are provided from any form of input, or modality to deliver via the internet an MS Word document in a look alike format – with a capacity of two thousand words a day, at GBP 75.00 per one thousand words, if I specify the delivery date, and you are happy with the delivery quoted.
Odd figures are rounded to the next 100 words. If you specify a different delivery date or condition, I may change the unit price in a bargaining process. Minimum amount (GBP 15.00) charged for 200 words. Public Service Interpreting I am going to apply for membership in the relevant Association (PSI), should my business justify it. Minimum charge of GBP 100.00 per day, plus costs and/or GBP 20.00 per hour. In the meantime I am available for telephone interpreting through thebigwordgroup LINK Payment
By bank transfer within eight days after delivery to my business account with HSBC. Translation using CAT tools or TMs, software localisation, etc.is also feasible. Open to any assignment subject to discussing details beforehand. Delivery Principles
First come, first served. If urgent and non significant amount is to be translated (anything under 200 words), you get priority/instant response service, especially if you are a returning customer.
Semantics In Informal Logic
Semantics as seen by formal logic is rubbish when it comes to applying it human languages. The reasons are clear humans are not machines and their language is not meant to be formally fixed for once and all, hence it will always remain semantically ambiguous. Read this article (LINK) to hear more
Posted by admin on Thursday 28 May 2009 - 18:27:14
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Language Technologies in online action
One of the recent examples of LT tools is visible on SKYNEWS television in the UK. A company produces online captions of what is being said by the people on and off screen. The words of various speakers are marked by different colours and the obvious and hilarious mistakes (misunderstanding of voice input due to incorrect chunking and selection of homophones) re eventually corrected or left as they were, making the reading of the captions a tiresome exercise. Now the translation of modalities, like speech to text or text to speech makes sense, but the desire to do that online, simulating a kind of human interpreter is a scam. Even if you assume that the program is capable of learning, the underlying philosophy must be to expect a string that the program is familiar with as it has already had a match approved by humans later, the information will be necessarily lost as it is always the new content where it is to be found. (In fact, by misunderstanding the text the program furnishes you with a lot of new, unexpected information which at the end of the day is garbage.) But this is not the most important issue in this short report. In Machine Translation where a text in L1 is translated into L2 by using TranslationMemories similarly to what is seen in the above television news service, you do not translate word for word, or you should not anyway, because what you are trying to do is to find a matching phrase describing a chunk of reality in L1 to make sense in L2too. Meaning is never complete without context, and the less you know about a subject, the more context will need to be made explicit. There is no suchthing as language competence and domain competence separately. If you do not have them both, do not translate anything meant to be a serious text, not a farce or a parody.
But the greatest lesson is not what is outlined above. This footage illustrates the fact that interpreting and/or translating employs a look ahead approach to the job, therefore there is no such thing as knowing a language and knowing your subject matter. Knowledge, skill and competence to translate go hand in hand. It is an anecdotal evidence that once a n interpreter was asked to translate a lecture on birdlife in Hungary and she/he was shown a picture of a cinke (tit). She/he said that it was a bird, then the slide of another songbird vörösbegy (robin) came, and she/he said it is another bird, and so on. In order to be able to translate any text, you need to know your subject inside out. Machine Translation does not have the ways to replace a qualified and professionalhumantranslator. Despite building more and more sentence pairs in the Translation Memory, the problem is not solved. Instead, you are creating a software dinosaur, like Windows is one of them already where you do not need 90 percent of the functionalities available. Just think about that.
Posted by admin on Friday 20 February 2009 - 08:33:29
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The Language Show
The Language Show - 31st Oct - 2nd Nov 2008 Olympia London
Click the right hand button on your mouse to listen to Some Chinese Music
The 2008 Language Show in London The 2008 Language Show in London Was an event that was a need to go, because I have been trying to find a job as an ESL teacher in the UK for quite some time, and the show had some promises for wannabe’s. Besides, as a person involved in developing new ideas in the language and applied linguistics markets I was interested to see the current panorama of what is going on worldwide. My number one motivation was terminated after a short while since I learnt that the opportunities are not for non-British citizens. If you want a teaching job in the UK, you need teaching experience in the UK. But you cannot get that, because of condition two. It was interesting that even some universities follow a similar policy. Like I was going to be interviewed for a lecturer position in translation by the Met Univ about a year ago, then they cancelled it, re-advertised the job with one more new criterion for eligibility – guess what – you need to be a British passport holder. So much about topic one. Or just one more related thing, I just remember another turn down on the basis of discrimination policies: The British Council openly wrote back to me that they would never recruit a new TESOL new teacher above 65. Good Morning Europe, wakie-wakie. As far as new development in the language teaching business, including various resources and teaching materials I saw what I expected to see, most of the publishers and language schools with all their latest temptation devices. It was interesting to find that the promoters of Chinese language learning have a lot to offer similarly to the promoters of minor languages, such as Catalan, Basque, or Galitian. Romania was also pushing her language while the Hungary stand was only pushing entertainment via tourism, as if it was a show on catering or hospitality. It may be due to an assumption that the new head of Hungarian Cultural Centre is personally not interested in such a waste of money as inviting people to learn Hungarian in these days when Hungary has nothing to be proud of.
The presence of software for language learning reflects the fact that the once simple process of learning is now intrinsically connected with learning first how to use the learning aids, before anything in terms of acquiring new knowledge or skills actually takes place. You find individual learning support (Helping Learning), which is an internet delivery of live teaching services, or assistive software for language learning (Claro Software) integrating resources to improve efficiency in dealing with language assignments in several languages. Other services are even more ambitious connecting classrooms all over the world to share educational projects and curricula (www.rafi.ki) online. Some of the exhibitors showed extreme courage and an interesting perception of reality. A German developer English Made Easy reformed the phonetic transcription of the English Language (www.saaspel.com), another chap produced a stack of traditionally printed memory cards to help memorising words whereas TaskMagic (www.taskmagic.co.uk) is a kind of authoring software to produce tailored games and exercises used for language learning. LINK offers a tool for reorganising classroom work around PCs easily and realistically, yet another company Sanako (formerly Tanberg) have moved from language lab hardware to integrating other PC applications into a set of classroom management tools. It is also about the use of multimedia without telling you when and why you may need to switch over from one medium to another. At the other end of the applications Gapfillers offer a device for personal usage on the move using mobile telephone technology. The idea is to chunk the daily assignments to suit a busy learner making use of his/her spare time (www.gapfillers.co.uk). Perhaps the most comprehensive set of products on CDs came from IClanguage LINK showing what a book can turn out to be, given the relatively cheap technology of digital visualisation and recording. But the language show was probably not the revision of all that there is for us today in the world in the above field. A Brasil author Patricia Lupion Torres and a UK professor have undertaken to give you a relatively full picture of recent developments and achievement in a book scheduled for print early next year. LINK The book is also advertised elsewhere as a book on applied ICT science LINK Her book where authors were invited to write on the subjects detailed at this website LINK is not the only venture of this kind as in Canada a similar publication was started earlier: LINK
Posted by admin on Sunday 02 November 2008 - 21:08:36
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HUNGARIAN INVENTIONS AND INVENTORS (EXCERPT)
HUNGARIAN INVENTIONS AND INVENTORS (EXCERPT) (COLLATED BY GYULA KRAMER)
Posted by admin on Sunday 02 November 2008 - 14:11:41
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Machine Translation and Translation Memories
Machine Translation and Translation Memories Machine Translation in its present form and implementation is not a blessing, but a curse. It is only good for those who are taking part in designing and producing products heavily sponsored by naive financiers. MT is nothing but the utilisation of paired sentences, one in L1 and another in L2. They are matched via their numeric identifiers and the match itself is examined through a statistical analysis of characters that is a morphological analysis of the texts – any text, subject matter being irrelevant. Now this solution in its basic form has been around for a long time. It is called EDI or Electronic Data Interchange. The main difference is that in EDI you get an exact translation of what you have on both sides, no messing around with texts that you do not understand on each side, because everybody sees the text in his/her native or original language. In MT, however you tend to have a non qualified translator, a simple match-maker of instances from a bilingual paired corpora, whose job is to check when the match is not 100%, whether by modifying the new segment, you can get a perfect match or not. Now since the corpora may be homogenous, you seem to be working efficiently, producing more „translation” than otherwise. But that is not true. And it is not just efficiency, but quality at risk. Serious problems may occur despite the continuous development of the software to get rid of the snags. Blunders do happen. In case of a nearly 100% match where in one sentence you have 120 ml, and 210µ in the other, you will notice that the numbers are different, so you change them accordingly, and you may overlook the unit. Well, you may not, but somebody did, it is a true story. Another true story illustrates the point. But you need a little background info. Working with a MT software you do not see the original context of a segment so you may not remember the book form and forget that a line is from a table or a free running page. The context therefore is slightly different and can be deceptive as in the illustration below. If you read Hungarian, then it is an exercise for you and try to answer the question. If you do not, just read on.
In the context of the book (how to make interviews for employment, hiring) the meaning of word application in Hungarian (alkalmazás) may pop in first, despite the fact that alkalmazás has at least two different connotations, such as employment and application, and application has again two different meanings, such as alkalmazás és felvételi kérelem, the latter being the document sent in to apply for a job, which should have been written there. And that meaning was missed out when that page was translated on a word by word match (100%) in the above example. Do you want more? You can, but nor form free, I am afraid. Therefore Six Sigma quality control will never be attainable in such an environment, and the rest of QA is a matter of faith, not reality. In reality, translation is not and should not be focused around finding the right word or matching texts on the basis of morphological analysis. Those working with AI already realise that, but they have a problem: they have not identified the „terminal symbols” as yet, and a couple of other items that are needed for a top down approach to MT. But it is in the air. And they know that there is a tremendous lot to be gained or lost once and for all. What translation is about should be clear: orientation in reality. In one chunk of reality (C1) objects have names in L1, in another chunk of reality (C2) in L2. If you need to translate anything on C1 into L2 from L1, you need to find the relevant expressions in L2 on C1. It is as simple as that. If there are no words for the details of C1, you need to create words in compliance with the word formation rules of L2 – and you should seek agreement about the solutions or equations between two speakers, a speaker of L1 and L2 and a speaker L2 and L1 who not only speak the two languages, but are also knowledgeable about C1 and c2. Without the latter they will produce crap in some of the time and in some of the assignments. Therefore you need to have a proper definition of the word translation itself.
Posted by admin on Friday 01 February 2008 - 09:58:51
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Welcome
Genezistan
What is all that about?
The word is concocted from genezis and tan. Genezis (Γένεσις) means "birth", or “origin", while tan is a Hungarian word meaning a “study” or the part of the words ending in -ics in English/Latin (like Economics, Linguistics, etc.)
I am using it to tag my ideas about the subject of „in the beginning” especially in the fields of language, cognition and computing.
My hopes that keep me moving in such a direction of interest are that sooner or later I find other people similarly interested and even willing to pursue the practical applications of anything discovered along my or our intellectual journey.
I believe that when we are lost in the woods or in a maze, we need to change our perspective. We may even have to start from scratch, or to go back to the drawing board. In order to do so, we need to step out from the framework of ideas or paradigm that we have been using and must have the courage to risk the chance of going down the road alone. But are we not all going alone towards a disgraceful end?
Newbury, 06 06 09
Ez az oldal e107 portál rendszert használ, és a GNU GPL licensz alatt lett kiadva .
