[ 12 May 2004: Message edited by: audra trower williams ]

quote:

---

Because we are at the press conference with Chinese PM Wen Jiabao and Commission President Romano Prodi, we will be doing what is called relay translation.

This means the original language, Chinese, will be translated by an official Chinese interpreter into English, which we will then pick up to translate into French.

We will be doing more and more relay interpreting with enlargement. There are more risks of errors with this form of translation and one gets less of a feeling for what the speaker says.

---

[ 12 May 2004: Message edited by: Wilfred Day ]

The problem is that the basin of qualified interpreters and translators into some of the less-spoken member languages is tiny indeed. Guess I could go study Maltese ...

quote:

---

Originally posted by lagatta:
I wonder if Maltese would be difficult for someone who is fluent in both Arabic and Italian. That is the case for a fair number of folks in Tunisia.

---

I found a scary piece on the net. Here's the worst bit:

quote:

---

In the course of this process the Maltese, while retaining the basic Arabic forms for the conjugation of verbs of Semitic origin or of loan-verbs which, by phonetic analogy, could fit into this pattern, created an additional verbal form to accept and int egrate verbs formed from the Sicilian or Italian vocables. And since verbs might be considered as forming the vertebra of the language, it could well be argued that this development must have taken place very early in the formative stage of an independent Maltese language.

---

quote:

---

Translating untranslateable idioms and obscure technical terms in real time takes special gifts.

---

For a compelling fictional treatment of this topic -- and just generally an excellent novel, in my opinion -- see Between Mountains, by Maggie Helwig.

(Full disclosure: the author is a friend of mine).

[ 12 May 2004: Message edited by: 'lance ]

http://europa.eu.int/eurodicautom/Controller

quote:

---

One of our daughters (the movie-star one) just came back from Malta after about six weeks there shooting a film (whoo hoo! She is

---

Actually there is quite a large ex-patriate Maltese community in Toronto. Most of the folks came to Canada in the 1950's and 1960's.