Let’s look at a different kind of language – not Indo-European or of lesser diffusion, but the one without which this blog would be dead as a doornail. You guessed it: PHP – Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is a general-purpose scripting language for dynamic web pages and, according to Wikipedia, installed on more than 20 million websites and 1 million web servers.

The pages of this blog do not exist on the server the way you see them in your browser. Instead, they consist of a bunch of PHP scripts that are activated by the page request of the browser. The scripts, working server-side, combine content from other files or databases with HTML and CSS information and output a web page that is displayed in your browser window.

For example, the code to insert the Tweet button below this post looks like this:

<?php if (function_exists('tweetmeme')) { echo tweetmeme(); }?>

Scripting languages are tightly regulated by rules that govern operators, variables, syntax, and much more. In addition, they have to be logical. Steps that break logic can lead to loops that never resolve. With version 5.3, PHP seems to be changing course and is introducing a GOTO operator, which we all know so well from procedural languages.

GOTO in object-oriented PHP 5? What could go wrong?

Click image to embiggen. [From xkcd.com/292/]

Last week was my time to explore life outside translation. I get easily stuck in front of my computer, and before I even know it, a month has passed. When moving to California last year, one of the resolutions was to take regular breaks. Last week, we drove up north to Sonoma County.

more…

… in English translation (side by side) are available at this site of the Japanese Ministry of Justice. The site offers a Law Search, a Dictionary Search, and a Keyword in Context Search. I have heard no comments yet on the usefulness of the site, but I am intrigued by the button that lets you reverse the black on white writing to white on black – but only for the portal, not for the displayed documents. Whatever for?

Now here’s a story (which I found through a tweet by Elizabeth Marsi @EDMtranslations) translators can use to convince potential clients: According to Reuters, Finnair is showing strong growth in on-line ticket sales thanks to localizing their sales sites in 11 languages.

In April our web sales in Japan were the best after Finland … (with) sharp growth of 256 percent.

If that doesn’t convince the undecided client I don’t know what does.

I noticed that my home town in Germany is hosting an international conference on The Cultures of James Bond. “James Bond has become a popular icon and has developed nothing short of his own cultural mythology”, reads the introduction. It is fitting that it was the Apollo movie theatre in Saarbrücken’s Eisenbahnstraße where I saw my first James Bond movie, Dr. No, in 1963.

I also noticed that the Universität des Saarlandes, in their English-language website for the event, have elected the term Imprint to name their required legal compliance statement. This choice, which always sets my teeth on edge, is showing up more and more – but in translated websites only, it seems. I have yet to see a native English website that uses “Imprint.” There have been discussions about this, although not recently, and I remember in particular a thread in Transblawg.

Do I ever have questions when I translate a text? Of course I do, lots of times. As a translator, I have to be (or make myself) knowledgeable about the subject matter I’m working on. Linguistic questions come up. Sometimes the source text is not as clear as it should be and it requires high powers of deduction to understand the meaning. But translators have help: monolingual dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, books and magazine articles in the source and/or target language on the product or process in question. Internet searches for terminology in context – and much more. If all that fails, I can call a colleague, and if none of my colleagues is able to help, I can post a question in a forum or mailing list.

The ATA Chronicle, newsletter of the American Translators Association, has a column called The Translation Inquirer. I usually look at the English/German inquiries and I am often left speechless by what people (translators?) are asking about. Do they not have dictionaries? Have they no Internet connection? As an example, in a recent edition, the following inquiry appeared:

(G-E 5-09.5) In a manual about engine control, the mystery word Dongle appeared. Here is the context: Dialogsoftware (Diskette, Dialogkabel mit Dongle, Handbuch). What is it?

Is this inquirer kidding? Let’s just assume for a moment that this “translator” is so young that s/he has never seen a dongle in the wild, a simple check of the German Wikikpedia entry for Dongle would have given plenty of explanation plus photos of the thing. Clicking on English in the left box Andere Sprachen would have brought up the Dongle entry in the English Wikipedia, and the original question would have been answered. A search for dongle in google.de with the Seiten auf Deutsch option brings up a multitude of sources that show explanations and context, helping to confirm the Wikipedia information.

Mystery word? For me, the only mystery is how this ended up as an inquiry.

Translators, myself included, seem to give a lot of weight to technology. The tools we use often become more important than the result of our work. I told the owner of an agency, for which I did an editing job recently, that many of the German sentences simply did not makes sense, even though (or because) they closely followed the English source. She shrugged it off by saying that a translator couldn’t be expected to do better than the original.

I happen to disagree and believe that is a cop-out to produce non-sentences in the target language simply because the source consists of non-sentences – and was pleased to see Nick Rosenthal’s (@nickrosenthal) tweet about a style workshop for translators. From the workshop description:

The ability to produce polished prose, no matter how uneven the original text, is one factor distinguishing top-end translators able to command high fees from bulk providers and bottom feeders.

Style does matter, even or especially with technical material. We should have more style and editing workshops.

Among the many useless utilities, this on-line helper called “Flip” is a good candidate for top prize.

Enjoy.

Note: The font flip does not work equally well with all fonts since it depends on the availability of characters and the font style. The upside-down “u,” as it appears twice in “ʎʇılıʇn ssǝlǝsn,” is represented by the letter “n.” My headline style capitalizes letters, and “N” doesn’t look like an upside-down “u” anymore. Effect lost!

Only today did I get around to Gabriele Zöttl’s post on common difficulties in localization jobs, which appeared in her blog Über-Setzer-Logbuch this past March. In it, she refers to an interesting and detailed article by English-to-Czech translator Miloš Průdek.

Průdek’s article, entitled Localization, shows how collaboration between software developers, UI designers and translators is essential for successful localization, and how (and why) you should go about organizing such a team. It explains some common mistakes software developers tend to do unintentionally and is a good primer for anyone planning a localization project or having discussions with clients about the prerequisites for an upcoming localization project.

Can anybody tell me what it is about the German mind slash structural approach to web design slash esthetic sensibilty that leads to most of their websites being based on framesets? I thought frames went out the door when CSS became mainstream. What am I missing?