GlobeGlotter Translation

28/08/2022

This is the fifth time in a little less than a fortnight that the maintainer of this page is faced with a phishing attempt of this kind and reported it to Facebook. Although the approach is fairly unsophisticated and its goal not hard to “rumble”, a distracted page admin might not get suspicious and still fall for it on the spur of the moment. So what's taking Facebook so long to get this under control?

These posts follow a shock-and-awe strategy by including tags for up to 40 pages that are clumsily hidden out of the initially collapsed post's display range, and try to create the impression of an official Facebook department having taken down all of those pages' content due to an alleged violation of community standards:

“Dear page admin.
You need to declare your page because we have found that some activity violates Facebook community policies.
For your protection, your page has been hidden from Facebook users and deactivated.

Click on the following link to confirm that you are the account holder: [clumsily contrived tinyURL link]

According to Facebook Community Standards, you have 24 hours to complete these steps before your account is permanently disabled.

Thank you for helping us improve the way we maintain Facebook.

Sincerely

The Facebook Community Standards team.”

The pages responsible for these half-baked yet annoying phishing attacks all share a common naming convention with just the 10-digit “serial” number varying, and slight variations in the profile image (which probably points to several independent culprits applying the same, concerted strategy) Expecting experienced page admins to click on a link that's not within the official Facebook domain is bold, but occasionally one might carelessly do so when distracted by other more important things that don't even leave time to verify the equally bold but easy to debunk claim that “your page has been hidden from Facebook users”.

Hopefully Facebook will do away with this nuisance soon.

13/09/2018

It's good to have something tangible when a literary translation job has been finalised. The Ministry of Culture, Republic of China (Taiwan) was kind enough to provide me with a printed copy of Sabrina Huang's (黃麗群) short story which I'd tried my very best to transfer into German for a cultural exchange programme. I sincerely hope that back home our efforts helped spark some interest for contemporary Taiwanese authors. This particular piece of writing gave me goosebumps towards the end, that's how captivated I was during the translation process.

12/01/2018

What do you call “tea” in your language? Having been exposed to Minnan Chinese since I migrated to Taiwan gave me a hint as to why we say “Tee” in my native language German while other languages have words that seem to stem from the Mandarin Chinese “茶 chá”. What I'm still somewhat puzzled about is how it could end up a masculine German noun rather than a feminine or neutral one. Knowing a word's genus is often determined by its ending I presume it's worth taking a peek at coffee (German “Kaffee”) for clues, another masculine loanword which shares the ending vowel with “Tee”. If the import and consumption of the two goods started during a similar historical period in German-speaking areas there might be a link but this is of course wild speculation. If you know more on this don't hesitate to share it in a comment.

"Tea" spread by sea, while "cha" spread by land.

05/06/2017

If you're a translator and feel your revenues are under threat from AI perhaps you want to look into your options as a transcreator, or find your niche in literary translation. Especially the latter, in my view, can in and of itself be considered an art form unlikely to be mastered by machines any time soon. Many countries' jurisdiction regards the translators of literary work as a creator (as opposed to a mere transferring agent) and therefore grants them a share of sales revenues.

A profession under pressure

22/02/2017

I had been secretly hoping someone would organise an event like this, to sort of get my observation corroborated that despite Google's phenomenal attempts to put artificial intelligence on the job of translating between all kinds of natural languages – and you and me, my cherished fellow translators … Well, out of the job it would appear – their marketing department certainly has a tendency to exaggerate in building a reputation for their neural network technology GNMT that blows its successes just a tiny sliver out of proportion. When elaborating on the AI's high success rates in one of the more recent press releases the focus was on language pairs that aren't in fact that dissimilar in terms of grammatical structuring: Japanese and Korean. Laymen may easily be fooled by the two entirely different writing systems into readily ignoring the circumstance that Google translate used to transfer texts between the two East Asian languages quite satisfactorily even when GNMT wasn't part of the equation yet. Quite probably it won't be long until we tie with translating machines, but I still see a glimpse of hope that at least when it comes to source texts whose translation requires properties that cannot be emulated, namely imaginative, literary and ӕsthetic prowess, we will not be surpassed all that swiftly.

Humans beat artificial intelligence (AI) language software in translation at a high-profile battle held in South Korea on Tuesday, though experts forecast the cutting-edge technology is improving at fast rate and may reach human-level accuracy soon.

21/12/2016

Yay! Dictionaries are my favourite. Merry Christmas!

11/10/2016

A little addendum to my post from 21st April about grammar snobs. This video explains that aside from the descriptivist position taken in the previous clip, the prescriptivist approach which it criticises almost inexorably actually is useful in some respects. I presume things are never black or white and it may be advisable to heed this TED video's explanations as a reconciliatory and linguistically wholesome panorama view.