Why Professional Human-Powered Arabic Translation is Key to Your Business Success
While French philosopher René Descartes believes thinking proves his existence as depicted in the famous quote “I think, therefore I am”, international and foreign businesses in Arab countries ought to establish their presence through Arabic translation!
Whether it is a consumable product, technological solution, consulting services, or content that you are selling, the Middle East is undoubtedly a promising market for your business.
Based on key factors like geography, economy, communication, diplomacy, knowledge, and media, the Power Language Index (2016) ranked Arabic the 5th most powerful language globally.
Although some argue that English is the world’s lingua franca and sufficient to communicate worldwide, the EF English Proficiency Index (2020) reveals that the majority of Arab countries rank “low” and “very low” in terms of proficiency in English skills. This stresses the necessity of speaking Arabic, the people’s tongue, to be able to expand in this growing market.
However, with nearly 3.5 million speakers in 22 different countries in both Asia and Africa, Arab natives speak a wide range of dialects, rendering communication stuck in a high context, which requires the use of the modern standard Arabic (MSA) to reach out to the vast majority.
This task is rife with potential challenges and errors if lacking an expert eye. The Arab communities have recently witnessed a wave of funny translations delivered solely by machines without human intervention, creating odd translations like “البصل الأخضر يغادر”, literally meaning in English “the green onion is leaving” to an essential product named “green onion leaves” just because the English word “leaves” could be either the plural of a leaf or the third person verb of leave depending on the context!
Achieving a solid presence in the Arab world is thus only confined to a professional translation task force that knows all the ins and outs!
CAT Tools
The growing demand for translation services has brought to the fore a new set of technologies that can assist translators with their beyond deplorable and most demanding tasks—CAT Tools. With the plethora of translator-aiding and project-management technologies, CAT Tools’ approach is rather holistic (i.e., their integrated environments are designed with all linguistic needs in mind); and therefore, they offer translators a wide variety of solutions to maintain quality and consistency, and to be punctilious and meticulous, nonetheless.
With that said, CAT Tools have shown to have a rather global application, with many translators finding it rather sordid and excruciating to approach business and financial literatures without their having access to the many solutions CAT Tools offer. Understandably though, CAT Tools are not to be confused with machine-translation technologies (although most of them offer some sort of integrated machine-translation engines)—as the onus is on translators to ‘translate’.
Benefits
As mentioned earlier, CAT Tools offer a rich profusion of technologies and solutions, the benefits of which can be summed in the following:
Post-haste Delivery: Clients can be so ‘one foot in crazy, the other on a banana peel’; and therefore, they might well stir for post-haste delivery—answering to their laundry list of asinine requirements can be surely draining for translators. CAT Tools help translators speed up the translation process through the following:
– File Preparation and Statistics: CAT Tools allow translators to prepare for the translation process beforehand by running a thorough analysis of the projects in hand; the corollary to which is a comprehensive report detailing match rates, wordage, and repetitions—this can very much give translators an estimate on the time needed for the delivery of their tasks.
– Homogeneity and Repetitions: CAT Tools allow for segment matching; meaning that context matches are compared to previous occurrences in older bilingual documents (Translators need to introduce little to no adjustments in most cases). As for repetitions, CAT Tools account for the no-match occurrences in the source file, the remaining occurrences repeated within the same file (As well as cross-file occurrences) are not accounted for and are auto-propagated.
– External and Internal Engines and Resources: CAT Tools offer a great mixture of resources that can be used to speed up the translation process in one integrated translation environment:
- Translation Memory—a database of human-made translations aggregated from previous translation work and stored either on a local server or on the cloud.
- Term Bases—a terminology module that consists of databases of stored terms.
- Plug-ins—external engines and resources designed to facilitate the translation process (some are paid services offered by external partners).
Consistent Terminology: Working with projects of monstrous size imposes a further burden on translators as to maintain consistency throughout the projects in hand—this is made starkly apparent in the PowerPoint slides attached herewith (An excerpt from a previous project we have worked on where the reference files were not consistent). One of the benefits that CAT Tools secure for translators is consistent terminology—one of the many ways to realise this is through Concordance Search; a repertoire of stored human translations that can be utilised in unifying the terminology used (Certain CAT Tools allow for the extraction/exportation of a project-specific glossaries that can be then used as reference materials).
Collaboration Features: as part of their resource allocation and project management solutions, most CAT Tools allow for the assignment of multiple translators to one project; allowing them to work simultaneously thereon whilst maintaining utmost consistency, and to eventually to deliver projects on time—CAT Tools are single-source synchronous and complex software assets that allow for a seamless workflow.
Language & Translation
Apr 25
“Ecology shows that a variety of forms is a prerequisite for biological survival. Monocultures are vulnerable and easily destroyed. Plurality in human ecology functions in the same way. One language in one nation does not bring about equity or harmony for the members or groups of that nation.”
— Pattanayak 1988.380
The activity of translation has yet proven to be—so the argument runs—a conditio sin qua non for human communication. And whilst Peter Mühlhäusler argues that “The transition from polylingualism to monolingualism is accelerating”, the activity of translation remains a universalistic—yet particularistic—tool for language maintenance. Translation—in theory—concerns the rendering of linguistic discourse from one language to another; and whilst the linguistic ability is a defining characteristic of the human race, translation—as a matter of course—is rather vital for the theory of language.
Translation in Theory – Steiner’s Hermeneutic Motion
Steiner’s contributions to the study of language are no tenuous—his model, the “Hermeneutic Motion”, divides the process of translation into a tetrad of stages: (1) Trust; according to Steiner: “All understanding, and the demonstrative statement of understanding, which is translation, starts with an act of trust” (157)—that is, the translator must trust that a linguistic entity, although foreign to them, is indeed meaningful, and in keeping with this approach, a linguistic entity is indeed decipherable. (2) Aggression; entertaining the Hegelian thought that all cognition is aggressive, to Steiner, foreign texts must be tackled aggressively; for the act of understanding is invasive and extractive rather than passive. (3) Incorporation; this stage entails the embodiment of the extracted meaning into a new linguistic entity. (4) Restitution; Steiner argues that translators can overinterpret a given text—the effects of such overinterpretation can be manifested during the Incorporation stage, and translators must revive the balance between the source and target texts.