Injuns, ackshally. Teh Ay-rabs jest passed 'em along west, lahk silk ‘n’ sodomy.
Honest?
Ogre, I used to live in Alabama, & I assure you that being a shit is one of the things Alabama requires of it’s gubantorial candidates, says so in the State Constitution.
Just out of curiosity, is this Tim james a loathsome shit for any reason other than his stance on driver’s license tests? And that he is a (shudder) Conservative? I know nothing about him, so I’m just asking.
Honest - although the characters we use to represent numerals don’t really look anything like Arabic or “Hindu” numerals, except for 1.
Putting aside the hyperbole about volunteers, translation services are cheap. Yeah, and I don’t care how much your wife makes, this is the government here, and it’s a very infrequent do-once-for-all-comers expense. So unless they’re paying her in solid gold life-size replicas of the statue of liberty it’s cheap.
Besides, haven’t they already done the translation? In the ad it says that Alabama is now offering them in 12 languages but Tim James wants them done away with.
Well, yeah, obviously, but even if we pretend there was a translation expense here, it still wouldn’t be significant. I guess you could say I’m refuting the hypothetical.
Though it crosses my mind that there may be some additions costs due to offering multiple languages - just not translation costs. What comes to mind is they’ve got to print copies of this stuff out. Of course if they keep any surplus around to use in later years then that’s no cost either, but I guess there could be storage expenses or something…
Though seriously - we all know why Tim James really is arguing againt them; he’s appealing to the anti-immigrant and racist votes. (Which aren’t necessarily identical.) Pretending otherwise is pure bull.
Oh hell yeah, the drivers exams is the least of it.
-He trashes his opponent for (shudder) believing evolution should be taught in public schools and (shudder again) saying the Bible isn’t all meant to be taken literally.
-He wants sex offenders to go in person once every 90 days to re-register and says anybody who has a problem with this is a “liberal crying over the inconvenience of rapists”. (Probably the people who in fact would have the most problem with this are those at the courthouse who already are shortstaffed and don’t have the time to re-register sex offenders whose status/address/etc. haven’t changed just so Tim James can pander how hard-on he is about crime.)
-He trashes his Republican opponent for the primary for having formerly been a Democrat. The great irony of this is that Tim James is known for one thing- being the spoiled brat son of Fob James, who was twice governor of Alabama- once as a Democrat and then as a Republican.
The making sex offenders re-register in person, not giving drivers’ tests in any language but English, and his opponent’s unworthiness due to religious leanings are as close as he gets to discussing any actual issues. He doesn’t mention anything he’d do for Alabama’s absolutely appalling/horrible/in-the-crapper gathering flies/laughing-stock public school system other than he’d require creationism to be taught alongside ‘evil-lution’; he doesn’t mention anything about working class Alabamians or even illegal immigrants other than the driving exams, and he’s blatantly appealing to the most poorly educated and bigoted strata of society to get elected. If he’s elected then The Daily Show will probably just open up a bureau here because he’s the type who’ll put a giant cross on the courthouse lawn under the rebel flag to protest whatever ‘obamanation’ he’s currently acting like a chimp against. (His father once literally acted like a chimp to protest evolution being taught while he was governor; Alabama’s one of those states that has to have an “evolution is a theory/not a fact” sticker on textbooks thanks to him.
Oh yeah, definitely agreeing with you on the translation costs being minimal. Either way, it’s a huge reach. I mean, if we really want to save money, is this the way to do it?
You misunderstood me. I meant are there any negatives?
While the former is not trivial, it is well explained without language by bright orange signs, and arrows and striping on the road.
The latter is trivial. Perhaps not to the driver stuck in traffic, but it is not a matter of highway safety.
Just out of curiosity, what would it cost to translate the test? Bricker, what’s the ballpark hourly rate for English-Spanish translation? What would a job lasting, say 8 hours, cost? I can’t imagine the test involved would take more than a day to translate, unless one would also have to translate the entire rules-of-the-road DMV handbook.
Yeah, but they refuse to sing spirituals while they pick the cotton, which takes all the fun out of it.
I have managed millions of words of translation in dozens of languages, primarily in the software realm. I say that having worked on both the buy and sell side. If your wife has worked in software localization, there is a good chance she worked for one of my vendors or sub-vendors (translation distribution is trickier than you might think).
Judging from your claim that she does not make peanuts, then she probably has her own direct clients right now, meaning she does more than translate, but also client managing, editing, quality assurance, maybe page composition, and so on.
I am quire sure she earns it, in general translators are underpaid.
But why are they underpaid?
Because for many types of translations, people are perfectly comfortable with the concept that so-and-so down-the-street’s kid’s wife speaks the language we need, let’s bake her a cake and she will do it.
That is why professional translators measure their prices in cents per word, depending on the language and supply/demand, maybe well under 10 cents per word, and they struggle to get vendors to pay them on repeat jobs for words that haven’t changed since the last go-round (“translation memory”) while the client will gladly pay some sum to the vendor for words in translation memory.
Also, if you want to see a lot of volunteer translation, check out the documentation and user interface for any major and mid-major open source software program - it may be available in dozens of languages, simply because someone volunteered to do it.
The poster upthread was entirely correct - the cost to translate, and mange the translation on vendor and client side for a drivers test, even a driver’s manual, is peanuts in the grand scheme of things. If that.
Actually, the reason they will go out of business is not because they suddenly can’t afford the labor, its that they can’t afford the labor because the market won’t pay the new cost of building a house. Well, some of it can, so the market contracts, and the low-end folks get squeezed out.
You don’t need language fluency to recognize signs, and that is all you need really. Ever driven in French Canada or Japan or Europe? You can manage it without speaking the language or even reading it. 100 years of driving history now proves it is not a large problem at all.
Well, in fairness, it is a little more complex than that. There are going to be lots of legal terms there, and first you have to identify those and consult to build a list of approved translations for these, and to make sure that they are used consistently. Especially if there is more than one translator. This takes research, presumably to see what other states have already done,or to use an industry standard if one exisits (and it very well might).
Not only that, but as far as Spanish goes, you might have different words for some of these terms in different dialects, and there are going to be other dialect related issues too. There is not one universal Spanish any more than there is universal English.
Still, you are talking about a very small job. I can’t imagine such a job would even ping the minimum for most of the vendors I have worked with/for, if bid alone. Probably it is tied to some general translation contract let by the State and is not even competitively bid, someone just picks up a phone and says “Please do this and please bill it to so and so…”
You mean… they’ll tk hrrr joooob?