International Organizations

Geneva, the “Capital of Peace”, has traditionally been a space for diplomacy and international relations. The city hosts one of the largest hubs of the UN system and its busiest center for meetings and conferences. Every day, decisions are made which have an impact on the lives of people across the world. Around 8,000 meetings took place at the Palais des Nations in 2022, topics ranging from disarmament to human rights, health, or international trade. Historically, “International Geneva” has grown not only through the presence of the League of Nations which is widely considered to be the predecessor of the United Nations, but also thanks to the Red Cross and other non-governmental organizations, devised by local philanthropes, and to organizations such as the International Telecommunication Union Opens in new window(founded in Berne in 1865 and moved to Geneva in 1948). ITU was one of the first entities established to facilitate cross-border technical cooperation, and it is now a specialized agency under the umbrella of the UN. Today, Geneva houses around 40 international organizations, 180 permanent missions and more than 400 NGOs. Large parts of the UN family call Geneva their home. In addition to the UN entities headquartered here, most UN funds, programmes and agencies maintain a regional office or liaison office in Switzerland. Together, they bring "UN Geneva" to life. A range of UN entities are headquartered in Geneva, making the city a center point for different topics such as health, human rights, refugees and migration, disarmament and more.

Simultaneous, Consecutive and Whispered Interpreting

Interpreters translate spoken speeches for multilingual audiences, in a culturally sensitive manner to facilitate communication. They work in legal, education, health care, media and multinational companies. The interpretation can be simultaneous or consecutive, through speaking or signing. When it is performed simultaneously it takes place at the same time the speaker is talking. These kinds of interpreters usually work with some other people in order to segment the interpreting process. In the consecutive interpretation, the interpreter waits for the speaker to finish his speech so that he can translate what the speaker has said. The speaker makes pauses during the conversation. In whispered interpretation or its French name chuchotage, the interpreter silently whispers the translation into the client’s ear while the speaker talks. In contrast, translators work with the written word and usually have the luxury of time to consult dictionaries and review their work before it is finalised. Interpreters prioritize understanding and communication over perfection as it's challenging to achieve in a live setting.

The Art of Listening

Interpreters relay informations and messages clearly, preferably at the same level of fluency without breaking the flow of conversation. They must make sense of a message composed in one language while simultaneously constructing and articulating the same message in another tongue. They must take into consideration the speaker’s tone, facial expressions and body language to ensure they reflect the true meaning of the message. Furthermore, they cope with stress when dealing with difficult speakers and need to remain relaxed, even in seemingly tough situations. If an interpreter has a break, parts of sentences will be missed and the overall meaning of the discourse will be chopped off. Listening skills and a powerful short-term memory are particularly important. Interpreters working at the UN are expected to recognize, understand and – in a split second - have a word in another language for any one of a myriad of issues. They work in groups that alternate every 20-30 minutes. The range of interpretation subjects is broad, including politics, legal affairs, economic and social issues, human rights, finance and administration.

The Quest for Truth

Scientific research and translation are defined by the quest for truth. Scientific translation must convey the exact meaning of the original text, with concision and clarity. It is essential to the advancement of science. While literary translation turns to the authors’ aesthetic intention, scientific translation centers on the accuracy of scientific terms. The translator must read the latest books and academic journals to keep up with the constant development of knowledge and discoveries. In many countries English is generally the lingua franca of science. However, it should not be assumed that everyone who can benefit from scientific findings speaks English, or that all relevant findings are even being published in English. Many scientific papers go unnoticed because of the linguistic barriers, resulting in the potential distortion of research in some fields. An alarming example of this happened in 2004, when there was a delay of more than 6 months in the World Health Organisation’s and The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation’s awareness of pigs infected with avian influenza, due to papers reporting the discovery being published in Chinese. This was a public health concern as pigs may have the potential to make the fatal disease more infectious to humans. The translation of scientific texts is important to expand global scientific knowledge. Let me quote Marie Curie: “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

Challenges in Translating Scientific Texts

Translation at the same time enables and hinders the exchange of knowledge. Scientific language can be difficult to convey across languages. Certain concepts may not exist in your target audience’s culture so ideas need to be adapted carefully. Texts and images often include numbers, formulas, graphs, diagrams and symbols, and must be localized. Scientific language is characterized by a specific lexical system and the constant emergence of neologisms. Technical words such as hypothesis, experiment, analysis, and description are shared by a variety of disciplines. Moreover, a curious interplay between scientific writings couched in localized forms of English can happen. Slight differences in the lexicon, and larger differences in standard style and form, provide a geological article written in French in France, evocative literary qualities absent in sobersided British English. We can imagine the working translator at his or her task, a task as subtly exacting as translating poetry.

The World’s Global Language

Every team has a brand. Every athlete has a brand. Throughout history, sport has brought people together and served as a bridge across many different vibrant communities. There are not many things that have that level of impact. Culturally, societally and globally. The World Cup exists beyond the field in the same way the NBA exists beyond the court or F1 beyond the circuit. Brands convey messages that tap into fans' favorite memories with the goal of evoking a nostalgic feeling and looking ahead to creating new ones. They aim for fans to feel like their sport is the most vibrant community in the world, giving a historical perspective without feeling old and dusty. Sports translators must develop valuable marketing strategies to bring fans closer to the brands through unique content that drives engagement and excitement. They must be experienced and passionate athletes to understand what customers want to hear, and should keep up with sporting culture and language. Understanding the target audience and the linguistic nuances that come with it is important.

Build Your International Presence

There are more and more global sports and outdoor brands every year. The process of internationalizing your brand can only be done with proper localization and a real cultural adaptation. Sports translators should be aware that a brand’s success with sports marketing requires both careful strategy and many seasons of training. We deal with some of the most formidable, biggest-spending marketers in the world and we have to be good to stand out, because it's competitive. Each sports discipline has a specific terminology, often from the country it originated in and everything must be implemented to avoid any cultural faux-pas that could cause bad press for your brand. Building authentic connections with consumers doesn’t happen by chance and high-quality translations are key to helping your brand connect with new fans every year. Request a quotation or speak with me to discuss your requirements. I would love to help your brand florish by leading, not following, contemporary culture. I am here to break conventional rules, with enthusiasm and expertise.

The Golden Rules

We translators must follow style guides, so that you can watch your favorite shows with subtitles translated in the language of your choice. Style guides are materials that tend to change the least often. That being said, because a style guide contains key guidelines that influence every part of the translation, it will not just talk about how to handle things that exist in the English language. It's going to contain sections that deal with recommended style for handling grammatical categories and sentence structures that do not have any equivalent in the source language. One example would be how to handle verb tenses and verb forms. It will also help the translator in adapting the tone and style to the target market. For example, French audience will have a different perception of how much informal is too informal then, for example, people in Italy. The English language is more polite, French is more direct. A tweak in tone to achieve a similar communicative effect is often a good idea, even when adapting just within one language such as between American English and English for UK. Being too literal can destroy the meaning, being too adaptive can also destroy the meaning. It is a fine line between the two. What I've written just scratches the surface. What other points can you add to this list that I may have not mentioned?

A Few Reminders

An anagram is a word or phrase made by using the letters of another word or phrase in a different order, such as « migraine » and « imaginer ». In the movie Silence of the lambs, Faust Federel is an anagram for « sulfate de fer ». Throughout his career as a burglar, Maurice Leblanc's gentleman Arsène Lupin used anagrams: Paule Sinner, Prince Paul Sernine, and Don Luis Perenna. A holorime is a form of rhyme where two very similar sequences of sounds can form phrases composed of different words and with different meanings, as in the verses: « Et ma blême araignée, ogre illogique et las | Aimable, aime à régner, au gris logis qu’elle a », by Victor Hugo. A pun is a humorous use of a word or phrase that sounds like another. The word « calembour » in French, was invented by Denis Diderot. « De deux choses lune, l’autre c’est le soleil » wrote Jacques Prévert. Interesting facts, the masculine noun « scarabée » end with « ée » and the word « les ténèbres » only exist in plural form.

The Alchemy of Words

The job of localization is to give a product or content the look and feel of having been created specifically for a target population, whatever their language, culture, or location. Translation is a piece of the overall localization workflow. For localized products, we translators work on very different types of content and different file types, such as image files, audio files, video files, software resource files, XML files, and HTML files. And we work for different clients with very different expectations. Audio obviously has to be recorded in each target language if it is supposed to be localized. The challenge here is how to translate the script for the audio. Text that is going to be read out loud needs to have a high degree of fluidity. Tongue-twisters have no place in a script for video voiceover. Super long sentences aren't a good fit for a localized podcast. Often, there is also the challenge of timing, since a lot of audio is actually used with video. The voiceover has to match the shown content. In the movie, a voice talent for the target language cannot speak longer than the person shown. Similar timing considerations apply for subtitles. In this case, it is the amount of time needed for reading the shown text that constrains how long it can be. French needs more words than the English language to convey the same meaning.

A Bit of History

Language is one of the most essential parts of our heritage and culture. Considering mankind's ability to develop cars that can drive without human interaction and computers that win chess games against the best human players, one would think we'd be able to solve the problem of a universal communication for ourselves. Translation with the help of machines seems to be the most obvious and desirable way to achieve this. So we began asking computers to help us communicate. But even now, with computers that can perform an exaFLOP – which is a billion operations per second – we haven't reached the goal of a universal communication solution. When talking about machine translation, the earliest example that is always mentioned is the attempt to translate Russian into English during the Cold War. In 1954, IBM and Georgetown University succeeded in machine translating more than 60 sentences with only 6 grammar rules and 250 lexical items in the computer's vocabulary. After some time, the first rules-based machine translation engine, or RbMT engine, was developed in the early 1970s.

Translation Is an Art

Can AI replace professional human interpreters and translators? No. At least, not yet. Professional translators play a crucial role in ensuring accurate and precise communication. It has a long way to go before it is capable of producing genuine human translations. AI can produce basic errors and generate misinformation, it does not have the knowledge to make all the required adaptations and some activities need a ton of human judgment. Isn’t AI purely mechanical and lifeless? The translation industry has seen significant advancements in technology in recent years and AI can perform more complex tasks than machine learning. There is no doubt that AI can help increase efficiency in certain fields or in providing real-time translations. However, it should not replace the expertise of professional human translators such as in the medical field. This neural network is a bundle of algorithms after all. Even if it uses a continuously increasing amount of data on the internet, and even if it can learn by itself (sounds scary), AI will always remain in the field of this knowledge. It can not step into the unknown and come with something new, have insights and true reflection. Human beings have much more than the ability to think.

Translating the Future

Nobel laureate Economist Paul Krugman said in a New York Times op-ed that "ChatGPT and whatever follows are probably an economic story for the 2030s, not for the next few years." AI is here to stay. The future of the translation industry will depend on the continued development of this fantastic technology, fed with data at increasing warp speed. It will create needs for services to review its output and should serve as a tool for translators. Being able to process large amounts of text quickly, it will reduce the need for human labor and it should result in significant cost savings for companies who rely on the language industry. The main concern with the use of AI is in relation to your privacy. AI is an open-source chatbot, and this poses a considerable security risk to anyone who uses it. Hackers could carry out cyberattacks and gain access to confidential business and client information. Not only does this put your own data at risk, but there could also be a customer privacy breach. Both parties are protected by privacy rules and translators are prohibited from selling or sharing your data, ensuring your translations are confidential and secure.

The Gaming Experience

The first known game has its origins in 3500 BC in ancient Egypt. Games have compelled us to take action, compete, and cooperate with one another in order to survive. So it's not surprising that our enthusiasm for gaming has crossed over into the virtual world. In the 1950s, Computer Science was becoming an academic discipline at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Originally intended for serious computations and other research, it later evolved into a medium for video games. Since the beginning, they have been localized. Localization is the process of preparing a video game or creating a product suited to a specific locale, and it goes a step further than just translation. By localizing your game, you create a welcoming environment for gamers from all corners around the world. It includes producing localized assets, implementing them in an internationalized build, testing, editing and bug fixing. Today, the gaming industry is the most popular industry in tech due to its influences on culture, entertainment and technological advancement.

Historical and Cultural Friction

In Age of Empires (1997), a scenario was created in which the Yamato armies of Japan invaded the Korean peninsula and effectively overwhelmed the Chosen regime of Korea. Historians tell us that this is what occurred and so the game designers diligently replicated reality. However, the government of South Korea saw history differently and disputed the scenario’s accuracy and would not allow the game to be sold. A downloadable patch was developed that slightly changed the scenario so that the Yamato invasion wasn’t quite as overwhelming, i.e., the Chosen armies were given a fighting chance in the game’s world. When Resistance: Fall of Man (2006) was released in the U.K., the Church of England was shocked to learn that their Manchester Cathedral was recreated in great detail in the game’s world. But not only was it recreated but the violent action of the game played out within the church itself, something considered very disturbing by the Church of England. Sony eventually issued an apology and the Church of England subsequently issued new “Sacred Digital Guidelines” to help video game developers and others with respecting their religious structures. Ghost Recon 2 (2004): In South Korea, the Korea Media Rating Board (now the Game Rating Board or GRB) banned this title because the game featured a belligerent North Korean general. The South Korean government is firmly against the depiction of their northern neighbor as an aggressor because of the ongoing tensions between the two countries, as well as South Korea’s longterm interest in reunification with the North. The KMRB also denied sales of the game Mercenaries in 2005 for the same reasons. In 2007, the GRB changed their minds due to local gamer pressure over freedom of speech rights and now allows titles like Ghost Recon 2.

Something to Chew on

Eugène Poubelle was born to a bourgeois family in Caen. He studied to become a lawyer and obtained a PhD. He became Préfet of the Seine département and on March 7th, 1884 Poubelle decreed that owners of buildings must provide their residents with three covered containers of 40 to 120 litres to hold household refuse. The refuse was to be sorted into compostable items, paper and cloth, and crockery and shells. The population of Paris, close to two million, needed a system to empty the containers regularly. Parisians began to name their boxes after Poubelle, a habit encouraged by the newspaper Le Figaro, which called them Boîtes Poubelle. Poubelle's surname remains the most common French word for a bin.

Can You Solve this Mystery?

Un soir d’été, un roi fût décapité. Trois moines eurent la tête tranchée. Le lendemain, on ne retrouva qu’un seul corps. Pourquoi ?