Oversetter

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:08:00 +0000

Gosh! Prizes, accolades and kudos: I am flattered to learn that this Oversetter blog has been nominated as one of the top 100 blogs for language professionals.

Even better news is that you, gentle reader, get to play too! You can vote for this blog by clicking on this button, then scooting down the list to the entry for Oversetter:

And thank you. I have fun writing this blog. It gives me an opportunity to simply tell things as I see them. To learn that people find that interesting is very humbling.

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:03:00 +0000

Saving money - or rather, spending your translation budget effectively - is more important than ever.

Leading XML guru Sarah O'Keefe recently published an article on Efficient Multilingual Workflows, which might equally well be called How to save money by using XML when translating and publishing your company's documentation.

Sarah and I had some interesting and wide-ranging discussions about XML when she was writing the article, and her article kindly quotes my views on how you can save costs in the translation cycle through the effective use of XML to reduce DTP costs. Click here to read Sarah O'Keefe's article.

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:13:00 +0000

A pencil sharpener: That's how I think of next weekend's "Style Matters" workshop, organised by the Scottish network of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting.

I'm a technical translator by original training, with a full set of professional qualifications (starting with a degree in languages, then moving on to membership of two professional bodies, including passing relevant professional exams in both organisations). Yup, translators have professional qualifications, too!

But these days, most of my time is spent actually running a translation company in England. So whilst I spend a lot of time on quality assurance matters (from initial translator recruitment, through to training issues, to workflow management and final QA checks before we return completed translations to clients), I get to spend very little time actually translating.

That's the appeal of professional development days for translators. I get to translate. Better yet, I get to translate alongside other professionals, with constructive feedback.

It helps keep me at the top of my game. It makes sure my pencil stays sharp. Whatever line of work we are in, it is always good to stay fresh!

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:09:00 +0000

String concatenation used to be a big issue in the translation world, once upon a long ago. Programmers would insert variables into the middle of a sentence in their software strings, not realising that pluralisation in other languages involves more than sticking the letter S on the end of a word. But I thought that era was past, most programmers now know better, and internationalise their applications from the start. Based on some comments I heard at the recent ITI Conference in London, it appears that it is sometimes still an issue, so I am re-posting some old notes on the subject.

If we look at sentence structures in different languages, it quickly becomes clear that string concatenation is bound to result in problems in at least one language. Some languages, such as German, require the verb to be at the end of the sentence. Some require different structures for negative constructions (think of ne ... pas in French), other languages require adjective agreement for gender and even for different cases.

Back in 1997 in a "Global from Day One" article in Byte, the authors made the point that stringing together the local string for "file", the local string for "error", and the local string for "has occurred" may not give the local string for "file error has occurred". Hall quotes the example of "%d long green blade(s) of grass", and points out that in many languages the adjectives ("long" and "green") must reflect the number used in the variable. He also gives an example in Polish, showing that plural agreements are not always as simple as one might think:

1 red armchair 1 czerwony fotel

2, 3, 4 red armchairs 2, 3, 4 czerwone fotele

5-20 red armchairs 5-20 cerwonych foteli

Well-intentioned programmers often used to try to save space by using variables in strings, rather than creating a number of similar complete strings that have to be stored for calling up by the program. Unfortunately, this approach often does not work across different languages. For example, in Developing International Software for Windows 95 and Windows NT, Nadine Kano gives the example of the following three sentences:

"Not enough memory to open the file FileName1."
"Not enough memory to save the file FileName1."
"Not enough memory to spellcheck the file FileName1."

Let's have a look at what happens when we translate these sentences into German, and notice how the italicised variables move around (they do not all follow the same pattern):

"Nicht genug Speicher, um DateiName1 zu öffnen."
"Nicht genug Speicher, um DateiName1 zu speichern."
"Nicht genug Speicher für Rechtschreibprüfung von DateiName1."

Most books and articles on this subject strongly recommend storing each sentence in its entirety, and I would fully endorse that approach.

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Fri, 15 May 2009 09:52:00 +0000

Conference time: I am speaking at the Institute of Translation and Interpreting's International Conference in London this weekend, which will be a lot of fun.

I'm involved in two things at the ITI Conference.

Firstly, I'm taking part in a panel discussion on Customer Service in the translation profession, which I'm sure will be a lively and interesting discussion.

And secondly, I'm telling people about the ITI's PSG course, which is an online course that teaches business skills to professional translators.

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Sun, 10 May 2009 15:12:00 +0000

A quick overview of features in the new MemoQ 3.5: Kevin Lossner in Berlin has kindly posted a short review of the new features in MemoQ's new version 3.5. This is a major update to the MemoQ translation memory tool, particularly their new sub-segment matching feature. If you are interested in translation technology, and in the tools that professional translators use in their work, then do have a read of Kevin's article.

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Fri, 08 May 2009 12:04:00 +0000

Communicating well with your staff is essential for any business. So I was interested to read an article on the American Bar Association's website about a court case in France where a company was sued for failing to provide French employees with information in their own language (French). The company in question provided internal documentation in English only - and the French courts duly ruled that this was inappropriate. (At the time of writing, the company is appealing against this legal decision.)

Without wishing to criticise the company in question, it amazes me that any company would not want to communicate clearly with their own staff. Am I old-fashioned in thinking that your staff are your company's greatest asset? And in thinking that making them feel valued is important for a company's success?

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Mon, 04 May 2009 08:18:00 +0000

15 minutes of fame: The ITI conference is approaching, and Sarah Dillon has interviewed me as part of her series of interviews with people who are speaking at the ITI Conference in 2009. See http://www.dillonslattery.com/2009/05/experts-in-the-industry-nick-rosenthal-salftrans.html#more-414

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:20:00 +0000

Website translations: Clients often ask me if they can have a look at some translations that our SalfTrans team have translated. So we've updated our website to include some more links to websites that we have translated.

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:49:00 +0000

"Never let the cock beat loose.... ". There, that got your attention, didn't it? But I bet it didn't quite get your attention in the way you'd like to grasp the attention of your customers when they read your product manual, did it?

Kevin Lossner, a translator based in Berlin, quotes this lovely example of shoddy translation on his blog at http://simmer-lossner.blogspot.com/2009/03/never-let-cock-beat-loose.html

Next time somebody offers you a cheap translation, stop and think. Are you sure that is what you really want?

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:59:00 +0000

ITI's West Midlands Regional Group (www.iti-wmg.org.uk) have very kindly invited me to speak to them in October 2009 on Customer Service, which is one of my pet topics. This will be part of a one-day training seminar for translators, and will be held on a Saturday in October 2009, probably at Aston University.

A lot of translators don't realise how important customer service is. Fortunately, there are a lot who do! The old "I don't do customer service, I just translate" attitude is dying out, replaced with a brighter, chirpier, more proactive generation of translators (although in fairness, I know some very "mature" translators who also give excellent customer service to their clients).

I spoke at a West Midlands regional group event a couple of years ago, and the day received a lot of positive feedback. Equally importantly, it was tremendous fun!

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 09:17:00 +0000

Where foreign-language teaching in Britain is going wrong: I was shcoked ( but not suprised) to see an article on the BBC News website today which claims that teachers of modern languages are being trained to use scripting to help kids pass oral exams in French or German or Spanish. Nothing wrong with that. My teachers taught me how to pass the exams, too. But they taught me how to do so on a basis of understanding, or responding appropriately by showing I had understood the question. Now, it seems, the whole thing can be scripted, with questions asked in an order that the child knows in advance:

He suggested getting pupils to learn and rehearse phrases which showed their ability to use a verb properly and then to ask questions in a particular order which elicited those phrases, interspersed with others that required "Oui" as the response.

He said it was also important that the pupil knew the order the questions would come up.

I would go so far as to suggest that while this may help kids to pass language exams, it contributes absolutely nothing to giving them the language skills or confidence that they need if they wish to travel, or to be effective in the modern international business world.

And I shake my head, sadly.

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:28:00 +0000

It is good to see the program for the Institute of Translation and Interpreting's Conference in May 2009 taking shape. They now have speaker details listed at http://iti-conference.org.uk/conference-2009/content/view/18/54/

I will be participating in a panel discussion on customer service, and also giving a short presentation about a professional development course for translators that ITI runs. It promises to be a fun conference!

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 23:25:00 +0000

"Machine translation is fine - it'll give you the bulk of what it means". Or so people keep telling me! Personally, I'm a little wary. And here's a lovely example of why I am cautious. This machine translation of an Italian report of a bike race is, um.... interesting.

I start form the perspective of knowing a bit about cycle racing, and being able to take a semi-intelligent guess at how things may have been expressed in the Italian. But even so, it left me confused!

"The flown one has been launch to the 300 meters from the arrival banner."

Yer wot?

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:05:00 +0000

Language learning in schools: Is Britain at odds with the rest of the EU?

As a professional translator, I clearly place value on the learning of foreign language skills in schools. They bring obvious practical benefits (the ability to communicate when in a foreign country, to order a beer, to book a hotel room, to say "hello" and "thank you" to overseas business partners), but they also bring educational benefits - there is research that shows that learning a second language stretches and develops parts of the brain which (to borrow a line from the old Heineken advert) other subjects cannot reach.

The EU clearly recognises this, too, and has today announced that they would like to encourage member states to ensure that 80% of pupils in secondary education should be learning two European languages by the year 2020.

Meantime, in Britain (and most especially in England), the number of pupils taking a GCSE exam in languages is plummeting. Even more shockingly, the BBC claims that only 45% of secondary schools in England are in a position to teach two foreign languages to GCSE standard. This is really not good for Britain's long-term future, not good for our schools, and not good for the employability of English youngsters in a job market that is becoming increasingly international.

I may be a linguist, but I also studied maths when I was at school. So I can see that the figures reflect the decline of language learning in England: Across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, there were 216,718 for foreign languages in 2007. In 2008, that figure had dropped to 201,940. Because I had to study a range of subjects at school, I can recognise that this represents a drop of roughly 7% in one single year. And sadly, that merely reflects the trend. Equally sadly, very, very few British schoolchildren could even attempt to read out the number in French (the number of pupils taking French at GCSE has fallen by 30% since it stopped being compulsory for over-14s to learn French in 2004).

So what happened? Well, back in 2002, the British government decided that studying modern languages should no longer be compulsory in secondary schools. I have often wondered why, and in February 2009 BBC News quoted the then-Education Secretary Estelle Morris as saying - well, read her comments yourself. I read it as saying "Truants told us they didn't like going to school because they didn't like having to learn foreign languages." So she did away with the compulsory learning of modern languages. (Interestingly, Ms Morris did not abolish compulsory schooling, which would surely have been the more logical conclusion!).

I despair!

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 12:48:00 +0000

Early Bird booking discounts for the 2009 ITI Conference, to be held in London in May 2009, expire on 28th Feb 2009. So if you are thinking of attending, book now!

I'll be speaking at the ITI Conference this year. Actually, I'll be speaking twice: Once on customer service in the translation world, and once about the PSG, a professional development course for translators that the Institute of Translation and Interpreting runs (and which I am involved with - I will be tutoring on the marketing module this year).

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:02:00 +0000

I have been a bit of a twit, and forgotten to mention here that I now have a Twitter account: http://twitter.com/nickrosenthal

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:59:00 +0000

Terminology consistency doesn't sound an exciting subject, but it is crucial for professional translators. Most translators use specialist tools, such as Trados MultiTerm or MemoQ Termbase, for terminology management.

But of course, these only help translators to keep track of terminology they already know. First, we have to know it. And for translators working in the computing field, that's where the Microsoft Glossaries come in. Ever wondered what Network printer search is in German? A quick check of the Microsoft Glossary shows that on a German version of Windows, that would be Netzwerkdruckersuche.

And now, there's an easy way to look this stuff up in the online version of the Microsoft Glossaries. Just go to: http://www.microsoft.com/language/en/us/default.mspx

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 10:42:00 +0000

STC meeting in Berlin: Jeff Iezzi is kindly organising a meeting of the Berlin Local Interest Group of the Society for Technical Communication. I say kindly as they have arranged it to coincide with my visit.

Meeting details: Saturday 24th January 2009, 13:00 at Hackescher Hof, on ... Rosenthaler Strasse! http://www.hackescher-hof.de/

My thanks to Jeff for organising the meeting, and for hosting it on a street that bears my family name!

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:21:00 +0000

I am off to Berlin later this week. I'll be watching some bike racing, meeting with some of our clients, hooking up with the Berlin branch of the Society for Technical Communication, and visting friends. And I realise with a sense of shock that it is 25 years this year since I worked as a translator in Berlin. Where on earth does time go to?

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 18:25:00 +0000

Scotland, and Joomla: I'm off to see the Welsh Wizard for a couple of days so we can work together on setting up a website and discussion lists for the PSG, an online professional development course for translators that I tutor on. For those interested, the course is run by the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, or ITI.

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:01:00 +0000

Good customer service is a wonderful thing when you encounter it. I don't mean the sort of fawning pampering that simply strokes the ego. I'm talking here abut the sort of customer service that changes our perceptions, alters the way we think about doing things, and makes us "rearrange our prejudices", to quote a friend of mine.

I run a technical translation company. For many years now, we have used translation memory tools in order to ensure consistency in the translations that we produce. Over the years, I've actually worked with several different TM tools. But as a general rule, for most of our production work we stick with a market-leading translation memory system. There are a number of reasons for this (and I suspect these reasons are not unique to our company). These include: we're familiar with it, we've invested a lot of time in learning its foibles, in understanding how it works, in developing our skillsets and professional expertise with this software. If we're going to change to a different translation memory package, we will need a good incentive to do so.

And last week, we got one.

One of our clients has a habit of sending their user manuals to us as large Word files. OK, there is a separate point to be made about the wisdom of that - and no, I wouldn't necessarily do it that way myself. But it works for our client. It fits with their workflow requirements, and their skillsets. So our job is to find ways to translate these big Word files. And generally, that works just fine. The translation memory tools that we use grumble a bit, our translators grumble a bit, but it works.

Every once in a while, though, we hit a file that the regular translation memory tool that we use simply cannot process. Normally, with a bit of detective work, we can work out why, then solve the problem and carry on with the translation. Normally, but not always.

Last week, we received a 40 MB file in Word that we simply could not translate in our normal translation memory system. We'd had problems with previous versions of this manual over the past couple of years. So we decided to stop banging our head on a brick wall, and try something different.

One of the TM tools (sorry! I mean "Translation environments") that we've been looking at recently is called MemoQ. We've owned licences for it for a couple of years, but each time I look at rolling MemoQ out for production use we either find some minor gremlin that renders it unsuitable for our needs, or we simply hit a workflow issue that renders the change unattractive in business terms. In fairness, I must immediately point out that the developers of MemoQ have always listened politely to any feedback I have given them, and have always gone away and acted on our feedback, usually within a week or two. That in itself is impressive.

So, to recap, we had a big Word file that we needed to translate. And our regular TM program (or Computer Aided Translation tool, to use all the jargon terms!) didn't want to play ball (with a 40 MB file, that is actually understandable....).

Time to try something different. One of our project managers worked with me and we processed the overlarge Word file using MemoQ. This was an engineering test only - we didn't worry about producing a good translation. We invested minimal time to produce a "translation" that was actually half in German and half in English. Then we said "OK, now kick out our translation as a Word file, please." Not unreasonably, MemoQ declined. It gave me messages about "out of memory" (which again, I can entirely understand - doing anything to a 40 MB Word file is going to use a lot of memory!).

But here comes the good bit. On Friday afternoon, I sent an email to the support team at Kilgray (the developers of MemoQ). And by the end of the working day on Friday, after several messages backwards and forwards, they had very kindly exported our file for us, and given me some helpful pointers on how to work around this problem in the future. Above all, their excellent, responsive customer service gave me the confidence to have our translator team work in MemoQ to translate this file.

And that's the point about excellent customer service. The MemoQ guys took this opportunity to show me what their software can do to support a professional translator, and what their support guys can and will do to support their clients. I was impressed. Support like this gives me confidence that if we run into any technical issues, they will be resolved - quickly, and helpfully.

Every once in a while, you get to glimpse the future. To see a better way of doing things. For me, last week was one of those occasions. To István, Gábor and Sándor, a very big "thank you"!

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:29:00 +0000

Translation memory tools are not something that most people get excited about. Even most translators! And Termbases are worse. Termbases, or glossaries, are a much-neglected area in the high-tech world of translation memories (and with good reason, actually - terminology management tools have often been clunky and awkward to use. Make something awkward enough, and people will simply not use it!).

Today I was showing a translator how to use a new translation memory tool called MemoQ. And I have to say, their terminology management tool (or Termbase) impressed me. Two things in particular really impressed me:

To add a new term to the termbase, I simply had to highlight the source term and highlight the target term. This makes life very easy, and I am astonished that some other vendors of translation memory systems do not offer this ease of use. Well done MemoQ. And I believe Star Transit also offers this. On the version of Trados that I use, I can't highlight terms in both the source and target windows, so I end up having to type either the source or target term (or do clunky things involving copy and paste).
I was impressed to see that while I am working on translating a sentence, if I add a term from that sentence into the termbase, it shows up immediately in MemoQ. In real time. And gives me immediate benefit. Again, my experience with other TM tools is that the "terminology" hit only comes in the next time I open a segment containing that term. So again, this is an enhancement to usability, and enhancement to translator productivity, and therefore an incentive to add terms to the termbase (which, in turn, enhances quality). That's what they call "win-win".

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 10:41:00 +0000

I have always greatly admired people who have tattoos in a foreign language. Some friends of mine have tattoos in Chinese or Japanese. Now, although I am a linguist and a translator, I don't speak (or read) Chinese or Japanese. And neither do these friends. Which is why I admire their bravery.

The Max Planck Forschung, a German research body, were equally brave. They wanted an elegant Chinese poem to go on the cover of their learned journal. What did they actually end up printing? Let's just say there were red faces all round on their editorial board.

The moral? If you are going to use a translation for a tattoo on your body, for the front cover of a magazine, or for communicating with your clients, it is prudent to engage the services of skilled, qualified professional translators. Unless you feel brave....

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 10:14:00 +0000

So what do translators get up to on a Sunday? Read the second installment of Philippa Hammond's excellent review of the Translator as Strategic Partner conference, held in November 2008 in London.

Incidentally, Philippa makes the point that translating the sort of XML-based materials that are held in a Content Management System (or CMS) is still a specialised area for translators. I had 15 minutes to present on this at the conference, so it was a quick and high-level overview. But my underlying point is that this is becoming more common, and will continue to become even more normal. One translator friend (yes, translators have friends!) who specialises in translating tourist guides was recently surprised to find that all the copy for a book she was actually in XML, stored in a CMS.