ATTW Bulletin

What should I do? As an instructor of technical communication at a public university, I am faced with a challenge: I know that I have a professional obligation to introduce my students to international technical communication in general and to localization/translation specifically. On the other hand, many of my students have minimal language study experience, minimal concern with the rest of the world, and have not traveled much outside of the U. S.

We are nevertheless charged with preparing our students for jobs in the international technical communication workforce. What Susan Hackett writes about the software industry applies to other technical communication workplaces as well, “ As more and more companies expand to global markets, software professionals need to know how to work with translators and how to write for audiences that are non-native speakers of English.” (See http://www.epictrends.com/resources/localization/Think%20globally.shtml )

What can we teach our students that helps prepare them for the international technical communication workplace? One excellent suggestion, as Maylath has written about, is to teach our technical communication students how to prepare documents for translation (Maylath and Thrush, 1997). Certainly this is one excellent suggestion. Moreover, preparing students to understand the rhetorical underpinnings of localization is equally important.

Clearly poor localization can lead to serious mistakes in cross-cultural communication. For example, in an audio news clip from Iraq I heard US troops playing a taped set of instructions to Iraqi civilians. The voice was that of an Egyptian woman speaking in her Egyptian dialect. Typically classical Arabic spoken by a male voice is the preferred form of Arabic in such situations. Since Cairo is the “Hollywood” of the Arab world, most Arab television viewers associate the Egyptian dialect with sitcoms and movies. The US forces in that instance had based critical communication with the Iraqi civilians on a faulty localization strategy.

What tools are available to us? Weiss (in Lovitt and Goswami, 1999) writes that we instructors should harness the resource of international students on our campuses. Indeed, I am on a campus of 14,000 students with more than 500 international students from 71 countries. I have worked with students from Nepal, Somalia, Pakistan, Malaysia, China, Palestine, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. I have invited international students in my courses to help my students to understand localization issues. In addition we have US students studying languages. We offer undergraduate minors in French, German, and Spanish. In addition, courses in Swedish and Norwegian are available.

I have taken some students on a field trip to a translation/localization firm to hear their professionals describe the process they follow to localize technical documents. But this is not practical every semester.

What does the Internet offer us? Laura K. Lawless, a professional French instructor and translator, describes web-based online translators as teaching tools for meeting student needs more effectively in her project description “Online Translation—French Class Project” (See http://french.about.com/od/teachingresources/a/autotranslation.htm .)

To get feedback on the use of web-based translating software from a language teacher, I turned to a colleague and asked him to do the following:

Choose a sentence in English. Use each of the five translators above to first translate it into French.

Note : The following is the English sentence that my colleague used to test each of the web-based translators:

“If a business doubles its production without increasing its production costs proportionally, there is economy of scale because the per-unit production cost has decreased.”

Correct translation:

« Si une entreprise double sa production sans augmenter proportionnellement ses coûts de production, il y a économie d'échelle parce que le coût de production unitaire a diminué. »

Then back-translate the text into English using the same five translators.
Make a table in which you enter the original text, the translation, and the back-translated text.
Make brief comments on each translator and rank them according to accuracy.

My colleague had this reaction: “All the machine-generated translations contain errors in syntax, vocabulary, and article usage. The most serious vocabulary error is the use of “affaires” (the correct translation of “business” as an abstract concept) rather than “une enterprise” (a business or a company). In addition, all the translators misplaced the adverb “proportionnellement” and failed to render the adjective “per-unit” correctly. Similarly, all the translators failed to omit the article (as required idiomatically) in their rendering of “there is economy of scale”). The paralink.com site had the best syntax and grammar and would have been ranked best overall had it used “coût de production” instead of “prix de production”—a surprising, very basic vocabulary error.”

He went on to explain, “On the other hand, accuracy of verb choice (doubler, augments, diminuer) was very good in all the translations, as was translation of the technical term ‘economy of scale.'”

He also uses web-based translators in his classes: “Use of on-line translators is a topic we discuss in my Business French class. We do a translation-retranslation exercise similar to this one using a 500-word newspaper article. My caveat to the students is always this: on-line translators are most useful for referencing vocabulary but always produce syntax and grammar errors of varying severity. Therefore they should never be used as the sole source of translation. Ironically, machine translators are most useful to those who already have an advanced knowledge of the foreign language and the ability to detect (and correct) errors in syntax and grammar.”

While we know that web-based translators are of questionable accuracy, they may nevertheless be useful as teaching tools for technical communication students. When used in conjunction with human translators in technical communication assignments, web-based translators can help undergraduate students with little exposure to translation/localization of technical documents to understand some of the issues in international technical communication. I also have learned that “learning by doing” is often an effective pedagogical style. The following is an exercise that I have been assigning to my students for at least five years.

Bilingual instruction assignment

To the student: You will use online translators for this exercise. You will also work face-to-face with a human translator.

Use these web-based translators:

http://world.altavista.com/

http://translation2.paralink.com/

http://www.worldlingo.com/products_services/worldlingo_translator.html

http://www.freetranslation.com/

http://www.systransoft.com/

Take the “Numbered Steps” text from your Instruction Sheet assignment ( Note : This is an assignment students have previously completed) and translate it into a language you have studied. Choose a language for which you can find a colleague who can help you complete the assignment. Try to work with a native speaker of that language. Use each of the five web-based translators.
Back-translate the text into English. Make a table in which you enter the original text, the translation, and the back-translated text.
Then write a 200-word response to this exercise in which you discuss your procedure, your comparison of each of the translators (rank them from best to worst), and the evaluation by a person who reads that language. Research the type of technology that the web-based translator uses to translate and include that in your report. Include the name and email address of the international partner that you worked with.

Based on my years of experience with students completing my bilingual instruction assignment, their feedback and my own observations, and the observations of other professionals such as my colleague who teaches French, I conclude that these outcomes are possible: (1) despite their inaccuracy, online translators are useful in the technical communication classroom, (2) students learn that web-based translators are useful only if used in appropriate settings, and (3) web-based translators help expose students to issues in the international technical communication workplace.

A note of thanks to Dr. Bowles of Iowa State University's Department of Foreign Language and Literature for his insights into web-based translators.

Suggested Readings

Bond, Francis, Toward a Science of Machine Translation, <http://utrecht.elsnet.org/roadmap/docs/tmi2002-bond.pdf>

Gikandi, David, Online Translation Services and How to Choose the Right One, <http://www.4hb.com/communicate/0260onlinetranschoose.html>

Hoft, Nancy, International Technical Communication: How to export information about high technology, 1995. See chapter 8 on Translation.

Hutchins, John, Machine translation (computer-based translation), <http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/WJHutchins/>

Lu, Xiaofe, Machine Translation, Linguistics 384 <http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~xflu/384/slides/mt-slides-4up.pdf>

Maylath, Bruce and Emily A. Thrush, Café, thé, Ou Lait?: How Shall We Train Technical Communicators to Translate? , STC Proceedings, 1997
http://www.stc.org/confproceed/1997/PDFs/0018.PDF

Maylath, Bruce, Writing Globally: Teaching the Technical Writing Student to Prepare Documents for Translation, Journal of Business and Technical Communication 11 (1997): 339-352.

Ray, Deborah S. and Eric J. Ray, Good, Fast, Cheap: Translation Memory Systems Offer the Potential for All Three. Originally published in May 1999 (V. 46, No. 2). http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/magazine/technical/translationmemory.html

Weiss, Timothy, The Implication of Translation for Professional Communication, in Lovitt and Goswami, Exploring the Rhetoric of International Professional Communication: An Agenda for Teachers and Researchers, 1999