Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1231020
13 NEWS maltatoday | SUNDAY • 05 APRIL 2020 NEWS Powerful EU translation tool gets public release ONE of the recent innovations inside the European Commission has been an EU-funded machine translation pro- gramme which has now been made ac- cessible to employees of small and medi- um-sized enterprises. In what is described as a more trust- worthy version of 'Google Translate', the eTranslation tool, funded by the Connecting European Facility, until re- cently only allowed public administra- tions to produce these fast and faithful translations from Maltese to English and vice-versa. But now the translation tool has been accessible to the public, specifically to SMEs, with its obvious benefits being time-saving translations of large texts. The Commission's own representatives in Malta recently spoke of the eTransla- tion tool in an interview with University of Malta research magazine Think. The eTranslation platform has a dis- tinct advantage by basing itself on es- tablished sources and by being built on a neural, not statistical, machine trans- lation model. "Malta has an added advantage when it comes to this tool as we're very much a bilingual country, unlike others who would need a bridge translation to Eng- lish [using English as an intermediary language between two others — ed.] be- fore making use of the product," EC offi- cial Mark Vella said. "Maltese is widely spoken amongst fam- ilies, groups of friends, other social, and even professional contexts. The prob- lems seem to start at the written-word level. You can still see a cultural resist- ance to Maltese, even when it comes to administrative or bureaucratic proce- dures." According to Vella, the eTranslation product helps to address this confidence gap by translating documents into Mal- tese quickly – indeed, an ideal tool in the hands of institutions handling large volumes of text, like media houses them- selves. The programme also provides high se- curity – all data processed by the system stay within the Commission's firewalls and can't be seen by outsiders; it trans- lates from and into any official EU lan- guage; and it works best with texts on EU-related matters. Additionally, the machine translation service accepts not just .doc formats but also Excel spreadsheet, Powerpoint pres- entations, html documents, and even PDFs. It can detect the language of text longer than 30 characters, translates sever- al documents into several languages in one go, keeps the format of the original document, and offers 552 language pairs, covering all 24 official EU languages, Ice- landic and Norwegian. A rediscovery of the vocabulary Prof. Adrian Grima from the University of Malta's Faculty of Maltese posts regular updates on the use of Maltese words and loan-words pertaining to the pandemic Imxija – spread or contagion This is perhaps one word which, as Prof. Adrian Grima points out, is en- joying renewed prominence and whose roots, from the Maltese word mean- ing 'to walk', instantly suggest what it means. As laid down in Erin Serracino Inglott's Il-Miklem Malti, imxija: IMX- IJA, mard mexxej li joħduh bosta nies, bħall-influwenza, il-ħosba, eċċ.; mard li jintrikeb, epidemija (a contagious disease like the influen- za... that is passed on to many, an epidemic). Persuna – person The word persuna is always in the feminine, even when speaking of a male person. "You often realise someone speaks Mal- tese well by the way they use the word persuna if they use it in the mas- culine to refer to a male person. The mistake de- rives from words such as kollega (colleague) or vittma (victim), which can be used for both genders… those who find this difficult can use bniedem (human, but ge- neric term for person) instead of persu- na, but bniedma for a woman. I hope the incorrect usage of persuna is only a seasonal thing," Grima jokes. Sahhiet – greetings Grima says he always bids people goodbye with the Saħħiet, derived from the oft-used saħħa, which augurs good health, and is Maltese for 'health'. "I think I might have got this from Olivier Friggieri," says Grima. Grima's colleagues in the Department of Maltese – Prof. Albert Borg, Prof. Arnold Cassola, Dr Immanuel Mifsud and Dr Michael Spagnol – also propose the following: "Ħu ħsieb saħħtek" (take care of your health); "Kuraġġ" (cour- age!); "Agħmel il-qalb" and "Qawwi qa- lbek" (take heart or be strong). The return of the tsunami Adrian Grima is certainly mindful of one thing: how tsunami became such an integral part of everyday speech. Health minister Chris Fearne has employed the tsunami metaphor to describe the efforts of doctors to prevent an insur- mountable wave of medical patients af- flicted by COVID-19 that would make it impossible to tend to all at once. "The metaphor really made its way in our collective consciousness when an earthquake in the Indian Ocean in 2004 killed 230,000 with a tsunami. From then on, the word has become part of everybody's language," he said. The word was even employed by a for- mer Nationalist minister on the year's arrival of irregular migrants to Malta from Libya. Other metaphors used on the fight against the coronavirus are "war" – shown in headlines such as this one from The Guardian, 'NHS hospitals likened to war zones as doctors prepare to make grim decisions' or from Italy's RAI, 'Italy reacts to the coronavirus: We're fighting an invisible enemy'. Pulmonite The Maltese word for pneumonia is pulmo- nite, which also includes bronkopulmonite, a se- rious illness complicated by the inflammation of the bronchi. "My father often warned us to keep warm so as not to catch some pulmonite," Grima says. Quarantine and Kwaran- tina In Maltese, the preposi- tion fi (in) is not required to refer to quarantine. So one says: "toqgħod kwarantina", "qiegħed kwarantina", "żam- mewha kwarantina", "poġġewhom kwaranti- na", "għadha kwaranti- na", and "ilha kwarantina". Health authorities also use the word 'isolation' or iżolament, ironically from the word 'isola' (island). In Il-Miklem Malti, Erin Serracino Inglott prefers the version 'korantina', "Serracino Inglott says this comes from the Sicilian curantina, which is understandable given the contacts Malta has always had with Sicily and its ports. Kwarantina comes from the Italian quarantena and quarantine, de- riving from the Italian quaranta (forty), for a space in which persons from con- tagious lands can spend 40 days under observation. "In the Dizionario portatile Mal- tese-Italiano-Inglese published in Li- vorno fl-1843, Francesco Vella writes quarantina and says the popular ver- sion of the word as spoken by the peo- ple is curantina. In his 1845 dictionary, Giovanni Battista Falzon uses kwaran- tina, as does Dun Karm Psaila a 100 years later in 1847." quire an extra effort to find their equivalent in Maltese. Examples of more complicated terms in- clude: contact tracing (insegwu minn fejn ittieħdet), incubation period (sakemm joħorġu s-sin- tomi), acute episode (perjodu aktar diffiċli), respiratory illness (mard tan-nifs), social distanc- ing (distanzi bejnietna), surfaces (uċuħ), cluster (grupp), commu- nity spread (imxija), essential retail (bejgħ bl-imnut essenzjali), public/mass gatherings (laqgħat pubbliċi/folol), travel history (fejn kienu msefrin), frontline (fuq quddiem) and containment phase (iż-żmien li nżommuha milli tixtered). "Quite often journalists pick up the terms in English and per- petuate them in their frequent reports. One understands that medics and politicians involved in the current situation, like ac- ademics and educators and a few other professions, are daily ex- posed to English – this language is a tool of their daily life. "However once such persons become public communicators they inevitably turn into commu- nal speakers. Such communica- tions would greatly benefit from speakers mastering the desired language skills. "Final objective? Top clarity for all receivers." Adrian Grima: monitoring the COVID-19 pandemic word by word