Italian electronic dictionaries: an update

Several years ago I had written a couple of posts on the Italian dictionaries available online or on CD:

Patches for Italian dictionaries on CD-Rom

and

English-Italian dictionaries: CD-ROMs and online

After almost six years, someone wrote to me today, asking for further advice, since her copy of the Rizzoli-Sansoni dictionary no longer worked, even using the suggested patch:

I happily used this dictionary on my XP machine until this morning: when I clicked on it, it opened with the word list but without the definitions as occurred before the patch install. I worked for 2 hours trying everything I could think of, including trying to reinstall the patch.
I have a few questions which I hope you can help me with:

1. Is there a patch for Service Pack 3 for the Sansoni? Would that be the problem? The old patch will not even re-install. It says it cannot find the path....so my reasoning is perhaps it has something to do with Service Pack 3 or some recent upgrade from Microsoft. 

1. I found a site that has a CD ROM Ragazzini 2011 for 50 Euro. Are you familiar with it? If you are, do you like it? Is it also tied to the web as is the Sansoni? I was really hoping that if I have to spring for a new dictionary, it would be complete in itself and not depend on the availability of the Internet or be at the mercy of upgrades of Service Packs and operating systems.

I like the Sansoni because I can search for phrases, for instance on Friday I looked up "beat around the bush" and found the correct phrase to use. The on line dictionaries only allow you to search for a word. I absolutely need a dictionary that can do the phrase search.
To sum it up, I would like to repair the Sansoni if possible and then would definitely be open to buying a new dictionary on CD Rom with these features: not accompanied by a hard copy, one that is stand alone and not tied to the web or updates to computer operations and very importantly, can search for phrases.

I answered my correspondent by e-mail, but since I think this could be of general interest, I’m reposting part of my answers here:


The old Rizzoli-Sansoni dictionary (and other dictionaries on CD-Rom based on the same Edigeo software, such as the Picchi English-Italian and the Tam Spanish-Italian) work in Windows 7 without any need for a patch. Using the old patch (available from the Edigeo Web site), they still work - at least on my old XP laptop, which I keep updated with the latest patches from Microsoft, so I don’t think the problem has to do with Microsoft: a more likely explanation is the interference of some other piece of software.
For anybody for whom the old dictionaries no longer work, there are several options available:

1. Upgrade to Windows 7 – your dictionary problems might go away, but you would have to pay for the new OS, and, if your laptop is too old or does not have enough resources, Windows 7 might not run well on it (or not run at all). Also, of course, there is no guarantee that an old dictionary will keep on working – any Windows update might break them.
2. Contact Edigeo: they created the software for Rizzoli-Sansoni, and might be able to help.
3. Instead of trying to get the CD-Rom for the Ragazzini, I suggest instead a subscription to Ragazzini (and maybe some other dictionary: they offer several different general and technical dictionaries) from the Zanichelli online dictionary site. The yearly subscription is cheap: about 10 Euro per dictionary (prices vary depending on the dictionary you are interested in).
   The advantage there is that you always have the most up to date version of the dictionary. The disadvantage, of course, is that when you don’t have access to the Internet you also don’t have access to your dictionary. The Ragazzini online does allow full-text search, so you would still be able to find phrases.
4. From the eLexico.com site you can get a variety of dictionaries as downloads (for about 40 Euros per dictionary), or as online subscriptions (for about 20 Euro/year). Among the dictionaries offered, there is the Sansoni, but they also have Picchi and several other good dictionaries.
5. Rely on the many dictionaries available online for free. I’ll write an update to my old article soon, to see what is now available, and what no longer is.
   Remember, however, that free online dictionaries, even when they offer the full contents of the paid versions, usually limit search to headwords only (no full text search).

New utility to keep track of changes in bilingual files

Change Tracker, a recently released freeware utility, helps translators, editors and project managers seeing what was changed in a translated bilingual file.

The program works by aligning two files (or two sets of files), to compare the original translation with the edited bilingual files, showing what was changed, added or deleted between one version and the other (similar to what the Track Changes feature of MS Word does – but for bilingual files). This information can be seen in the program interface, and also exported as an Excel file.

I’ve tried the program on a pair of files translated with Trados 2007, and with a set of files translated with SDL Studio. In both instances, the program worked well, producing a clear report of all changes made to the translation.

Several popular CAT file formats are supported:

• Trados 2007 and SDL Studio (TTX, SDLXLIFF)
• MemoQ (XLIFF)
• Idiom, Translation Workspace (XLZ)
• Oscar (TMX)
• Wordfast (TXML)
• Microsoft Helium (HE)
• Microsoft Word (e.g., from Trados Workbench: DOC, DOCX, RTF)

This could e a very useful addition to your QA toolbox.

An important change to this site… and a summary of last year

I've finally decided to give About Translation its own domain name - so you can now find this blog at www.aboutranslation.com (the old address, http://aboutranslation.blogspot.com, will redirect here).
My apologies for the very sparse posting during the last couple of months; I'll now start posting more often again, but, before that, a summary of how this blog did last year:

Stats

According to Site Meter, at the beginning of 2011 the total number of page views for About Translation was 220,036. By 12/31/2011 the numbers had climbed to 299,475, so the total for the year was 79,439 – up from 63,822 in 2010 (and increase of almost 25%).
The best day of 2011 was May 16, with 529 page views, and the best month was November, with 8,923. By the way, there seem to be a huge difference in statistics, depending on who is doing the counting. I use Site Meter, but Blogger (which started providing statistics only in July 2009) seems to count about three times as many page views as Site Meter: according to Blogger, the total for November was 28,101.
The free version of Site Meter does not provide stats by the post, so for these I have to rely on Blogger. The three most read posts of the year were Can translators ignore theory? (November 15 – 1,091 page views so far, and 19 comments), Why high-volume discounts seldom makes sense (November 25 – 694 page views), and Questions and answers: how to start out (May 18, 689 page views).

Awards and other things

During the year, About Translation was selected among the Top 25 Language Professional Blogs (and Top 100 Language Lovers) of 2011 by bab.la and Lexiophiles. It was also chosen among the Kwintessential Top Ten Translator’s Blogs of 2011.
Finally, Corinne McKay and I reprised the Blogging 101 presentation, which was well received at the 52nd ATA Conference in Boston.

Stop Internet censorship

Much of the content of this blog has been illegally reposted without attribution at least twice in the last couple of years, so you would think that I should be in favor of legislation allegedly protecting me from Internet “piracy”.

But the PIPA and SOPA bills currently before Congress are an overbroad approach that would do but much harm, by stifling legitimate discourse on the Internet.

For more information about why PIPA and SOPA violate free speech and harm innovation, please see:

How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation

To take action to stop the bills by writing to Congress, you can use this Electronics Frontier Foundation site.

Happy Holidays!

I'm sorry I have not posted since the end of November: I had to bring up to date our invoicing (as well as sending some payment reminders to a few customers), close our accounting for the year, and was also pretty busy with the University (I taught two courses at the same time during the Fall term, and was also mentoring two students through their Capstone project).

I'll catch up with some very interesting comments that have been made in the Can translators ignore theory? as soon as I'm back in Denver, after the Christmas holidays.

Speaking of holidays,

my very best wishes to you of Happy Holidays, a Merry Christmas, and a happy, healthy and prosperous new year!

Letters of Blood, by Göran Printz-Påhlson

Open Book Publishers has recently announced the forthcoming publication of Letters of Blood and other English Works. The book contains the English translations of selected poems by the major Swedish modernist poet and critic Göran Printz-Påhlson. As well as Letters of Blood, the collection includes the full text of his statement "The Words of the Tribe".

Göran Printz-Påhlson died in 2006. He was a critic, a poet, and a translator (he translated American, Irish and English poets into Swedish, and Swedish poets into English).

Open Book Publishers is an open-access non-profit publisher specializing in the Humanities and Social Sciences. They publish their books in paperback, hardback and digital format (pdf, epub, mobi), and include the full versions of all titles for free reading on Google Books.

Why high-volume discounts seldom make sense

I'm sure you can all recognize an exchange such as the following:

“I'm sorry, we cannot accept your rate of $ 0.X/word. But if you accept $ 0.Y/word, instead, we can guarantee you plenty of work."

A problem, sometimes, is that the promised "plenty of work" never actually arrives but your new customer insists you have to bill them at the high-volume rate. The real problem, however, is if they keep their word and start to swamp you with plenty of big projects.

Yes, your income might appear to go up, and you'll feel the thrill of always being busy. Doubts will begin to creep in, however, when you find yourself turning down assignments from other prospects because you are always busy working for your high-volume customer - especially when you have to refuse higher-paying projects.

Also, if you are always busy working for your high-volume customer, the percentage of your work coming from them creeps up over time, which puts you in a risky situation: you are letting yourself become a hostage of a single customer.

If (but I think I should really say "when") your high-volume customer comes back to you demanding further discounts (maybe lamenting the difficult market situation, or whatever), and you have allowed yourself to rely on them for 80% of your income, you'll be hard pressed not to give in (not only that, but you'll have already showed them you are an easy mark - after all you already lowered your rates for them, didn't you?).

So, in short, if you give in to request for volume discounts:

• Sometimes you will give the discount, but won't get the volume
• When you do get the volume, you'll find yourself turning down higher paying jobs because you are so busy on the lower paying ones
• And finally, you'll find yourself an easy target for further discount demands.

So tell me again: why did you think it was a good idea to agree to your customer's high-volume discount request?

Can translators ignore theory?

Being informed about translation theory is knowing what others have said and thought about translation: its purposes, how to judge whether a translation is accurate, successful, or well written. How to translate to achieve specific goals, what responsibilities translators have, and whether they are primarily responsible to the author, the original text, the reader, or the customer who commissioned a specific translation.

To be sure, without knowing or being aware of translation theory one can still translate. But translators who learned translation from teachers who reject theory out of hand and only emphasize learning by simply translating, are still following a translation theory of sorts. A theory, however, they are not aware of, and that they cannot, therefore, examine critically and tap for specific occasions or assignments.

Downplaying the importance of theory, while teaching translation through a series of commandments, as Mark Freehill seemingly does (from what could be seen in his presentation at the recent 52nd ATA Conference), is contradictory: his students will learn a confusing mishmash where on the one hand they are told that there are many different ways to translate a text (true, of course, as far as that goes), but on the other hand are taught absolute “commandments of interpretation” and “deadly sins of translation”.

Take the “deadly sin” of his that was most hotly debated during his presentation:

Never, never, never give in the temptation to improve the original. If the original is vague or clumsy or just plain wrong, then a good translation will faithfully reflect the flaws. After all, that was how the original author wrote it.

Stated in such stark terms, this is nonsense. Freehill referred, in his examples, to legal translations, saying that the reader of the translation has a right to know where the original went wrong. Fine (maybe) if the reader commissioned the translation precisely so as to find its weak points, perhaps to challenge them in court. But what if the customer is, instead, a foreign attorney who had his brief translated to file it in a US Court? Should a conscientious translator merrily translate the text “as is”, errors, warts and all, or should he point out to his customer unclear and wordy passages, suggesting suitable improvements? What about a translator commissioned to translated a hastily (and therefore badly) written press release. Shouldn’t he do his utmost to make the translated press release as smoothly flowing, well written and informative as possible in the target language?

During Freehill’s presentation Chris Durban remarked that by teaching his students never to improve on the original, he was condemning them to the bottom of the market. I agree. By limiting the choices available to his students, Mr. Freehill is depriving them of vital tools necessary to succeed in translation.

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For an interesting discussion between a translation theorist and a professional translator, see Can Theory Help Translators? A Dialogue Between the Ivory Tower and the Wordface, by Andrew Chesterman and Emma Wagner (St. Jerome, 2002)

New landing page for Xbench training

I’ve changed the tab for my Xbench presentation, to convert it into a landing page. In the process, the web address for the page has changed, so if you had linked to it to access my presentation, the link no longer works.
To access the presentation you can either go to the tab here on top (now renamed “Xbench Training”), or go directly to http://aboutranslation.blogspot.com/p/xbench-training.html.

Attention to details

I found this image in an instruction leaflet I was proofreading. Do you notice anything peculiar with this image?

It must have been flipped horizontally during DTP – otherwise this watch would seem to go counterclockwise!