Translation Notes: “Director”

Translating “Director” into Italian in legal, business, and financial contexts is less straightforward than it looks.

Meanings of “Director”

In English corporate practice, a director is usually a member of the board, i.e., part of the company’s governing organ. In job titles like “Finance Director” or “Marketing Director”, however, “director” often labels a senior manager heading a function, not necessarily a board member.

Italian translations

For Italian joint stock companies (“Società per Azioni”, or S.p.A.) and limited liability companies (“Società a responsabilità limitata”, or S.r.l.), the functional equivalent of a board “director” is an amministratore (or membro del consiglio di amministrazione). In this sense, director and amministratore both indicate a person who takes part in management and decision‑making at organ level.

Within the board, titles such as “managing director” or “executive director” are commonly rendered as amministratore delegato (or “AD”), who is both an amministratore (board member) and the top executive charged with day‑to‑day management. In current Italian practice, the amministratore delegato is often referred to by the English acronym “CEO”.

By contrast, direttore in today’s corporate Italian typically indicates a high‑ranking employee: direttore generale, direttore finanziario, direttore commerciale, etc. Modern legal drafting tends to reserve amministratore for members of the board and direttore for management roles within the organizational chart.

False friends and traps

The main trap is translating every “director” as direttore. When “director” refers to a board member, the correct Italian is amministratore or membro del consiglio di amministrazione, not direttore. A direttore generale is usually a top manager reporting to the board, not one of its members.

Rule of thumb

If the person sits on the board → amministratore / membro del consiglio di amministrazione.
If it’s a functional job title → direttore (+ area: finanziario, marketing, ecc.).

How to access Microsoft terminology now that Microsoft shut down its Language Portal

On June 30, Microsoft closed the Microsoft Language Portal. For at least a few weeks before that, a message appeared on the Portal, with links from which the users could download Microsoft Terminology and Style Guides.

Those links disappeared with the Portal, but it is still possible to download the style guides and access both terminology and the UI strings: 

See below:

• An article that explains how to access various Microsoft language resources
• Links to download style guides in many languages 
• Search the terminology
• Search the UI strings 

The interface provided to search the terminology and UI strings is Microsoft Power BI, a “unified, scalable platform for self-service and enterprise business intelligence (BI)”. 

Whether the access to terminology and UI strings through Power BI is temporary or permanent is unknown.

Subscribers to MSDN platforms used to be able to download all UI strings and terminology. I don’t know if that is still true.

Term Extraction Using Concordance Tools

Yesterday, at the 9th annual conference of the Colorado Translators Association, I gave a new presentation: "Term Extraction Using Concordance Tools". I think it was well received: lots of colleagues attended, and several had various questions to ask at the end.
I've posted the presentation (in embedded form) in the "Other Presentations" tab of this blog, from which you can also download a copy. At the end off the presentation there are links to all the programs mentioned.

The Microsoft Language Portal has a new look

The Microsoft Language Portal, an indispensable resource for all translators who work with Windows software localization, has just received a new look, which brings it better in line with recent changes to other Microsoft programs, from Office to Edge and Windows itself.

The new look of the Microsoft Language Portal

Personally, I find the new look, more modern--and perhaps more attractive--but a bit less legible.

Compare the old look below:

Th old look of the Microsoft Language Portal

The addition of more color to the interface helped separate the search form from the results area. The old look also displayed more terms per page:

The old version of the Microsoft Language Portal displayed more terms per page

I haven't worked long enough with the new interface to see if there are other changes other than the obvious cosmetic ones.

International Terminology Summer School 2015

If you are a terminologist, or would like to be, this might interest you:

International Terminology Summer School 2015

13-17 July 2015

Cologne University for Applied Sciences

The organizers have received by now almost 70 registrations from participants coming from more than 20 different countries and representing important organizations, companies and universities, but a few places are still available. 

You can register at: http://www.termnet.org/english/events/tss_2015/registration.php 

The International Terminology Summer School (TSS) is the leading and largest international summer school for terminology professionals with about 80 participants from some 40 countries and almost every continent. TSS offers a one-week, practice-oriented training course covering a comprehensive overview of the methods and principles of terminology management. The course is taught by some of the most renowned and prominent terminology experts in the world. Participation in TSS qualifies to obtain the ECQA Certificate for Terminology Managers. 

More information about program, venue and travel at: http://www.termnet.org/english/events/tss_2015/index.php

New version of my Xbench presentation now available for viewing and download

I've just uploaded the new version of my Xbench presentation, now updated with all the changes I made to it for the workshop I gave at the 5th CTA Conference, earlier this month. You can view a copy of the presentation as an online presentation by going to the Xbench page of this blog, or you can download a zipped copy of the presentation, from the same page.

Xbench currently offered at a 60% discount

Xbench, an excellent translation QA and terminology management tool, is currently on offer at a 60% discount (only Euro 39/year, instead of the regular 99/year). The special price offer will last until June 5.

You can find a through presentation of what Xbench is and how it can help you with terminology management and translation QA in the presentation you can see in another page of this same blog.

Some additional answers about Xbench

At the ATA Conference in Chicago I gave a presentation on how to use Xbench for terminology management and translation QA (you can see and download the presentation from the Xbench tab in this blog).

I believe that the presentation was well received, and that most people found the program very useful, but I was stumped by a few questions. I've now inquired with the Xbench developers at ApSIC, and they have provided the missing information:

Q. Is Xbench compatible with languages that use non-Roman alphabets (e.g., languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet)?
A. Yes, Xbench 3.0 uses Unicode, and is therefore compatible with other alphabets.

Q. Is Xbench compatible with double-byte languages?
A. Xbench's compatibility with double-byte languages is quite good (Japan is ApSIC's largest customer base after Spain, and Korea is quite big as well, China is the country with most active users and downloads), but there are some caveats. Xbench does not have heuristics in place to identify words within a DBCS strings, so some features that rely on whole words identification do not work well (for example if Chinese is the source language in a key terms check).

Q. Is Xbench compatible with bi-directional languages?
A. With Xbench 3.0 build 1266 (the current build as of now), compatibility is still poor, but ApSIC is actively working to improve bi-directional compatibility.

Q. What are the size limits for files loaded in Xbench?
A. For the 32-bit version, there is a limit of 2GB per file (and a maximum for all files loaded of 2 or 4 GB). For the 64-bit version the limit is the available memory and available swap disk. ApSIC recommends installing the 64-bit version if you have a 64-bit Windows. The 64-bit version used to have a limitation of 2GB per file (however, with an unlimited number of files), but now that limitation has been lifted, and files in excess of 2GB should work.

Please note that all these answers refer to version 3.0 of Xbench (the commercial version of the program).

Xbench adds support for SDL Trados Studio memories

If you have not updated to version 3 of Xbench, now there is yet another reason to do so: the most recent build of the tool (build 1136) adds support for SDL Trados Studio memories (.sdltm files), so, if you were accustomed to convert them to TMX format just to be able to search for terms in them using Xbench, you no longer need to do so. You can download Xbench from Xbench.net. If you download version 3, make sure to choose the correct version for your operating system: there are both a 32-bit and a 64-bit editions of the tool.

Xbench freeware version (2.9) is still available, and still useful, but ApSIC is clearly adding value to the new commercial version of their terminology management and translation QA tool.

If you need an introduction to Xbench, you can download one from this blog (click here): the intorduction is now a bit out of date, as I had written it for the previous version of the tool, but still touches most important functions.

An update on the Microsoft Glossaries

I've written previously about the Microsoft Glossaries, and how the freely downloadable set of glossaries was  superseded by the Microsoft Language Portal.

The glossaries are still available for download (as "UI translations"), but only to paying MSDN or Microsoft TechNet subscribers.

Some Microsoft technology, however, is available for download from the Microsoft Language Portal: you can download, in TBX format, the Microsoft Terminology Collection in various languages. The number of terms included for each language differs due to the varying levels of localization (for Italian there are 18,520 terms) - it is however, a useful set of terms for anybody working on the translation of software files (at least, for Windows).

You can use the tbx files directly with such a tool as Xbench, or you can import them in most terminology tools.

Another useful thing to download from the Microsoft Language Portal is the style guides for the languages you work with - the one style guide not available for download is the English Style Guide (sold by O'Reilly as the Microsoft Manual of Style).

Xbench presentation

Yesterday I gave a presentation to the Colorado Translators Association on Xbench, ApSIC’s excellent terminology management and translation QA freeware tool.
You can download the presentation from the Xbench Training tab of this blog.
To download the tool itself, just go to ApSIC’s webiste

Forthcoming XBench presentation

Thursday, February 24, between 6 and 8:30 PM, I’ll give a presentation at the Colorado Translators Association on how to use XBench for terminology and translation QA.
This session is suitable for most language combinations and translation platforms (XBench is a Windows program; it works well together with a variety of different CAT tools) and technical levels.
The cost at the door is $10 for CTA members and $15 for non-members.
The presentation will be at the Lafayette Public Library, which is located at 775 W. Baseline Rd. in Lafayette:
http://www.cityoflafayette.com/SectionIndex.asp?SectionID=24
We will be in the lower level meeting room. The reservation is under Colorado Translators Association.
Here below is a brief description of the main points I’ll touch during the presentation.

***

XBench for terminology and QA

XBench is a Windows software tool for Terminology management and QA. It is developed by ApSic, a Spanish translation and localization company. It offers a wealth of useful features, at an unbeatable price: the program is freeware.

1 Terminology search and management

You can use XBench to search your glossaries, translation memories and other bilingual resources using simple or more powerful search functions.
In XBench you can include glossaries in multiple formats, various kinds of translation memories and several types of bilingual files.
XBench can be called from most application via simple (and configurable) keyboard shortcuts.
Finally, you can update on the fly the glossaries or other bilingual resources you use.

2 Quality Assurance

In addition to using XBench for terminology search and management, you can use it to check and improve the quality of your translation projects. If you use XBench for team projects, you can write your instructions directly within XBench, then distribute your XBench projects to your translators.

3 Saving projects

You can save each XBench project with the set of glossaries and settings you specify. This way, the next time you work on a similar assignment, you can use the same XBench project, with the same set of files and QA checks.

4 Documentation

 

5 Other tools to use with XBench

 

6 Future developments and support of other CAT tools

Windows 7 terminology now available from the Microsoft Language Portal

The Microsoft Language Portal now includes the Windows 7 terminology. The product field only indicates "Windows", but the terms now include those specific to the new OS.

The Windows 7 glossary is also available as a downloadable glossary to those who have an MSDN subscription.

(Hat tip to Licia Corbolante of Terminologia etc.)

New version of XBench released

ApSic has just released a new version of XBench, their wonderful freeware terminology and translation QA tool. Among other improvements, now XBench permits to run regular expression searches, and has expanded the list of supported formats.

You can find a detailed description of the improved features in this post, from
Translator’s Shack, and you can download Xbench directly from the ApSic website.

(Hat tip to Roberto Savelli).

Real-time terminology sharing with Google Docs

One of my partners and I are working on the same project. In a way, it is a throwback to an earlier era: a pdf project that we could not convert using OCR.

We took the opportunity to test the Google Docs spreadsheet as a remote real-time shared terminology tool. We wanted to know if it would allow us to open our glossary at the same time to check terminology and add, change, and delete entries.

The Google Docs spreadsheet does a remarkable job of allowing simultaneous use by two translators.

At first, we set up the spreadsheet so the approved entries were in one page, my partner's additions in a second one, and mine in a third one. We feared that typing a new entry on the same page simultaneously could unintentionally overwrite data. After a while, however, to test the limits of the application, we tried to write at the same time on the same line of the same page.

We could not do that: Google Docs prevented us from accidentally messing up each other's entries.

This was by no means a stress test: perhaps many simultaneous users on the same page could damage a document and lose data. But for two people working far away at the same time on the same project it is a useful tool: data sharing in real time without the need to set up any server or other network application or hardware.

Best of all, it is free, and the data is frequently saved by Google.

In a later post I'll give a more detailed description of how to set up such a shared Google Docs spreadsheet.

The Magical School of Terminology Management

“Anything worth writing about is worth explaining. But you can't make something clear to someone else if it isn't clear to you. Before you write about a subject, make sure you know it inside out. If there are questions in your mind, don't skip them or cover them up.”
[...]
“Whenever there's something wrong with your writing, suspect that there's something wrong with your thinking. Perhaps your writing is unclear because your ideas are unclear. Think, read, learn some more.”

(Patricia T. O'Conner: Words Fail Me. Harcourt Brace & Co., New York, San Diego, London, 1999)

Replace “write” and “writing” with “translate” and “translating”: these statements still hold true.

Many inexperienced translators, and even several that should know better, follow what we may call “the school of magical terminology management”. They believe that what's important is to know the right name for a thing, not to understand it. Like in magic - where knowing the true name of someone means having power over him - in magical terminology, knowing the true name of something means you can translate it, even if you don’t really understand what it means.

Of course, magic doesn't work in the real world, nor does magical terminology: to translate correctly we need to understand how things work, what the author is trying to say, how to follow the instructions given in the original. If you understand them, you'll be able to translate correctly even if you cannot find how a particular piece of hardware is called in your language. If you don’t understand and cannot follow them, it does not matter how many terms you might have found: your translation will fail. If you cannot understand the original, neither will your readers understand your translation.

Not understanding the source text also means not being able to see where the source text goes awry. It means not being able to ask the right questions to the customer: if you are not clear about what you know and what you don't know, you'll be afraid of showing your ignorance, and will end asking too little, or the wrong question. It means failing to spot when the source text is ambiguous on purpose, or where the translation should differ from the original.

Microsoft's Language Excellence: new life for the MS Glossaries

Microsoft Language Excellence's team (formerly MILS) launched today the Language Portal, a new terminology Web site.

The new site makes available more of Microsoft's linguistic resources than ever before.

Using the Language Portal interface, one can search Microsoft terminology and UI strings from most released products: Language Excellence has thus made available the MS Glossaries, once hidden under MSDN.

The portal offers a page for sending terminology feedback back to Microsoft, a link for downloading Microsoft's Style Guides, a "Language Portal Blog", articles, links to events and to other linguistic resources.

In the search interface one can look up a word or string and search its translation in any of the dozens of languages in which Microsoft products are translated (of course, the coverage for some of the languages will be more extensive than for others).
The search may be run on all the products available, or restricted to a specific piece of software.

The results page is divided between a Terminology pane, which provides Source, Target, Definition and Product, and a "Software strings" pane, with Source, Target and Product.

Searching through this interface will probably not be as quick as searching on the Microsoft's glossaries stored locally on your computer hard disk; on the other hand, the results obtained should be more up to date, and searching for translations in several different languages will no longer require downloading several gigabytes of zipped files on the off-chance that they may come handy one day.

Virtual Terminologist

Virtual-Terminologist is a website that offers customization and import services for Trados termbases.

Additionally, they make available for free download a few termbases (French-English language pair only, so far), and have an informative page on the Cardinal Virtues in Terminology Management.