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.

The seductive power of words

Words are the embryos of ideas, the seed of thought, the framework of reasoning, but their contents goes beyond the simple official definition found in dictionaries. There, words appear exact, precisely and scientifically measured... And in these cold, orderly lists you cannot find the inner expanse of each word, but only the doorway to them.

From "La seducción de las palabras", by Alex Grijelmo, Santillana Ediciones Generales, 2000, as published by Punto de Lectura, 2007 (the translation o the passage is my own).

The right word

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug”

Mark Twain

New widget for this blog

In the right-hand bar I've added three Technorati charts, to track the relative frequency in blogs of the strings "translation", "translation quality" and "Trados" over a period of thirty days.

By clicking on the charts, you go to a Technorati page with links to the actual posts.

Yet again: Trados fuzzy match woes (Expanded)

Continuing from my post of August 25, some further evidence of just how badly designed the fuzzy matching algorithms are in Trados:

So, according to Trados, "INSTALLING DISPLAY" is a 67% match for "Installing Display", while "Ownership of the Services and Marks." is a 65% match for "Description of the Service and Definitions."


A smarter matching algorithm would give more importance to meaningful words ("Description", "Service", "Definitions") than to grammatical ones ("of" "the" "and"), and would treat a difference between upper and lower case as much less significant than the chance similarity of two sentence structures.

By the way if "Installing Display" is changed to "Installing the Display", it does not come up as a fuzzy match at all (unless the fuzzy threshold is set extremely low), since it becomes a mere 40% match:


The worse thing is that all these problems have been known for years, but Trados (and now SDL/Trados) programmers have done nothing to improve the situation.