ATA Conference in Seattle

In some ways, it was a better conference than usual: an interesting city, good fish restaurant, some interesting presentations, and the chance to meet again with old friends.

The hotel was not the best, given the number of people that came this year: the elevators were always overcrowded and took forever, and many of the conference rooms were way too small.

As usual, the presentations were a mixed bag: most had either too narrow a focus to be of interest for most people, or were slanted too much towards beginners... for example the presentation on using word macros was, in my opinion, way too basic, as was the one on XML.

Other presentations were much better. Of those that I attended the best was definitely the presentation and seminar on legal translation from Italian into English. Also very interesting and topical was the presentation on "Neutral Spanish" (and why such thing does not exist and is totally unnecessary).

Our own presentation was fairly well received; I did not present very well - I was nervous, and it showed, but Franco did much better in his part of the presentation (as well as in his presentation with Microsoft on MT).

Probably the best part was meeting again with Masaki, our partner that now works at Microsoft: we went twice with him at an excellent fish restaurant: especially the first evening we had an excellent time, the four of us remaining at our table for ours, talking about translation, Microsoft, and the "good old times" at J.D. Edwards.

Our presentation at the ATA

We gave our presentation ("Translation Quality measurement in Practice") at the 46th ATA Conference, in Seattle.
You can download a pdf version of the presentation from our web site devoted to translation quality: TranslationQuality.com.

TranslationQuality.com and Translation Quality Blog Now Up

Our new web site, devoted to translation quality issues (at present mainly our work on the measurement of translation quality), is now up.

You can visit it at TranslationQuality.com.

Also active is our new blog, Translation Quality Blog, which we intend as an open forum for questions regarding traslation quality and translation quality improvement.

ATA conference coming... with our presentation

Our presentation, "Translation Quality Measurement in Practice", will be on Saturday morning, at 8:30.
We have quite a few new things to present after a one year absence, including our practical experience implementing TQI at Lionbridge.
Anybody who is interested in translation quality is cordially invited to our presentation.

See you in Seattle.

Bulgarian Invents Unique Translation Method

from Sofia News Agency

Very short on details ("Koycho Mitev's invention uses digits to record speech and automatically transfer it into whatever other language") and I'm afraid I'll believe it when I see it.

From what it says here, it might be a variation of a word for word translation: "word = n. 23 in English, n. 23 in Italian = parola".

The Link Between Global Markets and Translation

(from PRWeb)

"L'industria della traduzione: realtà e prospettive del mercato italiano", a book by Gianni Davico, "focuses on the impact that globalization has made on the translation industry in Italy, while stressing the importance of communication across borders and cultures".

For a short review of the book, see this previous entry.

The downside of project memories

I find project memories fairly useless: it is true that they include fuzzy matches, and permit a translation company to limit the size of the memories sent to translators, but they are of very limited usefulness as regards terminology, since the concordance feature will only find terms that are in either the 100% or fuzzy matches, but will miss any term that appears in segments where the fuzzy threshold is not reached.

Post script:
One thing that was probably not clear in my original post: I think that project memories are almost useless, but cerainly not translation memory. Project memories are created by analyzing a project against an existing (full) translation memory, so that they may contain only the segments from the full memory that match (either 100% or as fuzzy matches) the segments contained in the text to be translated.
My issue with project memories is that any term contained in a segment of the full translation memory that is not similar enough to a segment in the text to be translated as to be included in the project memory is not going to appear in the project memory, and will, therefore, not appear in a concordance search.

...for example, like...

The ubiquitous "like" has, long taken over most illiterate conversation here in the United States.

Now it's rearing its ugly head even in technical writing, where the writers (one would think) are supposed to know better:

"There are a few things, for example, like some editing functions and the Help files, that are only available in the xxx program on the desktop."

Either use "...for example, some editing functions...", or "...like some editing functions...".

"...for example, like..." is redundant.

One reason I believe the sooner Trados disappears, the better...

...is the very poor quality of their matching engine. For example, I'm currently translating a list of software strings for a telephony system.

For the following string:

468:"Enable DUALmode"

I get a 62% fuzzy match, the original SL of which was:

451:"New building"

Very useful: the number "4", the colon and both quotes are, indeed, identical.

Even better:

For the string:

519:"Value"

I get a 74% fuzzy match, the original SL of which was:

142:"Permanent"

Hopefully, SDLX will be a change for the better.

Interesting Book on the Italian Translation Market

Gianni Davico has written an interesting book: L'industria della traduzione, Realtà e prospettive del mercato italiano.
This is the first book on the Italian translation market. High spots of the book are interviews with Rodrigo Vergara of Logos, and other players in the Italian translation industry. Also interesting is Davico's analysis of the emerging division of the translation market between high-end and low-end, with a shrinking share of the market left in the middle.
The book is very useful as an up-to-date introduction to a subject that has not been dealt with at book length before.
Even though aimed at the Italian market, most of its contents and conclusions hold true for other markets as well.
Among the trends examined in the book there is the continuing expansion of the translation market, which is closely linked, however, to a trend towards lower and lower rates.