I so wish I could do that

Reading 462 books a year.

Brings to mind a passage in Chaim Potok's The Chosen, where Reuven more or less tells Danny to knock it off, because if Danny was reading ten books a week, Reuven himself was not far behind, at seven or eight.

The best I ever managed was slightly over 160 in a year, when I was in college, and nowadays I'm lucky if I break 50 or so.

Sigh.

Low rates for beginners

Corinne McKay, in her blog "Thoughts On Translation", has an excellent post on Avoiding beginner's mistakes.

I would like to underscore one of the points she makes:

"DO NOT set your rates suspiciously low. I think that especially in a down economy, many beginning freelancers are tempted to set their rates markedly below the going rate for their languages. [...] I think that lowball rates attract bottom-feeding clients who are looking for high-quality work for minimum wage. "

I agree, and would like to add something:

Not only do many beginners set their rates too low, but, when this is pointed out to them, they complain that otherwise they would not get any work.

What they don't realize is that work will eventually come aplenty to good translators, but that working for substandard rates leads to lower-quality work.

When working for low rates, the most obvious way to increase revenue is to accept more and more work. This means that work gets rushed and the inevitable errors creep in. Being kept busy by low-paying customers, also leaves little time for keeping up to date, for searching new customers and for accepting higher-paying work, should it arrive.

Working for substandard rates easily leads to accepting work for which one is ill suited: but in this regard, see another point in Corinne's post:

"DO NOT take on work that you know is wrong for you just because you need work".

Another error many beginners do is to complain about "the agency's rate": there is no such thing - it's your rate, not the agency's, but thinking of it as the agency's rate leads to accepting things such as agencies unilaterally lowering their rates (as recently discusses on ProZ).

Finally, working for low rates means accepting work from the cheapest agencies in the industry. Eventually the translator's résumé will list a whole range of agencies notorious for paying little and for their little regard for quality. And once that is the image one conveys with his or her résumé, it is difficult to rebrand oneself as a "high-quality translator".

"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.

Guns and Overtranslation

The English text used as a source language in an online translation recently concluded contains a word that may easily trip the unwary: "gun".

Heathrow Airport is one of the few places in England you can be sure of seeing a gun.

In the translation into Italian, many translated "gun" as "pistola". Others chose to translate it as "arma da fuoco" or simply as "arma", and a single translator as "fucile" (rifle).

Unfortunately, although "pistola" may be the translation that first comes to mind, here it is wrong. In the feedback section, I objected to this choice of words, but most commenters disagreed, pointing out dictionary entries clearly showing "pistola" as a legitimate translation for gun.

The dictionary, however, is just a tool; it is up to us to use it wisely: "gun" should be translated as "pistola" only when it means a handgun. I would have no objection if "Doc Holliday was the fastest gun in the west" was translated as "...era la pistola più veloce del West". All of us have a clear image of the wild West as a place where rough justice was meted out by Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp in "My Darling Clementine" or by Gary Cooper as Marshall Will Kane in "High Noon" armed with a six-shot Colt 45 Peacemaker.

But the guns carried and used by security police at airports, to guard against terrorist threats are, usually, small machine guns (i.e., "mitra" or "mitragliette", in Italian), and not the pistols or revolvers dangling from the belts of policemen (and women) in most parts of the world - but not as yet, save for airports, by British bobbies. So, unless one knew for sure that British anti-terror police are limited to hand guns only (and they are not, as you can see below), the correct translation should be "armi da fuoco" or the superordinate "armi". The translation of gun with "pistola" here is a case of overtranslation: adding more detail to the translated text than is warranted by the original.

And the objection of those who justified the use of "pistole" for guns because it was one of the terms suggested by the dictionary? One, reality trumps any reference book, and, two, "cannone" also is found in the dictionary under "gun", and while British police are more heavily armed than with puny pistols, they are not (yet) issued cannons and howitzers to blast away at travelers who forgot the strict limits on carry-on liquids.

By the way, a simple image search in Google clearly shows that the British security police weapon of choice appears to be a machine gun or short automatic rifle, see for example:

Appendix

I run a short analysis of the terms chosen by the finalists for the major Romance languages and for German:

        weapon          firearm           pistol       revolver
German      waffe       2   schusswaffe   3
Catalan     arma        3                     pistola  3     
French      arme à feu  5                                 revolver 2
Italian     arma        2   arma da fuoco 1   pistola  2  
Portuguese
(European)  arma        5
Portuguese
(Brasilian) arma        8                                 revólver 1
Rumanian    armă        2   armă de foc   2   pistoale 1
Spanish     arma        5   arma de fuego 2      
Total                  27                13            6           3

Happy Holidays!

I'll be traveling abroad for the holidays, and won't be carrying my computer with me, so this is probably my last post for the year.

At the beginning of the year I said I would try to post more often:

For this year I am resolved to post more often, at least whenever some idea for an interesting post arrives, and not let ideas wither away for lack of attention. They say that if you don't write down resolutions, you'll never do anything to make them happen. So here I am: sharing my resolve to write more on this blog and perhaps elsewhere.

I think that I mostly succeeded, though some months have been better then other.

Thank you to all of you who visited this blog and to those who shared your ideas with your comments.

Happy holidays!

A useful tool for Trados users

Many Trados users complain that it is impossible to use most Trados keyboard shortcuts when working on a laptop. Using the mouse to click on the toolbar icons feels awkward to people accustomed to touch type, and trying to activate the keyboard shortcuts through the virtual keypad accessed via the Fn key often ends up as an exercise in frustration.

A simple (and cheap) solution is to buy an USB numeric keypad: mine cost only a few dollars, is very lightweight and is also useful when working on a spreadsheet or entering numbers.

It may also help those of us accustomed to enter accented characters via the Alt+number route.
If you use an USB keypad like this, however, you may have to experiment a bit: on my computer, for example, the Alt+number accented characters only appeared after hitting the backspace key. This may differ on different laptops.

Numeric keypad

Trados: beware of wrong links

I have complained in the past of various problems Trados has with fuzzy matches. A particularly insidious one is the way Trados treats Internet URIs and other links.

For matching purposes, Trados processes URIs as if they were no different than any other text segment. By doing so, it considers two identical URIs (say, for example "http://aboutranslation.blogspot.com") as 100% matches (which is OK), but it also consider two different URLs (for example, "http://flickr.com" and "http://facebook.com") as fuzzy matches.

This is wrong and dangerous.

If the two URLs are as different as Flickr.com and Facebook.com, the problem may seem trivial: a glance suffices to see that they are different, and to copy over the correct URL.


But other addresses looks much more similar, and we can easily accept the wrong link while translating quickly:

Trados, in fact, consider these two links as 97% similar.

But there is no such a think as a "similar" link: it either gets you to the correct page or file, or not, and the way Trados matches them adds to the risk of inserting a wrong link in our translations.

Changing the internal logic to treat URLs differently would be trivial, but the Trados programmers (or, more likely, their managers), cannot be bothered to spend the necessary time for a simple improvement that would ensure higher quality.

Editors

A good editor is an essential part of a translation team, but working with a bad one may be a nightmare.

• A good editor must be a good translator, but sometimes a good translator is not a good editor: a good translator who has too high an opinion of himself and who is convinced that the definition of error is "something translated different from what what I would do" is unlikely to make a good editor.
  
• A good editor must know when to change things that are not real errors. This may be necessary to achieve an appropriate register, to standardize style and terminology in team projects, to follow the style guide provided by the customer, etc.
• A good editor must also know when, instead, it is better to leave things alone (for example, when the translation is done in a style different than one would use, but which is still appropriate).
  
• A good editor needs to know how to indicate when a translation is wrong, how to indicate the type of error, and when instead to indicate that the changes made are preferential.
  

When I work as an editor I tend to make many changes in the translations I receive. But I also take care to say to the customer when the corrections are because of real errors (serious or otherwise) and when I am suggesting stylistic changes. For example:

"You'll see that I have made a lot of changes, but the translation was not, in fact, incorrect: these are almost all preferential changes made to give more of a "marketing" flavor to an otherwise correct translation."

"The sorrow with any translation"

A couple of interesting quotes from a recent, excellent article (from "The Australian") on new translations of Virgil:

"The sorrow with any translation is that you're never really quite there, [but] you may be someplace almost as good."
[Stanley Lombardo, professor of classics at the University of Kansas]

A translator must strive to see the work in its own terms, [Ruden] believes, while knowing that such a goal will always be just out of reach. "But it's something that you keep pushing and pushing and pushing, until you pass out from exhaustion."
[Sarah Ruden, poet and classicist]

The entire article is very much worth reading, and a welcome change of pace from the humdrum translations we might be working on.

Writing in a foreign language

As translators, we are not supposed to work into our second language, only from it. However, we have to write in a foreign language when we live and work in a foreign country: We need to be able to write it well to correspond with our customers and colleagues, to give classes and presentations, to write resumes and applications. If we want to communicate more broadly, we may decide that a more widespread language (like English) opens to us a wider stage.

We should strive to write our second language as well as possible, with elegance and precision, style, restraint, and power. We may even find that writing in a foreign language is easier than translating into it: when we translate, we are bound to the path chosen for us by the original author; when we write, we are making our own way.

I came to love English, to appreciate its difficulties and beauty, its subtleties, its style. Over time I learned to think in English, now I often dream in it. Do I write like a native? I don't think so: we are often blind to our faults. But I'm attuned to the way good English is written: for certain things, it is a more flexible tool than Italian.

In English a good standard is saying things in a simple manner, trying to be concise, to use the active voice. Far too often, in Italian we find instead convoluted sentences, needlessly complex syntax, the use of language not to communicate but as a way to show off. Hence, so much legal and bureaucratic verbiage, and also the misplaced love for half-learned, and one-fourth-understood foreign (especially English) words when Italian ones would do.