Requiescat in pace: Peter Newmark passed away on July 12

I met Peter Newmark when I attended a translation seminar at the Polytechnic of Central London in 1990. Newmark was an excellent teacher: always interesting, able to intersperse talk of practical and theoretical aspects of translation with anecdotes of his experiences as translator and interpreter while serving with the British army in Italy during WWII.

Although that seminar was all too brief, I learned much from Peter Newmark – and meeting him also led to his books: unlike most books in translation studies, which easily become too technical and theoretical, Peter Newmark's books are of real use for the practicing translator (I’m especially fond of his two collections of “Paragraphs on Translation”, and of course the name of this blog is a direct homage to Newmark's “About Translation”).

Antony Pym wrote an obituary on the European Society for Translation Studies’ site; Margaret Rogers wrote a longer personal note, published on the Notes on Translation Studies blog.

To the translators who send us their résumés

Dear translators,

I realize that, especially for beginners, finding new customers is difficult. So I am all in favor of your efforts to market your services by sending out your résumé.

However, I sometimes have the strange feeling that many of you don’t really send out résumés and applications to acquire new customers, but rather to collect rejections and silence – so as to be able to truthfully complain on ProZ and similar sites that you have sent out hundreds of résumés without any success.

If this is the real reason many of you send out your résumés, it would explain many otherwise puzzling facts:

• messages full of spelling horrors and other mistakes
• messages with attached a résumé in a file… but with no text at all in the body of the message
• messages sent without any indication of your language pair or specialization
• résumés that either hide, or sometimes actually don’t include, your language pair

All of that is either a sign of real ineptitude on your part, or a well-planned effort ideally designed not to acquire any new customer.

My suggestion: if you do want to find new customers, carefully review and edit your résumé (or rewrite it from scratch), and pay particular attention to write a cover message that is short, clear and to the point – with the aim of inducing the recipient to open your résumé and be dazzled by your expertise.

And, please, do your homework: address your message to a real person: “Dear Sir or Madam” message are directly filtered to my junk mail folder.

Best wishes of a more successful job search,

Riccardo

Don’t search from the wrong side: a reminder for SDL 2009 users

A frequent complaint against SDL Trados Studio 2009 is that sometimes the program doesn’t find matches the user is sure are in memory.

The problem is real and we have seen it, but I believe that sometimes what the user is complaining about is a mismatch between Studio 2009 and Trados 2007.

In Trados 2007 it was possible to search a concordance only on the source text. This was a severe drawback (no target concordance), but it was simple to use: highlight some text, click on the concordance button (or hit F3), and you got your results.

In Studio 2009, on the other hand, you can find concordances not only on the source, but also on the target. This is great, but it also means that depending on where you highlight text, you may not get the results that you expect.

For example, if you copy your source text to target (to overwrite it – a frequent technique when translating marked-up text). You have on the right of the editor’s pane (the target part), text that is still in your source language. You highlight a few words, because you are sure you had encountered them earlier, and want to see your previous translation. You click F3 to invoke the concordance search…

…and don’t get any match. Yet you are sure you have that string in memory. What happened?

What happened is that if you selected the text in the target part of the screen, and then called the concordance search, you were searching for a concordance on the translated text – but since the text you selected is not translated yet, the concordance doesn’t return any result.

If you selected the same words on the left (the source part of the screen), then launched the concordance search, you would get the result you expected:

So, even though it is true that Studio 2009 sometimes does not return matches you do have in memory, the program is not always to blame – just remember to launch your concordance searches from the appropriate side of the screen.

Update – Solutions for different concordance searches

Thanks to SDL’s Paul Filkin – here is how to handle the different concordance searches in Studio 2009:

• F3 will take the source when you are in source, and target when you are in target
• Ctrl+F3 will always search the source no matter where you take the text from.
• Ctrl+Shift+F3 will always search the target no matter where you take the text from.

…and (again according to Paul), you can even customize these shortcuts, to better suit your needs.

I like having a tool with a rich set of options – even if that sometimes means a steeper learning curve.
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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!

Denver Public Library v. foreign language readers

We are just back in Denver, in time for a weekend that included the Denver Public Library’s annual book sale.We normally enjoy the book sale: a chance to contribute to the library and, at the same time, find some interesting books.

There was an unusual quantity of foreign language books this year, including many Italian ones. Unlike last year, when the Italian books available mostly came from a couple of private donors, this year all of the books came from the library’s own shelves.

I had a bad feeling about that: I thought the library had decided to reduce its Italian collection. I asked a librarian, but it was even worse than I thought: the Denver Public Library has decided to get rid of most foreign language collections in their entirety.

Considering the painful cost-cutting measures the library has to implement (including the planned closure of up to half its branches) I could understand a decision not to purchase foreign language books any longer. But why not keep those they already had, at least until they were in fit conditions for borrowing (and the stamps on the books clearly showed most of them had been borrowed many times from the library)?

So, if you want to read Petrarca, Dante, Goldoni, Calvino, Pavese or Levi in the original, you are out of luck at the Denver Public Library.

Questions and answers: how to start out

I received these questions from a colleague who is just starting out in our profession, and with her permission, I’m sharing them here together with my answers (after removing a few identifying details), in the hope they may be of interest for other translators:

I am a Spanish to English translator, just starting out in this field, but I’ve heard that we Spanish to English translators are a dime a dozen. I have received conflicting suggestions about the best way to go about getting into this field:

1. Subscribe to TranslatorsCafé and forget about sending your resumes to agencies.
2. Send your résumé to any and every agency. 
3. Writing a blog that I could use to market myself. I guess if I could do it in two languages that would be even better, but I don't have any ideas. 

And several other different suggestions.  Any advice would be appreciated.

While it is true that there are many Spanish to English translators, good translators are not all that frequent, so if you are a good translator, you’ll eventually break through.

My idea about the advice you have received:

1. Subscribe to Translator Café (but don’t forget ProZ or other portals). I think you should, but wait to test the waters before paying for the membership. There are many translators that get much work from such translation portals, but the work offered on such sites is normally poorly paid. So, do subscribe to such sites (and perhaps, even pay for a membership), but do not rely on them as your only source of work.
   
2. Send your résumé to translation companies. I advise against a scattershot approach in this: much better to take the time necessary to research your prospects, see in which way they prefer to be approached (résumé sent to a particular person or persons, or to a specific address, or filling up a form online). Résumés sent to “Dear Sir or Madam” are normally deleted sight unseen.
   
3. Using a blog as a marketing tool. Good idea, but you should think carefully how to achieve your aim: who is your public? To attract customers, your blog should be aimed at direct customers or to translation companies (difficult to do both at the same time). If you do not plan carefully your blog, you might end with a blog that maybe is widely read (if you make it interesting), but by the wrong public (I, for instance, didn’t plan when I started writing About Translation. It  has now attracted a large enough public for such a niche endeavor, but the wrong public if my aim had been to attract more customers: most of my readers are other translators).
   

Some further ideas you didn’t mention.

• Contact local translation companies in person, and see if they are interested in your services – you are likely going to find the rates in Mexico, where you live, very low, but you might expand from there to agencies elsewhere once you have gained some experience with them; also, if you return to your hometown in the USA to visit friends or family, take the time to go an introduce yourself to translation companies there (try to set up an appointment in advance: don’t just drop in on them).
• There are some good resources on the web to help beginning translators – I believe the “beginning translators” posts here in About Translation are one, but better ones are, for example, Corinne McKay’s blog (Thoughts on Translation) and book (How To Succeed as a Freelance Translator – the second edition has just been published), and Judy and Dagmar Jenner’s really useful book The Entrepreneurial Linguist. You can also find much useful advice (amid a sea of useless blather) in the translation fora of such sites as ProZ and TranslatorsCafé  and on social networks such as LinkedIn.
• Join the ATA and also your local translators association in Mexico, and/or in your hometown in the USA.
• Try to get ATA certified. This is usually difficult in your language pair, but useful if you manage it.
• Enroll in a university-level course in translation. There are several excellent ones – including the Denver University’s University College program where I teach.
• Finally, if you decide to start your own blog. Check out the “Blogging 101” presentation here – you might find it useful.

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!

Interesting bilingual blog is looking for a French co-blogger

Have you ever checked out Le mot juste en anglais? It’s a blog aimed at French speakers who wish to enhance their understanding of English.

Jonathan Golberg, the blog author, is looking for a native French co-blogger, and asked me to post the following announcement:

Si vous êtes de langue maternelle française et que vous aimez l’anglais ; si, de surcroît, vous voulez prêter main forte à un blog franco-anglais (www.Le-mot-juste-en-anglais.com),
contactez Jonathan Goldberg : Le.mot.juste.en.anglais@gmail.com.
Ce blog linguistique publie des articles soignés, sérieux ou drôles, et invite ses lecteurs à une participation active.

If your mother-tongue is French and you have a keen interest in  English, and if you would like to collaborate in maintaining  a French-language  blog (www.Le-mot-juste-en-anglais.com) aimed at enhancing understanding of written English, please contact Jonathan Goldberg at Le.mot.juste.en.anglais@gmail.com The blog endeavors to publish high-quality linguistic articles, both serious and humorous, and it invites readers to comment and exchange views.

I’ve checked Le mot just en anglais out (notwithstanding my limited knowledge of French), and found it well done and quite interesting – among the latest posts, for example there is an extended article on the word “birther” (as in those strange people who still cannot believe a black man born in Hawaii is the legitimate president of the USA).