About Translation

(Bull)Shift Happens

2013-05-16T10:22:00.000-06:00

Keith Laska, CEO of SDL, has recently published a self-serving, jargon-filled post on SDL's community blog.

His claim is not all that novel: that there is so much content to translate now, that MT must be part of the equation. He then goes out on a limb with some unsubstantiated claims about how MT has become so much better, in recent years (can you spot the logical fallacy in a statement like "As for MT quality concerns: the machine translation quality debate is dead. Over 75% of our language markets report the use - or pending use - of some form of machine translation solution."? - a hint: "use" or "pending use" are not the same as "successful use", and stating, without a shred of evidence, that the MT debate is over doesn't mean that it is).

But my question is another: is there a special secret pact between CEOs that requires them to spew such corporate drivel as "value is now at the critical intersection between machines and humans"? Is that sentence supposed to mean something, or is it there just to give the impression that it carries some momentous meaning? Am I alone in thinking that "thought leadership", in "to drive high-quality, secure MT improvements, innovation and thought leadership" sounds creepy?

Keith, if you do have some good MT product or strategy, write your post again, in a way that does not make the reader think that your product or service is so poor you have to hide it in a fog of jargon lest your prospects realize how hollow the vaunted MT progress actually is.

Speaking as an SDL customer, in fact, I have a suggestion: why don't you redirect some of the efforts you are spending on pushing MT onto the unwary, and instead concentrate on actually improving those products of yours that we human translators use every day? A hint: starting with long overdue improvements to fuzzy-matching algorithms would be a good idea.

When will SDL improve fuzzy matching?

2013-05-15T08:00:00.000-06:00

In a series of posts between 2005 and 2008 I had expressed my frustration at the poor, and sometimes dangerous and misleading, fuzzy matches offered by "old" Trados. SDL Trados Studio is a match better tool, overall, than Trados Wrokbench, but in one respect it has not improved at all: fuzzy matching. You can see from the screenshot below that I had just translated the title "GENERAL CLEANING PROCEDURES".

Two segments down, the same title appears again, again all in upper case. But since the surrounding tags are different, the translation memory does not offer my translation for the title as a suggestion. It does, instead, suggest several other segments, all of which are poor matches for the text of my segment, but all of which have more similar tags.

For more on fuzzy matching woes, see these previous posts of mine:

One reason I believe the sooner Trados disappears, the better... (August 2005)
Proof positive that Trados programmers should change job (September 2006)
When are two names 67% the same? (February 2008)
Yet again: Trados fuzzy match woes (August 2008)
Yet again: Trados fuzzy match woes (Expanded) (August 2008)
Trados: beware of wrong links (November 2008)

Looking back at these old titles, I realize that I was somewhat intemperate in my wording - especially in the first two posts. I apologize for that, but the meat of the question remains: the purpose of fuzzy matching should be to help translators by leveraging past translations. By not improving their fuzzy matching algorithms, SDL is failing us. I repeat what I said in my previous posts: SDL's programmers should get to work and improve the fuzzy matching algorithms they use, so as to give more weight to the more significant parts of the segment.

INTERSECT: A Newsletter About Language, Culture and Interpreting

2013-05-13T08:00:00.000-06:00

Cross-Cultural Communications is a training agency in the U.S. devoted to community interpreting and cultural competence. I don't really know much about the services they offer, but Intersect, the e-mail newsletter they publish about language, culture and interpreting, collects interesting news about language and interpreting. If your are interested, you can subscribe here.

Mediterranean Editors & Translators - Language, Culture and Identity

2013-05-10T10:46:00.002-06:00

Registration is now open for Mediterranean Editors and Translators’ 9th annual meeting

Language, Culture and Identity

24-26 October 2013, Monastery of Poblet, Tarragona, Catalonia

www.metmeetings.org

Italian dictionaries

2013-05-07T13:52:00.002-06:00

Just a quick note: I've updated the Italian dictionaries online post with additional resources.

Top 100 Language Lovers 2013 – Nominate your favourite now!

2013-05-06T19:28:00.001-06:00

The bab.la language portal and the Lexiophiles language blog are announcing the start of the contest to choose the Top 100 Language Lovers.

You can nominate your favorite blog, facebook page or Twitter account in the following categories:

1. Language Learning Blogs: blogs about the language learning process, both from the learners and teachers perspective.
2. Language Professionals Blogs: blogs by people using languages in their profession, such as translators or interpreters.
3. Language Facebook Pages: Facebook Pages related to language topics, such as dictionaries, translation tools, language lovers’ communities and more.
4. Language Twitter accounts: Twitterers who share content about languages.

The nominations for the Top 100 Language Lovers 2013 competition are open until May 20th, 23:59 pm German time.

About Translation was chosen among the top 100 language blogs in 2008 and 2011, and in 2011 among the top 25 language professionals blogs.

Note-Taking for Translators

2013-05-03T17:03:00.001-06:00

Tomorrow (Saturday) is the 3rd Annual Conference of the Colorado Translators Association.

I'll be giving a presentation on "Note-Taking for Translators and Translation Editors".

I've added a page to this blog with links to the presentation in Power Point and pdf formats.

Italian dictionaries online

2013-04-18T19:20:00.001-06:00

I first wrote about the Italian bilingual and monolingual dictionaries available online some five years ago. Since, however, such links are liable to change, with old sites disappearing and new ones taking their place, here is an up to date list of sites that offer English-Italian, Italian monolingual, and other Italian bilingual dictionaries:

Picchi's English-Italian dictionary (published by Hoepli) is available for free from La Repubblica website: Dizionari - La Repubblica. The same site also offers the Grande Dizionario di Italiano Hoepli.
The current incarnation of the excellent Sansoni English-Italian dictionary (published by Rizzoli) is available online at the Corriere della Sera website: Dizionari e Traduttori - Corriere della Sera. The same web page also offers several other Italian monolingual dictionaries and Italian-Spanish, Italian-French and Italian-German bilingual dictionaries.
The venerable Hazon English-Italian dictionary is available from the Garzanti website: Garzanti Linguistica, where you can also find Garzanti's Italian monolingual dictionary and an Italian-French bilingual dictionary.
The English-Italian bilingual dictionary I'm currently using most often is Ragazzini's. You can subscribe to it on Zanichelli's site (Dizionari online Zanichelli). From the same site you can subscribe to several other dictionaries, including Zingarelli (Italian monolingual), Tommaseo (a historic Italian monolingual dictionary), several different specialized English-Italian bilingual dictionaries, and other bilingual dictionaries including Italian-Spanish, Italian-French, Italian-German, Italian-Russian and Italian-Albanian.
Oxford-Paravia Concise English-Italian dictionary is available from the Oxford-Paravia website.
WordReference.com offers access to two different English-Italian dictionaries: its own and Collins'.
The eLexico.com website offers a wide range of bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, either via online subscriptions (generally more expensive than those available from Zanichelli), downloadable installable dictionaries, or both things combined. Among the dictionaries downloadable from eLexico.com are Picchi, Sansoni, the excellent Italian monolingual Devoto-Oli, and many others.
Lexicool.com lets the user search many different dictionaries. You can find Italian-English bilingual dictionaries, as well as Italian and English monolingual resources (Thanks to Carlotta for the suggestion)
The Treccani website offers access to the Enciclopedia italiana online, to the Italian language Vocabolario, and to a good Italian synonyms dictionary (Thanks to Licia for the suggestion)

Update

I've added links to the Lexicool and Treccani sites, thanks to suggestions by Carlotta Saconney and Licia Corbolante.

Quick tip: how to avoid the "Attempted to read or write protected memory" error in Studio

2013-04-15T08:00:00.000-06:00

Some time a file (usually an MS Word file) causes Studio to display the following error message:

Sometimes, Studio, instead of displaying the error (or in addition to it), shows garbage characters in the Editor:

According to the SDL knowledge base, this is likely due with problems displaying certain specific fonts (and, indeed, this source file did use some unusual fonts).

If this is the reason for the error (I believe it might appear in other instances), the way to overcome it, is to prevent studio to try to display formatting. You do this by going to the Options ( Tools > Options), and change the "Formatting display style" from "Show all formatting and tags"

To "Show all tags but do not show formatting":

When you return to the Editor you'll see that the text now displays correctly:

Warning: the lowest price may actually harm you

2013-04-12T08:00:00.000-06:00

Just read this in a translation company's blog:

The quoting of a project is as important as the process in which the work is actually done. Quoting at the lowest price, for example, will attract clients and provides greater sales possibilities.

I find this simplistic, self-serving and misleading. Yes, other things being equal a customer will choose the lower bid.

Things are seldom equal, however, and customers might actually value other things more than saving the last few pennies. They might, for example, value the better quality provided by a better (and more expensive) translator.

But never fear: that same translation company assures us that

At [XX] Translations, we provide our client with the most competitive pricing and the highest quality in the industry.

I could believe they sell at the lowest price (though that would be difficult to prove, with the translation market as fragmented as it is); or maybe I could believe that they are able to offer the best quality (again, a difficult proposition to prove). That they can provide the lowest prices AND the best quality, both at the same time? Sorry: no, I cannot believe that.

The problem with certain agencies is that they seem so terrified by their competitors, that they try everything to lower their prices. But at what heavy cost! this way they are more likely to lose their best translators, and remain with the worst, thus decreasing the quality they can actually offer (no matter what they boast). And the more they are unable to compete on quality, the more they have to compete on price, in a downward spiral that, I believe, will doom many formerly good and viable translation companies.

Unfortunately, in their fall they are probably going to damage many translators, and many unsuspecting clients who believed exaggerated claims of good quality from companies that are no longer able to sustain them.

Quick tip: how to make text easier to read in Studio

2013-04-11T16:18:00.002-06:00

Sometimes when you work in Studio, the color of the text makes it either difficult or even impossible to read...

There is a simple solution: from the Editor, select Options, then Editor, and then Font Adaptarion:

Adjust the Text color contrast slider, if necessary, all the way to the right:

The result is much easier to read:

And bear in mind that changing how the text is displayed in Studio won't affect how it appears in your translation.

New book: "Role of Translation in Nation Building"

2013-03-23T12:21:00.001-06:00

Ravi Kumar, president of the Indian Translators Association, and editor of a new book on translation, has just sent me the following announcement about an interesting new book: "Role of Translation in Nation Building".

The book has been jointly published by Modlingua and the Indian Translators Association.

The book talks about how translators have always played a pivotal role in social and cultural change in society and how they continue to play a major role in dissemination of the ever expanding knowledge and information available today. In this globalized world the demand for translation and language related services has increased many times and that translation is not only needed for the creation of national identity but it has also become an essential tool for keeping pace with the processes of globalization and localization. Many times we take for granted the translator's crucial role at the (intra) national level and we are less aware of their equally pivotal place as mediators at the international level and, potentially, in the creation of the even larger and comprehensive global supra national identities which seem destined to follow in the future.

The book also covers how translation has played crucial role in shaping up nations not only in Indian/Asian context but also in the context of Europe, Canada, Africa, Australia and Arab world. Hence, in a way, the extent/range of thoughts/issues discussed in the book, encompass the entire globe. The book is also an attempt to find answers to issues like:

What role has translation played in Nation Building in the Indian as well as global context?

How easy or difficult is it to view Translation and Nation Building as a well-gelling couple?

Did translation play a role in Turkish modernism movements and its accession to European Union?

What about Translation and Nation Building in the African, Arabian and Australian contexts?

Do national conflicts and language politics actually impact literary works and translations?

How can media play an effective part in bringing social changes by means of translations?

How has translation impacted the discourse on nationalism and globalization in the Arab World?

The book can be utilized as a guiding base/reference tool/textbook by:

Students of language learning and its theory; translation studies; literature.

Research scholars working in areas related to translation, nationalism, globalization, international studies, etc.

Professors, teachers involved in teaching the above mentioned subjects/topics.

Digital as well as Printed version available at Modlingua, K-5B, Lower Ground Floor, Kalkaji, New Delhi -110019
SMS: +91-8287636881 E-mail: sales@modlingua.com

ISBN Printed Version: 978-81-926798-0-8; ISBN Digital Version: 978-81-926798-1-5. Price within India INR 395, outside India US $ 24.95. Payment option available through Paypal. Contact:
Modlingua Learning
K-5B, Lower Ground Floor
Kalkaji, New Delhi -110019
Web: www.modlingua.comSMS: +91-8287636881 Skype: ravikumar.net
Facebook Link: https://www.facebook.com/modlingua

Unfair business practices

2013-02-28T10:26:00.000-07:00

I received an e-mail asking me to join a new phone-interpreting service. Phone interpreting is not a service I would normally consider, but I went to the site, just to have a look. Then I read their "general terms and conditions", and found these two egregious conditions:

5.1 Translin will invoice and make all commercially reasonable efforts to collect payment from the Client. At the end of each month, the Interpreter will receive an e-mail listing the work for that month and the amount that can be invoiced. The Interpreter is responsible for invoicing Translin. Translin applies a 14 Business Day payment term after receipt of invoice.
5.2 In the event that the Client has complained about the quality of the service provided by you, Translin has the right to reduce or cancel payment to the Interpreter if and to the extent Translin in its sole discretion considers the Client’s complaint to have merit.

Now, "will invoice and make all commercially reasonable efforts to collect payment from the Client" sure seems to imply that if they do not collect from their Client, you are out of luck, and you won't be able to invoice Translin.
Worse yet, they can always decide to dock your pay or not to pay you at all if they decide their client's complaint is justified... and they get to decide that at their "sole discretion".

My advice: stay away from this service.

Bottom line: always read the fine print, and don't be afraid to reject conditions it they are not fair.

Xbench 3.0 – Making good on my promise

2013-01-09T17:11:00.000-07:00

Well before ApSIC announced the pro version of Xbench – when the program was still just freeware – I said (and wrote) several times that I would be ready to pay for the program whenever ApSIC decided to turn it into a commercial product.

I've just made good on my promise by pre-paying for two subscriptions to Xbench.

If you are interested in Xbench, and want to obtain it at a steep discount, tomorrow is the last day you can get it at the special € 19 early pre-release rate.

After January 10, you'll still be able pre-pay the subscription at a (decreasing) discount:

€19/year until January 10
€39/year until January 17
€59/year until January 24
€79/year until BETA officially ends
€99/year after the official release of the program.

So, if you find Xbench useful (I find it indispensable) it's a good idea to prepay for it while it is offered at a reduced price. To download Xbench, and to pre-pay the subscriptions, go to www.Xbench.net.

Xbench 3.0 – Now in public beta with some major new features

2012-12-15T00:47:00.002-07:00

ApSIC have announced today the public beta of Xbench, their terminology management and translation QA program.

I’ll write a review of the new version of Xbench after working with it for a while, but there are some major improvements that should please many translators:

Full unicode support
Separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions
Support of MemoQ 6 XLIFF files
Support of Wordfast 3.1 Pro
Integration of the spell checkers in the program itself (you no longer need to download and install the dictionaries separately).

The QA functions are also improved, with two new tests that will certainly interest those of us who often translate software: checks for CamelCase and for ALL UPPERCASE string mismatches.

Unlike most other beta programs, Xbench 3.0 comes with good documentation: an excellent help system and a new 70-page manual.

You can read about all the new and improved features in ApSIC's blog, but if you want an introduction to Xbench, see my old presentation: it is no longer up to date, now that 3.0 is out, but should give you a good idea about what this program can do to help your translations.

A big change is that version 3.0, when it is finally released, will be available through a paid subscription; those who pre-order before the end of the beta period will enjoy a discount (up to 80% if you subscribe by December 27, less so if you wait). Version 2.9, however, will remain free and will still be available for download. I believe that charging for the program will be good for the translation community: the program's priorities will no longer depend on ApSIC's internal use only, so they should match even more closely the needs of other translators.

To download the public beta you can go to xbench.net (if you are in a hurry, the link for the download is here). If you want to pre-order a subscription to take advantage of the discounts (and I strongly recommend you do so), the link is here.

Update

There was some confusion about the pricing scheme for Xbench licenses - ApSIC have now clarified things in a new post on their own blog.

750 Words - A simple but surprisingly good idea to get you in the habit of writing

2012-12-13T11:24:00.002-07:00

There is plenty of advice given to writers - but most of it boils down to "get in the habit of writing - and the best way to do so, is by writing every single day". For some, this may be easy, for others not so much: there are too many distractions, and sometimes (make it often) we may not feel like writing. In fact, I believe most of us are always ready with some excuse not to.

Enter 750words.com, a simple site that encourages you to write every day: not for publication (what you write remains private - this is not a blogging platform), but to get you in the habit of writing something (at least 750 words, in fact) every single day. The site encourages you in a number of ways, most of which may appear cheesy: the badge of an egg when you start out becomes a turkey after three days in which you have achieved your 750 words goal, and on to a penguin (five days), a flamingo (ten), and so on. There are badges for continuous days of writing without distraction (doing the 750 words without an interruption), badges for continuous days of writing fast (750 words within 20 minutes) - badges for night owls (sorry, for "night bats" according to the site), and for morning roosters for those who complete their writing either late at night or very early in the morning.

If all this seems silly, it most certainly is... but it also works, at least for some of us: it provides that little extra encouragement to write every day, and make a habit of it.

Since you know your writing is private, you don't get stressed out by the pressure of producing well-finished prose, and since each day's writing is no longer editable after the end of the day, you are encouraged to go on and write something new, instead of fiddling with your previous output. (Even if your writing is no longer editable on the site, however, it does not disappear, and you can always download it for later use elsewhere).

You can use the site for different purposes: to write morning pages and to freewrite are two obvious examples, but I find it also works to help you write the first draft of something you may then post in your blog or publish elsewhere (this post, in fact, was started as a draft in 750words.com).

The site is free (although if you find it useful donations are welcome), and very simple to use. Try it: you may like it and find it helps you develop the habit of writing every day.

Trados Studio Manual - now with its own blog and Facebook page

2012-12-12T10:44:00.002-07:00

I mentioned before that there is now a Trados Studio manual, available for purchase from SDL's Open Exchange. I've not as yet reviewed the manual thoroughly, but I've used it for reference several times already, and I highly recommend it: it's useful, well organized and well written - a far cry from the mess that is SDL's own documentation. Now that Mats Linder has written two editions of the Studio manual (one for Studio 2009, one for 2011), and that he has updated them to also cover the latest SDL's upgrades (including Stdio 2001 SP2) I urge him to write a good manual for MultiTerm - the need there is even more pressing, considering how badly the MultiTerm help system is written.

Mats has recently also launched a blog dedicated to the manual and a Facebook page where he links to useful sites and blog entries by other knowledgeable people, with the purpose to give practical tips on translation matters.

I recommend both the blog and the Facebook page - they are certain to be useful to SDL Trados studio users.

Feeling lazy? A sure-fire way not to get work

2012-12-06T16:01:00.000-07:00

Novice translators often get advice on how to get work and how to successfully conduct their freelance business. Several leading translators, in fact, have published books aimed at less experienced colleagues (among these books, I especially recommend those by Corinne McKay, the Jenner twins and Chris Durban).

However, what if you feel lazy, don’t really want to receive work, but, for some reason, you have to make a show of looking for it? Maybe your significant other has been nagging you to send your résumé to your prospects, and when you temporized by saying “I need to research them first”, she answered by providing you with a list of 7,600 translation agencies and a paid subscription to Payment Practices.

What then: Are you doomed to the drudgery of toil? Not to worry: Here you’ll find a 10-point proven strategy to make sure no translation company in their right mind will ever send projects your way (and it works for direct customers, too):

1. Be full of it: Write a bombastic cover message for your résumé. Feel free to add implausible claims (“...I am a Vogon native speaker, but can also easily translate into Klingon, as I spent two weeks on vacation there once, and I specialize in all subjects...”). A patronizing and condescending tone is also very helpful in turning prospects away (“...as you should know, language translation is a profession only a selected few can undertake...”).

2. Deliberately misspell your cover message, and add some egregious error of grammar, syntax, punctuation and usage (very effective, for instance, is to claim “I have challenges to provide high-quality service and meeting deadlines,” as in an application I received some time ago).

2.1 Bonus material: If you don’t know how to write a thoroughly off-putting cover message, take heart: Here is a real masterpiece I received (with a few details changed to protect the sender) that you can use as a template:

“Good morning!

I hereby request the following question, I saw this email and you were recruiting freelance translators, I wonder if that offer is still open?

I am a young Portuguese who have a graduation in Portuguese and Dutch by the faculty of letters of Coimbra. And for three years I teached English in Portugal. Over these three years, at home, I did a translation of various texts, literary and non-literary, for example: user guides , how to apply a product; how to put a machine to work in a factory; the warning letters and simple letters; poems; short stories; emails with requests; cookery recipes; medical prescription; college and University diplomas and etc.

I´m available and able to make in these three languages translation. I can also translate from Italian to Portuguese and Spanish to Portuguese, because I had a year of Italian and Spanish in University.

I am currently living in Burma.

My work as a translator will be done at home in the computer and then I send my translations through my email for your company.

If you are interested in my services as a freelance translator, could you tell me what email can I send my CV?

Please contact me at (address) for any further information.

Best regards,

Jane A. Translator”

3. Don’t mention your language pair in the title of your message. Let your prospects guess.

4. Don’t mention your language pair in the header of your résumé, either. If you really feel compelled to add it, the bottom of page three (possibly under “other information and personal interests”) should do nicely. If they finally get there, your prospects will be happy to discover you don’t translate in a language they are interested in.

5. If you have worked as a translator in the past, do include every detail of all projects you ever did (in fact, list all language assignments you did since middle school, for good measure). Remember: Your goal is to bore your prospect, and a seven-page single-spaced résumé should easily do the trick.

6. Wide margins and a legible layout are for chumps. Use the narrowest margins your word processor lets you get away with, don’t indent between paragraphs, and don’t use any font other than Arial Narrow (8 points maximum). If your prospects cannot read your résumé, they will not be tempted to hire you.

7. If (as you should) you are writing your résumé in a language which is not your own, make sure not to have it revised by a native speaker: She could accidentally correct all the errors you have worked so hard to add.

8. In the unfortunate case that a prospect, despite your efforts, answers your message and asks you to take a short translation test, be original: don’t just say you don’t do free tests (they might respect you for that), and certainly don’t accept to translate the test and do your best on it. Instead, accept the test, use Gurgle Translate, don’t spell-check, and send the test late (if they gave you a deadline), or not at all (if they didn’t).

9. If you decide to take a test, ignore any instructions that come with it: following them would waste your time, and you might unfortunately find in them some suggestion of how your prospect would like you to proceed. You want to show you are an independent spirit, not someone who meekly accepts to do what he is tasked to do.

10. And finally: Now that we live in a Web 2.0 world, with plenty of social media available to show what you really think to all and sundry, let your personality shine under your real name. Badmouth translation companies and belittle other translators on AmateurZ and BabbleBook. Suggest plenty of erroneous terms in online translation fora (in fact, suggest them in at least three different languages you don’t know). Display a righteous attitude (better yet, a paranoid one), and let everybody know that all translation companies (and all direct customers, for that matter), are out to get you to work for free, that all other translators are infinitely worse than you, that of course translators can and should translate from their second language into their third one, and that the sole reason for university translation departments the whole word over is to churn out plenty of lemmings ready to jump off a cliff and take all the work away from you.

P.S. This will be the subject for another article, but learn to be very rude on the phone, especially if some project manager calls you.

---

NOTE: This article, together with many others from several prominent translators, was written for Mox II: What they don't tell you about translation, the new collection of Mox cartoons by Alejandro Moreno-Ramos. Mox II was published today: go and order it - it is the perfect gift for any translator.

Mox II

2012-12-06T15:53:00.000-07:00

Many translators already know (and identify with) Alejandro Moreno-Ramos's downtrodden translator, Mox.

Last year Alejandro published Mox Illustrated Guide to Freelance Translation, with articles from several prominent translators and over two hundred cartoons, many never published on his blog before.

Now he has done it again with his second book: Mox II - What they don't tell you about translation, which has been published today - a perfect gift for other translators (or for yourself).

As in the first book, the adventures of Mox, Calvo, and the other characters in the strip are accompanied by a series of articles from prominent translators - and this year I had the honor of being invited to contribute one of of the articles. With Alejandro's permission I'm republishing my article (it will be in my next post) - but I urge you to order the book so you enjoy the other articles and the new cartoons.

For the second time since I became a US citizen four years ago...

2012-11-06T10:18:00.000-07:00

The great thing about translation management software...

2012-11-05T18:48:00.000-07:00

...is how it faultlessly ensures translation quality.

Many translators bitch and moan about translation companies who use translation management software: how tiresome it is to log in to download even small projects, log in to create invoices, and so on and so forth.
Sadly, these translators don't seem to see the big picture: by using such translation management platforms translation companies ensure the quality of their projects - no more wrong files sent out to translators, or received from them.

Everything is tidy, ship-shape and tightly controlled... or, is it?

A translation company (whose name I'll charitably refrain from mentioning), has just sent me a small project to edit. I logged in their translation management platform and downloaded the translated package: All there for me in one tidy zip file: a folder with the source file, a second folder with the bilingual translated target file to edit, a third folder with the translation memory, a fourth folder with the translation memory log.

Only...

The source file did not correspond to the translated file (and it was not just a question of different file names: the content was also was fundamentally different);
The translated bilingual file I was supposed to edit had segments in which the target language appeared also in the source language place (I could more easily understand the reverse, and attribute it to a sloppy translator);
The analysis log referred to the source file (the one that did not correspond to the target one) and to a project with a different name and number than the one I had received.

Yep... translation management platforms work great: no longer problems for translation companies who rely on them.

Colorado in the Fall

2012-10-21T17:47:00.000-06:00

These are the colors of Colorado in the fall...

L'Infinito

2012-10-08T16:53:00.001-06:00

In Italian schools they used to have students memorize poems - tons of them, beginning with easy ones in elementary school, going up to long sections of the Divine Comedy by the time you were in high school.

At the time, I resented having to repeatedly read and recite verse, but now that I've long forgotten most of the poems I had memorized, the few that remain have become treasured possessions.

Here is one of the best of them: Giacomo Leopardi's L'Infinito

L'Infinito

Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle,

e questa siepe, che da tanta parte

dell'ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.

Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati

spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani

silenzi, e profondissima quïete

io nel pensier mi fingo, ove per poco

il cor non si spaura. E come il vento

odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello

infinito silenzio a questa voce

vo comparando: e mi sovvien l'eterno,

e le morte stagioni, e la presente

e viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa

immensità s'annega il pensier mio:

e il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare.

Giacomo Leopardi

What I've been doing instead of blogging

2012-10-05T10:24:00.000-06:00

This year I've been blogging a lot less than in the past few years. Part of the reason was blogging fatigue, but mostly because I've been working on a special project for the Italian Language Division of the ATA: our new revamped website.

I started out thinking it would be a quick job of selecting a nice template and adding some updated content, and I ended up by hand-coding or tweaking all the pages and creating some special graphics for the site (such as the banner image of the home page).

In addition to that the ILD Twitter account is now active: @ATA_ILD, and of course, Tradurre (the ILD's blog) has been active for years.

Comment spam

2012-10-01T09:15:00.002-06:00

In the last couple of weeks this blog has been on the receiving end of a real tsunami of comment spam, mostly from one sort or another of sleazy term paper mills, but also from sundry fly-by-night translation agencies that have somehow got the (mistaken) idea that sending contentless comments here (and, I've no doubt, to many other blogs as well) would somehow increase their web presence and lead to translation wealth.

This means I've had to delete dozens of comments, both from the (fairly efficient) Blogger spam folder, but also from the automatically published comments.

If in doing so I have inadvertently deleted a real comment of yours, I'm sorry, and I apologize.