PARLEZ VOUS TRADE?; BEHIND-THE-SCENES FIRMS KEEP REGION'S GLOBAL BUSINESS PARTNERS SPEAKING SAME LANGUAGE.

Byline: Jeremy Bagott Staff Writer

Somewhere near Paris, a French-speaking translator with an expertise in medical technology awaits a project.

Seven thousand miles away, in the San Fernando Valley, the marketing department of a medical device manufacturer decides it is time to have a 28,000-word user's manual translated into a half-dozen languages, one of which is French.

The two are brought together by a New Jersey-based company with an expertise in project management, product localization and translation software, and a long list of worldwide offices.

As telecommunications advances connect the global marketplace, companies that can successfully market their products to individual foreign cultures should prosper. Behind this global expansion, the language services sector plays a hidden, yet crucial, role that is growing as quickly as the world is shrinking.

``Translation is absolutely vital to international trade,'' said Vance Baugham, vice president of trade development for the World Trade Center Association of Los Angeles-Long Beach. ``Good translation expresses the idea and is sensitive to the nuances of a foreign culture and its customs.

``With the advent of the Internet, English has become more prevalent. But when it comes to the bottom line, translation and interpreting become a key component.''

To define a few terms: ``translation'' is most commonly used to signify adaptations of the written word, ``interpreting'' denotes verbal interactions, while ``localizing'' means changing text and marketing approach with an emphasis not only on language but on the target culture itself.

``It's kind of like everyone is endeavoring to reverse the Tower of Babel,'' said Baugham, who is also trade manager for the Port of Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley Trade Office. ``Languages can facilitate communication, but they can also cause an extraordinary amount of confusion.''

The combined market worldwide for commercial translation, which includes such diverse services as written translation, multimedia adaptation, interpreting, translation software development and language training, is estimated between $8 billion and $10 billion with a 20 percent annual growth rate. The dollar value for English-Japanese translation alone is thought to be well over $1 billion.

But those figures may be low.

``The rubric `business translation,' '' said San Pedro-based business and technology translator Stephen Franke, ``is hard to quantify as a separate, stand-alone cost. Firms tend to include translation costs in their marketing and advertising budgets,'' making it hard to break out exact numbers.

In the Los Angeles region's $181 billion in international trade, language services play no less a part, with its No. 1 and No. 2 trade partners being Japan and China respectively. Every piece of software, industrial machinery, every replacement part, catalog, repair guide, entertainment video and point-of-purchase display, every marketing plan, bid description and annual report will involve some degree of adaptation if it is to be targeted to a foreign market.

But the translation and localization industry, according to a report by the international marketing research firm Ovum, is highly fragmented, with no player holding more than 1 percent of the market worldwide. According to conservative estimates, there are about 20,000 translation companies, agencies and service providers in the United States, including free-lancers.

Back at local medical device maker MiniMed Inc. of Sylmar, the target languages for its insulin pump's manual were Spanish, German, French, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian and Italian.

With large projects like MiniMed's, the Santa Monica office of Princeton, N.J.-based Berlitz GlobalNET - MiniMed's partner on the project - tends to go to its offices abroad.

The manual, which took about a month to complete, went on a whirlwind tour of the globe, with the French portion of the project alone going from Sylmar to Santa Monica to Paris and then out to translators and editors in France, then back to Santa Monica and Sylmar, then back to France for further refinement and finally back to the client.

Other portions of the MiniMed project were routed through Berlitz's bureaus in Rome; Sindelfingen, Germany; Madrid, Spain; Bergen, Norway; and Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

In translation, it is a cardinal rule that a translator be a native speaker of the target language. In other words, a translator for a project from English to Mandarin Chinese should be a native speaker of Mandarin, not English.

``The problem with translation by a nonnative speaker,'' said Monica Matulich, company spokeswoman for Cyrsh Technologies Corporation, a Woodland Hills-based translation software developer, ``is that they translate according to the way they learned the language in school, which is not necessarily the colloquial or best usage.

``If you've only learned it as a second language, no matter what your proficiency level, there's going to be room for error. It's often a question of the book vs. the real world.''

Translation software, like Cyrsh's, may be suitable for some types of translations, but the technology has historically been riddled with problems.

With a sentence like ``Inspect the filter for wear and tear,'' the computer might translate it to mean you should inspect the filter for wear and then tear it.

Matulich says Cyrsh Technologies has overcome those problems.

Its system, she said, is different in that it translates not word for word but based on context and is 100 percent tolerant of typographical errors and spelling mistakes. The company says its system can search, retrieve and translate text to and from 28 languages.

By the first quarter of next year, the company expects to have its first module available. It will allow users to send e-mail in their native languages and recipients to receive and read it in the language of choice.

Bernard Liller, national accounts manager for Thousand Oaks-based translation firm Network Omni, is skeptical of the technology. Network Omni uses human translators for all levels of translation.

``Take the term `hydrostatic transmission,' '' said Liller. ``You could translate the term into a hundred languages. Whatever you store in the computer will be accurate. But in the context of a phrase, the syntax will often be wrong. You could end up with a sentence like, `This car a hydrostatic transmission equipped is with.'

``If you have two or three pages of text like this, it will read like one of those glove compartment manuals that Toyota came out with decades ago,'' said Liller, who handles translation and interpreting for clients like Disney, Warner Bros., Hertz and Blue Cross.

``In the area of advertising,'' Liller said, ``how can a computer ever begin to understand a phrase like `The Big Apple goes bananas'? It's going to be a lot easier to translate from scratch using old-fashioned elbow grease.''

One thing translation companies do agree on is the need to assemble client-specific glossaries. Large accounts get their own word lists for consistency's sake. If, for example, the term ``repetition cycle'' appears in one version of a manufacturer's product, it must appear in all subsequent versions.

``I've been preaching this for 20 years,'' Liller said. ``The more you know about a certain industry, the more knowledgeable you become about its specific terms. It's important to develop a business glossary before you start the translation project. You want the accuracy, and you want the client to approve the terms. A client may feed you 200 phrases that are common in their industry.

``Once the translator has the accurate terminology, he or she has the basics to begin a quality translation.''

Then there is the question of the translator having expertise in a given field, beyond a mere proficiency in two or more languages.

``To be a good translator in one area is important. All translators should have an expertise,'' Baugham said. ``You may speak a language. I know English; I grew up here. But I may not know engineering terminology in English.''

Despite the best of intentions, gaffes occur. Liller said one of his favorite gaffes was for the advertising tag line ``Pepsi Comes Alive.''

It was mistakenly translated in China as ``Pepsi comes out of the grave.''

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3 Photos

PHOTO (1 -- 2 -- color) Above, Monica Matulich, company spokeswoman for Woodland Hills-based translation software developer Cyrsh Technologies Corp., says translation must be done by a native speaker. Translations such as the Arabic-English one at left are done at Cyrsh.

(3) Charles Darrel, a salesman at Cyrsh Technologies in Woodland Hills, extols translation software.

Evan Yee/Staff Photographer