Financial terminology

Term of the Day

For Tuesday, December 15, 2009

escrow

Definition

Arrangement under which a deed, money, security, or other property or document is held by a neutral third-party (called an escrow agent) in trust for a first-party (called grantor, obligor, or promisor) for a specified period or until the occurrence of a condition or event. The escrow agent is duty bound to deliver the asset or document in his or her possession to a named second-party (called grantee, obligee, or promisee) upon the fulfillment of the condition(s) or the happening of a stated event, as established in the escrow agreement.

escrow is in the Accounting & Auditing, Banking, Commerce & Finance and Corporate, Commercial, & General Law subjects.

escrow appears in the definitions of the following terms: principal, interest, taxes, and insurance (PITI) and advance refunding.

This content can be found on the following page:

http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/escrow.html

Happy or drunk? in a court room hearing.

NBCNewYork.com

It may have been a courtroom first: a witness, who apparently needed Spanish translation, stopped her testimony to correct the court-appointed translator -- in English.

The assault trial of State Senator Hiram Monserrate was brought to a halt this afternoon when defense witness Jasmina Rojas, an Ecuadoran immigrant who is the cousin of the alleged victim, stopped her testimony to complain that her words were being improperly translated.

"I've never had this happen before!" exclaimed veteran Queens Supreme Court Judge William Erlbaum.

It happened over a key word -- and issue -- in the trial. Rojas is Karla Giraldo's cousin and was with Giraldo at night last December hours before Giraldo allegedly was slashed with broken glass by boyfriend Monserrate. The senator's defense attorney called Rojas to verify Giraldo's story of having been drunk.

Matters got sticky when the interpreter translated Rojas as saying Giraldo had been "happy." When a prosecutor who was cross-examining pounced on the difference between "happy" and "drunk" (the less drunk Giraldo was, the better for the district attorney), Rojas herself objected. The witness' English evidently is good enough to know that she meant "drunk."

That caused attorneys on both sides to ask that Rojas continue in English, led a bemused Judge Erlbaum to ask the interpreter if she wanted to be replaced and generally brought the proceedings to a snickering halt for 12 minutes.

Outside the courtroom later, one court officer with knowledge of Ecuadoran culture said that people there will often use the Spanish word for "happy" when they mean "drunk," and add a tipsy hand gesture to convey full meaning. But hand gestures are useless at a legal proceeding that allows only spoken words.

So far defense attorneys have no plan to call that officer as a witness to enlighten Judge Erlbaum, who's deciding the case without a jury.

After an abruptly called recess, Rojas returned to the stand to continue ... in Spanish. With the same interpreter.

Who's the better translator: Machines or humans?

Downloaded from www.cnn.com / international news / October 7

Who's the better translator: Machines or humans?

One of the Internet's great promises is that it's the ultimate democratizer. It's open to everyone and allows all people to communicate.

But, so far, there have been several hitches in that plan. Not everyone has access to a computer and a broadband connection. Some governments still censor the Internet. And of course, we don't all speak the same language.

For the World Wide Web to be truly global, shouldn't Chinese speakers be able to chat online with people who only speak Spanish? And why should an English speaker be barred from reading blogs written in Malagasy or Zulu?

Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. are two Web companies trying particularly hard to make this happen, and they've released a number of updates to their translation services in recent weeks.

The two online giants are going about the process in different ways.

Facebook aims to translate the Web using an army of volunteers and some hired professional translators. Meanwhile, Google plans to let computers do most of the work.

Which method will ultimately prevail remains to be seen.

But for now, here's a look at the latest language features from both companies, and some background on how their translation services work. (Feel free to add your own Internet translation tips -- and fun translation bloopers -- in the comments section at the bottom of the story):

Facebook's human translation

Many tech bloggers think Facebook's method of human translation seems promising. After all, the American-born social networking site introduced non-English languages for the first time only in January 2008. Now about 70 percent of Facebook's 300 million users are outside of the United States.

How it works: Real people are at the heart of Facebook translation plan. They suggest translated phrases and vote on translations that others have submitted. These crowd-sourced edits -- which work kind of like Wikipedia -- make Facebook's translation service smarter over time. Go to Facebook's translation page to check it out or to participate.

Size: More than 65 languages function on Facebook now, according to Facebook's statistics. At least another 30 languages are in the works, meaning Facebook needs help working out the kinks on those languages before they're put to use.

What's new? Facebook announced in a blog post on September 30 that the social network has made its crowd-sourced translation technology available to other sites on the Web. The update allows sites to install a translation gadget on their sites through Facebook Connect, a service that lets Facebook users sign in on other Web pages.

Facebook also added some new languages, including Latin and "Pirate," which translates the Facebooky word "share" as "blabber t'yer mates!"

Pros and cons: People are good at knowing idioms and slang, so Facebook tends to get these right, but there are limited numbers of multi-lingual volunteers who want to spend time helping Facebook translate things.

Also, Facebook's site is available in many languages, but its human translators don't touch wall posts, photo comments and other user-submitted items, which is a big con if you want to have friends who don't share a common language with you. People who use Facebook Connect to translate their sites can choose which text they want users to help translate, according to Facebook spokeswoman Malorie Lucich.

Craig Ulliott, founder of whereivebeen.com, said he's excited about Facebook's translation application, but it would be too much to ask his site's users to translate user-submitted material.

Google's 'mechanical' translation

Google uses mathematical equations to try to translate the Web's content. This fits in line with the company's mission, which is to organize the world's information and make it useful and accessible to all.

How it works: Google's computers learn how to be translators by examining text that's already on the Web, and from professional Web translations posted online, said Franz Och, a principal scientist at Google. The more text is out there, the more Google learns and the better its translations become. The search-engine company currently translates documents, search results and full Web pages.

Size: Google claims to be the largest free language translation service online. It covers 51 languages and more than 2,500 language pairs. The site's interface has been translated, with the help of Google users, into 130 languages.

What's new?: Google recently created a widget that any Web developer can put on his or her page to offer up Google translations. So, say you're a blogger who writes about music. You might get some Brazilian readers if you offered up a button to translate your site into Portuguese.

Google also recently unveiled a translation service for Google Docs, which lets anyone upload a document to the Web and have it translated into a number of languages for free. And there's a new Firefox add-on from Google to help people translate the Web more quickly.

Och said real-time translation of Internet chats is on the horizon, as are more languages and increased quality as Google's computers get smarter.

Pros and cons: Google's computerized approach means it can translate tons of content -- and fast. But computers aren't quite up to speed with ever-evolving modern speech, so reports of translation errors are fairly common.

On the plus side, the service has been vastly improved in the last five years, Och said. Also, Google lets people spot translation errors, suggest new wordings and translate its interface into languages Google's computers don't speak just yet.

El idioma español en América Latina.

Visita este sitio:

http://noticias.aol.com/trivia/como-se-dice-en-mi-pais?icid=200100127x1210652893x1200640462


para conocer más de la riqueza de nuestra lengua española y su uso en América Latina.

Además, éste es un buen recurso para mejorar la calidad de nuestras traducciones en cuanto a acepciones.

Clerk - Court legal term confusion could prevent a death

US judge 'ignored death row plea'

Richards was executed hours after Judge Keller allegedly closed the court

A prominent judge in Texas has gone on trial accused of refusing to let lawyers for a convicted murderer on death row lodge a last-minute appeal.

Sharon Keller is charged with professional misconduct.

The prisoner, Michael Wayne Richard, was put to death hours after she allegedly shut the court, despite being told an appeal was imminent.

Half of all executions in the US last year were in Texas where critics have dubbed Judge Keller "Sharon Killer".

She is known for her tough stance on the death penalty.

Just hours before his scheduled execution in September 2007, lawyers for Richard tried to lodge an appeal with Judge Keller, the presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

Their efforts were delayed by computer glitches and when they phoned the court to request extra time, they say they were told court closes at 5pm.

Richard, convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering a woman 20 years ago, was put to death by lethal injection some three hours later. He became the 26th person to be executed in Texas that year.

'Confusion'

His lawyers allege that Judge Keller deliberately ordered the courthouse to close at 5pm, knowing a last-minute appeal was imminent.

The State Commission on Judicial Conduct said the judge had engaged in "wilful or persistent conduct that cast public discredit on the judiciary".

Judge Keller's lawyers say she meant that the court building closed at that time, but that there was an after-hours judge on duty who would have accepted the appeal.

"This whole case is about the confusion between the word 'court' and 'clerk'," Chip Babcock said, adding: "There is no question the clerk's office closes at 5pm. That does not mean there aren't after-hours filings."

It is common practice to keep the courthouse open in death penalty cases.

State prosecutors have charged Judge Keller with five counts of professional misconduct.

If found guilty, she could lose her position on the State Appeals Court, a demotion that could end her career.

INTERPRETING - Facial Expressions Show Language Barriers, Too

Facial Expressions Show Language Barriers, Too

ScienceDaily (Aug. 16, 2009) — People from East Asia tend to have a tougher time than those from European countries telling the difference between a face that looks fearful versus surprised, disgusted versus angry, and now a new report published online on August 13th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, explains why. Rather than scanning evenly across a face as Westerners do, Easterners fixate their attention on the eyes.

"We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions," said Rachael E. Jack of The University of Glasgow. "Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, whereas Easterners favor the eyes and neglect the mouth. This means that Easterners have difficulty distinguishing facial expressions that look similar around the eye region."

The discovery shows that human communication of emotion is a lot more complex than experts had believed, according to the researchers led by Roberto Caldara at The University of Glasgow. As a result, facial expressions that had been considered universally recognizable cannot be used to reliably convey emotion in cross-cultural situations.

The researchers studied cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions by recording the eye movements of 13 Western Caucasian and 13 East Asian people while they observed pictures of expressive faces and put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry, or neutral. The faces were standardized according to the so-called Facial Action Coding System (FACS) such that each expression displayed a specific combination of facial muscles typically associated with each feeling of emotion. They then compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using their particular eye movement strategies.

It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes and made significantly more errors than Westerners did. The cultural specificity in eye movements that they show is probably a reflection of cultural specificity in facial expressions, Jack said. Their data suggest that while Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion, Easterners use the eyes more and mouth less.

A survey of Eastern versus Western emoticons certainly supports that idea.

"Emoticons are used to convey different emotions in cyberspace as they are the iconic representation of facial expressions," Jack said. "Interestingly, there are clear cultural differences in the formations of these icons." Western emoticons primarily use the mouth to convey emotional states, e.g. : ) for happy and : ( for sad, she noted, whereas Eastern emoticons use the eyes, e.g. ^.^ for happy and ;_; for sad.

"In sum," the researchers wrote, "our data demonstrate genuine perceptual differences between Western Caucasian and East Asian observers and show that FACS-coded facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotion. From here on, examining how the different facets of cultural ideologies and concepts have diversified these basic social skills will elevate knowledge of human emotion processing from a reductionist to a more authentic representation. Otherwise, when it comes to communicating emotions across cultures, Easterners and Westerners will find themselves lost in translation."

The researchers include Rachael E. Jack, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK; Caroline Blais, Universite´ de Montreal, Montreal, Canada; Christoph Scheepers, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK; Philippe G. Schyns, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK; and Roberto Caldara, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK.

What's in a word?

What’s in a Word?
Language may shape our thoughts.

By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEK

Published Jul 9, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Jul 20, 2009

When the Viaduct de Millau opened in the south of France in 2004, this tallest bridge in the world won worldwide accolades. German newspapers described how it "floated above the clouds" with "elegance and lightness" and "breathtaking" beauty. In France, papers praised the "immense" "concrete giant." Was it mere coincidence that the Germans saw beauty where the French saw heft and power? Lera Boroditsky thinks not.

A psychologist at Stanford University, she has long been intrigued by an age-old question whose modern form dates to 1956, when linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf asked whether the language we speak shapes the way we think and see the world. If so, then language is not merely a means of expressing thought, but a constraint on it, too. Although philosophers, anthropologists, and others have weighed in, with most concluding that language does not shape thought in any significant way, the field has been notable for a distressing lack of empiricism—as in testable hypotheses and actual data.

That's where Boroditsky comes in. In a series of clever experiments guided by pointed questions, she is amassing evidence that, yes, language shapes thought. The effect is powerful enough, she says, that "the private mental lives of speakers of different languages may differ dramatically," not only when they are thinking in order to speak, "but in all manner of cognitive tasks," including basic sensory perception. "Even a small fluke of grammar"—the gender of nouns—"can have an effect on how people think about things in the world," she says.

As in that bridge. In German, the noun for bridge, Brücke, is feminine. In French, pont is masculine. German speakers saw prototypically female features; French speakers, masculine ones. Similarly, Germans describe keys (Schlüssel) with words such as hard, heavy, jagged, and metal, while to Spaniards keys (llaves) are golden, intricate, little, and lovely. Guess which language construes key as masculine and which as feminine? Grammatical gender also shapes how we construe abstractions. In 85 percent of artistic depictions of death and victory, for instance, the idea is represented by a man if the noun is masculine and a woman if it is feminine, says Boroditsky. Germans tend to paint death as male, and Russians tend to paint it as female.

Language even shapes what we see. People have a better memory for colors if different shades have distinct names—not English's light blue and dark blue, for instance, but Russian's goluboy and sinly. Skeptics of the language-shapes-thought claim have argued that that's a trivial finding, showing only that people remember what they saw in both a visual form and a verbal one, but not proving that they actually see the hues differently. In an ingenious experiment, however, Boroditsky and colleagues showed volunteers three color swatches and asked them which of the bottom two was the same as the top one. Native Russian speakers were faster than English speakers when the colors had distinct names, suggesting that having a name for something allows you to perceive it more sharply. Similarly, Korean uses one word for "in" when one object is in another snugly (a letter in an envelope), and a different one when an object is in something loosely (an apple in a bowl). Sure enough, Korean adults are better than English speakers at distinguishing tight fit from loose fit.

In Australia, the Aboriginal Kuuk Thaayorre use compass directions for every spatial cue rather than right or left, leading to locutions such as "there is an ant on your southeast leg." The Kuuk Thaayorre are also much more skillful than English speakers at dead reckoning, even in unfamiliar surroundings or strange buildings. Their language "equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities," Boroditsky wrote on Edge.org.

Science has only scratched the surface of how language affects thought. In Russian, verb forms indicate whether the action was completed or not—as in "she ate [and finished] the pizza." In Turkish, verbs indicate whether the action was observed or merely rumored. Boroditsky would love to run an experiment testing whether native Russian speakers are better than others at noticing if an action is completed, and if Turks have a heightened sensitivity to fact versus hearsay. Similarly, while English says "she broke the bowl" even if it smashed accidentally (she dropped something on it, say), Spanish and Japanese describe the same event more like "the bowl broke itself." "When we show people video of the same event," says Boroditsky, "English speakers remember who was to blame even in an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers remember it less well than they do intentional actions. It raises questions about whether language affects even something as basic as how we construct our ideas of causality."

Begley is NEWSWEEK's science editor.

Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/205985

LECCION INAUGURAL 2009

LECCION INAUGURAL
TRADPROF 2009



1. "Diferencias Conceptuales entre la Traducción e Interpretación"

Expositora: Doris Caspani, Intérprete Certificada de Corte en Kentucky y Tennessee, EUA, miembro de NAJIT.

a) Marco conceptual de ambos procesos

b) Modos de interpretación

c) Técnicas de Traducción

d) La actividad traductora actualmente en EUA


Sábado 17 de enero, 2009, local 1-16, Edificio Reforma Montúfar, Avenida La Reforma 12-01 zona 10.
Inversión: Q240.00
www.serviciostradprof.com

PERFIL ACADÉMICO DE LA CONFERENCISTA:

Doris M. Caspani was born in Austria and grew up in the Netherlands and Venezuela. She obtained a diploma in Hotel Business from Bad Gleichenberg in Styria, Austria and graduated with a B. A. from the College of Mount St. Joseph on the Ohio. After more than twenty years of responsible administrative experience in areas such as promotional, administrative assistant and executive secretary with major international and import-export companies, airline, hotel and food industries in Austria, Venezuela, Colombia, Belgium, Germany, and the United States and eight years in teaching Foreign Languages, she embarked almost ten years ago in medical and judiciary interpretation and obtained her State of Tennessee and State of Kentucky Court Interpreter Certification in 2006 and 2007, respectively. She is fluent in German, Spanish, English and French and has working knowledge of Italian and Dutch. Currently a NAJIT –National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators- and other national and international translator and interpreter organizations member.