TRANSLATION, GLOBALIZATION AND LOCALIZATION

The volume of translation conducted worldwide has increased dramatically in the last fifty years. Even though English may have become a lingua franca of world trade, it is the increasing globalization and the advent of the internet that have meant that promotional literature, technical manuals, webpages and all ranges of other communication are being translated into other languages at a faster and faster pace.

Globalization is a multi-level term that is used to refer to the global nature of the world economy with the all-pervasive spread of multinationals. In commercial translation it is often used in the sense of the creation of local versions of websites of internationally important companies or the translation of product and marketing material for the global market (see Esselink 2000:

4). Michael Cronin’s Translation and Globalization (Cronin 2003) deals with some of the complex cultural, political and philosophical consequences of translation in the global age.

In addition, the growth of international organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union has made interpreting at meetings and translation of documentation a necessity. In the case of the European Union, the commitment to translate into all official languages of the Member States has seen the number of original pages of documentation translated by its Translation Centre in Luxembourg alone increase from 20,000 in 1995 to 280,000 in 2001 (European Communities Court of Auditors 2002). The turnover of the Translation Centre, employing 140 permanent staff and tendering out a portion of its work to commercial translation agencies, was almost 26 million euros in 2001 (European Court of Auditors 2002:

9). But this is just a small portion of the EU’s translation and interpreting costs, estimated in 2001 at 2 billion euros per year (Austermühl 2001:3).

Computer power is therefore being harnessed by the translation industry, but it still remains Computer-Assisted Translation. The goal of fully automatic or Machine Translation (MT) remains elusive although recent developments have been more promising. First a little history to put it into context:

Bar-Hillel considered that real-world knowledge was necessary for translation and that this was impossible for a machine to replicate. He felt that the goal of a fully mechanized translation on a par with that produced by a professional translator was unrealistic. In his opinion, it would be more realistic to attempt to produce machines that worked in conjunction with humans.

In a brief overview of the history of the field, Martin Kay (1980/2003) discusses some of the obstacles to successful Machine Translation including ‘words with multiple meanings, sentences with multiple grammatical structures, uncertainty about what a pronoun refers to, and other problems of grammar’. He uses a now well-known example (Example A14.1) to illustrate the problems: