Aug 20th, 2008 | NCTA Events, Outreach | No Comments
By Brigitte Keen
From as far away as Monterey, 16 NCTA members drove to the KTEH studios in San Jose in order to volunteer their services on pledge night, Friday, August 15. We were eagerly awaited and five of us were immediately whisked off to take pledges during the BBC news, while the rest of us, who had not been trained before, received our instructions on how to operate the phones and fill out the pledge forms.
In between the BBC news and the next program, “Victor Borge”, we managed to install the new NCTA banner in front of the tables with the telephones. We hope very much that some of you watched the various shows KTEH was broadcasting that evening and can confirm that our efforts were not in vain. We had no idea if the banner was visible when the cameras panned over to the phone volunteers. We also did not know if we were on camera, as we were constantly on the phone taking pledges with relatively short interruptions, from 6 pm until shortly after 10 pm. Some of us caught short glimpses of the programs - the BBC news, Victor Borge: The Great Dane of Comedy, the Mrs. Bradley mysteries and Rumpole of the Bailey.
An excellent dinner was donated by the Los Gatos restaurant “Crimson”. However, we were extremely busy and had hardly started eating, when we were called back into the studio to take pledges. Isn’t it good to be wanted!
KTEH is a relatively small operation, much smaller than KQED. And we were told by Tom Fanella, KTEH’s president, that while KQED is a PBS station and much wealthier, KTEH is a PBS affiliate and does not have the same amount of corporate support as its sister station to the north.
A very nice surprise for those of us who are interested in the inner workings of a television studio was the studio tour we were offered during one of our longer breaks. A volunteer demonstrated all the special video effects which the engineers have at their fingertips, as well as the specialized digital video playback equipment, transmission equipment, etc. Most of the people operating the studio, such as some of the engineers on duty on our night as well as camera people and talent, among them Alan Dale and Victoria Hunter, are volunteers and some are station employees. There are plenty of interesting opportunities to volunteer in a technical or nontechnical capacity for those who have the time and the inclination.
Our goal for the evening was $24,000. However, the enthusiasm of the audience for the evening’s programs was such that we finished the evening having received a total of 323 pledges in the amount of $31,933 for the station! Three cheers for all the volunteers who made it possible!
TomC
posted this article under NCTA Events, Outreach on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
May 1st, 2008 | Interpretation, NCTA Meetings, Reports | No Comments
The first NCTA meeting of 2008 took place on February 9 and featured—in addition to our election results and news of ongoing projects—longtime NCTA member Hany Farag’s presentation on new developments in machine translation.
BY SARAH LLEWELLYN
NCTA Secretary Stafford Hemmer, standing in for the absent Vice President Yves Avérous, began the meeting with a series of announcements, including details of upcoming NCTA workshops, a call for volunteers to present future NCTA workshops and also to contribute to Translorial, and a reminder about the monthly happy hours that take place the last Monday of every month in San Francisco and Oakland.
Alison Dent announced the results of the recent (uncontested) election, and welcomed each of the new board members, who will begin two-year terms effective immediately. Dagmar Dolatschko will take over from Song White as treasurer; Paula Dieli will take over Naomi Baer’s position as membership director; Norma Kaminsky will be responsible for continuing education in place of the outgoing Mateo Rutherford; and Diane Montgomery will take on a new role of director of marketing. Stafford Hemmer will continue in his capacity as secretary. Stafford thanked each of the departing members of the board for their valuable and often inspirational contributions during their tenure.
The Interpreter Machine
The meeting’s featured presentation was given by long-time NCTA member and former board member Hany Farag. Hany works in the fields of language and technology and is a translator and state-certified Arabic interpreter, as well as a technologist specialized in automation and control systems.
Hany’s presentation focused on recent efforts in the development of an automated, real-time speech-to-speech translation device—an “interpreter machine”— under the auspices of DARPA, the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. While machine translation in various guises has been around for some 50 years, the development of such a system was hastened by an urgent need for Arabic-language interpreters in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion of that country.
Iraq: Facts and Challenges
One of the challenges facing the ground forces in Iraq was how to rebuild a nation of 20 million people, while having virtually no knowledge of the native language, Arabic. The number of interpreters needed— more than 5,000, based on U.S. troop deployments—was an unrealistic target, particularly given that in the whole of California there were, at most, 500 Arabic-language interpreters. And using local interpreters posed a variety of problems, not least of which was the reliability of their information for intelligence purposes. In response, DARPA instigated a project entitled Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) to develop an interpreter machine that could communicate spontaneously in real time in tactical—that is, war or battle—situations.
Competing to Succeed
Three teams of researchers were hired to develop systems: IBM, The Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN). Each year, their progress would be evaluated, and the worst-performing team could be eliminated—or, the program could be shut down entirely. At any time, up to 200 people have been working around the clock on this initiative: the largest language project in existence.
Due to the fact that the only existing, related technology was machine translation for text, the interpreter machine had to be developed using a series of building blocks. The first was ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition). Machine translation was the second component, involving the creation of a corpora, or body, of words in context to improve the translation. The third building block involved text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), which was already of exceptionally good quality.
By late 2006, two machines were ready for deployment in Iraq: IBM’s MASTOR and SRI’s IRAQCOMM, each using a different technology, and each having an accuracy level for text estimated to be around 75%. R&D is still in progress, with the goal of reaching 95% accuracy—comparable to a human interpreter—by 2010.
Hany concluded his presentation by suggesting that no one can stop the progress of technology, and that we need to embrace innovation by understanding it and contributing to it if we can. Researchers, after all, are not practicing interpreters!
After a brief Q&A session, NCTA presented Hany with a box of Valentine’s Day Joseph Schmidt chocolates, to thank him for his presentation.
Yves
posted this article under Interpretation, NCTA Meetings, Reports on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:45 pm
May 1st, 2008 | Announcements, Continuing Ed. | No Comments
Translating Poetry: A Primer
SATURDAY MAY 17, 1-4 PM
MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE LIBRARY,
57 POST STREET, SAN FRANCISCO
University of Florida-Gainesville professor of poetry Sidney Wade will present a hands-on workshop in the art of literary translation, designed both for those who are new to the field and interested, as well as those more experienced with the undertaking. There will be an introduction to the most basic elements of the craft, as well as some of the more exasperating issues. Procedures, questions, and conflicts will all be discussed. This workshop will entertain the following sorts of questions: Who is best qualified to translate poetry? How does one start? Why choose one language over another? What is a literal trot? How does a literal trot get translated into a fine poem in English?
Sidney Wade is the guest poetry editor of TWO LINES: World Writing in Translation for 2008. She is currently a professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she teaches poetry and translation workshops. She translates Turkish poetry and wrote Istanbul’dan/From Istanbul. She is a recent president of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs and the author of four other collections of poetry: Stroke, Celestial Bodies, Empty Sleeves, and Green.
Upcoming: ATA Certification Exam workshop, August 23rd.
Alison Dent
posted this article under Announcements, Continuing Ed. on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:42 pm
May 1st, 2008 | Essays, Literary Translation | Enter your password to view comments
Alison Dent
posted this article under Essays, Literary Translation on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Alison Dent
posted this article under Continuing Ed., Court Interpretation, Legal Interpretation, Legal Translation, Reports on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:35 pm
May 1st, 2008 | Literary Translation, Related organizations, Reports | Enter your password to view comments
Alison Dent
posted this article under Literary Translation, Related organizations, Reports on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:30 pm
May 1st, 2008 | Education, Perspective, Translation | Enter your password to view comments
Alison Dent
posted this article under Education, Perspective, Translation on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:25 pm
May 1st, 2008 | NCTA Info, NCTA Members, Perspective | Enter your password to view comments
Alison Dent
posted this article under NCTA Info, NCTA Members, Perspective on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:20 pm
May 1st, 2008 | NCTA Events, Reports | Enter your password to view comments
Alison Dent
posted this article under NCTA Events, Reports on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:10 pm
