"We need urgently a translator" - or, how not to entice one

Yesterday I received this message:

Dear miss, dear mister,

We need urgently a translator who translates technical documents from english to italian for our firm [name deleted].

Therefor we need a test for his person in order to know his translation qualities . The english texte to translate as a free test is enclosed to the email.

So, you need a translator urgently.

Happens.

But in order to entice someone during the weekend, a well written message, addressed to your candidates by name (if you need to send to multiple persons because of the urgency, there is always mail merge), with a polite inquiry about availability, rates (and an offer to pay a rush surcharge) would have greater chances of success than a message from an aol e-mail address, with almost no information about the customer, obviously sent to all and sundry, full of errors and, to top it all, demanding a free test.

14-Hour Days

I know I've not written anything in quite a while, but since late April I've been working some very long days: a quick look at the e-mail, one hour drive to Boulder, eight straight hours of software testing every day, then the drive back to Denver. (At least I get to listen to some good book on tape - right now an interesting biography of Julius Cesar).

In the evening, again the e-mail (trying not to leave important things behind).

After that a bit of editing for my partners or some short translation projects from good customers, and a bit of work for the on-line translation course I'm teaching for Denver University.

This first testing project should end next week (although more is probably coming soon). I'll try to write some post about localization testing, probably next week, or the week after that.

An unfortunate choice of words

I open my mailbox this morning and I'm greeted by a message from SDL TRADOS: "Upgrade Amnesty for SDL Passolo 3 and 4".

The message then goes on to say that users of Passolo version 3 and version 4 may still purchase licenses to the current version of the software for the reduced upgrade price.

I would normally call this an upgrade offer extension, and if that had been its title, there would be little to say.

By choosing to call it an "Upgrade Amnesty", though, SDL TRADOS seems to indicate that it considers those of its users who do not upgrade on the SDL schedule as offenders. After all, the meaning of "Amnesty" is clear, according to my Random House Webster dictionary:

–n.
1. a general pardon for offenses, [...] often granted before any trial or conviction.
2. Law. an act of forgiveness for past offenses, [...].
3. a forgetting or overlooking of any past offense.

Agency rating lists: update

In my February post about agency rating lists, I said that to access the TranslatorCafé "Hall of Fame and Shame" it was to necessary to pay TranslatorsCafé's $120 membership.

I have now been informed that any payment to TranslatorsCafé is sufficient to access the Hall of Fame and Shame. From the message I received:

[...] any payment (starting from $10 for credentials verification) [is] enough to get full and unrestricted access to the Hall of Fame and Shame without any time limitation. Active members also have full access irrespective of their membership status. For those who cannot pay, there is always a possibility to ask any moderator to provide with free access.

I will also update the original post with this new information.

Ask to see it first

Corinne McKay, in her excellent blog Thoughts on Translation, recently had an informative post on whether translators should be paid by the word or by the hour.

After a paragraph detailing the advantages of pricing by the word, she starts to mention the disadvantages:

Pricing by the word has an obvious disadvantage from the translator’s side, which is that you are agreeing to work for a flat and fixed rate. So, when you get to those three pages of barely legible handwriting, or the document that’s been scanned, faxed and photocopied eight times before arriving in your inbox, you have to decide whether you need to negotiate a higher per-word rate.

All true, but that's why one should always ask to see the project first, and only then quote on it. In the case of handwritten documents, and the like, also, quoting by the source word makes little sense: much better to provide a quote by the target word (unless one wants to spend time counting words on paper).

My standard answer for requests such as those mentioned above is normally:

Our estimate for the work is X dollars, based on the information you provided and our standard rate of X cents / word. We calculate the word count on the source language, except for documents not available in editable electronic format, for which the word count is calculated on the target text. For handwritten and other hard-to-read documents, there is a minimum fee of X dollars / document. Please note that this is an estimate only. We can provide a binding quote, and confirm our availability for the job, only after seeing the actual documents to translate.

Microsoft's Language Excellence: new life for the MS Glossaries

Microsoft Language Excellence's team (formerly MILS) launched today the Language Portal, a new terminology Web site.

The new site makes available more of Microsoft's linguistic resources than ever before.

Using the Language Portal interface, one can search Microsoft terminology and UI strings from most released products: Language Excellence has thus made available the MS Glossaries, once hidden under MSDN.

The portal offers a page for sending terminology feedback back to Microsoft, a link for downloading Microsoft's Style Guides, a "Language Portal Blog", articles, links to events and to other linguistic resources.

In the search interface one can look up a word or string and search its translation in any of the dozens of languages in which Microsoft products are translated (of course, the coverage for some of the languages will be more extensive than for others).
The search may be run on all the products available, or restricted to a specific piece of software.

The results page is divided between a Terminology pane, which provides Source, Target, Definition and Product, and a "Software strings" pane, with Source, Target and Product.

Searching through this interface will probably not be as quick as searching on the Microsoft's glossaries stored locally on your computer hard disk; on the other hand, the results obtained should be more up to date, and searching for translations in several different languages will no longer require downloading several gigabytes of zipped files on the off-chance that they may come handy one day.

grepWin: a great help for complex search and replace operations

grepWin is a simple, yet powerful, freeware tool for difficult search and replace operations on text files (for example, xml or html files).

For complex search and replace operations, nothing really beats RegEx (regular expressions) searches, but regular expressions may be very difficult to create.

grepWin includes a "Test regex" utility: by using the utility on a sample of the text, you can debug the search and replace strings until the desired result is obtained, and only then execute your search on the file(s) you are working on.

For added security, the tool offers the option to create a backup copy of the work files.

The tool is still very bare-bones; for example, there is no help system (you need to know regular expression syntax to use it effectively), but I find that its search capabilities are more powerful than those in other popular search tools such as Funduc's Search and Replace, or the search and replace functionality included in most text editors.

If you need an introduction to regular expressions, an excellent little book is "Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 minutes", by Ben Forta (Sams Publishing).

Answer to SDL

My previous post received a detailed comment from SDL, "so you can retain a balanced view".

Here are my further comments, in rebuttal of SDL's comment:

• It is not practical for SDL to maintain products doing back more than 3 years.

  
  

  Possibly so, but this has nothing to do with the subject of my post, which did not ask for ongoing support for users of 6.5, but for retaining the ability to upgrade older products at a discount. There are plenty of companies with more generous upgrade policies.
  
  For example the current requirements for an upgrade price to MS Office 2007 Professional are:
  

  
  Your PC needs to already have one of the following software products installed in order to use this upgrade.
  Microsoft Works 6.0-10
  Microsoft Works suite 2000-2006 or later
  Any 2000-2007 Microsoft Office program or suite
  Any Microsoft Office XP suite except Office XP Student and Teacher.
  

  
  
  

• The software is not buggy

  
  

  Many of the same bugs persist, from year to year. I've documented examples of Trados erratic behaviour in some previous posts (for instance this one, or this).
  
  

  For an egregious bug try this: have the text to translate in one big MS Word table, in which several columns are formatted as tw4winExternal to protect their contents, and only one is translatable text, with each segment on a separate row in the table (this is a common format in which interface strings are often sent out for translation).
  
  
  Open the first segment, translate it. Click "Set/CLose Next Open/Get", or "Translate to Fuzzy". The program skips several rows, and opens a segment much further down.
  
  This bug has been known from at least version 6.5 (it was not present in 5.5, as far as I know), but has not been corrected. The only solution is to manually open each segment.
  
  Technical support response has been "use Tag Editor" - which begs two questions: 1) the customer asks for a bilingual MSWord file, not a ttx file, and 2) TagEditor works, but has its own series of problems (for starter, the lack of any advanced search capabilities: using MS Word I can use at least a pared-down version of regular expressions, Tag Editor does not have even that)
  
  

• To get a PSMA and hence have ongoing free upgrades it is a minimal fee

  
  The fee is not minimal, especially for people not wishing to upgrade as often as SDL would wish.
  
  

• SDL provide support through a knowledge base and also free support for installation of the product even for non supported people

  This has nothing to do with the issue I raise in the post. I note, though, that boasting that "SDL provide free support for installation of the product even for non supported people" is disingenuous: what would you have otherwise "Sorry that Trados doesn't install on your machine. For an additional few hundred bucks, however, we can help you"?
  

Update

I've added the current requirements for update pricing of MS Office.

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)