The BBC recently featured and article on the language of love which listed a number of (some unusual) terms of endearment used in different languages, and a Dictionary of Affectionyms (Terms of Endearment) has just been published in Polish. This inspired me to remember some of the terms I came across when living in and visiting different countries, and I decided to check out the situation in the Polish language of love again – on the premise that language evolves all the time, and there might be new developments in that area.

Terms of endearment (aka pet-names etc.) are words which may not in the new context bear any resemblance to the original meaning, for example when calling your significant other: “baby-doll”, “munchkins” or "pumpkin". Some words are clearly derived from each other, such as "sweetheart", "sweetie", and "sweetie-pie", while others bear no etymological resemblance, such as "baby" and "cutie". "Honey" has been documented as a term of endearment as far back as the 14th century. "Baby" was supposedly first used in 1839 and "sugar" only appears as recently as 1930.

In most cases terms of endearment are simply nicknames or pet-names for people in some close or intimate relationship (lovers, partners, friends, family members). Many such terms are only used when two people are alone with each other and sometimes they are used only in specific situations, very occasionally or even on a single special occasion. It is quite a volatile linguistic phenomenon and hence difficult to study. The Polish researchers behind the Dictionary of Affectionyms (“Czułe słowka” - Agnieszka Zygmunt i Mirosław Bańko)  and other researchers in this field (Jacek Perlin, Maria Milewska)  have come across some interesting findings.

In general:

1. Terms of endearment reveal little or nothing about the true quality of the relationship in question;
2. It is not true that nations considered (stereotypically) to be ‘more romantic” (eg. Spaniards, Italians ) are also linguistically more developed in this department;
3. In fact, it seems that Poles and the Dutch are considered the most developed nations in terms of the sheer amount and their creativity for terms of endearment;
4. Spanish endearments are usually very poetic and somewhat exalted;
5. The Dutch and Polish languages are known for the greatest proliferation of animal associated terms of endearment;
6. Dutch terms are sometimes based on abstract humour, while the Spanish ones are rarely humorous at all;
7. Dutch terms of endearment are not usually childish, while the Italian ones frequently are;
8. In both Polish and French quite a few terms of endearment refer to somewhat ‘disgusting’ animals or use words that would be considered derogative in the original meaning.

It is therefore obvious that, like idioms, terms of endearment stem from our individual and/or national creativity and linguistic imagination, so it is very difficult to create a comprehensive dictionary of these terms because, apart from some traditionally popular terms, the genre evolves quickly and in an unpredictable way. Also, people are quite willing to share the traditional and typical terms but less inclined to volunteer the details of actual ‘bedroom talk” (aka dirty talk).  Obviously, what sounds great in certain intimate contexts, would in most public situations be considered gross or downright ridiculous. 

There is quite a lot of political correctness when it comes to the typical situations and popular terms of endearment. They say Carla Bruni calls Sarky “Chouchou”, Michelle refers to Barack Obama as ‘honey”, and the Christian Grey character may be into BDSM but he still usually refers to Ana as “baby”.  Some terms of endearment are popular in many languages – “baby”, “angel”, “sweetheart”, and ‘love”, for example. But there are many interestingly local and culture-specific terms.

Here are some examples of the language of love around the world – taken from the above mentioned articles, dictionary, and personal research.

1. Little cabbage (French)

Petit chou

“Chou” (cabbage) is the French equivalent of “sweetheart”.

2. Pumpkin (Brazil / Portuguese)

Chuchuzinho

“Chuchu” is the word for “squash” – but strangely similar to the French “chouchou”.

3. Egg with eyes (Japanese)

Tamago gata no kao

In Japan, women are frequently called “an egg with eyes” by those who love them.

4. Lump of sugar (Spanish)

Terron de azucar

Like “honey” in English, sweet foodstuffs of one kind or another make popular terms of endearment in numerous languages.

5. Fruit of my heart (Indonesian)

Buah hatiku

Although the term can be used romantically, featuring in love songs and poems, today it is most often used to express affection for children.

6. My flea (French)

Ma puce

“Ma puce” is roughly equivalent to “sweetie” in English.

7. Gazelle (Arabic)

Ghazal

Classical Arabic poetry abounds with the imagery of beautiful gazelles (i.e women with beautiful eyes - metaphorically speaking).

Habibi/habibati  (my love) is probably still the most popular term of endearment in Arabic.

8. Little elephant (Thai)

Chang noi

Elephants are the dearest of animals to Thai people.

9. Diving fish swooping geese (Chinese)

Chen yu luo yan

Based on classical Chinese legends of two of the most beautiful Chinese women ever. At the sight of one the fish would dive to the bottom of a lake, at the sight of the other the geese would swoop from the skies.

10. Little dove (Russian)

Golubchik (masc) / golubushka (fem)

Pushkin used the word “little dove” to refer affectionately to his elderly nanny in the lines of one of his best-known poems, but she could equally have used it to refer to him, when he was a child (and probably did). This term is popular not only in Russian but also other Slavic languages.

Polish

The Polish language which is traditionally quite deficient in explicit sexual vocabulary makes up for this by being incredibly prolific when it comes to terms of endearment. The above mentioned dictionary was preceded by some research and it seems that it is not only a question of sheer numbers but the Polish language can also boast a wide range of these terms. The typical categories would naturally be:

Animal-related: 

misiu (teddy bear), kotku (little cat), kurczaczku (chick), myszko (little mouse), żabciu (froggie), gołąbeczku (little dove), sroczko (little magpie), tygrysku (litte tiger), pszczółko (little bee), rybko (little fishy), żuczku (little beatle) etc.

Traditional romantic:

kochanie (love), księżniczko (princess), królowo (queen), maleńka (little one), laleczko (little doll), serce (heart), jedyna moja (my  only one), słoneczko (little sun), skarbie (treasure), laska (babe) etc.

However, some Polish terms of endearment seem to be quite unique and difficult to classify (especially the ones referring to men):

kruszynko (breadcrumb), dzikusku (little savage), dziadzie/dziadu (old fart), brzydalu (ugly one), capie (goat), pączusiu (little donut), robaczku (little worm), kluseczko (little noodle), mysiu-pysiu (mouse-snout), mój złoty (my golden one), chujku (little dick) etc.

One thing is certain, in both Dutch and Polish (the most popular languages for terms of endearment) the key thing is to use the diminutive form of a word.In Polish this would mean that the word will usually end in “-ek”,”-czka“, “-czku”, ”-siu“. This seems to be the key to success when creating original terms of endearment.

Upon reflection, I suspect that there is a world of fantastic and original terms of endearment out there in all languages that have not been mentioned in any study or in any articles I have come across on this subject.

Please share if you have any favourite, particularly outrageous or charming ones.

See also:

http://natemat.pl/15415,tesknoto-malenka-myszku-czule-slowka-po-polsku
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22699938
http://www.edulandia.pl/edukacja/1,101856,7549847,Polakow_czule_slowka.html#ixzz2UnZGPmtJ

Two members of the audience were unimpressed with Mark Childress’ lecture at TM-Europe. When he started speaking both looked up and showed a mild interest in this tall American with a deep voice who regularly quotes someone called Yogi Berra, allegedly a baseball philosopher. However, when Mark started talking our two unimpressed audience members seemed to take the view that terminology was worthy but dull and settled down to have a snooze. These two members of the audience were dogs. The people in the audience heard an excellent lecture on terminology. Kevin Lossner, who owns these two dogs will probably protest that they were in fact incredibly interested in everything that went on at TM-Europe 2012, but we know he’s lying.

Mark was the keynote speaker who opened TM-Europe 2012. The conference theme was The Future of Translation and we wanted to make a point by having a presentation on terminology open the conference. Mark gave a lecture and a very interesting lecture it was too. He brought up major issues with how terminology is used with real examples. He discussed how terminology can bewilder as well as inform. He also gave examples where using the terminology which is commonly understood rather than the terminology of the experts can save lives.

There is a lot of discussion at other conferences and on social and other media about the future of translation. Some commentators paint a future of automated, commoditized, lower quality translation. The people who are suggesting this is the future look like they know what they are talking about. This future of large LSPs brokering translation and machine translation vendors automating all in sight looks impressive. To paraphrase a wonderful line from Raymond Chandler: From thirty feet away they look like a lot of class. From ten feet away they look like they were meant to be seen from thirty feet away.

At TM-Europe we were discussing a different future. It was a future where words matter, language matters and there is absolutely nothing wrong with aiming for excellence. The second keynote speaker, Chris Durban made a very strong case for this pursuit of excellence and the premium market. Chris is an international business woman, a business analyst, a marketing expert, an entrepreneur and she has the words ‘Freelance Translator’ written on her business card. Her presentation received a lot of attention on twitter and in other blogs. Chris’ message is about being focused, being specialized and aiming for the premium market. She showed how she helped her clients to realize the importance of translation. Her stories of winning business always seemed to start with respect for the client and an understanding of their issues. She mentioned signing your work as way of taking responsibility for quality.

Stefan Gentz gave an excellent presentation on Change Management. He illustrated how we all have slightly different perspectives by asking everyone to stand up close their eyes and point north. As you can imagine not everyone was pointing in the same direction.

Reinhard Schaler took one particular aspect of the future, Social Localisation as the topic for his presentation. It is often the case when Reinhard gets up to speak he uses a video or music clip to illustrate his point. This time he used Randy Newman’s song Political Science (No one likes us – I don’t know why!) to illustrate the ‘Why don’t they just speak English’ attitude of some developers. Reinhard’s account of TM-Europe is available here: http://reinhardschaler.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/no-one-likes-us-i-dont-know-why-tm-europe-warsaw-3-4-october-2012/

Alain Chamsi, CEO, JiveFusion Technologies, Martin Beuster of Context and Doug Strock of Global Language Translations and Consulting gave excellent presentations on process and project management. The Technology Showcase had presentations from Paul Filkin of SDL, Gábor Ugray of Kilgray and Bastian Enners of Plunet. This was followed by an overview of research in NLP and other technologies from Dr. Maciej Ogrodniczuk of the Polish Academy of Science and Piotr Pęzik, of the University of Łódź.

Kevin Lossner, the owner of the dogs mentioned above, said somewhere his presentation was a rant. I am not sure of this but it certainly was a lively heart full opinion on a range of subjects. He wrote about it on his blog: http://www.translationtribulations.com/2012/10/the-buck-stops-where.html. Kevin spoke together with Doug Strock and Michal Tyszkowski of Centrum Lokalizacji C&M on a panel dealing with machine translation. The title of this presentation asked whether MT was hype. The discussion here had little hype and those using MT had a very realistic view of how it can be used. Michal compared it to packet soup. He pointed this was widely used a base ingredient for other things and rarely used on its own. Michal claimed the same was true of MT.

We had hoped that the translator, Miguel Llorens would join us for the MT panel and for The Warsaw Pact Debate. Sadly he died a few weeks before the conference. We used a presentation made up of twitter and blog quotes from Miguel as a background for the MT debate. As I got to decide which quotes to use I was able to include one of my favourite tweets from him which had absolutely nothing to do with the subject being discussed: The main question archaeologists of the future will have about our civilization: "Why did they have so many goddamned headphones?"

You can download the full presentation of Miguel quotes here: http://www.tm-europe.org/sites/default/files/Miguel-quotes.pptx

I took part in another panel discussion on standards along with Jerzy Czopik,Freelance Translator and Odette LIÉTAR of IDEST. Monika Popiolek chaired this lively discussion where there were many interesting contributions from the floor.

The conference ended with The Warsaw Pact Debate. We had Chris Durban, Mark Childress, Doug Strock and Reinhard Schaler. I only realized later that this combination of translator, end customer, lsp and academic was perfectly balanced. However, that was not the reason we picked these people. We picked them because we thought they would have some interesting things to say. They did! It was a very lively and interesting debate. One of the things I got out of this is marketing is crucial to improving your business and career and you need to allocate time for marketing.

This was the fifth TM-Europe conference. Susan Starling suggested that with the amount of people blogging about TM-Europe it might lose its reputation as the best kept secret of translation Industry conference. It would be great to welcome more people next year as well as welcome back those who attended this and previous year. I would to thank everyone who made it a successful conference, the programme committee of Mark Childress, Kevin Lossner, Monika Popiolek and myself, the speakers, those who blogged and tweeted and above all those who came to the conference.

See you for TM-Europe 2013.

Reinhard’s blog

http://reinhardschaler.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/no-one-likes-us-i-dont-know-why-tm-europe-warsaw-3-4-october-2012/

Kevin’s blog on TM-Europe

http://www.translationtribulations.com/2012/10/the-future-of-translation-now-in-warsaw.html

Kevin’s blog on Kevin’s presentations

http://www.translationtribulations.com/2012/10/the-buck-stops-where.html

Valerij Tomaranko’s blog

http://anmerkungen-des-uebersetzers.com/2012/10/08/tm-europe-2012-putting-a-face-to-a-name/

Jayne Fox’s blog

http://foxdocs.biz/BetweenTranslations/the-bulk-vs-premium-translation-market-inspiration-from-the-tm-europe-twitter-stream/

TM-Europe Facebook Album (thanks to Stefan Gentz)

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.189691217832483.46812.100003748172867&type=1&l=34bf32297f

We were all very sad to hear that Miguel Llorens passed away recently. It happened very suddenly, just a couple of weeks before he was due to participate in The Warsaw Pact Debate and the panel discussion on machine translation at the TM-Europe International Conference 2012 (3-5 October 2012, Warsaw) .

He was very much missed and often quoted at TM-Europe Conference. I am very sorry to have missed the opportunity to meet him in person. But as a tribute to this talented and provocative individual, I have published some of his memorable quotes below.

His comment on the invitation to speak at TM-Europe 2012
I'm being invited to something called the "Warsaw Pact Debate" for an October MT conference. I honestly know nothing about nuclear weapons." - Miguel Llorens

*

"Seven Similarities Between the Machine Translation Crowd and a Religious Sect

1.- Both fervently await a significant event that is in the future, but constantly deferred (the Second Coming, the Rapture, alien invasions, the day when machine translation [MT] is actually useful).

2.- Both gather periodically at ritual events to recite incantatory nonsense (covens, black masses, localization conferences).

3.- Both demand that you renounce all your worldly possessions in favor of a fuzzy afterlife no one has ever seen (Heaven, Paradise and the 72 virgins, well-paid post-editing).

4.- Both seek to alienate you from your loved ones and take all your money.

5.- Both solicit funding on the basis of preposterous premises.

6.- Both demand a significant amount of blind faith.

7.- Both have been denounced as farces by Richard Dawkins.

(I’m not actually sure about this last one)." - Miguel Llorens, 15 June, 2011

*

"'The main question archeologistsof the future will have about our civilization: "Why did they have so many goddamned headphones?'" - Miguel Llorens

*

"A reader calls me a 'conservative when it comes to the translation business' because of criticism of MT and crowdsourcing.

I suppose I am a conservative if innovation means producing shitty work."- Miguel Llorens

*

"Allegedly, we are facing a case in which demand for a service has expanded fantastically but the price per unit of that service has dropped." - Miguel Llorens

*

"Language Technology Isn’t Getting Better, Our Expectations Are Just Getting Lower" - Miguel Llorens

*

"When we push back the curtains, however, we find a huge hamster wheel powered by thousands of underpaid and underqualifiedtranslators post-editing stuff the agency downloaded from Google Translate." - Miguel Llorens

*

"Ha! Finally did it! I replied to an agency query asking them to "please provide your best rate." #HowYouLikeThemApples?" - Miguel Llorens

*

"McLocalization: –The Answer to a Question Nobody Asked" - Miguel Llorens

*

"My God, all these vacationing bankers returned to work today and they want me to translate the equivalent of the BaghavadGita in two hours." - Miguel Llorens

*

"Google Books asks me for my location. That's endearing. Oh, don't be coy, Google. You know I know you know where I am 24 hours a day." - Miguel Llorens

*

"Ok. I am a translator. Power is why I got into this game (not the sex... not the money...)." - Miguel Llorens

RIP Professional Translator!

Source of all the quotes - Miguel Llorens' blog & twitter

Copyright: Miguel Llorens

For more insightful and frequently hilarious posts visit Miguel Llorens' blog: http://traductor-financiero.blogspot.com

Following a period of relative calm, a new series of tweets, a blog article by Arle Lommel on 27 April, and a rather strange email from a French LSP recently appeared on the grapevine stating, in general, that: 1) it has been announced that the European Telecommunications Standards Initiative (ETSI) have been selected by LISA to take over their ‘open’ industry standards, 2) that the European Telecommunications Standards Initiative (ETSI) “has agreed to accept responsibility for the LISA open standards works”, and 3) that this is very good news.

Firstly, I have not been able to find any such “official announcement” by ETSI or LISA to this effect – on their website or anywhere else, so I am very much confused about who exactly has made this announcement on behalf of the entities in question and on what authority. Secondly, the only people that seem to be saying that this would actually be good news and welcomed by the industry are people that are not actually involved in standards work, and Arle Lommel.

Well, if these unconfirmed announcements turn out to be true, I don’t think it will be particularly welcomed by those in our industry who are actually involved in, or knowledgeable about standards, and I personally would not call any such development “good news”. On the contrary, it would mean that once again the ambitions of some individuals and strange goings-on have taken precedence over openness, best practice and looking out for our industry’s best interest.

I have already mentioned what was stated and implied in the above mentioned communication and I think several matters require clarification in this context. The facts concerning the potential overlap in the scope of the two organisations are as follows:

1) ETSI is a respected standards body and has developed some important standards in some technical fields. Their work to date has fitted exactly their own description of themselves as producing: “globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, converged, broadcast and internet technologies” (source: ETSI website).

2) The LISA standards are XML standards for the translation and localisation industry, and that is a completely different field of specialisation. It is true to say that the ‘communicative” element is inherent in many technologies, standards and activities but to say that there is any real overlap or synergies between what ETSI has been involved in so far and the LISA standards efforts, would be untrue. The fact is that ETSI deal with the underlying technologies used to transfer data in different systems while the LISA standards were concerned with language assets. Therefore, it seemed ridiculous to me from the beginning that anyone would seriously suggest ETSI as a continuator of the LISA work on our industry standards.

I have been involved in standards development in the translation industry since 1998 and have worked with both OASIS and ISO TC 37 TCs. As long as I have been involved with our industry standards I have never heard any mention of ETSI as an organisation which was interested in developing standards for the translation and localisation industry. It was recently mentioned in a blog by Arle that public opinion within our community was divided on this subject ‘with larger users tending to support ETSI and tech developers tending more to support OASIS.’ Frankly speaking, I find this statement incredible and unbelievable, and I am prepared to bet that by “larger users” he actually means a couple of companies, and he should definitely say who they are. In fact, I would love to see some solid data and names to support this improbable statement about our industry’s support for an organisation that most people have never even heard of.

Another fact, I have been told, was that ETSI has in fact been lobbying some large companies to get their support for moving into ‘a new field of standards development – namely the language industry’. But there is surely a huge difference between planning to move into a new field and begin work on some new standards, and actually claiming any experience or expertise in this field and making a serious bid to take on the work carried on for over two decades by many industry experts. Another fact that I find strange in these lobbying efforts is the idea that ETSI and the supporting companies would initiate an unfair campaign together against other standards organisations such as OASIS and Unicode, who are firmly established in our industry for standards and would be considered as logical heirs to the LISA body of open standards both by industry experts and laymen alike.

I fully appreciate that ETSI might like to broaden its ICT standards base to include language industry standards, and they may see acquiring the LISA standards as a way of doing this. I can also fully appreciate the fact that they might be lobbying for the LISA standards by asking Arle Lommel to make all sorts of more or less substantiated statements, or involve  a friendly French LSP (from their home turf) to do some enthusiastic PR on their behalf, or even the fact that they might think that a couple of phone calls to some managers might be helpful to their cause. In other words, it is perfectly valid for ETSI to want to broaden their scope, but I do not see how this benefits the translation and localisation industry, and I do not understand why the new ETSI pundits and lobbyists take it upon themselves to also mislead and misinform the general public about certain fundamental facts.

One such misleading fact is that ETSI allows any expert to be involved in standards development whether or not they are members of ETSI and there are no fees involved (as is the case with OASIS or Unicode). It’s an interesting piece of news, except it seems to be far from accurate. In fact, at ETSI, just like any other standards organisation, technical committees (TCs) are actually responsible for standards development and they are open only to full and associate members. Section 1.4 of the ETSI Technical Working Procedures states clearly who can participate in technical committees. It also states that observers and non-members are only allowed to attend meetings on an exceptional and temporary basis and must apply to attend in writing. The authorisation to attend is limited to three meeting or six months whichever is shorter. By default of course, such observers have no vote or any real say in the actual standards development, their participation is subject to approval and might be difficult to achieve in practice or turn out to be a futile exercise. Another misleading suggestion was that non-members would be welcome in the ETSI Industry Specification Group which a number of people have said that ETSI will establish for the translation and localisation industry. However section 3.4 of the ETSI Technical Working Procedures sets the same stipulations as above and allows only for participation of non-members on an exceptional and temporary basis. There is no mention of a time limit here, but there is mention that non-members will have to pay a per meeting fee and will have no right of vote. So, it seems, that the ETSI rules are quite typical, and there are no special conditions or preferences, so nobody should be making any promises or suggestions otherwise. Similar to all other organisations, at ETSI you don’t get to have much say unless you join properly and pay a membership fee. Also, you can ask or be asked to participate as a non-voting expert for free (or at a lower fee) but your request will be processed according to similar procedures as anywhere else and your power to influence the proceedings might be very limited. One way or another, you will have no real say for free, and the saying that ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’ still applies.

So, to sum it all up: 1) we are being told by certain individuals that ETSI has made an official statement to the effect that they will formally be given (or transferred) the LISA standards and will be in charge of maintaining and developing them from now on. But, such an official announcement does not seem to have been formally issued so far by LISA or ETSI, and no details of any such deal have been disclosed; 2) We are being told that this is ‘great news’ because ETSI is the best possible ‘location to host the LISA standards’. But there is absolutely nothing to substantiate this claim because ETSI has neither the record,  nor expertise in translation and localisation standards work, and seems a very unlikely candidate for any such responsibility by comparison with, for example, OASIS or Unicode.  – what is more, ETSI’s focus is primarily on Europe and this important point seems to have escaped the attention of many people; 3) We are being told that ETSI allows non-members to participate in their technical committees and Industry Specification Groups without any charges. The suggestion is that being involved in standards development within ETSI will be for free (as opposed to the cost involved when working with organisations like OASIS, Unicode or W3C). According to a very reliable source – published ETSI directives - this is not the case. In fact, if you look at the membership fee pricing scheme at ETSI, it appears to be a very expensive organisation to join, if you actually wish to become involved in standards development.

Therefore, given the above facts, we must conclude that the pundits lobbying on behalf of ETSI must either be completely ignorant of the actual facts and rules that govern standards development and industry experts groups participation at ETSI, or they are spreading silly gossip and misleading us on purpose. I cannot help but wonder what might be the goal behind this misinformation campaign and what is the real agenda. It will be very interesting to see, for example, if and who ETSI decides to employ as industry consultants and what they refer to as “Specialist Task Force Experts”.

The OSCAR group which developed the standards within LISA have officially proposed that the standards should be put in the public domain so that any organisation could work with them. The LISA members that I have personally spoken to in the past month and various standards development experts who have voiced their views at events, or in various online discussions, are predominantly in favour of the LISA standards being taken over by a dedicated industry standards organisations such as OASIS. Recent developments, would seem to suggest, that in spite of the prevailing opinions, campaigning on behalf of ETSI is going strong. Either, this is all codswallop or somebody at LISA has suddenly decided that the standards had to be transferred to one specific organisation, and that organisation is ETSI. It is a pity that the real justification for this is not being provided, and people are being misled once again. I have seen nothing to convince me that ETSI is a good home for the LISA standards, and I am not impressed by some of the lobbying activities going on. It is my opinion that there are not enough people doing the actual work of developing standards for translation and localisation to justify all this sort of political campaigning. At the end of the day, I still hope that facts and reason will prevail, and all will be well in the world again.

I have often expressed the view that our industry is absolutely fascinating because of its relative immaturity and frequent lack of sync with the business world out there. Apart from the easily identifiable educational and perceptual gaps, there are a lot more correlations to be found with other immature industries.

For example, another typical gap is the standard of communication and professionalism. With the popularization of social media, typical self-promotion and industry politics are increasingly mistaken for actual involvement in specific ventures or even expertise in a given field. Thus, marketing and sales people very frequently present themselves as domain experts, failed entrepreneurs routinely become business consultants, and localization course attendees are quickly elevated to the status of technology gurus. In general, in our industry people are very happy to except most statements at face value for no apparent reason at all. And of course, everyone knows absolutely everything about standards, or at least they have an opinion on the subject.

Another typical phenomenon is that whenever something important around standards is announced in our industry, there is a whole crowd of entrepreneurial individuals and organizations that wish to get on the band wagon asap. Sadly, a whole lot of other people take  these empty declarations seriously, ignore the blatant arrogance involved, and actually expect something positive to happen as a result of these declarations.

My little personal friend Jeromobot (whom I keep safely locked up in my personal safe where he will remain until our industry maturity model resembles anything close to a standard curve) or perhaps Jost Zetzsche (I never know which one of them is actually doing the writing) just wrote a very interesting article related to all the recent 'goings on' around standards. The recommended article is "Looking for a Safe Place to Live!" and was published in the most recent "188th Tool Kit" Newsletter (31.03.2011) - http://www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit/current.html.

The author makes several very sensible comments and presents some valid points concerning the recent announcements made by TAUS (the Translation Automation User Society, about them ‘taking on the role of an ‘industry watchdog for interoperability” by funding a "dashboard" that will track compliance of the various tools, particularly to TMX, XLIFF, etc., and GALA (the Globalization and Localization Association) and their newest standards initiative which will "seek input from localization buyers and suppliers, tool developers, and various partner localization and standards organizations by hiring Arle Lommel (formerly of LISA) to be in charge of this new program and "explore funding options for a long-term, stable standards program that is available to all in the industry."

What is really noteworthy in these and similar announcements is the combination of ambition and arrogance that is directly proportional to ignorance about industry standards, and lack of any real commitment to do actual development work. It is hardly surprising that while many people were confused and duped as usual, there were also a lot of negative comments from people actually involved with, or knowledgeable about, standards work.

As people quite rightly point out, TAUS is a semi-commercial venture and mainly represents large translation buyers, while GALA represents predominantly translation companies. Both do not represent any significant segment of the industry and are basically dedicated to promoting the interests of their members (some odd 400 companies) and their illustrious leaders – which is actually quite natural. What is more, neither organization has any previous record of developing or publishing any standards whatsoever.

Given the above, my personal message to all of our industry’s the self-declared ‘watch-dogs’, ‘top-dogs’, and ‘hot [air]-dogs” is this: Why don’t you guys first try and find out something about the standards that you wish to embrace so passionately. Then try joining some standardization organization and become a member of a TC, pay some fees, and try doing some standards development work yourself. And after you’ve contributed pro public bono to standards development and invested your own time, money and effort for a couple of years, you might lose the urge to run around in short pants blowing your own trumpet and start behaving like professionals who deserve to be treated seriously.

The reality behind standards work is that there is a very small group of experts that actually develop these industry standards at their own expense within a very small group of professional organizations (ISO, OASIS, Unicode, sometimes CEN and LISA, and one or two others), and the people that develop the standards do not normally try to cash in on them or otherwise promote themselves by coming out with all sorts of “hot air” initiatives. They just do the work because it interests them, makes sense, benefits the industry, and society as a whole.

We live in a day and age where anybody can check the credibility, expertise and credentials of any individual on the planet at just a click of the mouse, and yet many people are very happy to give up this privilege, prefer to choose ignorance over rational behaviour and, given the right circumstances, will happily worship any prophet that makes some suitably bombastic declarations, or learns how to use Twitter to pester other people at work.

I sometimes imagine that Ralph Nader would flip backwards if he saw people in our industry give credibility, and frequently pay good money, to read and listen to self-styled experts who they would never ever dream of buying a used car from.

Well, instead of constantly muttering “O tempora, o mores!”, we should all honestly acknowledge that our industry gets exactly the sort of experts that it deserves. Or just shrug, because as we say in Poland, “the dogs may bark, but the caravan just keeps moving on”.

P.S.

It has been announced by very important industry media that pending memoQfest (held on April 15, 2011, in Budapest) special measures and preparations to protect Jeromobot more adequately this time around are under way. However, Al Jazeera has just reported that there is another terrorist plot brewing on the wild steppes of our industry, and Jeromobot may once again be in danger of being abducted and taken hostage by fanatics. So, let’s all extend our support and keep Jeromobot – in the safe !

Warsaw is really beautiful at the end of September.  I know you possibly have images of white winters in Poland but trust me, summer likes this city and usually tries to stay that bit longer and amazes us with spectacular Indian Summers. Hence, Warsaw is a great place to spend the last few days of September. You will be feeling very good after the brilliant presentation you have just delivered at TM-Europe 2011. A dozen or so attendees will have tweeted immediately about how insightful your presentation was and one will even tweet about how well you looked. You are finishing a beer with some new friends and notice from the business cards that these are the people your sales director told you to meet. What could be more pleasant?

Now you want to know how to achieve this dream. It is very simple  - go to the TM-Europe 2011 website and have a look at the call for papers, http://www.tm-europe.org/callforpapers2011, then write down what you've been meaning to say for years, and submit a proposal. You have until April 30th to submit a paper. This year the conference theme is “Process Management and Standards for the Translation and Localisation Industry”.  The conference gets quite a few submissions and the ones which get selected are those that adhered to the criteria announced in the call for papers and present the most insightful views and original angles.

The second XLIFF Symposium takes place on the pre-conference day of TM-Europe 2011 and the call for papers for that event will be published within a couple of weeks.

The TM-Europe International Conference is a lively event where you get to meet many translation industry people who do not notmally attend other conferences. One of the great things about the conference is the level of expertise, originality and good humour among the audience. It is also a great opportunity to enjoy Warsaw in September and enjoy the famous Polish hospitality.

Following a presentation by Jaap van der Meer at the LISA standards summit a number of people have been expressing the view that translation memory as we currently know it will not be around in five years. I think they are wrong and I would like to explain why.

Those that claim that translation memory is on the way out have come to this conclusion because they believe that statistical machine translation is becoming more and more important and as the corpus for large MT engines such as the Google one grow, translation memory will become increasingly irrelevant. There are even claims that while translation memory may be here in five years it will not have an economic value.

There is a huge volume of commercial translation which goes through translation memory tools and a relatively small volume using machine translation tools. However, recently the amount of commercial organisations using machine translation has grown and there is a very large amount of non-commercial machine translation being done, particularly through Google. That said, if an organisation wants a quality translation for professional purposes they are likely to use a translation agency or translators who uses a translation memory tool.

One of the ideas behind the belief that the translation memory is on the way out is that the larger the corpus the better and we will soon get to a stage where an enormous corpus will produce almost perfect results from statistical machine translation engines. I believe there is an optimum level with statistical machine translation. The law of diminishing returns kicks in when you get beyond this level. There are more possibilities for errors in both the corpus and how systems manage it and even for creative sabotage. Google give translators and everyone else the opportunity to provide a better translation. While this will usually improve it, there is an opportunity to sabotage the corpus or at least make it funnier. Use Google Translate to translate ‘Quid Pro Quo’ from Latin to English for an example of this. However, I have no idea what the optimum level will prove to be.

The value behind translation memory is that a professional translation has worked on the matching segments or corpus. Translation memory is of greatest value when the content of the translation memory matches closely the content of the document to be translated. Translator and translation agencies are often specialists. They may work for the same customers for a long time and often concentrate on particular subject matter. Statistical machine translation such as Google’s may be able to offer a gist of a document but unless the corpus has matches which originated from a professional translator and matches their areas of expertise it cannot offer the same value as a well maintained translation memory. As long as translation memory continues to make translation work easier it will be used. I believe that in five years there may be changes but we are more likely to see improvements with translation memory than its demise.