Does the Blue Board tell more about bad translators than about bad translation companies?

I've just received from an English translation company, which will remain unnamed, the following message:

Dear Riccardo, 

My name is [...] and I am a Linguist Manager at [...].

We are looking long term English to Italian translators located in the US time zone. We are contacting you as we believe you would have the expertise to help us.

We are working with translation rates of 70USD per 1000 words translation and 20USD for proofreading per hour. We will require for you to take a 300 word test (free of charge) as part of the recruitment process. [...]  

If interested in the collaboration, please reply to this email with an updated CV and I will provide more details. Kind regards,

Now, 70USD per 1000 words is 7 cents per word: clearly unacceptable.

But they can afford to offer such bottom rates because apparently there are plenty of people very happy to work with them: their Blue Board rating is 4.9, and full of comments like "Professional and reliable company with professional and friendly people", "Great collaboration, prompt payment. Very reliable", "I've worked for [...] for a few years now, and with several PMs. They've treated me right".

They may be "professional and friendly", "prompt with payment", even "very reliable", but if what they pay is so low, I hardly think they can be said to have treated translators "right".

So once again the Blue Board proves useful: not so much in identifying a good company to work for, but rather to help find translators happy to work for peanuts.

A truly useful article on the quality of legal dictionaries

R. De Groot and Conrad Van Laer, of Mastrich University, published a few years ago a very useful article: The Quality of Legal Dictionaries: An Assessment.

In this article, De Groot and Van Laer assess the quality of many bilingual and multilingual legal dictionaries for the European Union languages. A truly interesting and useful part of the article is at the beginning, where the authors write some general remarks about translation issues to consider when tackling legal terminology - this is in effect a short but useful course on legal translation.

My thanks to Daniela Zambrini, who pointed this article out in a recent post on ProZ.

SDL Trados Studio Manual: first impression

I've just bought Mats Linder's SDL Trados Studio Manual. I plan to write a fuller review later, once I've had a chance of using the manual for a while, but my first impression is excellent: the book (which comes as two pdf files with the same content, one formatted for printing in A4 size, the other as an A5-sized booklet) is well organized and contains a wealth of information on SDL Trados Studio 2011.

Price: USD 45 (available through SDL's Open Exchange).

A master translator speaks

From Worldcrunch, a brief but interesting article on Josée Kamoun, the French translator of Philip Roth, John Irving and Jonathan Coe: Why Philip Roth Sounds So Good In French: The Method Of A Master Translator

“The translator dances the tango with the text. When the text leads with the left foot, the translator steps back with the right. It is an extremely tight embrace, and, if possible, graceful...”

I wonder if they are going to pay him in lettuce: rabbit signed up as court interpreter by ALS

From the Birmingham Mail: Jajo the Rabbit 'hired' as translator at Birmingham courts

Money quote:

"[The owner] successfully filled in an online application for carrot-chomping Jajo with Applied Language Solutions, which supplies linguists to West Midlands police and local courts.
The rabbit [...]  later received emails from the firm welcoming him aboard as a translator – and inviting him to an online seminar to learn more about his role."

Guess they are not kidding when they say the ALS contract has been somewhat problematic for court interpreting in the UK.

Update

And now Jajo, the interpreter rabbit, has his own Twitter account:

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!

Tip for translators from English: i.e./e.g.

There is a good reason why many style guides recommend against using "i.e." (id est = "that is") and "e.g." (exempli gratia = "for example"): too many native speakers do not know how to distinguish between the two, and whereas they would not say "that is" when they mean "for example", they often do use "i.e." instead of "e.g.".

So, as translators, whenever we see one of these abbreviations, we should make sure from the context what the author actually meant: these abbreviations are too often used incorrectly.

Italian electronic dictionaries: an update

Several years ago I had written a couple of posts on the Italian dictionaries available online or on CD:

Patches for Italian dictionaries on CD-Rom

and

English-Italian dictionaries: CD-ROMs and online

After almost six years, someone wrote to me today, asking for further advice, since her copy of the Rizzoli-Sansoni dictionary no longer worked, even using the suggested patch:

I happily used this dictionary on my XP machine until this morning: when I clicked on it, it opened with the word list but without the definitions as occurred before the patch install. I worked for 2 hours trying everything I could think of, including trying to reinstall the patch.
I have a few questions which I hope you can help me with:

1. Is there a patch for Service Pack 3 for the Sansoni? Would that be the problem? The old patch will not even re-install. It says it cannot find the path....so my reasoning is perhaps it has something to do with Service Pack 3 or some recent upgrade from Microsoft. 

1. I found a site that has a CD ROM Ragazzini 2011 for 50 Euro. Are you familiar with it? If you are, do you like it? Is it also tied to the web as is the Sansoni? I was really hoping that if I have to spring for a new dictionary, it would be complete in itself and not depend on the availability of the Internet or be at the mercy of upgrades of Service Packs and operating systems.

I like the Sansoni because I can search for phrases, for instance on Friday I looked up "beat around the bush" and found the correct phrase to use. The on line dictionaries only allow you to search for a word. I absolutely need a dictionary that can do the phrase search.
To sum it up, I would like to repair the Sansoni if possible and then would definitely be open to buying a new dictionary on CD Rom with these features: not accompanied by a hard copy, one that is stand alone and not tied to the web or updates to computer operations and very importantly, can search for phrases.

I answered my correspondent by e-mail, but since I think this could be of general interest, I’m reposting part of my answers here:


The old Rizzoli-Sansoni dictionary (and other dictionaries on CD-Rom based on the same Edigeo software, such as the Picchi English-Italian and the Tam Spanish-Italian) work in Windows 7 without any need for a patch. Using the old patch (available from the Edigeo Web site), they still work - at least on my old XP laptop, which I keep updated with the latest patches from Microsoft, so I don’t think the problem has to do with Microsoft: a more likely explanation is the interference of some other piece of software.
For anybody for whom the old dictionaries no longer work, there are several options available:

1. Upgrade to Windows 7 – your dictionary problems might go away, but you would have to pay for the new OS, and, if your laptop is too old or does not have enough resources, Windows 7 might not run well on it (or not run at all). Also, of course, there is no guarantee that an old dictionary will keep on working – any Windows update might break them.
2. Contact Edigeo: they created the software for Rizzoli-Sansoni, and might be able to help.
3. Instead of trying to get the CD-Rom for the Ragazzini, I suggest instead a subscription to Ragazzini (and maybe some other dictionary: they offer several different general and technical dictionaries) from the Zanichelli online dictionary site. The yearly subscription is cheap: about 10 Euro per dictionary (prices vary depending on the dictionary you are interested in).
   The advantage there is that you always have the most up to date version of the dictionary. The disadvantage, of course, is that when you don’t have access to the Internet you also don’t have access to your dictionary. The Ragazzini online does allow full-text search, so you would still be able to find phrases.
4. From the eLexico.com site you can get a variety of dictionaries as downloads (for about 40 Euros per dictionary), or as online subscriptions (for about 20 Euro/year). Among the dictionaries offered, there is the Sansoni, but they also have Picchi and several other good dictionaries.
5. Rely on the many dictionaries available online for free. I’ll write an update to my old article soon, to see what is now available, and what no longer is.
   Remember, however, that free online dictionaries, even when they offer the full contents of the paid versions, usually limit search to headwords only (no full text search).

New utility to keep track of changes in bilingual files

Change Tracker, a recently released freeware utility, helps translators, editors and project managers seeing what was changed in a translated bilingual file.

The program works by aligning two files (or two sets of files), to compare the original translation with the edited bilingual files, showing what was changed, added or deleted between one version and the other (similar to what the Track Changes feature of MS Word does – but for bilingual files). This information can be seen in the program interface, and also exported as an Excel file.

I’ve tried the program on a pair of files translated with Trados 2007, and with a set of files translated with SDL Studio. In both instances, the program worked well, producing a clear report of all changes made to the translation.

Several popular CAT file formats are supported:

• Trados 2007 and SDL Studio (TTX, SDLXLIFF)
• MemoQ (XLIFF)
• Idiom, Translation Workspace (XLZ)
• Oscar (TMX)
• Wordfast (TXML)
• Microsoft Helium (HE)
• Microsoft Word (e.g., from Trados Workbench: DOC, DOCX, RTF)

This could e a very useful addition to your QA toolbox.

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.