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Category Archives: Doc Byrne’s Miscellany

Are translators too reliant on the Internet?

I had a strangely unsettling experience over the weekend which has left me a little concerned for the future of translation and possibly even the world as we know it.  OK, maybe not the world, just translation. What happened? I couldn’t access the Internet! Yep, my ISP decided that the day I started on a large medical translation was the day they would shut down half of their network for “essential maintenance”. Typical!

A drug-eluting coronary stent

A drug-eluting coronary stent

So there I was, ready to start working on a medical text (on coronary stents and aortic aneurysms no less) and about to do my usual ritual of spending some time scanning the web for parallel texts and clarifying the meanings of unusual terms, but not this time. After the initial indignation bordering on rage at the fact that I couldn’t get online, this indignation gave way to unease. What if there was term I didn’t know? How would I find out how to translate it?  Now I have dozens of general and specialised dictionaries at hand and over 12 years experience as a translator so there really wasn’t anything to worry about but not having Internet access, and more specifically no Google, knocked me sideways and it took me a good half hour to regain my composure.

Google has helped reinforce my belief that translators shouldn’t put too much faith in dictionaries because they are often out of date and won’t tell you which of the various synonyms is correct. On top of that they rarely tell you how to use a particular word; the style and general language usage of certain genres of texts often being every bit as important as the specialised terms they contain. (I have to confess that I have been known on occasion to advise students to forget about paper dictionaries and use Google instead because parallel texts in particular are the only way to go when translating.) But Google has also made researching subjects much faster – or at least it seems that way. You mightn’t really find the answer any sooner but you’ll plough through a lot more material looking for it in the same time. I think I’ve gotten used to the fact that with access to Google, you can find the answer to any question providing you know how to search and more importantly, how to separate the wheat from the chaff in search results and you can do this much more quickly than nipping down to the local public library. There’s also a certain reassurance that comes from simply knowing it’s there.

This begs the question of whether we (I’m assuming it’s not just me who’s been affected by this) have become too dependent on the Internet. Yes it’s amazingly useful and fast, and yes it helps us to access enormous amounts of resources but what would happen to us as translators if we woke up one morning in an apocalyptic post-Internet age where Luddites danced through the streets rejoicing at the fact that there was no Internet and no search engines, iPhones, netbooks or online databases? Would we have become so reliant on the Internet that we would have forgotten how to do translation the old-fashioned way (”acoustic translation” for want of a better term – ok that’s probably not as funny as it sounds in my head). Would the quality of translations suddenly plummet? Would translators simply sit there, bewildered and at a complete loss as to where they should start?

Or am I just getting my undergarments knotted over nothing? Is lamenting the good old days when translators used pens and paper and the occasional carrier pigeon and never resorted to such demon-possessed trickery as the interweb the same as yearning for the “make-do” days when people could darn socks, use an abacus or wash half a dozen kids with one bathful of water? Useful skills maybe but, let’s be honest, not particularly desirable or likely ever to come back into fashion. Was translation “purer”, more honest and more difficult back then? Who knows?

As for my translation, I finished it on time and my subject knowledge of the area and old-fashioned paper dictionaries came through in the end… it just took a little longer to get started.

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Education at the speed of light (almost)… the Microlecture

Ferdinand von Prondzynsky (President of Dublin City University) recently posted an interesting article about a new phenomenon in education called the “microlecture”. Essentially a microlecture is a 60 second blast of information, delivered as a video or audio podcast. Now while Ferdinand, a man I have great respect for, was careful not to be instantly dismissive of what could be argued to be a daft new fad thought up by touchy feely educationalists eager to squander, I mean capture, more research funding he did point out that such an approach essentially eliminates some of the most important aspects of education: analysis, discussion and criticality. In this sense there is definitely a point to be made – most educational traditions eschew the rote learning approach in favour of students who can analyse, assess and create knowledge rather than mindlessly accept everything that is fed to them.

To put this in perspective I should probably explain a little bit about how microlectures work. Developed by David Penrose, the self-styled “One Minute Professor” microlectures involve stripping all of the unnecessary “padding” from a typical lecture and reducing it to a burst of keywords and phrases which are topped and tailed by roughly 30 seconds of introduction and conclusion. Lasting between 60 seconds to 3 minutes Penrose argues in an interview published on Chronicle.com that the format is a “framework for knowledge excavation” where “We’re going to show you where to dig, we’re going to tell you what you need to be looking for, and we’re going to oversee that process.” To some this might sound like a polite way of saying that lecturers get to put their feet up while the students do all the work (although others might ask whether this is a bad thing at all).

But anyway, let’s go back and address that niggling feeling which most of us probably have that microlecturing amounts to a dumbing down of education (a) because of the fact that a gimmicky 60 seconds is nowhere near long enough to impart all of the essential information and (b) there is no time or place for discussion, analysis or criticality. There probably is some mileage in the idea that the microlecture is not for everyone and most certainly not for every subject. At first glance it does seem more suited to technical or practical subjects than to certain theoretical subjects where analysis is essential.

Having said that, it is a possibility that it’s not the format or indeed its incompatibility with certain subjects that’s the problem. It could just be the course design and the sequencing of topics and classes within a course. In other words it might all boil down to the teachers themselves. I can see a clear use for microlectures as a primer for a particular topic. Imagine a microlecture outlining the key concepts in an area, say legal translation or usability issues in website design. Students are blasted with a bite-size overview of the topic and then told to build on it in preparation for a conventional lecture, tutorial or workshop in a week or two. This would, I imagine, usher students into a learning style where they create their own knowledge, they direct their own learning… already buzzwords like constructivism, inquiry-based learning, transferable skills and information literacy are circling overhead like flies. And this, I think, might be the hidden value of microlectures. It’s not what they contain, it’s how they can be used. As a primer or starting point, the microlecture can represent a scaffold (constructivist slang for “a hook to hang your coat on”) upon which students can build knowledge as they explore and learn about a subject. I’m not sure whether it will work – I think there are various pedagogical, organisational and cultural issues to be tackled – and only time will tell whether this is a genuine advance in learning or just another woolly attempt to pander to what some would call the Facebook generation with their ever-decreasing attention spans.

For more information about the microlecture format, take a look at the following:

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Getting into screencasting using Jing

I recently started using Jing for producing quick and easy screen recordings to help show students how to use certain software functions. What I like about Jing – as opposed to Camtasia, even though they are both made by Techsmith – is that the Jing controls are semi-hidden at the top of your screen until you are ready to use it. When you’ve finished recording a clip, Jing lets you upload it directly to the screencast.com website where you can create your own repository of videos. It will even generate the HTML code or give you the URL so that you can share it. Pretty nifty I think. The beauty of using tools like this to produce small, bite-size videos is that if, say, a student sends you an email asking how to do something with a piece of software you can, in the space of 5 or so minutes, record the answer (including audio commentary if you wish) and send them a link to the video which they can then play and replay as many times as they need to until they are happy. Obviously this is going to save everyone time: no making appointments, finding the student in a computer lab, showing the student how to do it over and over again… and to top it all off, once you make one of these recordings you can reuse it time and time again. Eventually you could even have a list of recordings posted on a website somewhere which students can use as a study aid or as a sort of FAQ/helpdesk.

The free version of Jing is limited to producing 5 minute clips but this is plenty of time for most tasks and in any case, you really shouldn’t be producing anything longer anyway. I wanted to see how quick and easy to use it was out of the box so for the first one (shown below) I kept it simple, didn’t use audio and relied on the default settings. The results are really very good – the picture quality is great (it looks a little dodgy in places but that’s because I’ve resized it after the fact) and the files weren’t excessively large. I didn’t add any audio to the first one but will add it to future recordings. Overall I’m very impressed with Jing. OK it’s not overflowing with functions but what it does it does very well and thanks to the sheer convenience of this tool it’s now a firm fixture in my toolkit.

If you’ve never tried screencasting or creating screen recordings before, Jing is a really good and easy-to-use option which will have you up and running in no time. More experienced users will love how quickly and easily you can create recordings.

Direct link to the file on Screencast.com

 

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