h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Last Wednesday I had to down tools quickly and rush home with a rather unpleasant affliction.

I languished, crawling from bed to loo and back, until Sunday, and dragged myself into work on Monday for four hours, and again on Tues for 4 hours. Today I'll do 6 hours.

Had to come in on my bike this morning because there was a power cut. A planned one - we had had notice! So we couldn't open the garage door. Ho hum.

Anyway - my tum has recovered, mostly, but I'm quite wobbly on my legs.

In other news, there is an interesting event planned at the local university tomorrow evening. They are measuring brain impulses on people as they do simultaneous translation and trying to work out the mechanics of it. This is the place to do that, as the "Dolmetscherschule" as it used to be called in the 50s (now it has evolved into the Fachbereich Translations,- Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft (Faculty of translation, language and culture studies) and is one of the two top universities in Germany for translators and interpreters.

They will also be looking at bilingualism. I'll be dragging hubbie along to that.

ohhhh sounds good (the study, not the illness)
I'll be interested in what they have to say.

So would I.

Sympathies

Have they abandoned the wonderful word Dolmetscher for 'Translations-'? How unlike the Germans.

In German universities there is a strong trend towards anglicising everything. No one can do a "Diplom" any more. The revered "Diplomingenieure" (my eldest just slipped in before they shut the door) are a dying generation.

Nowadays you can only be a "Bachelor" and go on to be a "Master". I'm a bit vague as to what will become of the "Doktor" title. Again, both my eldest son and his wife managed to get one while they were still going, but I'm not sure if that is a step up from "Master" or is going to concede to it completely. I think the universities decide for themselves, as they grant the titles.

Anyway - a very high percentage of lectures is now held in English (at least, on paper - not sure how that works out in practice) and, as has been seen, many faculties are re-naming themselves. The sits vac for university professorships etc are mainly in English in the big national papers.

In my experience, if someone is a real wiz at their subject, they are not necessarily going to be good at languages as well. Or certainly not good enough to express complicated scientific concepts in another language.

Which is why we have translators. Except that, if they were good enough to explain the complicated science, they'd be scientists themselves, wouldn't they? Even in everyday language, some professional translations are so toe-nail-curlingly wrong .... I hate to think of the results of a gross misinterpretation of delicate or volatile scientific procedures.

I pressed my kids not to go into languages. To me, being able to "speak English" in professional life, is like having a driving licence but no car to drive. So they all have down to earth professions, but they, at least, are able to practise their professions in either language.

Thanks for the sympathies. I will keep you all posted on what I learn this evening.

'To me, being able to "speak English" in professional life, is like having a driving licence but no car to drive.'

I went to nominate this as Quote of the Day, but that seems to have been discontinued four years ago...

Yes. It would involve a lot of commitment to revive it, fun though it would be. Thank you anyway. I have been saying that since my kids were at school. Perhaps I have some more gems somewhere

Anyway, so I went to the University. They are holding a symposium on Translation and Cognition. And this was an evening event in what we would have called a "language laboratory" at school.

Except that the students would sit with eye trackers and/or EEG caps on and do little tests.

The project is very much in its infancy. The study we saw went as follows:

The student sits in front of a screen - plain black - and is being monitored by EEG. Words appear on the screen (in English) and he/she has to say the equivalent word in German, obviously as quickly as possible - these kids are training to be simultaneous translators, after all.

The choice of words involves a mix of two types of translation techniques.

There are those that can be practically read off the screen. "Detail" - for example, you would translate as "Detail" (different pronunciation, of course), although a better German word would be "Einzelheit", but that doesn't matter. These, I think, they called transfers.

Others called for straightforward translation into a word that has no relation to the English: "Request", for example, could be translated several ways - "Bitte", "Anforderung", "Antrag", "Anfrage".... but none of them sound like "request". These were the cognitive translations.

We also noticed "Meaning" in there, which, if you were a German speaker and weren't careful (or well trained) you might be tempted to react to with "Meinung", which is, of course wrong. A cognitive one with a twist, so to speak.

(I asked if the candidates were informed if they were seeing verbs or nouns, because out of context, I wouldn't be able to translate "request" on its own. They are all substantives and the test persons were informed of that.)

The study measured the reaction time of the candidates and, most importantly, their brain activity in each case. The aim is to find out if there are, and if so what differences there are between the two types of translation.

These are the absolute baby steps of the project, and I am sure they discussed lots of other avenues of investigation during the Symposium.

And this is without even mentioning the eye tracking which, in other experiments, measures how the translator reads the text and where his eyes dwell, where they gloss over etc. They hope that this will help them to categorise words, phrases, idioms, tenses, whatever into those that create more or less furrowed brows. We didn't talk to anyone about this, but I can imagine it would improve at least the teaching programmes at the university because they could concentrate on what people subjectively find harder.

It's all very theoretical and doesn't really know exactly where it's going at the moment, but that's how this sort of thing works. Tiny steps at a time, and one thing leading to another.

http://traco.uni-mainz.de/

I might re-post that somewhere. I hope to follow the project and I'm sure I'll never remember to come back and look under "rehydration" to read about how I witnessed its beginnings...

That sounds like a fascinating step forward in translation education. Should filter down into all language teaching.

What will be most fascinating is if they get enough bilingual people to carry the same test out on. Then they can start working out what being "biligual" really is. In a conversation with one of the lecturers working on the project, my friend and I were pleased to find that our definition of bilingual seems to coincide with that of the university's.

I.e. - Neither my friend nor I who have both lived in Germany and spoken and written the language including translating and interpreting (in my case, without qualifications, but in the course of paid work, so I suppose it counts as professionally) would consider ourselves bilingual. Our children who, on the other hand, have spoken both languages from birth, are.

The lady said that they define bilingual as having started to learn a second language by the age of 4 at the latest.