Tag Archives: T&I

MIIS Info Session in Korea

On July 4, 2010, Professor Miryoung Sohn offered a talk in Seoul, Korea for alumni and forty-six prospective MIIS students.

Recent T&I graduate, Shihee Yu emceed the 2 hour event. The information session began with a general introduction to MIIS and followed with testimonies from a number of MIIS alums about their degree experiences and careers since leaving the Institute. Among those giving testimonies were two 2005 International Policy Studies graduates, Katie Klemsen and Nicola Kim and three Korean T&I graduates, Hyunsuk John Lee of class ‘03, Aeree Park of class ’02, and Jiyoung Park of class ’09 for MACII and ’10 for MATFL.

The prospective students were introduced to the T&I curriculum and the MIIS application process, and the session ended with a chance for the students to ask their questions about the Monterey Institute and its programs. The session was well-attended, with 46 prospective students and 10 Korean T&I alumni at the event. Following the information session, there was an alumni dinner.

Professor Uwe Muegge introduces TermWiki to a global audience

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While most practitioners in the language business understand the critical importance of managing terminology, very few translators, let alone interpreters, actually create comprehensive, project-specific dictionaries. One of the reasons for this phenomenon is the lack of powerful, easy-to-use, low-cost tools for collecting and maintaining multilingual vocabulary. TermWiki, a new web-based terminology management solution developed by CSOFT in collaboration with professor Uwe Muegge, is a free community solution that allows global organizations as well as individual freelancers to manage term collections of any size without installing or buying any software.

muegge termwiki

After presenting TermWiki to the academic community at the Leipzig International Conference on Translation Studies (LICTRA) last month, Uwe Muegge has been invited by the publisher of tcworld to contribute an article on TermWiki and collaborative terminology management to a special print issue of the online magazine tcworld. In his fourth publication this year, Muegge discusses the implications of not managing terminology in the context of a large, multilingual translation project, and how TermWiki revolutionizes authoring, translation, and review processes.

Professor John Balcom wins 2010 Northern California Book Award

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John Balcom‘s translation of Cao Naiqian’s “There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night” won the 2010 Northern California Book Award in the category of translated fiction.

Cao’s novel (actually a series of inter-locking short stories) deals with the lives of poor Shanxi villagers who can scarcely rise above the level of necessity. The work is set in the early 1970s. The book was published in Taiwan in 2005 and in China in 2007, where it was rated one of the top-ten books of the year in one poll. Michael Duke said, “The best thing about these stories, aside from the realistic depiction of a world none of wants to visit and few of us can imagine, is their almost lyrical presentation of human poverty, depravity, and occasional comradeship and mutual warmth. An excellent novel; the image of these disposable lives stays with one long after reading.”

Cao Naiqian (b. 1949) works for the Public Security Bureau of Datong City. He began writing in 1986. Swedish Nobel academician Goeran Malmqvist wrote that Cao Naiqian is one of three Chinese authors who deserved the Nobel Prize.

Professor Balcom’s award-winning translation has made this novel accessible to English readers around the world.

Issues In Re-Translation: The Case of Celestina by Peter Bush

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On April 1, 2010, Peter Bush, an award-winning literary translator living in Barcelona, discussed his new translation of Fernando de Rojas’s Renaissance masterpiece, Celestina. This translation re-asserts Celestina‘s power as a pioneering work of fiction, written over five hundred years ago in a language and mood that is thoroughly contemporary. De Rojas’s original mix of street wit, obscenity and cultured rhetoric mark Celestina as one of the first prose masterpieces of European literature and a work of art to rival Cervantes, Velázquez and Goya. In his talk, Bush examined the tradition of translating this classic and discussed the strategy informing his decision to dispense with the dramatic structure imposed by de Rojas’s original publishers at the end of the fifteenth century. He compared different versions of a specific extract in English and French to facilitate a critical exchange on the theory and practice of translation.

Peter Bush studied French and Spanish at Cambridge and researched Spanish fiction and history in Oxford. He was Professor of Literary Translation at Middesex University and at the University of East Anglia where he also directed the British Centre for Literary Translation. Recent projects include Juan Goytisolo’s Juan the Landless, Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas and Najat El Hachmi’s The Last Patriarch. He edited The Translator as Writer (with Susan Basnett), a collection of essays by leading translators on the art of literary translation.

Celestina by Fernando de Rojas, introduction by Juan Goytisolo, with an after word by translator, Peter Bush. Published by Dedalus Books (June 2009) and Penguin Classics USA (January 2010)

Fernando de Rojas was born in La Puebla de Montalbán in the early 1470s into a family whose Jewish forebears had been forced to convert to Christianity.

GSTILE Lecture Series Features Architect of Windows 7 Global Launch

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Ulrike Irmler, Principal Group Manager at Microsoft, discussed the complexity of a worldwide, simultaneous software launch that involved more than 90 languages. In her presentation, Ms. Irmler talked about the different audiences the

Microsoft operating system has, and how this diversity requires multiple, customized localization strategies. This presentation also highlighted the fact that in order to participate in a large-scale localization project today, language professionals must not only have excellent translation skills but also a good understanding of localization tools and processes, as well as subject-matter expertise.

Ulrike Irmler at her lecture

Ulrike Irmler’s talk, which had been advertised in the Monterey Herald and the Santa Cruz Sentinel, attracted a sizeable crowd of students, faculty, and members of the general public. Ms. Irmler’s presentation, the first half of which she gave in her native language of German (made available in English by members of the Interpretation Practicum course), focused on the difficulties of having widely different content (e.g. software user interface, marketing collateral, and forum content) translated for audiences with very different needs (e.g. private end-users vs. members of the developer community). She illustrated how the demands on her organization have grown from one release of Windows to the next: Process a growing volume of source text (Windows XP: 1 million words, Windows 7: 11 million words), in a growing number of languages (Windows XP: 77, Windows 7: 95), deliver localized versions faster (Windows XP: 120 days after English version, Windows 7: on the same day as English version) and do all of that with ever fewer people (Windows XP: staff of 250, Windows 7: staff of 100).

Ms. Irmler explained that the growing demands on her localization group are symptomatic for the entire software industry, and that these demands can only be met by constantly changing the way content for global audiences is created and localized. Microsoft fully embraces the outsourcing model, and in Ms. Irmler’s opinion, new business models like crowdsourcing (working with large groups of subject-matter experts that are lay translators) and machine translation (using automated translation tools for certain types of text) are here to stay.

About the speaker:

Ulrike Irmler has been involved in localization in different roles since 1997. Since 2008 she has been managing the Windows Localization organization. Her staff works in Redmond, Washington and 11 locations throughout the world. Her team is responsible for the localization of Windows Client and Server, all Windows family products and the international Windows Online localization, site management and publishing.