Conference 7.286::digital

    Interestingly enough, I'm leaving in 10 days to go down to Columbia to
    help impliment DSNlink for the distributor there.  see, there isn't
    really DEC in Columbia but a distributor that handles DEC stuff for US
    (I've got not idea how large the distributor is nor how large the
    customer base is).  I expect that this trip will be an eye opener for
    me in terms of how DEC works (as opposed to how the rest of the world
    works)!
    
    I just got back from the vet where I got my shots so I'm now anxious to
    get on the road.  Full report at 11.

    Hi,
    
    We have the same problem at the Atlanta support center, what
    we do is either have one of our spanish speaking support people
    help on the call, or if they are not available I have found that most
    of the folks can write in english or find someone who can.
    
    What I do is tell the customer to write the problem statement down
    and fax or e-mail it to me.
    
    I think cat is spelled gato, I lived in california for a number of
    years in the town of El Toro, on El Gato way, nears the streets of
    El Pero and La Vaca.
    
    Jim Graft

re: .0

I can't answer your questions, but it's a great note!
:^)
-Jack

Hey Gato (good multi-lingual pun, no?) it's obvious that if you simply
learn Spanish then you wouldn't be having these problems.  This sounds
like a "business need" course that the Customer Support Center really
ought to fund   ;-)

--Scott

    
    
    Well Buenosnochos, Scott!!  ;-)
    actually, gracia, I just signed up to take Beginning Spanish starting
    Monday.
    
    I figure a few months of beginning Spanish, and I'll get all the way up
    to 'dog', "my shoes are red", "this is my sister", "where is the
    bathroom pourfavour"...
    
    I'll be ready to kick butt then  ;-)

    I will be taking Russian and was told that I would have to foot the
    bill. Thats O.K. because if mgmt ever asks me to translate for them
    I`ll charge them the cost of the course for the first hour (1 hour
    min).
    
    I would do that no matter what language I wanted to learn.

    .0 There are several alternatives - 
    
    1).  You can learn Spanish
    2).  Support customer base that speak English
    3).  Use an interpretor
    4).  Engage a Spanish speaking techy type and let them support the
         customer.  
    
    .0 you know as well as I know we have to do the best with what we have.  

    
    
    no, there is another alternative. Continue to provide support FROM
    Latin America. We had a support organization. Where did it go and how
    much money are we really saving by not having it anymore? 
    
    There are always other alternatives to "like it or leave it".
    There just has to be someone willing to say out loud that the
    like it or leave it attitude is NOT helping our company to make money
    and survive and that the penny wise and pound foolish plan along with the
    "lump it" attitude (can you say COP OUT?) is what's killing us.
      
    
    

    Re: .0
    
    I think your best best is to hire a tech that speaks Spanish.
    (not me)
    
    Digital has sent me to teach SW courses in Bolivia, Venezuela,
    Mexico and Puerto Rico, using Spanish in Lectures, but with
    English course materials.  I learned Spanish as a child, and
    again in the Peace Corps.
    
    What students appreciate most is the chance to ask questions
    and get answers in their own language without an interpreter
    in between.
    
    If you shop carefully, you should be able to get someone that
    speaks both English and Spanish, and that is otherwise fully
    qualified for the job.  That way you don't have to commit
    the person full-time to Spanish language support, if there's
    not enough work to justify it.
    
    Anything less than that is, in my opinion, messy.
    
    Dave
    
      
    

    .9 There just has to be someone willing to say out loud that the like it 
    .9 or leave it attitude is NOT helping our company to make money and 
    .9 survive and that the penny wise and pound foolish plan along
    .9 with the "lump it" attitude (can you say COP OUT?) is what's killing us.
    
    I think you are confusing the attempts of a company to make a profit
    by cutting expenses with a "like it or leave it" mentality.   I've
    spoke with translators before - it takes more time - but you know what
    they say - when the go'n gets tough the tough get go'n.
    
    
    
    
    
    

    
    
    
    We all understand our need to watch the dollars and cents. 
    
    maybe the question is, at what point does "it takes more time" cease
    to be cost effective?  

    I'd suggest that you contact our Chihuahua plant.  They are to
    be closed soon but I believe that they may still have some 
    engineering personnel still there.  They speak english very
    well and they were building workstation and PC modules until
    very recently.  They are on node Parral::  Good luck!
    
    Mike Foris
    Albuquerque Manufacturing Plant
    

    
    actually, I played Volleyball against the Chihuahua team a few years
    ago....(albuquerque too!!)
    Remember the gold old days and the Southwest tourney??
    
    Great folks...I sure wish them all alot of
    luck with their plant closing  :-(
    
    thanks for the idea!
    

    
    You might try the BROKE::ESPAGNOL conference.  
    
    I can also give you the name of someone in the Florida LAC office 
    if necessary - contact me offline for that.
    
    Cindy

    I will be glad to help in any translation (Spanish/Englis).
    
    But, it's gonna cost you $$$

Norm.  Just remember these two phrases!  After DSNlink is going, that is :):

? Donde esta la cervesa porfavor ?
? Donde esta el banyo porfavor ?

They got me by in a pinch...

Cathy.  Also don't overlook possible contacts from MXOC00::MEXICO

Cervesas aside, once you finish your spanish course, you will 
likely want to become a resource.

If you enable CALL_ROUTING in your STARS database, there is an
article that contains the names of people who speak a foreign 
language and have volunteered to assist in technical support.
Search on MULTILINGUAL and RESOURCES.

Fifteen are listed for speaking spanish although I can tell you the 
list still has some folks who are no longer here (I have already
sent mail to the maintainer of the file about this).

... this list also has you listed as able to speak French.  Oui?.

In any case, bueno suerte...

    	At one time there was a European Area technical support group,
    which had people who were fluent in almost any of the languages. The
    girl at the end of the telephone wasn't technical, but she spoke seven
    languages fluently. If a Polish customer came on the line she could
    pass him to a Polish speaking technical expert, who might not be a
    technical expert in the right field, but could act as a translator for
    the person who was. At least there wasn't a non-technical person along
    the translation path.
    
    	European technical support has been disbanded, but maybe the best
    solution would be to get the customer to call technical support in
    Madrid? Portugal also has technical support which might help the
    Brazilians.
    
    	Dave, who used to be in the European support group, and could
    sometimes answer VMS questions in French without a translator.

    There are still a few groups that realize the importance of
    having a multi-lingual support group.  Here at the European Network
    Operations Center we have people fluent in 13 languages to include:
    
    French 		German		Russian
    English		Dutch         	Polish
    Spanish          	Norwegian     	Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese)
    Portuguese        	Swedish
    Italian          	Danish
    
    
    

    Re: The base note and the last three replies:
    
    Working through interpreters in a technical environment is in most
    cases slow and iefficient, because most of the interpreters that you
    can hire for contract purposes will have more of a linguistic
    background than a technical one.
    I've had this experience on a previous job, when I was a field engineer
    with GE in an Italian Steel mill.
    They had hired interpreters that were very good in both languages, but
    when it came to technical terms they were hopelessly lost.
    So I ended up doing the translations for my co-workers, which meant
    that I had to translate between two foreign languages (since my
    mother-tongue is German).
    
    I think the most cost efficient way for our company is the one
    described in the last couple of replies, having a number of multilingual,
    technically competent support people, that can help each other out.
    
    Having the time to do this is another matter :-)
    
    Christoph  

    Can anyone say how one signs up as a multilingual resource?
    
    What are the economics of being a "resource", or is it
    just volunteer work?
    
    Dave
    

    Bucko...

    Only if they don't understand the first time.

We said, "ONLY IF THEY DON:T UNDERSTAND THE FIRST TIME!"

;-)  (Not British, except by ancestry, but couldn't resist anyway.)

	Anyone know a good place to learn French in the greater Nashua, NH
	area?

							mike

Call the Adult Learning Center in Nashua.  
If they have sign language courses (which my daughter attended),
they may have foreign languages - even French, no?

Re: .8             

>    .0 There are several alternatives - 
    
>    1).  You can learn Spanish
>    2).  Support customer base that speak English
>    3).  Use an interpretor
>    4).  Engage a Spanish speaking techy type and let them support the
>         customer.  
    
There are also some good PC based business language translators.

> There are also some good PC based business language translators.

A coworker (hi Marc, I know you're reading this) spoke of an
experience his brother had with a pc english-to-spanish translator.

His brother wrote a letter to his bilingual sister-in-law telling 
of their 9 month-old daughter's experiences.  He used the pc software 
to translate the letter into spanish, then, for grins, translated the 
spanish translation back into english with interesting results.

'Dear Tina' was translated back to 'Dear Tub'
'Fort Mason' was translated back to 'Fort Bricklayer'

and in describing the little girl's prolific desire to crawl into 
cupboards, he jokingly wrote that the only way to stop her would 
be to:

'nail the little monster down'  which got translated back to 'spike 
the little freak down'.

I'm sure the english-to-spanish translation was just fine, though.

    	Machine translation has many years to go to become useful without a
    human translator, though it can speed the job of a human translator.
    There is the classic example from many years ago :-
    "Fruit flies like a banana".
    
    	This sentence is not only grammatically correct, but even true
    (possibly) whether you take "flies" as a noun or a verb. A human can
    take a much wider context to decide between the two possibilities, and
    guide a machine in which choice to take, but I haven't heard of a
    machine translator that could take into account the wider context. A
    reasonable machine translator into French would give a human a choice
    of the verb root "voler" and the noun root "mouche" and then complete
    the sentence. This would also involve switching between "comme" and
    "aimer" when translating "like".
    
    	This is not an isolated example, and similar examples exist in
    other languages. Ask a Frenchman to pronounce "couvent" without putting
    it in the context of a sentence, such as "Les poules du couvent
    couvent"  ;-)
    
    	At least for the moment you need a human translator to handle
    ambiguities and to polish the results, though a machine can certainly
    speed his work.

RE> .29

>There are also some good PC based business language translators.

My wife (whose native language is Spanish, and who is superbly fluent in 
English and fluent in French), looked over some of those packages.  She
read the boxes of all 4 of the packages which she saw in our local 
Egghead Software store and CompUSA super-store.

My wife went ballistic when she read the translations offered as examples
of how good the programs were.  She said that the translations were 
uniformly horrible, and that any Spanish speaker would be deeply offended 
if they were offered documents like the ones shown on the boxes.

So please check with a native speaker of the language being translated into,
before recommending or using an automatic translator program.

RE: .31

>    There is the classic example from many years ago :-
>    "Fruit flies like a banana".
    
I first heard a similar one years ago in relation to Artificial Intelligence,
which has similar problems in parsing and interpreting natural language:

	Time flies like arrows, fruit flies like honey.

-- Ken Moreau

    re: .32
>My wife went ballistic when she read the translations offered as examples
>of how good the programs were.  She said that the translations were 
>uniformly horrible, and that any Spanish speaker would be deeply offended 
>if they were offered documents like the ones shown on the boxes.
    
    	And presumably they used their better examples in the advertising
    material on the outside of the boxes!
    
    	Always use a native speaker of the output language for a final scan
    and correction, even if you can save some of the typing work of
    producing a draft with a machine.
    
    Dave, who uses his daughter to translate into French since she has
    spent 90% of her life in France, while he has only spent 25%.

      No true Englishman ever bothers to learn a foreign language. He knows
    his own language is the best, so why should he trouble to learn
    something inferior? The only phrase an Englishman needs to know in any
    language is "Do you speak English? If not, then fetch me someone who
    does."
    
    Ken 8*) 8*)

>    something inferior? The only phrase an Englishman needs to know in any
>    language is "Do you speak English? If not, then fetch me someone who
>    does."
    
   Of course, he can always just SPEAK LOUDER as this will naturally
    make English trivial to understand even to foreigners :-)

    Re: -.few
    
    Don't want to get into a debate over this but .28 suggested
    "some good PC based business language translators..."  Take
     ^^^^		^^^^^^^^
    a look at SOME of the recent crop of BUSINESS translators. Because
    of the "cut 'n dry" nature of business lingo the good ones
    give you a fairly good UNDERSTANDING of what the issue at hand 
    is. Nobody recommended they be used to translate a legal document 
    to save a son-in-law from the electric chair or to translate, 
    God forbid, the daughter's love letters from the South of France!  

    re: .36 "give you a fairly good UNDERSTANDING".
    
    	I think this is the essence. With the assumption that the person
    reading it *wants* to understand it, and that he can get clarification
    from a good human translator when he gets confused then these packages
    may be suitable. The problem in the base note was that there wasn't a
    good human translator available. Also, if you are trying to put out
    advertising material, or translating a business document that might
    form part of the basis of a contract, then in the first case you might
    have a reluctance on the part of the recipient to be bothered to
    understand, and in the second case you might have a substantial
    financial incentive to misinterpret it.
    
    	The one place you might use such a thing is for the daughter's love
    letters from the South of France. The intended recipient probably has a
    strong interest in trying to understand them. And since there are over
    40 nationalities at the school my daughter attends she could probably
    get a girl friend to check the accuracy of her foreign language.

If you know the consumer is you, or a co-worker (who you know is willing to
be tolerant) then you can possibly use a machine translation without further
fiddling.

If, however, you want to send something to an outside party, then I would
very definitely argue that you must NOT use any translation that hasn't
been cleaned up by a person who is highly competent in that language.
A poor translation (either machine-made or made by a subcompetent human)
will be taken, as a minimum, as evidence of incompetence on the part of the
sender, and at worst as a serious insult.

I remember a poorly translated letter my father once received (from England,
rendered into "dutch" by someone who clearly hadn't passed Dutch 101).  It was
good for a laugh but it also told us not to do business with the sender.
A few weeks later he received another letter, this one well-written,
apologizing profusely for the lousy translation in the first one.  That was
nice, but by then the damage was done.

The documents you mail out are every bit as much a factor in creating your
quality image as the machines and the software you sell.

	paul

    I wonder if mechanical translation becomes more/less relevant
    in light of the fact that the origianl request was for Spanish
    language telephone support,  not written document translation.
    
    Dave
    

    Re: -.1
    
    >I wonder if mechanical translation becomes more/less relevant
    >    in light of the fact that the origianl request was for Spanish
    >    language telephone support,  not written document translation.
    
    Thank you! That was all I had in mind.

I assume the idea of mechanical translation implies that you're going to
get hardcopy, presumably via fax.  Is that realistic?  Is it realistic to
expect a general purpose language translator to deal with matters of a
technical nature? (What is the Spanish for "frammis" or "doohickey"?)

The more important question seems to me to be this: how often do you get
calls from non-English speakers?  If this is more than just an isolated
incident, it seems clear that you need Spanish-speaking personnel.

Besides, compared to us in Europe, you've got it easy.  The number of
languages spoken on this continent is breathtaking, and besides that most
of them have dialects incomprehensible to other speakers of the main
language.  In this topic, you've also seen a reflection of the range of
attitudes about language, ranging from the insular British ("let 'em
speak English") to the cosmopolitan Dutch (Roelof probably speaks at
least two languages other than Dutch, and quite possibly more).  I've
got one language other than English (German, since that's where I live)
and have been told more times than you can count how much it helps me
with my business contacts that I can speak their language.  I also have
the remnants of my college French, which has disintegrated into a sort
of generic Romance language suitable for use in French, Italian, or
Spanish restaurants, but would be guaranteed to lose the most contented
customer if used in business.

Steve

    Here at the Americas Zone CSC we get calls in from Quebec, to South
    America.  We have engineers in the US who have Russian or Arabic as 
    their mother tongue, this makes their command of English (US version)
    rather hard to understand.  
    
    I took the 1st Semester of French to help in dealing with French 
    Canadians, but we could not find 4 students to take the class so it
    is cancelled.  We are getting a lot of students in Spanish, and a
    few in German.  (I do not know of any native german speakers calling
    in.)  
    
    This morning my first call was from Montevideo, Uruguay.  I have had
    several calls from South America, and Mexico.  While I speak, read
    and write German, Speak, and understand/read some Norsk, Dansk, and
    Swenska, I need French to enable me to do my job better.  Spanish and
    Portugeese are also helpful here.  We get a lot of Island (Carib.)
    calls from people who speak a version of the Queen's English...
    
    Dave

It's obvious that all we need to do is throw processing power at this
problem and solve it.  It seems to me that one ought to be able to
implement a reasonable subset of a "Universal Translator" with an Alpha
or two.

My college French was absolutely NO help with Canadian French.  The French
language channel on German cable TV recently ran a series about a hockey
team, whose uniforms looked a bit like the Nordiques but was some sort of
a national team.  It was in Canadian French.  They ran it with French
subtitles.

Steve

    re: .43

>It's obvious that all we need to do is throw processing power at this
>problem and solve it.  It seems to me that one ought to be able to
>implement a reasonable subset of a "Universal Translator" with an Alpha
>or two.

    Variations on this thought have been expressed since the early '50s.
    Eventually we will be able to do good natural language understanding.
    After that, converting that understanding into another language is
    fairly easy. Who knows, perhaps there is a breakthrough coming which
    will solve all the real hard problems.

    
    
    re .41
    
    The number of calls from Spanish speaking customers continues to
    increase so (as near as I can tell) there is no longer support in
    Latin America, and those calls are now coming to us.
    Since, up until now, we have staffed enough English speaking people to
    take English speaking customer calls, and have no need to staff Spanish
    speaking specialists, we are STUCK. 
    It's all well and good to say go out and hire some Spanish speaking
    folks, then teach them all of the products that it's taken the rest of
    us decades to get good at (!!), but a) even if that was feasible, we
    are LOSING people, not hiring people. 
    That leaves us with a)no Spanish speaking expertise in most areas.
    b)having to go thru interpretors for most calls  c)an increased
    number of calls from Spanish speaking customers  d)a dwindeling number
    of ANY speaking specialists who have the time to spend in three way
    conversations that take 3 times as long to work as any other call.
    Catch-22. But everything seems to be at this point.
    The LOGICAL answer would have been to NOT shut down our Latin America
    support until we could pick it up...
    But not to worry. I had my first day of Intro to Spanish today.
    !Hola Amigos!  ;-)

	Ah, now if only Esperanto took off....

							mike

    	Having worked on speech processing in the '60s I can assure you
    that computer analysis is extremely difficult. It is extremely
    difficult even to distinguish word boundaries from (for example) a
    glottal stop within a word. You don't have that sort of problem with
    written text.
    
    	As pointed out with Canadian French, you can get variations even
    within a language sufficient to cause problems. The French seem to
    regard Canadian French as quaint and charming, partly because of the
    accent and partly because of the use of words regarded as archaic in
    French. This is similar to the way many English regard American
    English. A human can handle the differences after maybe a week or two
    of listening to the other variant, but for a machine it is a major
    problem.
    
    	Machine recognition of general speech has always been 20 years in
    the future for at least the last 30 years, and I think this is still
    the case.

    Of course, the _real_ solution to this problem is simply require
    all customers to speak and write fluent American...
    
    ;-)

    Re: .46
    
    I'm repeating...
    
    Looking for a Spanish speaking support person does NOT imply
    looking for a person who doesn't speak English well.  You 
    can find people who do both.
    
    Looking for a Spanish speaking support person does NOT imply
    looking for an underqualified candidate.  You can find qualified
    people among the native Spanish speakers, and also find occasional
    Spanish speakers among non natives.
    
    If you have no budget for hiring, and no turnover, I guess it's
    a moot point.  But please don't let assumptions about Spanish
    speakers prevent you from finding one that can give you extra
    value for the same money.
    
    Dave

    	Absolutely agree with .50.  I have just spent lunchtime with a
    woman who is native Spanish. She used to work as a VMS system manager 
    for DEC, but is currently a secretary. We talked maybe 80% in English
    and 20% in French since her English is better than my French.
    
    	Mind you, you would probably have to offer her more than a
    secretary's salary to do support. She told me that the one thing she
    hated about system management was all of the idiot users coming along
    with "How do I do this?" type questions.

    The problem is not the people available who are trained in a technical
    skill and a foreign language, the problem is as Cathy said, WE ARE
    DOWNSIZING, RIGHTSIZING, MAKING PEOPLE REDUNDANT AND OTHERWISE LETTING
    EMPLOYEES GO, now what manager in their right mind is going to try to
    buck this trend and try to hire a person fluent in some other langauge?
    
    JUstification is the name of the game, and you had better not rock the
    boat, or you may well find yourself swimming.
    
    
    Dave
    

    Re: .52
    
    >JUstification is the name of the game, and you had better not rock the
    >boat, or you may well find yourself swimming.
    
    You mean you're *not* considering swimming?  It's time to
    "admit that the waters around you have grown".  As for me,
    I'm halfway to Guantanamo already.
    
    Dave

    
    >	Ah, now if only Esperanto took off....
    
    I always thought that would be one of the most promising avenues.
    During a trip to Iceland years ago, I found that they had one of
    the highest number of Esperanto speakers in Europe.  As this was
    a multinational trip, it was interesting to see the Icelandic
    guides use Esperanto as an interlingua to translate conversations
    between speakers of different languages.
    
    When ISE did some investigation of machine translation systems a few
    years back, one Dutch company had designed an interlingua system using
    Esperanto.  Irt was called the "Bilingual Knowledge Base".  This
    approach seemed to have more promise than the systems based on
    restricted English or the "raw power" approach of database lookups
    (we field tested one of the latter).  BKB funding was one of the early
    victims of cost cutting.
    
    Colin
    
    

    Re: .52
    
    Sorry my last reply was a little on the flip side.  I couldn't
    resist.
    
    You are of course, right about the downsizing issue.  I tried
    to address that by saying that the question of hiring someone
    might be moot.
    
    On rereading .0, I find that the message wasn't really asking
    how the problem should be solved.  It was just asking whether
    the solution he was forced to endure seemed wrong to others
    beside himeself.
    
    Ok, my answer to the .0 question: yes, it seems dmb to me, too.
    
    Interesting that some people leaped to a technical solution:
    (mechanical translators) while others (like me) leaped to
    a management solution (hire a Spanish speaking person).
    
    However, we *might* not be talking to anyone in this not
    who has the authority and responsibility to solve the problem.
    
    My only remaining point is that some writers in this note seem
    to think that if you hire a Spanish speaker, you have to settle
    for second best in some other area.  I disagree.
    
    Dave
    

    
    .54 - BSO's approach was based on the "interlingua" concept, the 
    idea that human beings translate using an intermediate or kernel
    language. The project was stopped when it was "about 90% finished" 
    [sic] - they seemed to realize that the remaining 10% of the work 
    was going to take the proverbial 90% of the time and budget. The
    "machine translation" (or MT) systems that I've seen are based on
    pattern recognition and retrieval/re-use of previously translated
    material: feed them something new and they'll choke.
    
    -maarten.
    

    Hi Gang!
    
    Just my 2 cents.  I have seen several references to a list containing
    people in the CSC who are fluent in a given language.  This may be 
    helpful but I am not sure how much.  If the person who is fluent in 
    given language is in a non-support role such as a secretary, how long
    will their manager allow them to neglect what they are supposed to do?
    After all a secretary is being paid to be a secretary not a translator. 
    
    Second issue is that if a language resource is on another team how long
    is management on the other team going to be happy using its resources 
    supporting another team?  I suspect not for long as they will probably
    require language assistance from *their* language resource.  
    
    It has also been suggested that the specialists learn the languages.  
    This may be feasible but I don't know if management will pay for it and
    give time off of work to do it.  I suspect not.  Frankly I am not going
    to learn French, Spanish, or Portugese because of what I feel is 
    short-sighted planning on managements part.
    
    Even if the company would pay for language courses it will still take
    some time (many months) before a person can carry on a conversation 
    in the language.  I have been taking Dutch for about a year (my wife is
    Dutch).  I still find it very difficult to follow a conversation in
    Dutch.  Granted I don't have gift for languages but I don't think my
    experience is atypical.  
    
    My feelings are:
    
    1) Providing support in other languages with very limited translational
    capability seems silly at best.
    2) Teaching specialists the other languages is certainly feasible but
    will require a commitment from management in terms of time and money. 
    Neither time nor money seem to be in plentiful supply.
    3) I feel that hiring some dedicated translators who have some
    technical background may be the quickest solution.  
    
    Again just my 2 cents,
    
    Carl

    
    
    
    
    Hola  Carl!
    
    
    re: <hiring>
    
    
    HIRING? At Digital.
    ????
    
    You HAVE been on vacation for awhile   ;-)
    
    Wouldn't it have been more cost affective to keep the folks who spoke
    the language and knew the products EMPLOYED in the first place?
    Penny wise and POUND foolish. 
    again and again and again. 
    We're going to look back someday and ask what the HELL happened and who
    is to blame and what we might have done differently to stop them from
    running this company into the ground with their short sighted
    decisions....
    But until then.....hola mr. customer.  Como esta usted?  (I'm working
    on the spelling stuff!!!)

RE: .32

>> I first heard a similar one years ago in relation to Artificial Intelligence,
>> which has similar problems in parsing and interpreting natural language:
>> 
>> 	Time flies like arrows, fruit flies like honey.

I also heard one in my AI class many years ago.  It seems they developed an
English-French-English translator.  They fed it the phrase:

	Out of sight, out of mind.

Doing a full round-trip translation cycle, it came back again in English as:


	Blind idiot.

Who knows?  Might even be a true story!  :^)


Paul

    Or the story I heard:
    
        The phrase    "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."
    
    translated from English to Russian back to English
    
        came out as   "The wine is good, but the meat is rotten."

    	Good technical translators that can handle telephone call speeds
    are *extremely* expensive. I worked with one a year or so ago when I
    was giving a presentation and he was doing the simultaneous
    translation, and I chatted with him during a break. It turned out that
    although we were in Geneva he lived near Valbonne, and when he
    mentioned where he lived, etc., I could guess that he is earning
    probably more than any DEC Valbonne manager.
    
    	If it is a serious problem in the U.S. then maybe someone should
    look at some sort of swap with the Madrid office. It is quite possible
    that they would be prepared to swap a good Spanish Unix expert who
    would speak English for a superb American Unix expert who could speak
    enough Spanish to buy groceries. Every DEC techie in Europe can handle
    technical English because most of the manuals and courses and source
    code comments are in English.

	I think the model of support center centralization is wrong
	at all. 
	Instead of searching for multi lingual specialist - its better
	to have local first/second line support and only the third
	line centralized.

	The "new" created organisation doesn't work for our customers -
	this feedback should go back to management.

	Neither our customer have to speek fluent english Nor the support
	specialist have to learn several languages !

	Vera 

    Re: .62
    
    I think you make a very good point.  My understanding of
    the earlier notes is that that is sort of what was done in 
    the Latin America office before it got closed, and that it
    was the closure of the Latin America office that created
    the problem described in .0
    
    Dave
    

    Dave,
    
    Yes the water is deep, and the sharks and baracudas are all about.
    
    
    Re languages... First you learn a language, and become proficient in
    it, and then you learn the technical language to go with it.  Technical
    language is like learning a whole new language.  Here in the CSC
    digital is paying for the training, I take 1/2 hour off of work time
    and the other time is mine.  
    
    We could not get 4 students to sign up for our french class, and the 
    advanced class could not do so either, so they merged our classes.  I
    am now doing 3 hours of French on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  I feel
    that while it is intense, this will help me get up to speed in the 
    language a lot sooner.  Now to find someone to hang around and speak
    the language with on a regular basis.  
    
    
    These courses are paid as they are directly work related.  I do not
    understand why they are paying some of the German courses.  
    
    Dave

First of all, it is completely irresponsible to dismantle local support while
you have active contracts without any transition plan. One might say that they
had no choice because they ran out of money in the local support organization.
It is so typical, in these cases, to dump the problem on someone else. In fact,
I've experienced the same symptom here in engineering during the last 4-5 years
that did not even involve language problems.

Why not require that some money is set aside from each support contract in a
contingency bin? If the country/region that sold the contract is not able to
offer the front ending the money is taken from that bin to fund centralized
front-ending. If they are able to handle it themselves then that bin is
transferred to the local/regional support center. Perhaps the country/region
could sign a contract with the generalized front-end and pay from their
contingency bin on a per-call basis. These technicians could be located in, for
example, Valbonne, Atlanta or Singapore.

If we are not able to set aside money in such a bin, due to budget constraints,
then we are obviously not charging enough for our contracts or we have
unrealistic expectations about our service margin for those countries/regions.
If contingency money had been set aside then we would have at least had the
budget to implement a reasonable exit plan.

>Per

    re: .64
>    Re languages... First you learn a language, and become proficient in
>    it, and then you learn the technical language to go with it.  Technical
>    language is like learning a whole new language.  Here in the CSC
>    digital is paying for the training, I take 1/2 hour off of work time
>    and the other time is mine.  
    
    	Yes, the technical language is a whole other business. My elder
    daughter has just got a biology degree from a British university. All
    her biology teaching up to that time had been in French, so even though
    she is bilingual, she had a very difficult first 6 months because she
    didn't know any of the technical terms in English. (She now has a job
    with an accountancy company, so she is learning a whole new set of
    technical terms, because she studied economics in French too when she
    was at school).

RE -1

I've heard of disecting a company; is this what your daughter now does? :-)

( must work for Hanson, Goldberg or one of the other groups that carve 
  up companies and make a vast profit )

>>  	Yes, the technical language is a whole other business. My elder
    daughter has just got a biology degree from a British university. All
    her biology teaching up to that time had been in French, so even though
    she is bilingual, she had a very difficult first 6 months because she
    didn't know any of the technical terms in English. (She now has a job
    with an accountancy company, so she is learning a whole new set of
    technical terms, because she studied economics in French too when she
>>  was at school).

    I've just had an idea that might help with the problem of providing
    remote technical assistance to someone in Colombia.  I'll offer
    it on the off chance that it might fill the bill where learning
    Spanish, using a mechanized translator, or hiring bilingual won't
    work.
    
    Here it is:  Use some sort of "chat" mode (split screen, two
    typists), to "talk"  the problem out in written English.
    
    I have never met a computer professional that could not read
    English, and at least write a little, even if their ability to
    speak and understand spoken English was almost nonexistent.
    
    I realize that this could be a big pain, too but, what the hey1
    If you're desperate...
    
    Regards,
        Dave
    

>>    Here it is:  Use some sort of "chat" mode (split screen, two
>>    typists), to "talk"  the problem out in written English.
    
Try typing (at a VMS prompt):

$ PHONE node::user

This is exactly what you asked for. It's been there since at least 1980, if
not longer. Of course, you need to make sure that the two end nodes are
on the same DECnet and the machines both have PHONE installed...

You can do a similar thing with most PC terminal emulators by just dialing the
other person's PC. No split screen, just take turns typing.

--RS