LRC International Localisation Summer School 2006

6th LRC Internationalisation and Localisation Summer School

12 - 15 June 2006
University of Limerick, Ireland

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Summer School

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This opening session will introduce attendees to the basics of localisation, explaining common concepts and reflecting on commonly held beliefs about localisation and internationalisation. It will address important issues such as "what is localisation and why localise?" and will explain why localisation is translation and also why it's not! It will look at the challenges facing localisers and also the outlook for the future of the industry.

In addition, attendees will have the opportunity to analyse and localise a small software application, learning, in a basic way, how to access translatable resources, check the effects of their actions and also how to fix any problems that may occur.

When you travel to Spain, do you really want to find out from a web-based, localized US travel guide where to eat in Barcelona, Santiago, Madrid of Seville? Or when you travel to the Middle East, read up on the history of the region on a localized US web page? Sadly, this is what you will most likely be offered when you search the web for this kind of information.

This session will look at how local content producers and local cultures need technical experts to bring their content to the world so that the world can enjoy the different perspectives and approaches offered by them. It will look at the value of local content, and having access to it, and the importance of changing the fact that most localisation of content originates from a single culture and erases the inherent curiosities and uniqueness that makes experiencing a different culture a new and exciting experience.

Reinhard Schäler has been involved in the localisation industry since 1987. He is the founder and director of the Localisation Research Centre (LRC) at the University of Limerick, the editor of the quarterly publication Localisation Focus, a founder editor of the International Journal of Localisation (IJL), member of the editorial panel of Multilingual Computing, founder and CEO of The Institute of Localisation Professionals (TILP), and vice chair of the OASIS Technical Committee on Translation Web Services. He is a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems (CSIS) at the University of Limerick, Ireland.

Juliane House: - Text and Context in Translation

This lecture deals with a fundamental issue of translation: The relationship between a text and its cognitive and material environment, its context, and how this relationship influences the process and the nature of translation.

While research on texts as units larger than sentences has had a rich tradition in translation studies, the notion of context has received much less attention. It is therefore necessary to attempt to “rethink context” for translation.

As a first step, Juliane will briefly examine what has been said about “context” in different disciplines. The currently fashionable view of context as something dynamic, emergent, and fluid is rejected in favour of the more traditional one seems more appropriate for written texts and for translation. In receiving and producing text, translators habitually unite text and context in acts of interpretation taking account of the situatedness of text reception and production. Translators thus manage to overcome the separation of text and context by uniting (in their minds) time and place, words and things, languages and cultures – all this, however, at a particular point in time.

In a second step she will present her own theory of translation as an act of re-contextualisation. Two basic types of translation – overt and covert translation - are suggested as indicators of very different re-contextualisation strategies. Covert translation, unlike overt tran slation, critically involves the application of a “cultural filter” with which translators take account of the new context (and the new addressees). She will provide several examples of cultural filtering in different genres and stress the necessity to base acts of reframing and otherwise changing originals on results of contrastive pragmatic research.

Finally Juliane will touch on a recent important development in translation: The influence of global English on recontextualisation processes.

About Juliane House

Juliane House is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Hamburg University and co-director of the German Science Foundation’s Research Centre on Multilingualism, where she co-ordinates the Multilingual Communication Group as well as two projects on translation and interpreting. Her research interests include translation theory, contrastive pragmatics, discourse analysis, English as a lingua franca and intercultural communication. She has written and edited many articles and books, among them A Model for Translation Quality Assessment, Translation Quality Assessment: A Model Revisited, Interlingual and Intercultural Communication, Cross-Cultural Pragmatics,, Misunderstanding in Social Life, Multilingual Communication, Translation and the Construction of Identity.

Michael Kemmann: - Medical Device Localisation

Manufacturers of medical devices, diagnostic instruments, etc., act in heavily regulated environments. Often, some of the regulatory requirements they are facing are language-related. With utmost product safety as the core concern of manufacturers, users and health authorities alike, the safety of use can in many cases only be guaranteed by providing users (whether they are patients, laboratory staff or surgeons) with instructions in their respective languages. This creates a large demand for translation and localisation; however, with respect to the high risk manufacturers are running if errors in their user documentation lead to misuse of a device and potential harm to a patient, the special requirements to quality control in the localisation workflow are obvious.

The first part of the session will start with an overview of the constituents of the regulatory environment relevant to the language business, and will look at their consequences for the (European) markets. The second part will look at workflows, Quality Assurance models and some more of the "nuts and bolts" aspects typical to medical localisation.

About Michael Kemmann

Michael was born in 1967 in Aachen, Germany and studied German and English literature at the universities of Würzburg, Aachen and Bonn. He received an M.A. (major: Newer German Literature) from Bonn university in 1995 and from 1995-1997 was Editor / Senior Editor at Translingua in Bonn.

From 1997-1999 he worked as an independent translator, localiser and consultant, working (partly on site) for several large software, telecommunication and financial corporations. In 1999 he became Managing Director of Transline Localization and after an MBO in 2003, and the subsequent renaming of the company, he is now the Managing Director and owner of ADAPT Localization Services, Bonn.

Risk management in localisation processes

This seminar will present the basic concepts of risk management and consider some of the ways in which they can be applied to the twin processes of internationalisation and localisation.

Special attention will be paid to notions of error. We know that errors always occur; we have to live with them; but how can we assess the relative risks involved? Several classical errors will be discussed, although participants are invited to present (or confess) their own.

The second half of the seminar will focus on the problem of defining goals. For the project manager, a clear definition of the goals is the first step toward identifying and assessing risks. For workers like translators, revisers or engineers, however, many risks cannot be assessed because the goals are never made explicit.

Some final questions will be asked about the long-term risks of localisation itself as a communication process. Does the industry exist simply to sell more things faster and for more profit? What might be the goals of localisation with respect to the future strength and diversity of our languages and cultures? What are the risks if we fail to meet those goals? Tentative answers to these questions will be drawn from Bourdieu’s analysis of economic and symbolic capital.

The seminar thus aims to be both useful and, hopefully, upsetting.

Anthony Pym is the director postgraduate programs in translation at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain.

He is also the author of Translation and Text Transfer (1992), Epistemological Problems in Translation and its Teaching (1993), Pour une éthique du traducteur (1997), Method in Translation History (1998), Negotiating the Frontier: Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History (2000), and The Moving Text: Localization, Distribution, and Translation (2004). Editor of L'Internationalité littéraire (1988), Mites australians (1990) and the series Translation Theories Explained and Translation Practices Explained (St Jerome); co-editor of Les formations en traduction et interprétation. Essai de recensement mondial (1995).

Florian Sachse: - What makes .NET localization different?

Many concepts within .NET allow for the extremely efficient development of software and easy reuse of components. These concepts have also had an impact on software localisation and caused a paradigm shift that not only localisation tools have to address but also localisers. .NET can make the lives of localisation engineers more difficult but a good understanding of the concepts behind .NET helps to keep localisation projects manageable.

In the first part of this session some of the most widely used resource formats under the Windows OS, .rc files and Java property files, will be presented. We will look at how localisation tools deal with this kind of data and we will discuss the conceptual limitations of the formats.

In the second part of the session .NET concepts related to localisation and the resource format of .NET will be presented. The third part will discuss the impact of .NET concepts on the localisation process and how localisation tools deal with .NET resources.

As a hand out, the attendees will get a CD containing sample material and the QA tool "Inspector" developed by PASS Engineering for IGNITE and TILP

Florian Sachse is a founder and Managing Director of PASS Engineering. He is one of the chief developers of the PASSOLO localisation suite. His focus of interest is Microsoft .NET and he has given several .NET "Ask the Expert" sessions for the Institute of Localisation Professionals (TILP).

Florian is a member of a number of diverse organisations such as OASIS, GALA, and TILP, and was elected to the advisory board of the "Localization World" conference in Bonn, Germany. Florian is also a partner in the European Union projects IGNITE, DANDELION and eColoTrain. Each of these projects are dedicated to standards in the localisation process.

He enjoys sharing his knowledge with interested audiences by both speaking at conferences, and related events, or by authoring articles on software internationalisation and localisation.