Atlas News - December 2009
·“Signing Santa”
· EU addresses shortage of French interpreters
· The “Alien Language” experiment
· We offer Typesetting in all languages
· Other news…
A Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year for 2010! from the Atlas Team, who would also like to take this opportunity to thank everybody for all the hard work completed in 2009!
Please note our Christmas closing dates – Our office closes on Wednesday 23rd December 2009 at 4pm and reopens on Monday 4th January 2010 at 9am.
Hearing impaired Children at the Cherry Creek Shopping Centre in Denver had a very special opportunity to tell Santa what they wanted for Christmas. What made their conversations with Santa so special was the fact that he was able to communicate with them in their own language – in Sign Language. For the past 16 years, the shopping centre has brought in a “Signing Santa” and has therefore given the hearing impaired children of Denver the same opportunity that the children from the hearing world have to take part in the Christmas tradition. Many of the children brought pictures from magazines of the toys they would like for Christmas so that they could show Santa. Some older children were there to help mentor the younger children and help them communicate to Santa what they would like to see under their trees on Christmas morning.
Question of the month! Test yourself with our December question: Is Chinese a double- or single-byte language? (Answer can be found at the bottom of the newsletter)
EU addresses shortage of French interpreters
In November, European Commission representatives hosted a stand at the European Education Salon in Paris to encourage young people to consider a career in languages, amid fears that the EU will face a "serious shortage" of French-language interpreters within five to 10 years time.
"Without an increase in the number of qualified graduates leaving interpreting schools and universities, the EU institutions risk losing almost half of their French-speaking conference interpreters over the next decade," the European Commission warns, fearing "a potential crisis" in finding replacements for retiring French linguists. Students who visited the stand could obtain information about a career as an interpreter in the EU institutions, and could try interpreting for real using the 'Speech Repository', an e-learning tool for interpreters covering all 23 official EU languages.
The Commission said it wants "to make sure that young people know that interpreting can be an interesting career choice for university graduates with a good knowledge of languages".
A similar campaign will be launched before the end of the year to encourage young German speakers to consider an interpreting career at the EU institutions.
The “Alien Language” experiment
The Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit (LEC), has been trying to discover where language structure comes from by building miniature “alien” languages in the lab and watching how they evolve as they are passed on from one learner to the next. Some of these experiments were featured on the BBC programme Horizon.
Language allows us to understand utterances we have never heard before, because we can take sentences and decompose them into recombinable parts, like words and phrases. This makes language uniquely powerful and means that language structure looks as if it has been “designed” for communication.
What is the “alien language” experiment?
Normally, to explain the origins of design in nature, we appeal to Darwinian natural selection. This has led many to believe that humans evolved to have language structure encoded in our genes and in particular, that our brains have adapted to be good at learning language. LEC, on the otherhand, proposes an alternative approach: language has adapted to be good at being learned by us. This can happen because language evolves culturally through being repeatedly learned and used by generations of individuals. This is the process LEC aims to recreate in the laboratory, having previously demonstrated how it works in computer simulations. LEC creates a miniature artificial language involving random strings of syllables paired with alien fruit pictures. A volunteer tries to learn this language, and LEC tests him by asking him to produce what the alien would have said for each picture. This task proves to be very hard as the language has no structure.
However, the aim is to see how language evolves, not just how it is learned, so LEC has designed a kind of “Chinese Whispers” (a.k.a. “Telephone”) game but using whole languages. Put simply, a second volunteer is given the language that the first person produced to learn from. After this, the third person learns from the second and so on. The remarkable thing that happens is that, even though people are simply trying to give back exactly the language they were trained on, the language evolves. Over a few “generations” of participants in the experiment, the language gets easier and easier to learn. Eventually, the participants can even understand perfectly the alien sentences for fruit pictures they have never seen before.
Language, because it is culturally transmitted, is an evolutionary system in its own right. Many of the adaptive features of linguistic structure arise from this process rather than having to be encoded specifically in our genes. Of course, the human brain provides the essential scaffolding for the cultural evolution of language in the first place, but it need not specify all the details innately.
We offer Typesetting in all languages
Atlas’ typesetters handle all European languages, double-byte languages such as Chinese, Korean and Japanese and languages that flow from right to left, such as Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu. Typesetting rates are calculated by the page, depending on the complexity of the layout (graphs, tables, figures, pictures, etc), the format and the languages involved.
Being equally happy to adapt source language artwork or create new artwork from scratch, Atlas’ typesetters work on both Mac and Windows platforms and in a variety of formats, including Quark, PageMaker, Illustrator, Acrobat, In Design, Photoshop, Page Plus, Frame Maker, CorelDraw, PowerPoint, Word and many other packages.
Completed typeset artwork can be returned in an appropriate file format such as eps, hi-res PDF or as print-ready copy.
Click here to request a quote
Atlas would like to welcome new work placement Lina Balanta. Lina is from Cali, the city from where “salsa” originates, in southern Columbia. She is studying a BA in Modern Languages and Translation at Middlesex University. On completing her studies, her dream is to travel in Latin America, China and Italy and maybe settle in Italy to teach English and Spanish.
Atlas would like to congratulate Sofia on the birth of her baby boy! Sofia worked for Atlas as a Project Manager until 2004.
A quick reminder about the wide range of training courses Atlas will be hosting throughout 2010! These courses are aimed to cater for all your needs, whether you are a graduate wanting to start out as a freelancer, or a professional translator looking to expand your skills. We still have places available on our Voiceover for Beginners course s on Sat 27 February and Sat 27 March. Click here to enquire about our voiceocer courses. Please contact us for details about the other courses on offer in 2010.
In November and December, Atlas ran 7 different courses, all of which have been a huge success!
* Translation and editing for Polish translators
* Introduction to translation
* Setting up as a freelancer
* Trados Intermediate
* Which CAT tool?
* Working as a Project Manager
* Trados Beginners
Below you can see what people thought about some of the courses we’ve run to date:
“In my opinion it was a very useful course because it provided me with a better understanding of CAT tools. I had little clue about CAT tools before. I'm aware there is still much more to learn but this course has enabled me take a step forward. Also, it was great to be able to practice using the software as the trainer allowed us to install demos on our computers.”
Which CAT tool?
“I enjoyed this course and it was well organised. All the presentation material was clearly structured and accompanied with lots of helpful advice. In addition, I like the trainer's initiative in providing handouts and supplemental materials for further guidance.”
Setting up as a freelancer
“The trainer is great. She is very clear, positive and uses the software herself, thus she can understand what problems one may encounter. I really enjoyed it. It wasn’t only about theory as I also got to practice using the software. I had a document that I had to translate and she showed me how to do it with Trados and I did it! I never thought I would be able to start using it after a single one-day course, but I did!”
SDL Trados Level 1
“The course was truly inspirational!”
“I found this course very interesting and helpful. I had no idea there was so much a freelance translator has to remember when running a small business. The course taught me that being organised is the key to success. Working as a freelance translator not only requires good language skills but also many others, such as the ability to work under pressure and prioritise the workload.”
Translation and Editing for Polish Translations
"In this two-hour course Claire, the trainer, explained everything you need to know to work in the translation industry. Her course was great!”
Introduction to Translation
And finally… Each year, Atlas Translations makes donations to 3 charities rather than sending Christmas cards to its clients and suppliers. This year the charities chosen are Cancer Research UK, BLISS and Help for Heroes.
Please find some information below about the work of each charity:
Cancer Research UK Click here to visit their website
Cancer Research UK is the world's leading charity dedicated to research on the causes, treatment and prevention of cancer. Their vision is to conquer cancer through world-class research, aiming to control the disease within two generations. They support the work of over 3,000 scientists, doctors and nurses working across the UK. Their annual scientific spend is more than £213 million, which is raised almost entirely through public donations.
BLISS Click here to visit their website
Bliss, the special care baby charity, provides vital support and care to premature and sick babies across the UK. Founded nearly 30 years ago, Bliss offers guidance and essential information at a critical time in families' lives. Bliss also funds groundbreaking research and campaign for babies to receive the best possible level of care regardless of when and where they are born.
Help for Heroes Click here to visit their website
Bryn and Emma Parry founded Help for Heroes in October 2007 from a desire to help the wounded Servicemen and women returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. The message of the charity is simple: They are strictly non political and non critical; they simply want to help. They believe that anyone who volunteers to serve in time of war, knowing that they may risk all, is a hero. These are ordinary people doing extraordinary things and some of them are living with the consequences of their service for life. We may not be able to prevent our soldiers from being wounded, but together we can help them get better.
Answer to December question:
Chinese, Japanese and Korean are all double-byte languages. English, by contrast, is an alphabetic and therefore a single-byte language. Each letter in the English alphabet occupies a single byte in computer memory. The Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages are syllabic languages and each syllable occupies two bytes in computer memory.
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