Today we have the pleasure of interviewing Ido Gendel, professional translator
Trad Online: My first question is always the same, Ido, could you kindly tell our readers about your personal and professional background in a few words?
Ido Gendel: Hi, I am a freelance writer and translator from Israel. I have an M.A. in cognitive psychology, but I make most of my living by typing at the keyboard. I write marketing texts, articles about computers and technology, even science fiction stories (though unfortunately, the tiny local market for those makes their revenue minuscule). I also translate a lot, from English to Hebrew and – on special occasions – the other way around. I did not study translation formally; this was more of a private passion that turned, through a series of lucky breaks, into a profession. About eight years ago, I volunteered to translate an article from Scientific American for some local website I was involved with. When we contacted the magazine to get their permission, they told us that the Hebrew edition was just about to launch. With that article as my “performance test”, I got on board and stayed there ever since. In time, this experience helped me get a job as a technical translator at a local company, and three years later I became my own boss.
Trad Online: Being an independent translator, what advice could you give to young professionals?
Ido Gendel: I feel a bit unworthy to answer such a question. Every market, every specialization and person has its own different character, and anyway, it’s not like I’m fending off customers from my door as we speak…;-)
However, there’s one general rule that, I believe, applies to all freelancers: Never let yourself get too comfortable. Always learn, test your own limits and keep a lookout for opportunities, because when your situation changes – and it will change, sooner or later – you better be ready. Also, freelancer careers tend to develop like a rolling snowball. That is, you begin with a small opportunity and acquire a bit of experience and reputation; these somehow get you your next job, and so on. Therefore, it’s vital not to interrupt this process by doing a bad job, for whatever reason. If a deadline is unreasonable, or the pay is way too low, or the client is a nincompoop, don’t take the job – but once you accept a project, make it perfect. For your own sake, as a translator and as a service provider, never make compromises regarding the quality of your work. If not for any other reason, remember this is the age of search engines and social networking: when you screw up, everyone knows.
Trad Online: What can you tell us about the Hebrew language and its translation market?
Ido Gendel: Modern Hebrew has deep roots in the bible, but is nonetheless a young language, and it’s only spoken by Israelis – that is, some 7.5 million people (Jews, Arabs and other minorities included). It’s a small market. On the other hand, Israel has strong commercial and cultural relations with the rest of the world, so inter-lingual services are needed quite often.
English is a half-official language here, but – probably due to our close relationship with the US – it has an overwhelming presence. It is learned as a second language in schools, spoken to some degree by most (usually with a terrible accent), and more often than not, used in names of local businesses and even products. English words and phrases are abundant in everyday speech, especially teen slang. Terrible, isn’t it? Anyway, this makes the Hebrew<->English translation market, which is by far the biggest, very crowded and competitive. The situation is further complicated by unskilled translators, who think they can do a decent job just because they watch American TV shows without subtitles, and by employers with the same esteem for the profession (who also wish to pay accordingly). This last point, I believe, is not unique to Israel.
Trad Online: What about Machine Translation in Hebrew?
Ido Gendel: It’s not difficult to get human translators to talk against machine translation (MT), and in the current state of the industry, they run out of air sooner than they run out of examples. However, when reviewing the occasional popular articles and posts here that poke fun at MT, one cannot escape the feeling that they tend to focus more and more on poetry, slang, rare words and syntax, and other irregular uses of language. This may indicate that MT actually improves over time, especially when everyday Hebrew is concerned.
I should warn you that I’m not an expert on MT, and my own experience with it is limited to free, online tools such as Google Translate. It’s possible that somewhere, some proprietary or experimental software is doing a great job translating… but I doubt it. I will not go into the flaws of MT in general; instead, I would like to explain a particular difficulty facing Hebrew MT.
In written Hebrew, vowels are stated not only by letters, but also – and sometimes exclusively – using “vowel points” (punctuation). It’s not uncommon to have the same sequence of letters, with different punctuation, stand for three or more entirely different meanings. Nonetheless, proper punctuation is only used (as far as I can recall) in four cases: Young children/Beginner books, poetry, grammar textbooks, and the bible. One never finds it in regular books, newspapers or websites. The ability to tell the meaning of a printed word is therefore based not just on memory, but also on understanding of the context. Here’s a small example: The letters Alef and Tav (first and last in the alphabet) together make up words that mean “the”, “you [feminine, singular]”, or “shovel”. Of course, the same phenomenon exists in other languages (think of the different meanings of “Train” or “File”, for instance), but in Hebrew there are less obvious surrounding clues to help decipher the meaning (e.g. “a file / to file”), and there’s a much larger percentage of words with this problem.
In an attempt to make reading a bit easier, a method was invented to put extra vowel letters when there’s no punctuation. This is called “full spelling”. However, it does not solve the problem in all cases (sometimes these letters are not enough, or the sound cannot be represented this way), and there’s no agreement on the exact rules of doing it. So now you got more than one way to spell the same word… and you still have to figure out the context in order to understand what it means!
Granted, not all interpretations of a letter sequence are equally common. Statistically, the “The” interpretation of Alef-Tav is far more prevalent than “Shovel”. A good statistical engine can utilize this fact to get the meaning right part, even most of the time. However, when it’s wrong, the results are magnificently bad.
Trad Online: In your opinion, with advances in MT, will translators become “mere” proofreaders?
Ido Gendel: Only as far as you’re willing to twist the definition of proofreading. This reminds me of a job I was offered once, to proofread a translation of some cellphone menu. It was so faulty, that I had reason to believe, as I told the client, that it was made either by a machine or by a careless monkey punching a Hebrew keyboard. It was not proofreading, it was re-translating. The current output of MT simply requires too much editing. MT advances can be either qualitative (better algorithms) or quantitive (more comprehensive dictionaries and statistics) . In my opinion, the quantitive side has reached a peak; from now on, producing significantly better MT requires a qualitative revolution, and that is still nowhere is sight for any language, let alone Hebrew.
People use MT all the time to get the gist of texts from the web. I use it myself sometimes, to help me understand foreign-language websites or lyrics. Still, these were never the kinds of tasks translators were paid for. Translators, I believe, never made their living from some English-speaking guy who’s a bit curious to know what Jacques Brel was singing about. These small translation tasks are not important enough for people to pay for anyway; they don’t bite into the traditional translation market. For serious jobs, cheap clients may be tempted to cut costs using MT, but no self-respecting translator will accept MT output for proofreading at proofreading rates; natural selection will cause the others to starve to death.
That’s what I feel about mundane translations. When it comes to creative translations, the kind that requires structure, style, cultural adjustments, higher/lower language registers and so forth, MT is not even laughable.
Trad Online: Thanks very much Ido and all the best to you!
Ido Gendel can be contacted at info@idogendel.com