Trados 6.5 and SDLX 2004 (or older) no longer eligible for upgrade after April 1st, 2008

With a remarkably misleading title ("Our upgrading guidelines are changing"), SDL announces that, from April 1st, 2008, Trados v6.5 (or older) and SDLX 2004 (or older) will no longer be eligible for upgrade price, and that people wishing to upgrade their old software after that date will have to buy a new (i.e., full price) license.

The first page of the announcement only indicates that

our upgrade guidelines will be changing from Tuesday 1st April, 2008

Only if you click on "Visit our Frequently Asked Questions section", you'll find that

If you are on versions Trados v6.5 or previous or SDLX 2004 and previous, we recommend you upgrade to SDL Trados 2007 now in order to retain discounted upgrade pricing for the software. From the 1st of April 2008 onwards, there will no longer be upgrade eligibility from these versions.

Stopping eligibility entirely is, indeed, a change, but the way it is presented is misleading and borders on the outright dishonest.

So, many translators who were working happily with Trados 6.5, and had no intention to upgrade right now (but thought they might upgrade later, when they purchased a new computer with Windows Vista and Word 2007), will either have to upgrade immediately, or be compelled to pay full price later.

Of course, they might also decide to stay with the current version, and look for a competitive upgrade to some other tool later.

Way to go, SDL: instead of improving your buggy software to build up customer loyalty, compel the customer to upgrade RIGHT NOW, or lose that benefit forever.

Word chains

You know the kind: a "fee" becomes a "processing fee" - clear enough, that's a fee for processing something, and very different from "fee processing", which is something you do to fees.

But then words start to accrue, like barnacles on a fouled hull. "Fee", "processing fee", "double processing fee", and so on. And on.

For the translator, the problem compounds: is a "double processing fee" a "double fee" for "processing", or a "fee" for "double processing"?. Depending of what we are talking about, either reading could be correct, but usually not both at the same time. The translator, in most languages, needs to make a choice.

Asking the customer helps less than one would think: the technical writer or programmer who was the author of such a gem as "special ad-hoc double processing fee handling program safety time log" may no longer be around. Even if he is, he has no idea what it means, or which word modifies which other.

When I worked for a software company we had a competition in the translation department for spotting the longest such word chain. The eventual winner was a whopping thirteen words long, without article or preposition.

English is such a concise language you can often omit articles, prepositions and other functional words, but by doing so "maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding".

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(No: "special ad-hoc [etc.]" is not a string from some actual translation. I made it up for this post - but I have seen even worse)

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.

Localizable resources

Dr.Dobbs has a fairly interesting article on the use of page resources for the localization of web sites.

Page resources are literals stored in an application-specific assembly and bound to a culture identifier.

Fairly technical, but of interest for those of us who translate, localize or build multilingual web sites.

Wordiness

Something that annoys me is wordiness: I don't mind long texts, if there is little redundancy, but words that are there just to take up space, are another matter.

There is a dear friend that always translates "including [something]" as "ad inclusione di [qualcosa]". When I edit her, I can usually pare that down to "incluso" - one word instead of three, 7 characters instead of 16 (I know, I'm nitpicking).

Worse when the redundant words create an interference. From a letter I translated today: "Ali was originally born in Cairo". Unbidden, thoughts came to mind: is there a way one can be born otherwise? "Ali was originally born in Cairo, then he thought better of it, and was finally born in Alexandria, instead", perhaps?

When are two names 67% the same?

Would you prefer:

• To have "afxc04z5.htm" suggested as a translation when the html file in the string you are translating is actually "afxc04z5_10.htm"?

Or

• Would you rather copy manually the file name from the source segment to the target one, avoiding the risk of accepting a wrong file name while typing rapidly?

I would always opt for the second option - it's just too easy accepting a fuzzy match "as is", when you are typing fast, and this type of error is serious (it would break a web site), and remarkably difficult to spot (file names looks similar, and re-reading the translation there is no logical clue to indicate that something is amiss).

The brillant programming team that gave us useless fuzzy matches like this or this one, once again chooses the wrong answer:

When is DWI the same as murder?

Not when someone is run over by a drunk driver, but maybe when that driver, after his arrests, signs a mistranslated waiver.

Translation errors raise legal issues

[...] The form, waiving his right to a lawyer, states that Segundo was charged with “a murder,” and his penalty was “1 anus in jail and a $ 1, 000 fine.”

(from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette)

Signora Presidente and Ms Chairperson: different paths to gender-neutral language

Yesterday a translation of mine returned, marred by some questionable edits: turns out the editor was not even a native speaker of Italian. But that, as they say, is another story.

What is interesting is that one of the "corrections" she marked in my translation was this sentence (suitably changed here to protect my customer): "La Signora Jane Doe, Direttore del Centro..." [Ms. Jane Doe, Director of the Center ..."].

My editor changed that to "La Signora Jane Doe, Direttrice del Centro...". My old elementary teacher would have agreed with the editor and marked my translation with a blue pencil. That would have been right, back then: "La ... Direttore", feminine article plus male noun - a blatant error of concordance.

But usage changes with time. Now the old feminine names for titles and professions are disappearing from Italian: no longer "Direttrice", but "Direttore"; no longer "Avvocatessa", but "Avvocato", and so on, ever more often.

A similar trend in English has replaced "Chairman" with "Chairperson", and brought many other new gender-neutral nouns in English.

Yet, if the underlying reasons for these trends are the same, the two languages have taken strangely divergent roads to similar ends. In English, where gender is almost absent, this change towards neutrality has stripped the gender from most of the few words that retained it. In Italian, where every noun has a masculine and a feminine form, the trend among women has been to adopt the masculine labels for their professional titles.

In English, women resented words such as "Chairman", because the masculine ending implied that only men were suited for such a position. On a strikingly different path to the same goal, Italian women rejected the feminine versions of their titles, finding them demeaning, as if a "Presidentessa" was a second class Chairman, and an "Avvocatessa" a lawyer only by sufferance.

As indeed my elementary teacher would have agreed, when teaching to our class that a "Deputatessa" was the wife of a Representative, while a "Sindachessa" only the wife of the Mayor.

A final twist to this meandering story. The elementary teacher I was referring to was a man, as were all the other elementary teachers to the all-male school forms in our public school. I doubt that in Italy, nowadays, one would find many male elementary teachers left.

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He looked old to me, then, Maestro Buffon, certainly older than my parents; old enough that it was my grandmother who had been his elementary teacher.

And yet, he was probably younger than I am now.

English-Italian dictionaries: CD-ROMs and online

I believe that most, if not all, major EN>IT IT>EN dictionaries are now available on CD-ROM or at least with CD-ROM available (in addition to the paper dictionary).

I don't have a link for the Ragazzini (Zanichelli), but the Picchi (Hoepli), Rizzoli-Larousse "Sansoni" (which, sadly, does not contain the full text of the great Sansoni-Macchi), and Hazon-Garzanti are now available online.

Of the above, I think the best and most complete general English-Italian dictionary nowadays is Picchi's, closely followed by Rizzoli-Sansoni.

You can try them for yourself, using the following links:

• Picchi-Hoepli (register at the site: the dictionary is available even without registration, but only in abbreviated form)


• Rizzoli-Sansoni (the link I provide is to a page on our company's web site: you can obtain the code to add them to your own web page by following this link)


• Hazon-Garzanti.


• Oxford Paravia Concise


• Collins

Using these dictionaries "for free" online is tempting, and occasionally useful. Remember, however, that the CD-ROM versions have some important advantages: faster searches, availability even when you are not online, and additional functionality, (much richer search capability, from full-text searches to the use of boolean operators).

Update

I've added to the body of this post another two online dictionaries, Oxford-Paravia Concise and Collins, which have been suggested by colleagues.

I will probably write a comparison review of these online dictionaries in a future post.

The translation of Aesop's Fables

Aesop's fables have been so frequently published that it is widely assumed that in Europe only the Bible has more editions.

The Chronicle Review has a very interesting article (No Children's Tale: Aesop's translators have had varied agendas) on the varied history of the translation of Aesop's Fables, and of how they have changed with the times and with the different intentions of the various translators.

Today we assume that translators always work from the original text. It was not always so, hence (for example) the translations of Russian authors into Italian that were actually translations of the French translations. Even so, it is startling to read that

Caxton's translation is an English translation of a French translation of a Latin translation prepared by a German in 1476.

That German, at last, presumably translated from the Greek.

A very interesting article, well worth reading.