Translation Excellence Inc.

What’s the most popular language for a Tweet? Still English, as it turns out.

According to a recent study released by French media research company Semiocast, English-language Tweets make up 34 percent of Twitter content on an average day.

But Twitter is far from monolingual. The social media site has about 232 million users worldwide, and two-thirds of daily Tweets are in a language besides English.

The three most popular, according to the Semiocast study, are Japanese, Spanish, and Malay. Other top languages include Portuguese, Arabic, French, Turkish, Thai and Korean.

Why are certain languages more popular? Population could be one explanation. Languages with a higher number of speakers generally had a greater share of Tweets. Spanish, spoken by 6 percent of the world’s population, is also one of the most popular Twitter languages with 12 percent of daily Tweets. Portuguese and Arabic, the 5th and 6th most spoken languages in the world, each had 6 percent.

But population is not the only factor: culture and linguistics also play a role. In terms of linguistics, the Twitter character limit allows for different communication levels in different languages. Even though users are always limited to 140 characters, in some languages, thanks to the alphabet and language structure, those characters go further.

If a user can say more, they might be more inclined to use the service.

At least, that’s what Twitter’s second most popular language suggests. With 16 percent of daily Tweets, Japanese is hugely popular. It’s also a very condensed language. In Japanese, words often require fewer characters than English and the language permits brevity: pronouns are rarely used and the subject of a sentence may be implied by context and not stated. The ability to say more may be one reason that Japanese Twitter users make more of the service.

Meanwhile German, which uses many long subordinate clauses, makes up less than 1 percent of daily Twitter use. The language structure might be part of the reason for the low use of German on Twitter, with other factors like a culture that values privacy contributing.

Ultimately, the popularity of Twitter in any language depends on whether or not there is a competing local social media company offering similar services and business deals.

Malay, which makes up 8 percent of daily Tweets, maybe a popular language because of a partnership between Twitter and two mobile carriers in Malaysia, while Russian, one of the world’s most spoken languages, makes up only 1 percent of daily Tweets in part because local social media companies like Vkontakte are more popular.

As Twitter continues to expand globally, the languages that dominate the service will likely continue to change. If Twitter hopes to move beyond English, the company will have to pay attention to local linguistics, culture, and business to attract speakers of other languages.

Most companies use social media to market their products, build their brand, and gain clients, but freelancers can also benefit from making social media part of their business strategy. If you haven’t started taking advantage of the power of social media, here are three reasons why you should.

1. Stay visible

At bare minimum, social media offers translators, interpreters, and the agencies that serve them the ability to be seen. When you post something on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, or any other social networking site, you remind past clients of your importance in the industry and create the potential that new clients will find your page. That makes social media a powerful marketing tool for translators who need to gain recognition in the field.

2. Turn followers into clients

Social media is a virtual arm of networking. The people who discover your online accounts may remember you later when they need real-world services. So cultivate your relationships with your Facebook “Likes,” LinkedIn Connections, and everyone else you interact with online. If you keep them engaged with interesting content, they’re likely to remember you later when they need services.

Be sure to keep in mind, though, that you don’t have to create an account on every social media service. Focus on the ones your prospective clients already use. LinkedIn and Twitter may be a great start because they are more business-oriented than sites like Instagram or Facebook but think about the kind of brand you want to build and choose your sites accordingly.

3. Interact with the industry

Following translation companies and other freelancers on social media helps you in a multitude of ways. If they’re managing their accounts well, you’ll get to learn from their insights into the industry. The articles and statuses that they post may give you ideas about new areas to explore or different strategies to employ in your work. You may even find work, since companies sometimes announce jobs on social media. On the other hand, if your colleagues do a poor job of managing their accounts — not updating, updating too much, spamming — you may discover places where you can rise above the competition.

So make sure you have social media accounts to gain visibility, followers, and industry contacts. More importantly, make sure you update your accounts regularly. You never know when the virtual world may lead to real-world gain for your freelance career.

The art of simultaneous interpretation is used during United Nations gatherings, presidential speeches, and large international conferences. It is the process in which an interpreter interprets what a presenter is saying at the same time as they are speaking so that listeners receive the interpretation without delay. If the interpreter pauses, it is usually no more than a couple of words behind the speaker, and it is done in order to give the interpreter time to both process the speech and provide the interpretation.

Simultaneous interpretation is demanding. It is doubtlessly one of the most difficult language skills to learn. Just because someone is fluent in two languages does not mean that person will be able to render the nuances correctly in such a fast-paced environment. Simultaneous interpretation doesn’t allow time to search through a dictionary for unfamiliar expressions and gives no chance to consider how to best reinterpret unknown words or phrases. The interpreter must therefore be confident in thinking and speaking on the fly. Being able to quickly improvise is an essential skill. It is also extremely important that the interpreter is completely comfortable living and working within both cultures and able to convey the nuances of each of them in word, tone, and expression. In other words, it is not enough for them to merely restate a foreign language equivalent; they must assume the role of an actor who is able to convey the speaker’s words perfectly. Since body language differs among cultures, the interpreter must also be comfortable in conveying physical gestures and interpreting these gestures to communicate the same meaning to his or her audience.

Since it is such a mentally demanding profession, lengthy meetings and technical material will cause a single interpreter to tire and the quality of the interpretation to suffer.  It is important to remember that for international meetings and conferences, interpreters are the voice of the one speaking. For an audience who does not understand the speaker’s language, they take every word the interpreter utters to be true and accurate. If the quality declines as the interpreter tires, listeners may not receive the full impact of the original speaker’s words. For this reason, it is common industry practice to hire two interpreters for simultaneous interpretation assignments. By switching off every 15-30 minutes, interpreters can stay fresh and avoid costly misinterpretations.

Simultaneous interpretation may be challenging, but it isn’t impossible. For people with the right language skills and cultural background, simultaneous interpretation can be both personally and financially rewarding. The interpreter is exposed to a great variety of situations, people, and materials, and has an opportunity to help bridge gaps in communication and spread ideas.

Do you currently work as a simultaneous interpreter? What advice would you offer a newcomer to the profession?

Welcome to our first post from our new Tip of the Week series. In these blog posts, we’ll be going over some technical tips to make life easier, whether you are working in Microsoft Office, desktop publishing software, accounting software, or a CAT tool. Everyone here at TE is always looking up shortcuts or tricks to help with formatting, translating, and everything in between, so we figured we’d start sharing our findings. Hopefully, these tips will help you spend less time creating tables and more time focusing on the translation work we all love!

I work in Word every single day and I’m sure most of you are the same. Whether I’m doing a translation, formatting a translation, taking notes in a meeting, or writing a blog post, I find myself performing the same tasks over and over again. At some point, exasperated, I think, there has got to be an easier way to do this!

Well, guess what, there usually is. There are hundreds of keyboard shortcuts in Word (and some work in other Microsoft Office and even Adobe programs) that were created to make your life easier. By pressing keys at the same time or in certain orders you can save, open, or close documents, copy, paste, or highlight text, format fonts or paragraphs, and much more!

This first Tip of the Week will delve into some of the basic shortcuts that everyone should know. In upcoming tips, we’ll look into shortcuts for more complex formatting, how to add accents, and more. All of these shortcuts exist for PC and Mac so I’ve included both with the Mac shortcuts in parenthesis. The “+” in commands is there to show separation between the commands, you do not need to press the plus sign between commands.

Let’s Get Started

• Control + N (Command + N) = Create new document
• Control + O (Command + O) = Open document

And I Already Messed Up…

• Control + Z (Command + Z) = Undo last action
• Control + Y (Command + Y) = Redo last action
• Control + H (Command + Shift + H) = Opens find and replace window.

Need to format?

• Control + U (Command + U) = Underline
• Control + I (Command + I) = Italic
• Control + B (Command + B) = Bold
• Control + D (Command + D) = Change Font and Character settings
• Control + Shift + L (Command + Shift + L) = Create a bullet point
• Control + L (Command + L) = Aligns the highlight text to the left
• Control + E (Command + E) = Centers the highlighted text
• Control + R (Command + R) = Aligns the highlighted text to the right
• Control + J (Command + J) = Justifies the highlighted text
• Alt + O + P (Command + Option + M) = Change Paragraph settings

Proofreading and Reviewing

• Alt + Control + M (Command + Option + A)  = Insert a comment
• Control + Shift  + E (Command + Shift + E) = Turn track changes on or off
• Control + C (Command + C) = Copy selected text
• Control + X (Command + X) = Cut selected text
• Control + V (Command + V) = Paste
• Control + A (Command + A) = Select all contents of the page

Finished?

• Control + S (Command + S) = Save
• F12 (Command + Shift + S) = Save As
• Control + P (Command + P) = Open Print window
• Control + W (Command + W) = Close document
• Alt + F4 (Command + Q) = Exit Word

I’d recommend bookmarking this page for now so that you can use it as a resource until you have memorized these shortcuts. Once you’ve memorized all 26 of them, you’ll be zooming around Word and quickly opening, creating, formatting, saving, and printing documents!

Do you have a suggestion for a Tip of the Week? Did we miss something in this post? Please let us know on social media or in the comments below!

Would you translate Cuidad Juarez as Swineherd City?

That’s the premise of the Atlas of True Names, a map put together by cartographers Stephan Hormes and Silke Peust, which shows geographical names translated into English using their root languages.

Great Britain transforms into “Great Land of the Tattooed,” Chicago to “Stink Onions,” and the Seine to “The Gentle One.”

While the Atlas of True Names shows an entertaining side of geographic translation, determining how and when to translate place names requires careful consideration.

In some cases, professional translations function similar to those of the Atlas of True Names. A literal translation often serves when a location name includes a qualifier describing the type of place, such as “forest,” “sea,” or “valley.”

Translating Westminster Abbey into Hebrew, for example, yields the somewhat literal translation of Knessiyat Westminster or Church of Westminster, while in German it most often remains Westminster Abbey, even though it could change to the more literal Westminster Abtei. In any case, the name “Westminster” is preserved, while the qualifier “Abbey” changes according to the translation.

A more tricky task is determining when to change the entire name, and not just a qualifier. Country names might change entirely because of historical differences in naming, such as the country Germany, which in German is called “Deutschland,” but is referred to as “Alemanha” in Portuguese.

Political reasons like naming disputes can also produce different names. When translating a document from Japanese to English, for instance, a translator may encounter Nihonkai or the sea bordered by Japan, Russia, and Korea. The name translates literally to “Sea of Japan,” and while this is technically correct, the translator must be aware that Koreans would dispute the name, since they call the sea Dong-Hae, the East Sea.

Since there has not yet been an international consensus on the name, translating directly to the Sea of Japan could be culturally inappropriate, depending on the audience for the translation. A better solution might be to include both names, by printing: “Sea of Japan (East Sea).” A translator wouldn’t be able to determine this from the source text alone and would need cultural knowledge to decide upon the correct translation.

A good way to approach the translation of place names is to seek out official resources to determine the common usage of the name. A translator might consult a map or other primary source in the target language, such as a government document or media article. In some cases, a translator can draw from official guidelines for assistance. For translations into English from other languages, the European Commission Translation Service English Style Guide has a series of conventions in its stylebook for geography translation.

Still, a translator should consider each specific case when determining the proper translation. When in doubt, it’s best to leave the name in its original language. Correct place names, like names for people, stand on their own in any language, and a complete literal translation outside of the Atlas of True Names probably won’t make sense.

Sitting here just two short weeks into the new year I found myself reflecting on New Year’s Eve, when people all over the U.S. rang in the new year with various traditions. My family, for example, made a large pot of black-eyed peas and fried hog jowl to bring us lots of luck. Many people celebrate the coming year with a glass of champagne and a toast. Couples rang in the New Year with a kiss from their significant other at the stroke of midnight. For many people, watching the ball drop in Times Square as they count down the final ten seconds is a tradition in and of itself. Everyone hopes for success and luck in the new year, so we, like people in countries all over the world, combine unique traditions with personal resolutions as a foolproof recipe for guaranteed results.

These are some of the more common traditions in the United States, but what traditions do people observe around the world? What superstitions or beliefs are observed in other countries?

Where the Western Common Era calendar is used, New Year’s falls on January first. Where other calendars are used, such as the Islamic calendar in the Middle East and parts of Asia, the New Year is recognized as taking place in March. The Chinese New Year falls on a different date in January or February each year (for 2014, it takes place on January 31).

Regardless of the time of year, traditions are unique to a country’s culture and current circumstances. In the Netherlands, it is common to make a bonfire in the street out of your Christmas tree to welcome the New Year. In Germany, people enjoy predicting the future by melting small pieces of lead in a small spoon held over a candle and then dropping the pieces in cold water. Based on the shape of the hardened metal, futures are revealed.

In many parts of Latin America and Spain, it is a tradition to eat twelve grapes at midnight to have luck for the twelve months of the coming year. In both Peru and Colombia, if you hope to travel in the upcoming months, you would do well to run around the block with your suitcase. Of course, you will probably need some money to travel, so make sure you put on some yellow underwear before you set off for your trip, and if you want double the luck, wear it inside out.

In Japan, dried beans are scattered throughout the house in each room to chase away evil spirits, and Buddhist temple bells are rung 108 times (for the number of beads on a Buddhist rosary). The bell ringing is often watched televised and is similar to Americans watching the ball drop in New York Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

These are only a few of the many New Year’s traditions found throughout the world. I’d love to hear yours! Do you have a favorite New Year’s tradition? Let us know in the comments below.