5 Interesting things from Nataly Kelly's talk

1. Translation effect our lives

Translation plays a role in our daily lives in many ways. Misinterpretation of a word will lead
to danger in your life. For instance, there was a bilingual nurse in a Florida Hospital who
mistranslated the word ‘intoxicado’ into ‘intoxicated’. But, both are words that give
different meanings which are ‘food poisoning’ and ‘addict to drugs’. Then, the patient was
given the wrong course of treatment because of this mistranslated word, and the healthy
young man became quadriplegic. Here the mistranslation gave a big impact on a man’s life.
Another example is, Mara Clara from the Shuar is a poet. Nataly has translated one of her
poems that portrays Amazon’s secret. In the poem, she mentioned that there are many
secrets of healing and the powers of curing diseases in plants at Amazon. Only translation
has the power to spread this secret through languages to many people.

2. Translation can be found everywhere.

Translation is important to spread/convey the information, knowledge, and ideas to others.
For example, astronauts use translators and interpreters in space to communicate with
engineers on the ground who speak different languages. Furthermore, we can see that
translation is in all kinds of different places such as opera, novels, holy books, video games
and more. In addition, translators also allow us to use social media sites for both fun and
serious purposes. It is enabling people to interact, collaborate, and organise, just like
revolutions.

3. Translation is not easy

Knowing two languages isn't enough to be a good translator. Being a translator requires
more than just language fluency in two languages. The explanation for this is that
vocabulary can be complicated at times. They have the potential to be confused and
potential to be confused. It's difficult to find things out of context.
4. Translation will lead us into a new era: will human translators be replaced?
Google translator is available now in 65 languages plus English but there are between 6 and 7
thousand languages in the world today and there’s just one problem when we think about
extending Google translate in all of those languages: only 2261 have writing systems. The
rest of them are spoken or signed. There are hundreds of spoken languages:18 in America
alone. So written translation is not sufficient, cause the majority of them are spoken or
signed.

So even if we could address all that:

–        We would have to pause all human language development

–        Mine all texts ever produced in all language

–        Analyze all language variations as currently spoken by every human being on earth

–        And translate it in and out of all 6,000 to 7,000 languages

–        The need for humans will resume as soon as we press the ‘play’ button again.

5. Translation not only shapes our lives and transforms the world. It defines our future.
When we talk about access to information we really have to think to access to information as
a human right and until we can unlock that information for these 6-7,000 languages we’re
truly providing equal access to everybody who needs it. So that’s why translation matters and
that’s why translators have an important effect in the way we live our lives. Not only today,
but also in the future.