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Saturday, December 6, 2014

Translation: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow - 29 Translation(s) | dotSUB

Translation: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow - 29 Translation(s) | dotSUB




  • In the beginning was the Tower of Babel.
  • The usual story says it was man’s attempt to compete with the gods.
  • But what those Babylonians really did
  • was build the largest silo of translations in the known world.
  • Yes, they were trying to reach the clouds.
  • But the tower was so tall and heavy with the weight of translations
  • that it collapsed on top of them.
  • The translators escaped, and spread out all over the world.
  • in search of more effective tools.
  • For example, translators need good memories.
  • The more they work, the greater the stock of translations others can learn from.
  • The Rosetta Stone dates back to the 2nd century.
  • With its three versions of the same underlying text,
  • it’s one of the finest examples of a parallel corpus or translation memory.
  • Give translators parallel data, and they can move the world.
  • But they need proper training data.
  • In 9th century Bagdad, for example,
  • Arabic was a new target language for a huge job of translating scientific and medical content
  • from Greek and Syriak.
  • Caliph Al-Mamūn built the House of Wisdom to train a translator base,
  • establish terminology, and control translation quality.
  • The right skills flourish best with proper infrastructure and good tools.
  • After millennia of laborious copying,
  • moveable print technology was introduced in the 15th century.
  • It killed off Latin, and created the first multilingual publishing industry.
  • 500 years before, block-printing had been used in Asia
  • to print the Chinese translation of the Buddhist Tripitaka.
  • In Europe, Luther’s German translation of the Bible
  • was one of the first great print runs in history.
  • But the explosion of knowledge through printed translation
  • started worrying 17th century Europeans.
  • So many languages, but where’s the truth?
  • John Wilkins, Leibniz and others tried to develop a single logical language,
  • a shared interlingua for scientific communication.
  • But back in the real world, the translation workload kept growing...
  • Dominant languages like Latin, Chinese, or English tend to crush minority tongues.
  • Smaller language communities constantly fight back, and language wars are a fact of life.
  • In the late 19th century
  • Zamenhof invented Esperanto, a mash up auxiliary language for peace and progress.
  • A noble dream, but languages are rooted in locale.
  • Translators are always the spearhead of local responses to globalizing ambitions.
  • But they need better tools.
  • The electronic computer arrived in the 1950s,
  • not just a number cruncher but a symbol processor.
  • It promised software solutions to almost every translation automation problem.
  • Translators could finally use machines to do the heavy lifting.
  • We now live in a new world of instant global communications.
  • Translation is a daily necessity,
  • and we can use innovative information technology to leverage language data.
  • But first we must share, build and experiment together.
  • TAUS is here to help build a new Babel in the cloud,
  • to ensure that business and society communicate better
  • and solve the language problems that confront us all.

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