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.