Feed Burner Goes Away, and unfortunately so does your email subscription

 If you subscribed to receive updates from About Translation by email, please note that, since Google is going to remove or restrict Feedburner, your subscription will stop working in July 2021.

I've already removed the link on this page that allowed readers to subscribe, since there is little point in accepting new subscriptions, if the entire subscription service will stop working soon; I'm currently looking into alternatives to send the updates to this blog  to the readers who still wish to receive them. In the meantime, please note that I also automatically announce new posts to this blog via my Twitter feed (@RSchiaffino).

Top 100 Language Lovers 2016: voting phase has started

The Top 100 Language Lovers 2016 voting phase has started, and both this blog and my Twitter account are among the candidates.

This is the ninth year that the competition has been organized. About Translation has been voted among the top 100 a couple of times in the past, but this is the first time that my Twitter account has been selected for voting

The competition is looking for the best 100 Language Lovers in the following five categories: Language Learning Blogs, Language Professionals Blogs, Language Facebook Pages, Language Twitter Accounts and Language YouTube Channels.

The voting phase lasts from May 19th to June 6th. During this period, everyone can vote for their favorite Language Lovers in the five social media categories. The final results will be based on the internal ranking criteria of bab.la and Lexiophiles (50 %) and user votes (50 %). The winners will be announced on June 9th.

Click below to go to the voting page for the Language Professional blogs:

Click below to go to the voting page for the Language Twitter accounts:

(Once you are on the voting page, select your favorite and click on the Vote button)

Top 100 Language Lovers 2015

Just as it has done every year since 2008, LexioPhiles has organized the "Top 100 Language Lovers 2015" competition, which is currently at the voting stage.

You can vote for your favorite blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and YouTube channels, in several different categories:

• Language Learning Blogs: blogs about the language learning process, both from the learners and teachers perspectives. 
• Language Professionals Blogs: blogs by people using languages in their profession, such as translators or interpreters. 
• Language Facebook Pages: Facebook Pages related to language topics, such as dictionaries, translation tools, language lovers communities and more. 
• Language Twitter Accounts: Twitterers who share content about languages. 
• Language YouTube Channels: Youtubers who vlog about languages.

By following the links above you can get directly to each category, where you can see your favorite language sites or accounts, or perhaps find new ones you didn't know.

This year, About Translation has been nominated in the Language Professionals Blogs category. If you like this blog, and want to vote for it, you can do so by clicking on this button:

...and if you decide to vote for this blog, thank you!

2005-2015: Ten Years of About Translation

Exactly ten years ago I published When the "correct" translation is wrong, my first post in this blog.

Approximately a year after we established Aliquantum, our translation company, I launched About Translation, without a specific plan but with the idea that it would help attract customers.Since it wasn’t planned with customers in mind, however, it hasn't attracted them: it is read mostly by other translators who are interested in the same things that interest me. In hindsight, it is probably better this way: I might have abandoned the blog if it wasn't about something I personally find interesting.

About Translation, as it was in 2005

A few miscellaneous things

The name of this blog is a homage to the title of Peter Newmark's book "About Translation".
This was among the first blogs on translation (though certainly not the first), and it is now among the oldest still running (but there are a few still active that were started before About Translation); the oldest I know is Transblawg (going strong since 2003).
About Translation recently passed the one million pageviews mark on Blogspot (but Blogspot stats only date back to 2010). The real number is probably 1.25 million: using a different stat system, I had counted a total of 250K pageviews five years ago.

Most frequent subjects:

Translation technology (e.g., CAT tools), business practices, and advice to beginning translators.

Posts:

The number of posts has gone up and down during the years, with a high of 74 posts in 2006, and a low of 14 the following year. The total is 454 posts so far (including this one).
The post with the most readers is How to run Trados 2007 with Word 2010, (34747 page views and 60 comments), but the articles I like the most are two articles on wildcard searches in MS Word: How to use wildcard and format searches in MSWord to make sure all your numbers are formatted correctly, and Another Useful Wildcard Search

Other articles you might like:

• 15 tips on how to increase your chances when contacting translation companies
• Feeling lazy? A sure-fire way not to get work (published in Mox II)
• A marketing kit for translators

Plans for the future:

Stay tuned for new articles and some new features

About Translation nominated for Language Lovers 2014 Contest

Once again, the bab.la language portal and the Lexiophiles language blog have chosen various blogs, facebook pages and twitter accounts as candidates for the "Top 100 Language Lovers 2014" list.

About Translation has been nominated in the "Language Professional Blog" Category.

About Translation was chosen among the top 100 language blogs in 2008 and 2011, and in 2011 among the top 25 language professionals blogs.

If you like this blog, and want to add your vote, you can do so, by clicking on the button below:

 

If you prefer another language professional blog (there are many good ones from which to choose) you can go to the bab.la site, and vote for your favorite.

In addition to the Language Professional Blogs 2014, you'll also find voting buttons for the other categories:

• Language Twitter Account 2014, 
• Language Learning Blogs 2014,
• Language Facebook Pages 2014, and
• Language YouTube Channel 2014

The voting phase lasts from May 20^nd to June 9^th. During this period, everyone can vote for their favourite language lovers in the five social media categories. The final results will be based on Lexiophiles’ ranking criteria (50 %) and user votes (50 %). The winners will be announced on June 12^th.

P.S. to New commenting policy – Anonymous spammers

After publishing the new commenting policy a few days ago, the spammers have really stepped up their pointless efforts: About Translation is now receiving several dozen comments a day from “Anonymous”. All these comments go directly to spam (and deservedly so).

Unfortunately this means that when you leave a comment here, if you do it anonymously, it is most most unlikely that I’ll retrieve it from the spam folder and publish it.

If you have something interesting to say, please do so under your own name, or (if you really must), use some alias.

I’m sorry: I also preferred this blog when comments were published immediately. This is no longer possible, thanks to the stupidity and greed of these anonymous trolls.

New commenting policy

It used to be that, in order to have a more immediate discussion, you could leave commenting open on a blog.

Then spam comments begun to appear. At first they were an infrequent, minor nuisance, and a bit of clean-up once in a while was enough for keeping a blog clean.

Spam comments grew in frequency, which lead many bloggers to impose stricter moderation policies.

In this blog I started by leaving all comments open, but after a few years I had to impose moderation on all comments older than a certain date. Still, I tried to keep open commenting for the most recent posts.

But spam comments now have grown to the point that even for the most recent posts it is necessary to moderate all comments. I’m sorry for this, but I now have to direct all comments through the moderation queue.

I’ll try to post all legitimate comments as soon as possible, but some will end up being delayed – especially if they are written when I’m not at the computer.

Time to vote for the top 100 Language Lovers 2013 competition

Voting for the Top 100 Language Lovers 2013 competition is under way - you have until June 9th to give your votes to your favorite language blog, Facebook page or twitterer.

This year, Lexiophiles received 1024 nominations. Out of those nominations, they selected proceed to the voting phase 200 blogs in two different categories (language professional blog and language learner blog), 100 language Facebook pages, and 100 language twitterer to proceed to the voting phase.

Browse through the list of language blogs, Facebook pages and twitterers: you'll likely find some wonderful blog, page or twitter account you didn't know before.

About Translation has been included in the Language Professional Blogs category. If you like this blog, please consider giving it your vote!

To vote, click on the following button: it will lead you to a page where you'll be able to caset your vote for your favorite language professional blog.

On the right, on the same page there are the buttons to get you to the other three categories.

Top 100 Language Lovers 2013 – Nominate your favourite now!

The  bab.la language portal and the Lexiophiles language blog are announcing the start of the contest to choose the Top 100 Language Lovers.

You can nominate your favorite blog, facebook page or Twitter account in the following categories:

1. Language Learning Blogs: blogs about the language learning process, both from the learners and teachers perspective.
2. Language Professionals Blogs: blogs by people using languages in their profession, such as translators or interpreters.
3. Language Facebook Pages: Facebook Pages related to language topics, such as dictionaries, translation tools, language lovers’ communities and more.
4. Language Twitter accounts: Twitterers who share content about languages.

The nominations for the Top 100 Language Lovers 2013 competition are open until May 20th, 23:59 pm German time. 

About Translation was chosen among the top 100 language blogs in 2008 and 2011, and in 2011 among the top 25 language professionals blogs.

Trados Studio Manual - now with its own blog and Facebook page

I mentioned before that there is now a Trados Studio manual, available for purchase from SDL's Open Exchange. I've not as yet reviewed the manual thoroughly, but I've used it for reference several times already, and I highly recommend it: it's useful, well organized and well written - a far cry from the mess that is SDL's own documentation. Now that  Mats Linder has written two editions of the Studio manual (one for Studio 2009, one for 2011), and that he has updated them to also cover the latest SDL's upgrades (including Stdio 2001 SP2) I urge him to write a good manual for MultiTerm - the need there is even more pressing, considering how badly the MultiTerm help system is written.

Mats has recently also launched a blog dedicated to the manual and a Facebook page where he links to useful sites and blog entries by other knowledgeable people, with the purpose to give practical tips on translation matters.

I recommend both the blog and the Facebook page - they are certain to be useful to SDL Trados studio users.

Mox II

Many translators already know (and identify with) Alejandro Moreno-Ramos's downtrodden translator, Mox.

Last year Alejandro published Mox Illustrated Guide to Freelance Translation, with articles from several prominent translators and over two hundred cartoons, many never published on his blog before.

Now he has done it again with his second book: Mox II - What they don't tell you about translation, which  has been published today - a perfect gift for other translators (or for yourself).

As in the first book, the adventures of Mox, Calvo, and the other characters in the strip are accompanied by a series of articles from prominent translators - and this year I had the honor of being invited to contribute one of of the articles. With Alejandro's permission I'm republishing my article (it will be in my next post) - but I urge you to order the book so you enjoy the other articles and the new cartoons.

Comment spam

In the last couple of weeks this blog has been on the receiving end of a real tsunami of comment spam, mostly from one sort or another of sleazy term paper mills, but also from sundry fly-by-night translation agencies that have somehow got the (mistaken) idea that sending contentless comments here (and, I've no doubt, to many other blogs as well) would somehow increase their web presence and lead to translation wealth.

This means I've had to delete dozens of comments, both from the (fairly efficient) Blogger spam folder, but also from the automatically published comments.

If in doing so I have inadvertently deleted a real comment of yours, I'm sorry, and I apologize.

Great post on how to be a good commenter

John Scalzi, a popular SF author, and, with his 14-year-old "Whatever", one of the first and best bloggers around, has just published a great post with guidelines about how and when to comment, with ten questions each commenter should ask himself or herself before commenting. It will be useful for anybody who comments on blogs or contributes to online discussion threads.

The first three points are:

1. Do I actually have anything to say?
2. Is what I have to say actually on topic?
3. Does what I write actually stay on topic?

There are ten in all and each with a cogent and persuasive explanation, in Scalzi's usual snarky style.

Go and see the post for yourself, and, if you are a blogger, spread the word.

An important change to this site… and a summary of last year

I've finally decided to give About Translation its own domain name - so you can now find this blog at www.aboutranslation.com (the old address, http://aboutranslation.blogspot.com, will redirect here).
My apologies for the very sparse posting during the last couple of months; I'll now start posting more often again, but, before that, a summary of how this blog did last year:

Stats

According to Site Meter, at the beginning of 2011 the total number of page views for About Translation was 220,036. By 12/31/2011 the numbers had climbed to 299,475, so the total for the year was 79,439 – up from 63,822 in 2010 (and increase of almost 25%).
The best day of 2011 was May 16, with 529 page views, and the best month was November, with 8,923. By the way, there seem to be a huge difference in statistics, depending on who is doing the counting. I use Site Meter, but Blogger (which started providing statistics only in July 2009) seems to count about three times as many page views as Site Meter: according to Blogger, the total for November was 28,101.
The free version of Site Meter does not provide stats by the post, so for these I have to rely on Blogger. The three most read posts of the year were Can translators ignore theory? (November 15 – 1,091 page views so far, and 19 comments), Why high-volume discounts seldom makes sense (November 25 – 694 page views), and Questions and answers: how to start out (May 18, 689 page views).

Awards and other things

During the year, About Translation was selected among the Top 25 Language Professional Blogs (and Top 100 Language Lovers) of 2011 by bab.la and Lexiophiles. It was also chosen among the Kwintessential Top Ten Translator’s Blogs of 2011.
Finally, Corinne McKay and I reprised the Blogging 101 presentation, which was well received at the 52nd ATA Conference in Boston.

Open post on “Blogging 101”

As promised during the presentation, here is a post for questions and answers about our blogging presentation, or for other questions about blogging for translators.

Please feel free to ask any question by adding a comment to this post.

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You can download the most up to date version of our presentation from this blog (to download the presentation, select the “Blogging 101” tab above, and then follow the link to the ppt file).

If you have a blog or will start one, write to Corinne or to me: we love to see new interesting blogs o translation and related subjects.

The ATA conference is fast approaching

There are several sessions that look interesting at this year’s ATA Conference. The Italian division, in particular, will be very active, with two presentations on literary translation by special guest Tim Parks and a couple of interesting sessions on English to Italian legal translation.

You can find a list of all the scheduled sessions from the Conference’s preliminary program.

I’ll have a very busy Saturday at the conference, with two presentations within just a few hours:

• Blogging 101 (presented with Corinne McKay), Saturday 11:30 AM (session IC-10)
• Xbench: A Free Tool for Terminology and Quality Assurance, Saturday 2:30 PM (session LT-9)

If you are interested, older versions of both presentations are available from this blog (see the tabs above). I won’t post the most up to date version until after the conference.

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If you are going to the 52nd ATA Conference (Boston, October 26-30), but are unsure what to do (because it’s the first time for you), Jill Sommer has just posted a very useful QA session.

See you in Boston!

Volunteer translators wanted for Le mot just en anglais blog

Some time ago Jonathan Goldberg of Le mot just en anglais, asked me to post here an announcement that he was looking for a collaborator for his excellent bilingual blog.

That announcement resulted in three very helpful collaborators for Jonathan’s blog, but he still needs help with his blog:

I still desperately need translators - native French speakers who will be prepared to translate from English short articles in fields that are close to their hearts and at a regularity of their own choosing. In all such cases, the translators will be be credited and a link will be provided to their own blogs.

So he asked me to post the following announcement, in French and in English, to help him find collaborators:

Blog de qualité et très actif (Le mot juste en anglais), fruit d'un effort collaboratif de linguistes en herbe dans différents pays, cherche un/une Francophone (français langue maternelle), de préférence traducteur/traductrice de profession, pour traduire depuis l'anglais au moins un article par semaine (échantillon disponible sur simple demande). (travaille bénévole) Very active, quality blog (Le mot just en anglais), a collaborative effort of language lovers in different countries, needs the assistance of a native French speaker, preferably a professional translator, to translate at least one article a week. (Sample article available on request.) (voluntary work) Credit will be given to the translator at the end of each article, as well as a link to the translator's website or blog, if such exists.  If you are interested, please write to le.mot.juste.en.anglais@gmail.com with a short biography, city of residence and telephone number.

Reminder: commenting in About Translation

I've just deleted a comment that didn't even pretend to be about the post it purportedly commented: it was just a crappy ad for some crappy product or other.

Just to be clear: everyone is free to comment here. I won't delete comments because they contradict or even attack something I write. I don't mind strong language, and if you are not politically correct, fine with me. If your (cogent) comment contains a link to your web page, so be it: I have no problem with it.

However, if your comment is of the "Nice post! For a really excellent whatever check our website" variety, either try to articulate why your whatever should interest the readers of that specific post, or don't comment: your comment will be deleted as soon as I see it.

Also, if you are a translation company, you are very welcome to comment here, but if it looks like the sole purpose of your comment is to drive readers to your website, I will probably delete your comment (again, I won't delete your comment if it has something to say about the post to which it is attached).

On the other hand, sometimes comments are not displayed immediately. That might happen for two reasons: if the comment is to an older post, I need to approve it before it is displayed (the reason for this is that I found that most comment spam goes to older posts, not newer ones); the second reason is if Blogger's spam filter judges it as spam: the filter is not perfect, and sometimes it quarantines legitimate comments; in that case I will have to rescue the comment from the filter and approve it, before it is published.

Some news about this blog

On May 31st, while I was abroad, this blog reached a new nice round number: 250,000 page views served.

On the next day, the results of the annual Lexiophiles’ poll of best language blogs and sites came in: About Translation placed both among the Top 100 Language Lovers 2011 sites (in 93rd place) and among the Top 25 Language Professional Blogs (in 16th place).

Make sure to check the other sites chosen by the poll: you are sure to find some new interesting language sites.

A big “thank you!” to all you readers – without you (and without you comments) this blog would long ago have dwindled to nothing, but knowing there are people interested in reading what I have to say gives me the energy to keep on writing here and trying new ways to improve the site.

Thank you!

Time to vote for your favorite Language Professional Blog for 2011

If you like this blog, you can now vote for it in the Language Professionals Blogs category of the LexioPhiles "Top 100 Language Lovers 2011" poll.

Just follow the link and vote for your favorite language professional blog. Of course, if you choose to cast your vote for this blog, I would much appreciate it!