It is with great sadness that we at The Meehan Group share news of his passing as we pay tribute to his accomplishments.
Updates from London
MeehanJapan.com - New URL, New Look for Spring 2016
English is a Tool: Don't Use it like a Cudgel!
International colleagues resent the lack of effort made on the part of the monoglot English speaker. They experience a loss of professional stature when having to speak with those who are not only comfortable with the language, but who appear to vaunt the effortlessness with which they bend the language to their will. And they suspect that the offending expat uses this virtuosity to gain unfair advantage in the workplace.
#ViewFromTheBooth: #Maya Edition
Curious Factoid about Google Translate
It doesn't do point to point translations from Language A into Language B. It translates from A into English and then English into Language B.
Who knew?
The people at ppcorn.com put it thus:
It Does Not Translate One Language to Another. This might sound totally crazy – not to mention counterintuitive – but Google Translate doesn’t actually translate from one language to another. Instead, it translates the original language to English, and then it translates English to the target language. Though this makes the process easier, it may cause translation errors as English is far from a perfect language.
We'll let pass the theoretically hard-to-swallow notion with which the passage ends: just what might be a "perfect language" anyway?
More fund Google Translate tidbits for your enjoyment here.
Self-As-Other: Seeing the U.S. From Foreign(er's) Perspectives
Sometimes, the mirror ain't pretty.
Occasioned by a posting on Mental Floss , we at The Meehan Group have excerpted some of the more sardonic and amusing examples of what some foreign governments advise their citizens travelling to the United States of America.
AmazonCrossing, the literary translation imprint of Amazon Publishing, today announced a $10 million commitment over the next five years to increase the number & diversity of its books in translation.
Please, Do Your Part to Protect Professional Interpreters in Conflict Zones
Gallery of Translated Movie Posters
Iconic (and not-so-iconic) movie posters, post localization. This cover, from Malaysia, is slyly amusing for its use of social values as expressed through the origin(al) language. The originating article in Moviepilot is a quick read with some amusing tidbits - with some sweatshop labor pricing practices detailed. Unfortunately, they couldn't resist the by-now-tired trope of Lost in Translation in the title.
Interpreting Experience: The Gaijin in Rural Japan
Today is International Translation Day 2015
Kyoto Channels its Fastidious yet Polite Inner Self into Actionable Tourist Advice
Tourists. A blessing and a curse. And rarely displaying the self-awareness to modulate their hive behaviors even by the standards of their own country and culture, to say nothing of the subtleties of the destination's sensitivities -- which in the case of Kyoto within Japan is a superlative wrapped within a superlative. So this bold graphic is welcome, cheeky andquite effective.
Translation Wars: People-Powered-Platforms Fight Back
Consumer-ified machine translation apps -- on your computer, on your phone, on your Smart Watch -- have made impressive strides in aiding the awkward traveling tourist abroad, and the past year's headlines have been dominated by Google Translate and Microsoft's Skype simultaneous translation.
But more intriguing to us as human interpreters are human-translator-powered commerce platforms -- an Uber for language translation needs.. Setlr is a marketplace (in beta) whose mission is to put translators directly in touch with clients. Babelverse will use mobile tech to get at-point-of-need translation done real time by live humans.
Both should be interesting to watch as they go live and scale up network effects.
Interpreter who Abused Misplaced Trust Faces Harsh Penalties
Unexpected Paradoxes Explained by an Unlikely Localization of Comedy
While there is a limited sub-set of humor that is indeed universal - think pratfalls and perhaps body humor, in reality humor is an interpretive game that relies upon common references held by the speaker and audience, agility, indirection, mis-identification (intentional or otherwise), language play, representation verve (or is that verve in re-presenting) to name but a few of a long litany of tropes and tricks. By the time you move up the scale from humor to comedy, well, let's just say that there's something about the asserted simplicity of the image of the stand-up comic's mike, glass of water and stool on a bare stage that seems deceptive, almost fraudulently so. It's simple only if you can overlook the vast quantities of the mechanics/magic of culture/communication that have been relegated to the background status of unstated/un-examined assumptions. In short, language is a social tool - and its use is difficult to separate from its originating context, and jokes may well be among the hardest things to translate.
That notion is the centerpiece of a wonderful exposition in The Verge, a long-form case study of the process by which US Television Comedy Hit Seinfeld came to have its German following. It unearths so many interesting tidbits and a few seeming contradictions that are wonderfully explained ("In German, I do not like Seinfeld. In English, it's my favorite show."; Seinfeld is more of a hit in Germany than in England), and its nuanced take on media industry economics helps to explain such unlikely phenomena as the existence of voice-over actors in major European nations whose careers are premised upon their dubbing of a sole American actor (alas not a two-way street, due to economies of scale), or why streaming media underdog Hulu shelled out $160MM for streaming Seinfeld while Netflix took a pass.
Appetite whet? Read the original here.
Interpreters' Power: Putin Edition
Ambassadors from Tanzania and Zambia to Japan; a METI Vice Minister...
Why Movies Can Have Such Lousy Subtitles
Shoddy subtitles are all too common, and they can completely alter a viewer's understanding of a film. This gem from the NPR archive explores the circuitous and sloppy routes by which DVD releases are subtitled, often with appalling results.
