According to the Irish newspaper Lá, 1.6 million Irish people say that they can speak Irish (aka Gaelic or Gaeilge), 350,000 use it daily, and 83,000 living in the Gaeltacht (that is, Irish-speaking regions) say it’s their first language. This year the European Union added Irish (along with Bulgarian and Romanian, the languages of the E.U.’s 2 newest members) to its list of official languages. Ratification of Irish as an official language accelerated when Maltese, with only about 372,000 speakers, was made an official language of the European Union in 2004. On a trip to Ireland late last year we met with Mark Rodgers, managing director of Irish language service provider Cipherion Translations. His firm had just finished translating cellphone carrier Meteor’s website into Irish, an effort that was well-received by the press, Gaelic speakers, and even the accuracy-obsessed academic linguists. With rivals’ O2 and Vodafone websites not yet translated into Irish, Meteor expects a marketing boost and lower customer service costs — both
benefits of translating for domestic ethnic minorities that we have identified in our research in Hispanic and Asian communities in the U.S. Hinting at a project he’d like to do for Apple, Rodgers said people are now clamoring for an Irish version of the iPod.
He told us that the Meteor project was complicated by a shortage of high-quality Irish language resources, the result of an on-again, off-again government policy toward Gaelic:
- Until 1974, Irish was compulsory for civil servants. Then the government began an unsuccessful policy of “encouragement” over compulsion. Nearly 20 years later, pressure from the Gaeilge community resulted in the Official Languages Act of 2003 and the appointment of a Language Commissioner to oversee implementation. Now, 600-plus public bodies must produce a plan outlining their efforts to communicate with the public through Irish in their annual reports and policy documents.
- Given the more than 30-year hiatus since Irish was last compulsory, it turns out that older translators do much of the work — and most don’t use translation memories. Some LSPs have begun educating them in Trados, but TM-less translators are still the norm for Irish. Complementing the work of human translators is the machine translation work of Dublin City University professor Andy Way who has applied his data-driven MT work to addressing the zero translation problem through Traslan, a privately-held translation firm.
- While the problem isn’t as tough as bringing Hebrew into the modern age, LSPs find that they must re-provision their translator pool from the professors and teachers of Irish as an almost ancient language. Given the significant differences in opinion as to what is correct Irish, LSPs must take a more integrated approach to client review cycles. Add translation technology training to the equation and it will likely take years to train new Irishtranslators to the level of sophistication of the other European languages. The Irish government administers an exam to certify translators, and an accreditation program is underway.
The bottom line is that Irish speakers in Ireland, Spanish speakers in the U.S., and new-to-the-E.U. central European immigrants across Europe can’t easily avail themselves of government services they don’t understand. Translation eliminates that barrier. Meteor has followed the Irish government’s lead in recognizing that people don’t buy what they can’t understand. Companies in countries with sizeable linguistic minorities can make great inroads into those markets with a solid combination of good service and translated products and descriptions.
