Today: Seminar on Bridging the Implementation Gap

As a very late announcement, but maybe of interest to those living in the Netherlands: The Netherlands Helsinki Committee, formerly focusing mostly on the OSCE, is today organising a seminar on implementation problems and the ECHR. It is entitled 'Bridging the Implementation Gap - Enlarging Civil Society’s Role in the European Court of Human Rights’ Implementation Process' and takes place in The Hague. This is the conference announcement:

The Netherlands Helsinki Committee (NHC) wishes to stimulate a more serious and consistent implementation of the European Court of Human Rights’ judgments with a view to help bridge 'the implementation gap'. As a civil society organisation, we will focus on the role of NGO’s in the implementation process. To start off our contribution to improved implementation we have planned a seminar entitled

BRIDGING THE IMPLEMENTATION GAP
- Enlarging Civil Society’s Role in the European Court of Human Rights’ Implementation Process -

to take place in The Hague on 31 October 2011. The seminar will be followed by an informal NGO meeting to discuss and adopt an NGO Action Plan on the following day. We would like to cordially invite you to attend and participate in this seminar and contribute to the adoption of the Action Plan.

When discussing the ECtHR with our partners and experts we often notice that they place more emphasis on bringing well-reasoned applications and obtaining equally well-reasoned judgments than on following up on judgments to ensure their full and effective implementation. We are of the opinion that improved implementation has a strong potential to save the ECHR protection system from asphyxiation. Civil society can play a major role in this and a larger role than it has played to date. We define full and effective implementation as taking measures relating to legislation, policy and practice that go beyond the individual case and that remedy the structural problem that is at the root of a violation.

During the seminar we will discuss activities that civil society can initiate to rise to the challenge of bridging the implementation gap. We will invite civil society organisations from across Europe, professionals working at the Council of Europe, Parliamentary Assembly politicians and academics to participate. It is our intention that the seminar serves as the starting point for a Europe-wide civil society alliance to become exceedingly actively involved in the implementation process. This alliance will follow the Action Plan that we will adopt during the informal NGO meeting on the day following the seminar.

The first part of the seminar is dedicated to the importance of implementation and the (potential) role of civil society in the implementation process from the perspective of the Parliamentary Assembly, academia and the NHC. During the second part of the seminar, we will discuss examples of good practice, such as European NGO coalitions established to follow-up on a judgment, examples of structural non-implementation and formal and informal ways to press for implementation available to civil society. You are warmly invited to share your thoughts on this and tell us about initiatives of your organisation during this interactive and rather informal part of the seminar. At the end of the day, we will start brainstorming about an Action Plan and present our preliminary conclusions.

More points of view on Google News

By Jayakumar Hoskere, Software Engineer

When a big story breaks, there are often over a thousand articles written about the news event. At Google News, we work hard to surface the most relevant and interesting content to you -- so you can spend less time sorting through thousands of articles, and more time consuming news from a range of diverse perspectives.

For instance, since introducing expandable stories, we have added additional labels to call out special types of articles in many editions. These labels are designed to highlight different content types on Google News, and show you stories that complement and expand upon standard news reporting. The four labels we recently launched include:

• Live Updating: A live-updating article, such as a liveblog.
• Featured: An article a publisher has told us is standout.
• Fact-check: An article providing fact-check content about the story.
• Your Preferred source: An article from a source that you preferred.

Evaluating a story from different angles often provides a sharper perspective. That is why we also now highlight special types of articles in many Google News search results. Your search results will not only show recent articles, but also those from diverse perspectives that relate to a given query.

We also recently added the Translate button to non-English international stories in expandable story boxes in the U.S edition, giving you the ability to read pieces from all over the world -- even if you don’t speak the language.

 

We hope you find these changes useful as we continue to develop opportunities for you to find more interesting and valuable content.

News joins Google Dashboard

Posted by Panchapagesan Krishnamurthy, Software Engineer

Halloween is almost here and we're celebrating early. No trick -- just a treat. As of now, you can access Google News in the Google Dashboard. This gives you the ability to see basic information about your Google News personalizations, check out our privacy policy and click through to edit your preferences.

We're excited to bring you this additional level of control and encourage you to give it a whirl.

Article on Same-Sex Partners and ECHR

The Child and Family Law Quarterly (vol. 23, No. 1) includes an article entitled 'Families But Not (Yet) Marriages? Same-Sex Partners and the Developing European Convention ‘Margin of Appreciation’ by Nicholas Bamforth of the University of Oxford. This is the abstract:

This commentary examines two recent decisions of the First Section Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, namely Schalk and Kopf v Austria and P.B. and J.S. v Austria. Both are significant in accepting that same-sex partnerships may fall within the ‘protection of family life’ limb of Article 8 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms 1950, but Schalk and Kopf rejects the notion that Convention signatory states are required under Article 12 to admit same-sex couples to the right to marry, and declines to determine whether any minimal level of legal protection must be offered under Article 8. Both decisions highlight the central role currently played by the ‘margin of appreciation’ in this area.

Guide on Admissibility Criteria Translated

The Courts' Practical Guide on Admissibility Criteria, launched at the end of last year, already existed in the Court's working languages English and French. This week, the Guide has been made available in Italian, German, Greek and Bulgarian. Hopefully, up-to-date Russian, Romanian and Turkish translations will follow soon in order to enable access by lawyers from the states from which most applications stem. One may note that the small Principality of Liechtenstein, not really the biggest problem-maker for the Court, has paid for the German translation! Austrian and German lawyers will be grateful.

Prepositions: The Nightmare Begins

 I am shocked by your remarks! But I am not surprised with them.

Whether you study translating at school or teach yourself from books, you will find that it is a  necessarily detailed and highly technical subject. Non-linguists are often shocked when I show them a Baker, Newmark or Owens. So I like to think that the Bad Article is an oasis of simplicity in a desert of complications and nested problems. This is why I try to present everything in a more off-the-cuff way - if you want the full explanation, you can ask one of your teachers, or dive into a textbook. If you want a wider overview of the problem, illustrated with lots of real-life examples of it, then I'm your man. It’s not completely ‘gut instinct’, as someone once asked me, but it is verifiable information, based on years of solid examples, and also the biggest reason for my not posting more often here – I’ve got tons of notes and half-written articles, which await only the light bulb of understanding to click on over my head before I feel secure in presenting them to you, esteemed readers!

And so, after yet another long, rambling introduction in which I again try to justify my ramshackle methods, let’s get to the point of today’s post – prepositions! I’m often asked about these Smurfy little words, because there are quite a few of them and it’s not always immediately apparent or even logical as to which one to use where. After a while, it gets easier, and a lot of the corrections I make to peoples’ prepositions are in texts by less experienced translators. But beware, not even the old pros are immune to prepositional errors.

So this is clearly a topic that needs addressing, but I've never really found anything which explains it in a really good, clear way. So, I've defaulted back to the Wiki entry, which describes all the different species of preposition – time, place, la la la... So I'm proposing this: We’ll read the Wiki, then meet back here for some examples. The advantage here is that you get all the heavy lifting done by a reliable source, as well as some ‘live’ examples and a bit of analysis from Captain Colourful here. Deal?

Bad Prepositions
Numbered, with the bad ones bolded.

1) We are very pleased at this award, which justifies all our efforts so far.
2) But the programme is relevant forour company, because it aims to improve our sales.
3) This is an acknowledgement to our actions, and confirmation that we are on the right track.
4) Following a special mention ofthe International Federation, interest shot up.
5) These included the 2003 hit ofthe American artist Kelis, entitled Milkshake.
6) The critical details were either peripheral or relatively unimportant for a given incident.
7) It is impossible to specify the set of traits that put a given adult at risk for Type II insanity.
8) Children may indeed be suggestible to a degree which renders their testimony unusable for the truth-seeking process.
9) This may be of relevance forhealth experts.
10) Most of the rest of the conference was not of interest for our representatives.
11) This is the best recognition forour activity, in which we always try to be the best.
12) The book of the former journalist has sold well in many countries.

Good Prepositions
Numbered, with the corrected ones bolded.

1) We are very pleased with this award, which justifies all our efforts so far.
2) But the programme is relevant toour company, because it aims to improve our sales.
3) This is an acknowledgement of our actions, and confirmation that we are on the right track.
4) Following a special mention bythe International Federation, interest shot up.
5) These included the 2003 hit bythe American artist Kelis, entitled Milkshake.
6) The critical details were either peripheral or relatively unimportant to a given incident.
7) It is impossible to specify the set of traits that put a given adult at risk of Type II insanity.
8) Children may indeed be suggestible to a degree which renders their testimony unusable in the truth-seeking process.
9) This may be of relevance tohealth experts.
10) Most of the rest of the conference was not of interest to our representatives.
11) This is the best recognition ofour activity, in which we always try to be the best.
12) The book by the former journalist has sold well in many countries.

 Apparently, the song is some kind of metaphor for something.

Analysis
Despite the abundance of different flavours in the Bad Preposition shop, there are really only a handful that re-occur consistently in Pl>En translations. The examples here are (as usual) all lifted from things I’ve seen in my own work. This makes it easy to see that incorrect use of for, by and to are the main offenders.

Bad: of importance for, of relevance for, of interest for; unimportant for, not relevant for...
Good: of importance to, of relevance to, of interest to; unimportant to, not relevant to...
Remember: X is of noun/adjective to person/group.

Bad: the hit of the artist, a mention of the Federation, the book of the journalist...
Good: the hit by the artist, a mention by the Federation, the book by the journalist...
Remember: the noun by the person/group.

Bad: surprised at his statement, moved at her words...
Good: surprised by his statement, moved by her words...
Remember: verb by pronoun noun

Bad: pleased at this award,
Good: pleased by this award, pleased with this award,

Bad: unusable for the final process, unsuitable to our purposes...
Good: unusable in the final process, unsuitable for our purposes...

Remember: un(adjective, noun etc) ina task or operation, un(adjective, noun etc) for goals, aims

Now, there are some exceptions here and there, such as pleased with this award being okay, but not moved with her words, for example. Also note that a mention from someone is okay too, but not the hit from the artist. My theory is that it sometimes depends on the tense of the verb and/or the case of the sentence overall, as well as just whether or not it’s true to the idea of the original statement. For nearly every example up there, there are additional alternatives not listed (for example, one can be shocked at the response, as well as being shocked by the response. Again, it depends on case and tense).

Ultimately, I would urge you to focus on for/to, of/by and at/by, since these are the most common offenders in our translations! Nail those three suckers and you’ll be well on the way to fame and fortune.

If you’d like to shine a light on any of this, add your own examples or otherwise comment on the whole thing, remember that you can stop by our Facebook wall, email me directly, or even leave a comment below! My email address and the Facebook link are at the top of every page, and the commenting system here can be easily signed-in to with your Google details, or a bunch of other systems, all of which can be selected by clicking the “Comment As” button below the form.

Bringing relevant news to you, regardless of language

Posted by Yaroslav Kurovtsev, Software Engineer, Google Translate

To help bridge language barriers between you and the news of interest to you from around the world -- and to bring you more diverse perspectives on foreign events -- we’ve added a new “translate” button to the expandable story boxes in the U.S. English edition of Google News.

Clicking the translate button reveals the English translation of the original headline using Google Translate. Clicking on the headline takes you to the publisher’s website where you can choose to use Google Translate to see an English version of the entire article. Headlines are labeled with their country of origin.

To do this, we look for foreign articles from local sources on a relevant news topic. For example, in the case of the flood in Thailand, in addition to surfacing English articles from international press like New York Times, we might show a related article from a local source like อาร์วายที9.

At the same time, we hope readers will benefit from finding relevant news in other languages and being able to read it without knowing the language.