Tzviya Levin Rifkind

Challenges in bi-directional texts

If you are unfamiliar with at least one right-to-left language, such as Hebrew, Arabic or Farsi, your brain is untrained to understand and work with their opposite direction. This makes it difficult to understand right-to-left language alignment and behavior. Things are more complicated when a sentence includes both right-to-left and left-to-right languages. Such bi-directional sentences are prone to problems which some of them you might have already encountered. This presentation reviews important basics and presents a variety of problems. We will discuss issues in Word, Excel and CAT tools, understand the nature of these problems and review the tools each program has to address them.
The tips we will review are especially useful for minimizing problems in clean files by correctly preparing them for a CAT tool, understanding the nature of an issue that arose and correcting some of them.
This presentation is intended for both linguists who are not familiar with any right-to-left language and want to gain some basic understanding of their nature and those who work between a right-to-left language and a left-to-right language and want to enrich their tool kit.

BIOGRAPHY

Tzviya gained her Registered Nurse certificate in 1986 and completed her BA in nursing (Tel Aviv University, summa cum laude) in 2007. She worked as nurse for 23 years. Her career as an English into Hebrew translator began in 1998, working full time since 2010. In 2008, she was a guest lecturer at Tel Aviv University on the subject of medical translation. Tzviya is an ITA Recognized translator. She is an expert in the fields of medicine, life sciences and related areas, including pharmacology, dentistry, cosmetics, nutrition, gastronomy and pet food. For more information please see her website: www.sciencetrans.com.