one, feedback — or lack thereof — starts to make more sense.
The Japanese are, of course, Japanese. We can’t expect them to act like anything other than themselves. In our American culture, we are so delineated, so black and white. We are demanding, confrontational, young. Our culture is a child compared to theirs and we shouldn’t be surprised if sometimes the Japanese don’t feel like they shouldn’t simply pat us on the head and sigh. It makes sense that we would want everything immediately detailed out and that they would be a bit more patient and reserved. If we consider culture to be an integral part of translation, then we must consider it to be integral to proper in-country review as well.

Enter Maureen McCarthy, an employee whom I’ve asked to co-write this article. Maureen also happens to be In Every Language’s Japanese expert. Call her the Encyclopedia Britannica to my Memoirs of a Geisha. Everything I don’t know about Japan, she does, which is reason #412 why we like to have her around the office.
Maureen, am I crazy? Could the delay in ICR response time have anything to do with the Japanese not wanting to rush things, with their being less confrontational than Americans are?
In my experience, the delay time has more to do with the hierarchy that exists in a Japanese workplace, and the need for important decisions and documents to go through a lot of people. For example, when I lived in Akita, a friend of mine was planning to go on a business trip to Tokyo with some other colleagues. The trip was an annual affair with many people involved, and for months my friend had been eagerly awaiting this retreat. She had cleared her involvement with her immediate boss and with the head of the office. However, the trip was to take place in May. In Japan, there are often big employee shifts in the workplace every April, as this is when the academic and fiscal years begin in Japan. In this instance, the trip coordinator moved to a different branch and a new coordinator came on board. This meant that many aspects of the trip changed, including my friend’s involvement. The new coordinator thought she was not a necessary member of the group, but instead that she should remain at the office as she had many responsibilities there. Unfortunately, she was not informed of this decision until two weeks before the trip. This is not through any fault of the new coordinator, nor hers or her boss’s. It is simply that major decisions often need to go through a lot of channels in the Japanese workplace. In this case, the decision was especially difficult because key players in the decision making process changed, and the situation had to be reevaluated from the beginning.

More specifically, with ICR response times, there could be a number of factors at play, such as the people involved with the decision-making,  the steps it goes through on the Japanese end, and even the time of year — March, April, and May were always very hectic at my previous workplace. It is even possible that the original reviewer thought the translation was fine, so he did not see it as a priority for his superiors to view. But when his bosses did eventually see the translation, they may have had a very different idea concerning its suitability and told the initial reviewer to write back saying they were not pleased. By now of course, weeks –or maybe even months — have passed before you receive the email saying the translation was not up to the standard they expected.

So could that contribute to the fact that the reviews are often “incomplete” by American standards? In-country reviews are just a waste of time if they’re not helpful. Instead of a simple pass/fail — as though translation were 9th grade gym class — the reviewer should score the translation on, say, a scale of 1 to 5, rating clearly specified factors such as grammar, spelling, and non-subjective word choice (think translating neko as dog instead of cat). These factors should be agreed upon between the client and the reviewer ahead of time, and, if subjective factors start to come into play, these factors should be presented to the language service provider (LSP) so the LSP can better understand the client’s needs.
ICR itself has one of two goals. Some companies use ICR to help select a translation vendor. Multiple LSP’s translate a sample, then an in-country reviewer decides whose translation is the best. In these instances, it’s essential that the reviewer speak the original language so he can tell if any “errors” he finds are issues with the translation or problems that were also in the original.
The other common goal that ICR sets out to accomplish is to make sure that the translation is ready for its target market. In this way, reviewers are the governor on the go-cart, the childproof cap on a prescription, the airline agent who scans your ticket before boarding. In other words, the buck stops with them. That’s why you shouldn’t pick just anyone to perform your ICR. If this person is your final layover on the way to happy translation land, make sure he knows what he’s doing. In both instances, it’s essential that the reviewer be familiar with the content matter and, of course, the target language, country, and culture.
That’s why it’s so disparaging, as an LSP owner, when we receive back the occasional, negative ICR. All negative ICR’s are brought immediately to my attention to make sure the issues found are addressed. But if no specifics are provided, well, to quote George Costanza from “Seinfeld,” “I’ve got nothing.”
I appreciate what you say, Maureen, about how it may be the reviewer’s boss and not the actual reviewer coming back with ICR comments, and I think that’s part of why Japanese ICR’s can be so non-descript — because the person reporting on the review might not actually be the person with final say. But are there any other cultural factors that keep the details on the kibosh? Why are Japanese ICR’s so ambiguous? And, more importantly, is there anything LSP’s can do to help a reviewer provide the detail we need?
The Japanese are often described as extremely polite and formal. While this is true to a degree, there is also a strong inclination among many to be non-confrontational. If a conflict can be avoided, it usually will be. This is, of course, wonderful in many ways, as it means less fighting and troubles over small things, but it also has a downside in that we in the West often expect to talk through any problems. We Americans usually count on others, especially in a working environment, to tell us if they are displeased so we can work through it.

When I first began learning Japanese, all of my Japanese friends and colleagues were very supportive and encouraging. They would always compliment me on my language ability, and never corrected me or told me when my Japanese was incorrect. For me this was wonderful, and everyone’s kindness and encouragement really motivated me to do better. On the downside, when I began to study Japanese formally, I discovered I had been making mistakes all along. No one wanted to be the bearer of bad news or make me feel bad by correcting me.

When an ICR is undetailed, this most likely means that no one wants to be the bearer of bad news. When a reviewer feels that a translation is unacceptable, they probably do not want to dwell on the details as that may be uncomfortable and potentially embarrassing to one or both parties. This could explain the very brief answers and the lack of a proper, detailed review.

I am not sure if there is an easy solution to this problem, as so much of it stems from differences in our cultures, but I think, Terena, your suggestion of rankings on a scale, or a list of questions, would be a good approach to take. If the reviewer had a survey or form to complete, asking specific questions and having a list of choices, they may be more likely to respond and to give LSPs the details they desire.

Wonderful. It makes perfect sense that the reviewer wouldn’t want to be overly harsh or hurt anyone’s feelings with his review. I think we all agree that there’s a difference between constructive criticism and just being mean. But in translation, a mistake isn’t always a mistake. At home, I may sit on a sofa in my living room while you sit on a couch in your den. Language is often subjective. I hate to think that every time an ICR doesn’t go well, it means that the translation was poor. Sometimes it simply means the translation wasn’t perfect, with the meaning of perfection taking in a lot of subjective elements. Reading your response, though, Maureen, I think that no news, or detail, at least in this case, is bad news — that a lack of detail in the ICR means that the errors were all non-subjective, something made by an early language learner, like you said. Is that correct, or am I simply misunderstanding? Is it always a matter of bad or good, or could lack of detail in ICR mean there were subjective differences instead?
It doesn’t necessary mean that the errors are the translator’s fault, although that is a possibility. It is likely instead that the language the translator used could simply be different than what the reviewer wanted or expected.

There are many different levels of formality in Japanese. The way you speak to your boss is not the same as the way you speak to a colleague, which again is different than the way you would speak to your family members. If a document is being translated for a company, it is important to clarify what level of formality is to be used. For example, if the document is something that’s given to customers, most likely the customer will be addressed in very formal Japanese. If, however, the document is of a more familiar nature, it need not be as formal.

It is also important to remember that Japanese is often not as direct as English or other Western languages. Take, for instance, leaving work for the day. In English we may say something along the lines of “See you tomorrow!” In polite Japanese, however, one would say “osaki ni shitsure shimasu” (excuse me for the rudeness of going before you). If you’re not leaving work, though, and instead leaving a gathering of friends, it would change. While the English is still “see you tomorrow,” the Japanese would change to “mata ne” (see you later), “ja ne”(see ya), or maybe even “mata ashita”(see you again tomorrow).

Although situational differences are important when translating between all languages, Japanese has an abundance of them. Not only is Japanese often more florid than other languages, it also has a daunting amount of set phrases that are used in specific situations, such as the aforementioned leaving work. For ICR this may not mean that the translation is incorrect, but that there may have been a different phrase that the client wanted to be used. It could also be that the translator put the document perfectly into Japanese, but that the original document was very brusque and to the point, whereas in Japanese it would normally be written in much more elegant terms. This would not really be a translator error, but merely a lack of communication in terms of what the client really wants, as well as evidence of the great difficulty of translating between two such different languages. Perhaps, then, the only true solution would be more in-depth collaboration with the client, such as asking them a series of questions before beginning the project or touching base with them periodically throughout the process.

Another solution I can think of is to make sure your client wants translation instead of localization. Now, I’ve heard the argument that a really good translation is localization, but when clients entrust us with their documents, we as translators must take care not to overstep our bounds. It’s very easy to say that if a document is to the point in English that we need to soften it up in Japanese. But when a client asks for translation, as opposed to localization, we also have more of an obligation to be true to the original. There may be a reason why the text is more direct. Perhaps the author wants to unquestionably drive home his point, or maybe he’s upset and wants that emotion conveyed through the text. In those cases, completely rewriting the text to softening the tone and formalize the language would be inappropriate.
This is why it’s so important to get as much information as you can from your client before you begin. If the tone of an original document could be construed as rude in Japanese — or even simply neutral — we should point this out and find out how much of it is — and isn’t — intentional. At this stage, we’re doing more than simply translating; we’re making the document local. The difference between translation and localization becomes a hazy gray zone — a spectrum — and it takes cooperation between the translation team and the client to find out where along that spectrum the translation should hit. ICR should definitely be involved in that process; if the reviewer doesn’t know what the translator is striving for, then he won’t know how to judge the outcome.
Good translation cannot be created in a vacuum. In this regard, Japanese really isn’t all that different. In fact, because the Japanese culture focuses more on the team than the individual, a collaborative approach to translation should be easier for Japanese than for other languages. The processes applied to those other languages still work here: Get as much information as you can up front. Understand not just the words, but the intent, meaning, and goal of a document. Take culture into consideration.
I may not know Japan, but I do know translation and, as it turns out, all Japanese translation takes is the same attention you’d hopefully give to all your other languages, plus a little extra care.

(This article was co-written by our project manager for Asian languages, Maureen McCarthy, and originally ran in the January 2011 issue of MultiLingual Magazine.)

Filed Under: articles, client education, ICR, in-country review, Japanese, Maureen McCarthy, multilingual, quality assurance, quality control, translation