Infographic: Software Tools for Translation

I'm currently developing a course on CAT tools for the University College of Denver University.
I find mind mapping useful to generate and organize my ideas, so I created a mind map of the kind of software tools used by translators - CAT tools, of course, but also other types of tools, from those that help us manage our projects, to those we use for more specific tasks.

I asked Jost Zetzsche to take a look at my mind map, to see if he had any suggestions about types of programs I might have forgotten or things that should be changed.


Jost gave me some suggestions, and asked for a copy of the infographic for his Tool Box Journal.

Here is a copy of the infographic:

Software Tools for Translation

You can click here for a larger copy of the file, and here for a downloadable pdf.

I'd appreciate any suggestion or idea for future improvements.

How to spend a fortune and not learn anything

I've noticed that much of the most recent comment spam arriving here (and nicely caught by Blogger's spam filter) is from sites that sell research papers and other shortcuts of very dubious ethical value to lazy students. All of it seems tailored to the American market.

I've also noticed (teaching online at DU), that the use of paid-for essays, plagiarism and such must be on the rise: until last year, for example, students were only required to subscribe to the university's ethical policy. Now not only they have to do that, but their papers also are scanned using a software program that flags suspected plagiarism.

So: these students are paying for university (normally, paying a lot: university is expensive here), then they pay extra for someone to do their homework for them. Don't they realize that this way they are short-charging themselves, and that this way they will not really learn from what university has to offer?

P.S. This is not aimed at my students: I know they are doing their best in my classes - it's just a general comment prompted by too many spam comments purporting to sell "cheap essays".

Some advice on how to prepare for a translation school entrance exam

I’ve recently written some advice for a high-school student who was asking how best to prepare the entrance exam for the School of Interpreters and Translators of Trieste University. After writing my answer, I realized it could interest others, so here it is:

• Do translation exercises to train for your exam. But, mostly, read a lot: both in your native language and in the foreign languages you are going to study. Read novels, read non fiction, read the news. Read magazines: for English, The Economist or The Atlantic are always good choices (and many translation tests are taken from them). Read grammar books as if they were absorbing novels. Read books, in your native language and in your foreign ones,  on how to write. Remember: a translator is first of all a writer, and all writers are readers first.
• Don’t be overly impressed by other students who arrive at the entrance exam boasting perfect knowledge of three, four or more foreign languages. Strangely enough, such prodigies usually won’t be seen, once the exams’ result are out.
• The evening before the exam, listen to music, relax, do something fun. Above all, don’t cram. You should arrive rested, not fatigued.
• If you can (depends on your character), try to be relaxed at the exam; don’t get stressed out. Think that if you don’t pass, it isn’t the end of the world: you can always try again.
• During the exam, write quickly a first draft, so as to have enough time to edit yourself thoroughly. Writing is re-writing.
• Once you have completed your translation, set aside the source text and don’t look at it. Read your translation as if were an original. Correct it and change it to improve your writing, how it flows and reads.
• Only after you have completed this first edit, look again at the source text and compare it to your revised translation. Check sentence by sentence, making sure you didn’t omit (or add) anything, and that you have conveyed correctly the full meaning of the source.
• Don’t rely overmuch on dictionaries, especially bilingual ones. If you are well prepared you should already know all that you need to pass the exam. If you don’t know your languages (including your native tongue) well enough, dictionaries will be of little help.

Some of this is based on my experience as a student, so many years ago. The rest is lessons I’ve learned since, both as a translator and as a teacher.

A last bit of advice: if you do get in Translation School, take full advantage of it: you’ll gain an invaluable experience, and an excellent preparation for our profession.

But don’t forget to also study what most translation schools don’t teach: the business side of translation - what an invoice is and how to prepare one, how to draft an estimate, how to keep accounting, how much you should charge to earn a comfortable living, how to write a résumé and a cover letter, how to contact customers and how to keep them happy. Some good books to get started on the business side of translation are, for example, Corinne McKay’s How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator and Judy and Dagmar Jenner’s The Entrepreneurial Linguist: The Business-School Approach to Freelance Translation.

Best of luck with your exam!

Can translators ignore theory?

Being informed about translation theory is knowing what others have said and thought about translation: its purposes, how to judge whether a translation is accurate, successful, or well written. How to translate to achieve specific goals, what responsibilities translators have, and whether they are primarily responsible to the author, the original text, the reader, or the customer who commissioned a specific translation.

To be sure, without knowing or being aware of translation theory one can still translate. But translators who learned translation from teachers who reject theory out of hand and only emphasize learning by simply translating, are still following a translation theory of sorts. A theory, however, they are not aware of, and that they cannot, therefore, examine critically and tap for specific occasions or assignments.

Downplaying the importance of theory, while teaching translation through a series of commandments, as Mark Freehill seemingly does (from what could be seen in his presentation at the recent 52nd ATA Conference), is contradictory: his students will learn a confusing mishmash where on the one hand they are told that there are many different ways to translate a text (true, of course, as far as that goes), but on the other hand are taught absolute “commandments of interpretation” and “deadly sins of translation”.

Take the “deadly sin” of his that was most hotly debated during his presentation:

Never, never, never give in the temptation to improve the original. If the original is vague or clumsy or just plain wrong, then a good translation will faithfully reflect the flaws. After all, that was how the original author wrote it.

Stated in such stark terms, this is nonsense. Freehill referred, in his examples, to legal translations, saying that the reader of the translation has a right to know where the original went wrong. Fine (maybe) if the reader commissioned the translation precisely so as to find its weak points, perhaps to challenge them in court. But what if the customer is, instead, a foreign attorney who had his brief translated to file it in a US Court? Should a conscientious translator merrily translate the text “as is”, errors, warts and all, or should he point out to his customer unclear and wordy passages, suggesting suitable improvements? What about a translator commissioned to translated a hastily (and therefore badly) written press release. Shouldn’t he do his utmost to make the translated press release as smoothly flowing, well written and informative as possible in the target language?

During Freehill’s presentation Chris Durban remarked that by teaching his students never to improve on the original, he was condemning them to the bottom of the market. I agree. By limiting the choices available to his students, Mr. Freehill is depriving them of vital tools necessary to succeed in translation.

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For an interesting discussion between a translation theorist and a professional translator, see Can Theory Help Translators? A Dialogue Between the Ivory Tower and the Wordface, by Andrew Chesterman and Emma Wagner (St. Jerome, 2002)

Translate in the Catskills 2011

Ever since hearing from Corinne McKay so many good things about Translate in the Catskills, a conference focused on target language writing skills for translators, I had longed to go. Yet, I had doubts: the event was aimed, seemingly, only at translators who work from French into English or the other way round, and I was unsure how useful it would be for me. After all, I can barely understand spoken French, and though I can read it, still I was afraid any session on English into French translation would be wasted on me. I knew I would be able to follow discussions about French into English, but how applicable would they be for me, since, after all, I do not normally translate into English?

I mentioned my doubts to Corinne; she said last time there had been some people who translated neither from nor into French. She suggested I should contact Chris Durban (translator extraordinaire and the event’s organizer) to ask for details. Chris was friendly and helpful, and provided me with a list of former participants I could contact. In the end, she suggested I give it a try, and see for myself.

So I took the plunge: enrolled, and went. I am just back (after a far more complicated journey than expected – but that’s another story I may tell in a separate post). I’m very happy I took a chance on this event: I attended most of the into-English sessions, and even a few of the French ones, finding much to help improve my work. I won’t try to give a blow-by-blow of what was said during the various sessions (but if you go to Corinne’s Tweeter page, you’ll find hundreds of tweets sent in the real time from the conference); I will concentrate, instead, on the main ideas I found valuable.

• Translators are writers

To be a good translator, you have to remember you are a writer. That means concentrating on making your target text effective. Translate accurately, of course. But that, by itself, is not enough to craft an effective, well-written target text that does not feel translated: If you only concentrate on accuracy, neglecting effectiveness, you’ll produce, in Chris Durban’s words, “a description of a text, rather than a text in its own right”.

Sometimes (or at least in certain fields) your translation may need to wander rather far from the source to achieve the desired effect in the target language. Sometimes, you’ll need to shorten, lengthen or even change your text, because often what your customer needs but cannot articulate is rather different than a run-of-the-mill translation. A translator who sees himself as a “humble servant of the source text” (Ros Schwartz’ definition of this gun-shy attitude) is unlikely to be as effective as one who makes the text her own.

In certain fields at least, use of translation memory is a hindrance – unless you find ways to ensure the target text flows well and is effective. I’ll suggest a technique to achieve this in a later article.

• Techniques to achieve more effective translations

Use statistical analysis to see what a translated text should look like, comparing it to similar documents written originally in your target language.

To give an example presented by David Jemielity, if in translating into English CEO’s letters to shareholders you follow your source language conventions, you might refer to the company in the third person. You may even be asked by your customer to follow this path... after all, they are French (or Italian), and they are accustomed to writing of themselves this way (“Nel 2010 ACME ha fatto questo e quest’altro...”). However, if we can show our customers that CEO’s letters written originally in English are overwhelmingly in the first person (“In 2010, we did this and that at ACME...”), we may convince our customers to let us translate their letter this way, to make it more effective for them.

Similar strategies, buttressed by clear documentation, may show us other ways to improve our translation: sentence length and variety, use (or not) of the article before a company’s name, use of nominalizations, and so on.

• Marketing ideas

Look for direct customers by taking part in their industry’s events. When you attend such events, don’t ask if they need translations. Try other tactics, such as asking questions, complimenting the speaker, letting slip in the fact you are a translator. Gently point out to someone you have met at such an event, that something in their presentation was unclear, or that it should be phrased differently in your target language, offering (for free) to suggest improvements to the text. Don’t do this, however, in an aggressive way (“gotcha!”), nor when you are asking a question during an open session.

And let’s not market against ourselves: Be careful in what you say in online fora, tweets or blogs. Translators all too easily fall into bitching mode (about bad agencies, expensive software, opaque tools, cheap wannabe translators, or whatever). Remember, however, that what you write online may come back to haunt you.

But I don’t want to give you the idea it was all work all the time: those who arrived early went for a hike to the top of one of the mountains (I guess we would call them hills in Colorado). We went out for dinner on Friday. On Saturday Ros Schwartz presented her new translation of Le Petit Prince (you’ll have to order it from the UK, though: for copyright reasons it won’t be sold in the USA). Movie night on Saturday: an exclusive showing of The Woman with the Five Elephants – an interesting documentary on Svetlana Geier, a veteran Russian-German translator, who passed away last November, after completing new translations of Dostoyevsky’s major novels.

It was interesting to see this old translator (Geier was over eighty-five, at the time) dictating her translations to an elderly typist, who clacked away on a mechanical typewriter or editing by having her translation read out loud (and commented) by an old musician (not exactly what we Trados users are accustomed to!). If you have a chance, don’t miss this film; even if you are not a translator, you’ll be fascinated by the underlying history: Geier directly witnessed Stalin’s purges (her father was tortured an imprisoned for 18 months) and the German invasion. Her knowledge of German helped her and her mother getting away from Ukraine. They ended up in Germany, where she remained, working as a translator and teaching at the university.

So, this highly regarded German translator was a native speaker of a different language. Just to show you that even one of the most cherished principles of our profession (that translators should only work into their native tongue) has its exceptions.

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A big thanks to Chris Durban for organizing this energizing conference, and to all the presenters who did so much to make this a fruitful and memorable event!

Issue # 0 of FreelanceMag has just been released

Issue # 0 of FreelanceMag, “the first magazine dedicated to translation and to the freelance translators community” has just been released. FreelanceMag will be published both on paper and online.

I was contacted a couple of weeks ago, and asked to contribute an article. I didn’t have time to writing something new, so I contributed a post I had published here some time ago: “A marketing kit for translators”, which has now been titled “Marketing Tips for Freelancers” in the new magazine.

You can get Issue # 0 for free from the FreelanceMag Website.

You can freely distribute this first pdf issue of the magazine:

Please do not hesitate to distribute the PDF issue to all your contacts to help us getting known in the industry.
Please also note that we offer free advertising in our magazine to people/companies who subscribe to the one-year paper version of FreelanceMag.

New book on the business of freelance translation

Judy and Dagmar Jenner have just published “The Entrepreneurial Linguist: The Business-School Approach to Freelance Translation”.

Judy gave a presentation on her “business-school approach” to freelancing some time ago, at a CTA session, and I was impressed how helpful her approach was. The book is available both as a paperback and as a downloadable e-book. I just ordered my copy, and plan to review the book here, as soon as I have a chance to read it.

Congratulations to Judy and Dagmar!

A grammar exercise for translators

Here below is an article I recently wrote for the translation class I teach at Denver University. I would like to know what other translators think about the worth of exercises such as the one described below. Specifically, what do you think the advantages and drawbacks of an exercise like this can be for a student of translation?

Studying grammar to uncover translation problems

Too often students of translation (this is especially true of self-taught translators) concentrate on words alone: students learn word meanings as if they were labels, unconsciously trying to match them to the words in their native language. Grammar, frequently, is neglected: the student thinks of it as something he had to learn while learning a language, perhaps, but that now he already knows (or so he assumes).
Studying grammar, however, is important throughout the study of translation, and even beyond, when the translator is already a working professional.
One exercise I think is important and interesting is to study the examples given in grammar books and see how they should be translated to convey their meaning best. Usually there will be several correct solutions, although often none perfectly so.
Take a book on the English verb, or the section of a grammar book devoted to verbs. My first example is taken from Meaning and the English Verb, a slim textbook by Geoffrey Leech I had for a course in text linguistics I followed at the University of Genoa.
The way you can do the exercise is this: you read a statement about the use of a verbal tense...

8. The simple present is suitable for employment in the expression of 'eternal truths' [...] "The Atlantic Ocean separates the New World from the Old."

Simple enough, apparently. In Italian also we can use the present tense: "L'Oceano Atlantico separa il Vecchio Mondo dal Nuovo". But here already we can think of other ways such a sentence could be written in Italian. Perhaps we can use of the passive voice: "Il Vecchio e il Nuovo Mondo sono separati dall'Oceano Atlantico". Too heavy? Maybe "Il Nuovo Mondo è separato dal Vecchio dall'Oceano Atlantico". This also seems worse than our first try.
Back to the simple present, at least for now. Let's go to the next example, and see how it can be translated best.
This is from Rafael Seco's Manual de gramática española:

El presente expresa una acción no terminada que se ejecuta en el momento de la palabra. Entiéndase bien que el presente no debe estimarse como un instante fugaz, sino como un plazo de tiempo más o menos largo, en el cual está comprendido el momento en que se habla. Así puede decirse en presente: "Pedro estudia para abogado". No es que Pedro, en el preciso instante en que se habla, esté trabajando en sus estudios, sino que este trabajo lo viene realizando durante cierto período de tiempo dentro del cual está comprendido el instante en que se enuncia el verbo.

How best do we translate this simple sentence in English? Does the simple present work here, or is the present continuous better? If so, why, or why not?
I think you can see how doing often such an exercise may be invaluable for really learning how best to express a language's nuances in a different language.

Translation and Interpretation: Theory and Practice

On Monday I'll once again teach GS 4300 - Theory & Practice of Translation & Interpretation , a foundation course for the Certificate in Translation Studies of the University College, Denver University (after clicking on the link, scroll down the Global Affairs course page list until you get to the 4300 courses and click on the course title for a brief description of the course).

Several years ago I posted my class outlines in this blog. During the next three months I'll once again post periodically about the course, writing about what I'm teaching, my thoughts about the course and on the topics touched during it, what I learn from my students' questions, and what they learn from the course. I'll appreciate any comment you may have on these posts, as they'll help me improve the course as I'm teaching it and for the next time.

On Monday I'll start my introduction with this paragraph:

A deep knowledge of one’s own native language and of at least one foreign language is a necessary prerequisite, but, alone, it is not enough. To become a translator one should also fully understand the subject matter of the text to be translated, and have knowledge of things such as translation tools, reference materials, translation processes, and, above all, self knowledge: knowing what one knows as well as an awareness of what one does not know.

In your opinion, what are the prerequisites for becoming a translator?

Answers to an aspiring translator

I’ve received the following message (slightly edited to hide the author’s identity) from an aspiring translator.

I'm an aspiring translator; I've across many websites stating that Italian is in demand. Is this true? Also in your opinion, is it necessary to speak a language fluently even though translation deals with reading and writing? Is it absolutely necessary to live abroad for several years to become a translator? Can I add languages just by learning to read and write in those languages?

I’m sharing my answers in this post, in case other beginning translators might find them useful.

• I'm currently learning French but I've across many websites stating that Italian is in demand. Is this true?

For translation into English, Spanish, German, French and Italian are the main Western European languages. Studying a language depending on current demand is futile. Study a language because you feel attuned to it, or because you find it interesting and challenging, not because you suspect it might be in demand.

• Is it necessary to speak a language fluently even though translation deals with reading and writing?

Yes, although, if you do not plan to become an interpreter, it doesn't hurt too much if you don't acquire a perfect accent in your foreign languages. A professional translator only translates from a source language into his or her native language.

The proficiency you have to gain in your source language is the same as in your native language: a precondition for becoming a translator is to be able to read and understand one or more foreign languages just as well as your native one. You need to be able to understand all subtleties of the language you work with, all cultural references - just as if you were a native speaker of that language. Only then, you'll be able to convey what the foreign language says (and what it implies) into your native language.

• Is it absolutely necessary to live abroad for several years to become a translator?

No, but it is necessary to live and study abroad long enough to become thoroughly fluent in the foreign language. How long that may be, depends on your knowledge before going abroad, the quality of the courses you follow there, and your innate language-learning skills. Plan to spend at least several months abroad for each foreign language you study.

• Can I add languages just by learning to read and write in those languages?

You need to become fluent in your working foreign languages, and that includes learning to write with ease in all your working languages. Although as a translator you won't translate into the foreign language, you must be able to communicate with customers who only write and speak that language.

Finally, something you don't mention, but that is nonetheless essential: your knowledge of your own native language.

A translator is a writer, and must be able to write his own native language with correctness, clarity, subtlety and grace. In many respects, in fact, a translator's task is more difficult than a writer's: a writer can go where he pleases, and perhaps in doing so he can avoid his own weak points. A translator also is a writer, but he must follow a predetermined path, taking in stride all the obstacles the author scattered along that path, either on purpose (the subtleties of the original), or by chance (where the author failed and wrote obscurely where he should not have done so).

If you are interested in becoming a translator, I recommend you enroll in a good university-level translation program. The best in the States is offered by the Monterey Institute of International Studies, but there are also good programs elsewhere, including several offered online (among these, the program offered by the University College of Denver University, where I teach).

Courses for interpreters

I have received news of three different courses for interpreters.

The first course, Interactive Training for Professional Interpreters (now in its second year) will be held in Denver, for 5 Saturdays - March 6, 13, 20, 27, & April 3. It is  sponsored by Cesco Linguistic Services.

According to the message I received,

This 40 hour course is designed to responds to the training needs of individuals that already work in the interpreting profession or intend to pursue this career.

The course is an intensive 5 full day class of 8 hours each, providing instructional lessons and practical exercises in each mode of interpretation, in different contexts for any language.

If you are interested, contact Cesco Linguistic Services for more information.

The other two courses are organized by the National Center for Interpretation of the University of Arizona:

The Agnese Haury Institute for Interpretation will take place July 12 – 30, at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona.

The Agnese Haury Institute for Interpretation is the longest running intensive Spanish/English interpreter training program in the United States. The Institute, now in its 27th year, is an intensive three-week course dedicated to improving language and interpreting services in diverse areas

The Medical Interpreter Training Institute will take place July 12 – 18, at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, and consists of 54 hours of intensive terminology and skill building training.

Both courses are aimed at Spanish interpreters and other bilingual professionals.

For more information, contact the National Center for Interpretation.

The importance of knowing measurement units

When I teach translation, I tell my students that they should learn well at least the most common measurement units.

Case in point from a translation I'm doing at the moment.

The source text already provides conversions, but at least in one instance they are wrong:

"...leaving about 1-2 inches (51-103 mm) of wire..."

If it is 1 to 2 inches, then the measurement in millimeters should be 25 to 51 mm: 51 to 103 mm is 2 to 4 inches.

I pointed out this conflict to my customer, who opted for "...2-4 inches (51-103 mm)..."

I believe all technical translators (especially those who edit other translators' work) should be able to spot such inconsistencies at a glance.

Pointing out such insidious errors is usually appreciated by customers, and tells them you are paying attention to what you are doing.

Keeping our grammar current: Serianni's "Prima lezione di grammatica"

Most translators have studied the grammar of several different languages. Paradoxically, sometimes we are most out of date with the grammar of our own native language.

We studied it first in elementary school. Again in middle school - but usually skipping what we learned in the earlier grades. By high school, often we were done with grammar, shifting our attention to other linguistic subjects. Unless we continued specializing in our own language at university (perhaps studying to become a teacher), most of us never studied our own grammar again.

Meanwhile we studied the grammar of a foreign language (or more than one). As we studied it later than our own, this knowledge is likely fresher.

Without a conscious effort to keep current formal knowledge of our native language, we increasingly recall grammar notions through the fog of imperfect memory. We should not rely on the grammar book used when we were in grade school, either: grammatical knowledge and consensus change. We should learn what is newly acceptable, what was correct even if our primary school teacher said otherwise forty years ago, and maybe also the rule he clearly explained to the class - but that day we were too busy looking out of the window, and didn't pay attention.

There are plenty of good works available for the Italian translator who wishes to brush up old studies or keep current with new notions.

An excellent little book I've recently read is Luca Serianni's "Prima lezione di grammatica". Although not a comprehensive grammar (such as Serianni's own excellent "Grammatica italiana"), it analyses topics likely to interest the Italian translator, from the plural of unassimilated foreign words ("molti flash" or "molti flashes"?), to problems of coherence and cohesion, and of grammatical accord of number and gender in writing.

The book is well written, but demands some effort - Serianni uses technical terms as necessary, and I had to look some of them up. Some I didn't know, and some I only half recalled from studying grammar so long ago.

Recommended to all Italian translators!

Advice to beginners: short reckonings make long friends

Negotiating after the fact is unpleasant: better instead to make sure that our customers and us understand the same way what we are talking about.

To avoid misunderstandings, I've added in our price sheet short definitions of some terms that are often confused (editing and proofreading), or that may be controversial (whether the word count is calculated on the source or target, or when a job is charged at rush rates):

Editing: Revision of the translation with correction of mistranslations, omissions/additions, as well as language errors in the target language. Done by comparing the target text to the source text.
Proofreading: Revision of the translation to correct typos and similar errors in the target language. Done without reference to the source language.
Word counts: Word counts are normally calculated on the source text. Exceptions are texts provided as hard copy or in non-editable format (e.g., most pdf files): for these the word count is calculated on the target text.
Rush rate: applied on all projects that involve more than 2500 words of translation, or 7500 words of editing or 10,000 words of proofreading per person, per day.
Weekend rate: applied on any project that needs to be done on Saturday, Sunday or other holiday.

What's important is not so much the specific definitions chosen but rather sharing them with our customers, to avoid fruitless discussions later ("...I sent it to you on Friday, so there was plenty of time to do it by Monday morning: why should I pay a rush rate?").

Also, for each project it is better to make sure we agree with our customer before the project starts. Clarify with the customer any instruction that is not clear, and ask for missing instructions. In the same way, if we discussed the project on the phone, better to send a short e-mail to recap, and ask the customer to confirm:

"Dear John:

It was a pleasure talking to you earlier today. To recap what we discussed: I've agreed to translate project X by Tuesday EOB. The word count is 6,000 words, and the deliverables are clean and bilingual (Trados) files. The rate we agreed is $ y / word.

Please confirm and send me your PO or work order number.

Best regards,"

As we say in Italian, "patti chiari, amicizia lunga".

"Hello World": learning to program to better understand how translation works for software and the web

I'm developing a new class on software and web page localization for DU's University College.

I plan to teach how to create a web page using a text editor: I find that actually inputting the code, and see what the result looks like in a Browser, then changing it and see the effects of the changes, helps to understand how the web works.

I'll also teach how to write some simple programs, to show what's code, what are translatable strings, and how to tell the difference.

Finally, I'll introduce some more advanced topics, such as explaining the role that variables play in the text that users read on screen.

I don't think that software and web translators should necessarily become programmers (though knowing how to program at least a bit is often helpful). But to do our job better we should understand how various components of software go together. This way we can know what to translate and how, what not to translate and why, and, above all, what kind of questions to ask in case of doubt.

You can find more information on the Certificate of Advanced Study in Translation on the University College Web site.

The best tool for translation

This week, in the online course on translation I'm teaching for the University College of Denver University, I had this questions for my students:

What tools do we have available (software or not, narrowly aimed at producing translations, or with a broader usefulness)?

There are many way this can be answered. If I change my question to "What is the best tool for translators"?, I would answer that many of us who started translating when computers were not widespread would say the computer itself, and word processing software, are our most useful tools.

But what has changed life for translators even more has been the Internet. Formerly, one was limited to the dictionaries one had bought, hard copies of glossaries of variable quality, or some reference books. Perhaps an encyclopedia or two. If one lived in a big city with a good public library, there was more: still, even with a university library available, searches would be painstaking.

Now we have unlimited information on our screen: instant access to hundreds or thousands of source and target documents similar to those we are translating.

Now that there is so much information, what makes the difference is the ability to make good use of it and to separate the reliable and useful from the unreliable and useless.

Translation and Interpretation Training Workshops at Denver University

In my previous posts today I gave some info about the workshops I'll be teaching... but there are several more:

• CRN 1652 - Memory Exercises for Interpreters - 7/9, 7/16 7:30–9:30 pm
  
• CRN 1651 - Introduction to Sight Translation - 7/9, 7/16 5–7 pm
  
• CRN 1649 - Proofreading for Translators - 6/19, 6/26 6–8 pm
  
• CRN 1650 - Court & Legal Terminology - 6/21, 6/28 6–8 pm
  
• CRN 1653 - Blogging for Translators: How to Increase One’s Visibility on the Web - 7/10, 7/17 6–8 pm
  
• CRN 1654 - Note-taking for Interpreters - 7/12, 7/19 6–8 pm
  
• CRN 1655 - Freeware, Shareware, and Inexpensive Tools for Translators - 7/24, 7/31 6–8 pm
  
• CRN 1656 - File Management for Translators - 7/26, 8/2 6–8 pm
  

The workshops qualify for ATA continuing education credit.

For more information, please see Translation and Interpretation Training Workshops, in the University College web site (www.universitycollege.du.edu/).

DU Workshop - Freeware, Shareware, and Inexpensive Tools for Translators- 7/24/07 and 7/31/07

CRN 1655 - Freeware, Shareware, and
Inexpensive Tools for Translators

7/24, 7/31 - 6:00-8:00 pm

Translators often grumble about the high price of translation memory software tools, but there are many cheap (or even free) programs that can be surprisingly useful. The aim of this workshop is to introduce translators to some of the best cheap or free tools available, from full translation memory packages such as Omega-T, to a range of other tools including full-featured dictionaries and thesauri, programs used to search
glossaries, and so on. Basic computer knowledge required.

This is the second of two workshops I'll be teaching this summer at the University College of Denver University.

DU Workshop - Blogging for Translators - 7/10/07 and 7/17/07

CRN 1653 - Blogging for Translators: How to
Increase One’s Visibility on the Web

July 10 and 17, 2007 - 6:00-8:00 pm

Blogs are an excellent way for translators on a tight budget to present themselves on the Web.

The aim of this workshop is to introduce translators to blogs, how to create one for free, examples of blogging tools available, and what to do if one wants to create a more traditional Web page (including a very brief introduction to HTML).

This is the first of two workshops I'll be teaching this summer at the university College of Denver University.

Translation and Interpretation Open House at DU - 6/4/07

On June 4th from 6 to 8pm, the Translation and Interpretation faculty of University College, Denver University, will host an Open House at the South Renaissance Room, Mary Reed Building on the Denver University campus.

A panel of our T&I faculty will discuss the current state of the T&I professions and will answer questions from the audience.

There will be opportunities for Q&A, program information, and networking.