Five years of About Translation

Last week marked the fifth anniversary of About Translation.

The number of visitors in these five years has kept on growing: from a few thousand visitors in 2005, to a current total well over 90,000 visitors and 150,000 page views.

Now that Blogger permits more than one page per blog, I've added a permanent page devoted to the posts that may be most useful to other translators (for example, the articles on wildcard searches in Word), and an About page, where I moved the information about this blog. I plan to add some additional permanent pages in the future: any suggestion is welcome, of course.

Knowing that you find this blog interesting enough to read it is one of the reasons why I keep trying to improve it. Thank you!

For Colorado translators: Social Media for Translators

The CTA has organized this session on social media, to which I'll participate with a short presentation on blogging.

Monday, February 22, 6-8:30 PM, Social Media for Translators

This session will feature three CTA members to give you hands-on tips for making the most of social media in your business. Experienced blogger and techie Riccardo Schiaffino will talk about blogging and how to customize “off the shelf” blogging tools for your own use, Eve Bodeux will talk about using social networking tools such as LinkedIn and Twitter (and similar sites for your non-US countries) and Corinne McKay will provide information about blogging and podcasting as a marketing tool.

Location: Meeting Room L200, College Hill Library, 3705 West 112th Avenue, Westminster, CO 80031
Cost: $10 for CTA members, $15 for non-members.

Which (free) MT is best?

Ethan Shen, a Chinese translator, used for years, while studying in high school and college,  a variety of free MT translation engines. A question remained unsolved for him, however: which MT translation system is best?

To finally settle the question, Shen has devised a comparative study, and is looking for volunteers. Shen has set up a web site in which you can paste or input text to translate. The survey site feeds the source text to three diferent free MT systems (Google Translate, Yahoo/Babelfish and Microsoft Bing's). You are then asked to review the resulting translations, rate them, and add your comments.

Shen is looking for 10,000 testers between now and the end of March, for any of the language pairs supported by these machine translations systems.He will then analyze the results, and I believe he plans to publish the results of his research, or write about them.

If you would like to participate, you can do so by following the link to Which Engine Translates Best? March Madness Edition.

As an enticement to participate in the survey, Shen's company will award a new Apple iPad to a participant in the March Madness contest (you can find the details on Shen's survey site).

Who really wrote those words?

I'm reading "Writing Tools, 50 essential strategies for every writer", by Roy Peter Clark. Instead of rules to follow, his  book provides tools to exploit (although many of the tools sound quite similar to the rules provided by other books on writing).

Each tool has its own chapter, and each chapter gives  practical examples from many different authors, including some foreign writers. For instance, in his chapter on ordering words for emphasis, Clark quotes the famous opening of Cien años de soledad: "Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamento, el Coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo."

But Clark quotes this in English: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." Yet, in providing an example about words and their placement for emphasis, Clark attributes them to Gabriel García Márquez, alone, not also to Gregory Rabassa.

If these words serve as an example in a book in English about writing, Clarke should have mentioned that who chose them in English (and not others that might have legitimately been used), was Rabassa, the translator, not Márquez, the original author.

This is "the translator's invisibility", according to both meanings Lawrence Venuti gives to the term.

As translators, we lend our pens and words to others, and let them make them their own... unless we blunder: when we choose well, transform powerful source into spellbinding target, the translator's words become the original author's own. But if we fail in our choice of words, then the failure is ours: it's only then that we become visible.

Customers beware: the ethics of scattershot translation projects

Today I received a quote request from a new source, a translation company with which I had never worked before. They asked availability and rates for an urgent legal translation project. Together with their message they sent (not only to me, but to an unspecified number of English to Italian translators) a file with the source documents.

When I opened the files, I found a couple of very confidential documents, with the kind of information that, if I were the original customer, I would assume would be treated with the utmost caution by the agency.

At a minimum, this agency should have sent a message indicating the type of document to translate (e.g. "police records, about 1200 words"), and also that, before they could send it out to prospective translators, they needed to have a confidentiality agreement signed.

Sending confidential and sensitive documents to all and sundry, as they did, is a clear and serious breach of confidentiality.

First Impressions: OmniPage 17

OCR is not something we use very often, but sometimes it is useful or even necessary, when customer send us documents in hard copy or in a scanned graphic format.

The program we have used for the last few years is OmniPage Professional. We recently upgraded from OmniPage 15 to OmniPage 17. My first impressions are, on the whole, positive: OCR accuracy with documents not of the bast quality is improved, the program is much better at recognizing that stray dots on the page are not text (on the flip side, for Italian, this means that sometime the program does not recognize words such as "i" or "il", taking them as noise instead of characters).

An annoying defect I had not seen in the previous version is that the program sometimes puts the recognized characters on the wrong line in the target text.

On the whole, a useful program, and a real life saver when we need to translate repetitive documents that arrive to use in graphic form.

When translation rates are too high

You often see translators bemoaning falling translation rates and complaining of translation agencies that want to pay only a pittance.

Same of those translators, however, should pay much more attention to what they do than to the failings of translation agencies:

I've recently been asked to quote on an editing project where the Italian translator consistently misspelled "sì" as "si", "detto" as "ditto", "quel" as "quell", in addition to other mistakes such as "calico" for "calcio", "scora" for "scorsa", "so" for "si", "do" for "di", "siento" for "sento", "blocci" for "blocchi", and so on and on. In a short span of 107 words, I counted seven misspellings and two other errors, before giving up and telling the customer that this should be retranslated from scratch, not edited.

When they are paid a few cents a word, some translators are actually overpaid.

How to have more desktop on your laptop

Recently, my desktop computer suffered from a chain of problems. I had to send it for repairs twice; In the meantime, I’ve relied on my laptop.

When I use my laptop for short periods, or when I travel, I just use its built-in screen. For more sustained work, though, the small laptop screen is a hassle, with its tiny fonts and limited vertical space. So I connected the laptop to my desktop monitor.

At first, I just turned off the laptop monitor and used only the desktop one. Now, however, I’ve learned a trick that could prove useful to other people working from a laptop: I use both monitors at the same time, but, instead of displaying the same Windows desktop on both monitors (as you would do when projecting a Power Point presentation, for example), I extend the Windows desktop over the two monitors.

Several translators use a setup with two desktop monitors connected to the same computer. I did not know it could work also with a single desktop monitor and a laptop computer.

To use the laptop in this dual screen mode:

1. Put the laptop under the desktop monitor
2. Click Fn+F5 (your laptop might use different keys)
3. Select the dual monitor setup
4. Right click on the Windows desktop, click properties and select the Settings tab
5. Grab the inactive monitor icon, and drag it under the active one
6. If the computer displays a message that the second monitor will be activated, click on “Yes”; otherwise, select the check box “Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor.”
7. Click apply
8. If necessary, click again on the Windows desktop, click properties, select the Settings tab, and adjust the resolution of the two monitors
   

Now, instead of a single 1280 x 768 laptop monitor, or even a 1280 x 1024 desktop one, I can effectively use a 1280 x 1792 split screen.

In the top part (the desktop monitor), I have my translation editor (MS Word or Tag Editor). In the lower part (the laptop monitor) I have Workbench with my translation memory, XBench with my glossaries, and maybe other reference applications, like WordWeb Pro.

Two big monitors side by side would be even better, but this is already a big improvement over a laptop’s small monitor.

How to run two copies of Trados freelance while sharing the same Internet connection

You work from home, together with your partner. You decide to try a program that supposedly can help you do your job better and faster. In spite of a few defects, you find that the new program really helps, so you buy a second copy for your partner, and install it on her computer. Runs great on her computer as well, but, as soon as you launch it from yours, the program detects the copy running on her computer and reverts to demo mode.

This is probably the most annoying limitation of Trados freelance: two copies cannot run on the same network, even if you have paid for both copies. SDL wants you to buy a pro license.

According to SDL’s the reason is that running two copies of Trados at the same time is something only an agency would, and they want agencies to buy the more expensive pro version. So, if you are not an agency but you live and work with another translator, you are out of luck: you can either run Trados on two disconnected computers (so you cannot share a fast Internet connection), or you can have both computers connected, but only one of them running Trados.

There is a way you can still share the same Internet connection without violating the terms of the freelance license: put the two computers on different networks.

The way I’ve done it is by adding an inexpensive wireless router to our wired home network.

Our computers and various devices connect to our Internet router via Ethernet cables. Also connected to the wired router is a wireless router, to which our laptops can link. When it is time to launch a second freelance copy of Trados on one of the computers, I just unplug the Ethernet cable from my laptop. At that point the laptop is no longer on the same network as my partner’s desktop PC, but it still accesses the Internet (through the wireless router).

This is just a workaround and still a nuisance (the physically disconnected laptop no longer reaches some of the peripherals). I suspect that I could find a better solution if I knew networking better, but this is a useful stopgap: this way we can have two copies o Trados running at the same time, from two computers that share the same Internet connection.

Update

Read the comments for better way to sidestep this issue. Also, as Paul says in his comment, SDL finally did the right thing, and this issue no longer affects SDL Trados Studio 2009 (the newest version of the program).

One thing I did not mention before: we do have one copy of Trados 2007 pro installed on my desktop PC, so normally this old Trados issue does not affect us - my wife works on her licensed copy of Trados freelance, and I on my licensed copy of trados pro. However, we also have a second freelance copy installed on a laptop, for use wen, for example, I work offsite. Right now, however, my desktop PC is out for repairs, and I have to work from my laptop, so I was forcibly reminded of this really annoying Trados built-in limitation.

Once again: what not to do when you send out your résumé

Today I received a résumé that is an almost perfect example of what you should NOT do if you want to be more successful in your search for new customers:

• The author mentioned she had browsed our web page, yet the résumé was address "to whom it may concern". If she had browsed our web page, she could easily have found the names of the partners of our company: sending your résumé to a specific person, instead than to nobody in particular, increases the chance that it will be read.

• The author said in the subject of her e-mail she was an English to Spanish translator, but she did not include that information in the header of the résumé. Without that information, it is impossible to see at a glance what exactly you do.

• The résumé was in Spanish, though it was sent to a company based in the United States. As it happens, I do read Spanish, but if I did not, the résumé would have been sent to a person unable to read it. Tailor the language of your résumé to the language or languages of the country you are sending it to.

• The résumé included work experience not relevant to our profession, such as teacher of English or education coordinator. Only include information that is relevant to the position you seek.

• The résumé listed first educational attainments, and only afterwards professional experience. Also, it was in chronological order, with older items first. Your résumé should follow the most commonly used format for your target country. For the USA, you should mention your professional experience first, your educational experience only later. Also, you should list your professional experience in reverse chronological order (most recent first).

• The résumé was much too long (seven pages). One page (two maximum for experienced professionals) is usually more than enough: busy people don't want to wade through seven pages of repetitious information. Be short and to the point.

• The résumé listed as working language pairs both English into Spanish and Spanish into English. Unless you are truly bilingual (raised as bilingual from an early age), you should give as your target language only your own native language.

• While the résumé listed as working languages English and Spanish, under "Languages" it only gave French language courses. If a language is not among the languages you translate, do not mention it in your résumé.

• The résumé had a "hardware and software" section, which may be useful, but then included irrelevant information. Tell the CAT tools and other specialized tools you use (so, do include Trados, Acrobat professional and Auto-CAD, if you have them). Do not include programs that everybody is expected to have (Windows, Office), or outdated software (Adobe 4 when the current version is 9). If you do not use the latest version of some program, it is better to blur the issue a bit, by not mentioning the version number at all.

• The résumé had a three-page list of translations done. Much more useful is a brief summary that suggests the fields you have translated in (for example, "Translated for customer X medical documents and articles, as well as various magazine articles for customer Y"). A long list of translations is usually counterproductive for two reasons: a) it will not be read, and, b) it gives the impression to be a complete list of all the translations ever done, thus evidence of a relative lack of experience.

• Finally, the résumé had a list of further education courses, none of which had any relevance to translation (at first glance they seem all to be courses for teachers). If something does not add to your professional experience or attainments, do not include it. If you include something, explain why it makes you a better translator.

This résumé managed not to fall into a couple of frequent errors: it did not include personal information (such as date of birth or marital status), and it did not include a photograph (both no-no's for a résumé aimed at a US prospect).

It is difficult enough to win new customers by sending out a good résumé. Sending one that hides your true accomplishments and looks amateurish further stacks the deck against you.

For more Dos and Don’ts about translators’ résumés, download my article “How Not to Get Hired”.