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".

---

(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)

The best tool for translation

This week, in the online course on translation I'm teaching for the University College of Denver University, I had this questions for my students:

What tools do we have available (software or not, narrowly aimed at producing translations, or with a broader usefulness)?

There are many way this can be answered. If I change my question to "What is the best tool for translators"?, I would answer that many of us who started translating when computers were not widespread would say the computer itself, and word processing software, are our most useful tools.

But what has changed life for translators even more has been the Internet. Formerly, one was limited to the dictionaries one had bought, hard copies of glossaries of variable quality, or some reference books. Perhaps an encyclopedia or two. If one lived in a big city with a good public library, there was more: still, even with a university library available, searches would be painstaking.

Now we have unlimited information on our screen: instant access to hundreds or thousands of source and target documents similar to those we are translating.

Now that there is so much information, what makes the difference is the ability to make good use of it and to separate the reliable and useful from the unreliable and useless.

Localizable resources

Dr.Dobbs has a fairly interesting article on the use of page resources for the localization of web sites.

Page resources are literals stored in an application-specific assembly and bound to a culture identifier.

Fairly technical, but of interest for those of us who translate, localize or build multilingual web sites.

Wordiness

Something that annoys me is wordiness: I don't mind long texts, if there is little redundancy, but words that are there just to take up space, are another matter.

There is a dear friend that always translates "including [something]" as "ad inclusione di [qualcosa]". When I edit her, I can usually pare that down to "incluso" - one word instead of three, 7 characters instead of 16 (I know, I'm nitpicking).

Worse when the redundant words create an interference. From a letter I translated today: "Ali was originally born in Cairo". Unbidden, thoughts came to mind: is there a way one can be born otherwise? "Ali was originally born in Cairo, then he thought better of it, and was finally born in Alexandria, instead", perhaps?

When are two names 67% the same?

Would you prefer:

• To have "afxc04z5.htm" suggested as a translation when the html file in the string you are translating is actually "afxc04z5_10.htm"?

Or

• Would you rather copy manually the file name from the source segment to the target one, avoiding the risk of accepting a wrong file name while typing rapidly?

I would always opt for the second option - it's just too easy accepting a fuzzy match "as is", when you are typing fast, and this type of error is serious (it would break a web site), and remarkably difficult to spot (file names looks similar, and re-reading the translation there is no logical clue to indicate that something is amiss).

The brillant programming team that gave us useless fuzzy matches like this or this one, once again chooses the wrong answer:

When is DWI the same as murder?

Not when someone is run over by a drunk driver, but maybe when that driver, after his arrests, signs a mistranslated waiver.

Translation errors raise legal issues

[...] The form, waiving his right to a lawyer, states that Segundo was charged with “a murder,” and his penalty was “1 anus in jail and a $ 1, 000 fine.”

(from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette)

Signora Presidente and Ms Chairperson: different paths to gender-neutral language

Yesterday a translation of mine returned, marred by some questionable edits: turns out the editor was not even a native speaker of Italian. But that, as they say, is another story.

What is interesting is that one of the "corrections" she marked in my translation was this sentence (suitably changed here to protect my customer): "La Signora Jane Doe, Direttore del Centro..." [Ms. Jane Doe, Director of the Center ..."].

My editor changed that to "La Signora Jane Doe, Direttrice del Centro...". My old elementary teacher would have agreed with the editor and marked my translation with a blue pencil. That would have been right, back then: "La ... Direttore", feminine article plus male noun - a blatant error of concordance.

But usage changes with time. Now the old feminine names for titles and professions are disappearing from Italian: no longer "Direttrice", but "Direttore"; no longer "Avvocatessa", but "Avvocato", and so on, ever more often.

A similar trend in English has replaced "Chairman" with "Chairperson", and brought many other new gender-neutral nouns in English.

Yet, if the underlying reasons for these trends are the same, the two languages have taken strangely divergent roads to similar ends. In English, where gender is almost absent, this change towards neutrality has stripped the gender from most of the few words that retained it. In Italian, where every noun has a masculine and a feminine form, the trend among women has been to adopt the masculine labels for their professional titles.

In English, women resented words such as "Chairman", because the masculine ending implied that only men were suited for such a position. On a strikingly different path to the same goal, Italian women rejected the feminine versions of their titles, finding them demeaning, as if a "Presidentessa" was a second class Chairman, and an "Avvocatessa" a lawyer only by sufferance.

As indeed my elementary teacher would have agreed, when teaching to our class that a "Deputatessa" was the wife of a Representative, while a "Sindachessa" only the wife of the Mayor.

A final twist to this meandering story. The elementary teacher I was referring to was a man, as were all the other elementary teachers to the all-male school forms in our public school. I doubt that in Italy, nowadays, one would find many male elementary teachers left.

---

He looked old to me, then, Maestro Buffon, certainly older than my parents; old enough that it was my grandmother who had been his elementary teacher.

And yet, he was probably younger than I am now.

English-Italian dictionaries: CD-ROMs and online

I believe that most, if not all, major EN>IT IT>EN dictionaries are now available on CD-ROM or at least with CD-ROM available (in addition to the paper dictionary).

I don't have a link for the Ragazzini (Zanichelli), but the Picchi (Hoepli), Rizzoli-Larousse "Sansoni" (which, sadly, does not contain the full text of the great Sansoni-Macchi), and Hazon-Garzanti are now available online.

Of the above, I think the best and most complete general English-Italian dictionary nowadays is Picchi's, closely followed by Rizzoli-Sansoni.

You can try them for yourself, using the following links:

• Picchi-Hoepli (register at the site: the dictionary is available even without registration, but only in abbreviated form)


• Rizzoli-Sansoni (the link I provide is to a page on our company's web site: you can obtain the code to add them to your own web page by following this link)


• Hazon-Garzanti.


• Oxford Paravia Concise


• Collins

Using these dictionaries "for free" online is tempting, and occasionally useful. Remember, however, that the CD-ROM versions have some important advantages: faster searches, availability even when you are not online, and additional functionality, (much richer search capability, from full-text searches to the use of boolean operators).

Update

I've added to the body of this post another two online dictionaries, Oxford-Paravia Concise and Collins, which have been suggested by colleagues.

I will probably write a comparison review of these online dictionaries in a future post.

The translation of Aesop's Fables

Aesop's fables have been so frequently published that it is widely assumed that in Europe only the Bible has more editions.

The Chronicle Review has a very interesting article (No Children's Tale: Aesop's translators have had varied agendas) on the varied history of the translation of Aesop's Fables, and of how they have changed with the times and with the different intentions of the various translators.

Today we assume that translators always work from the original text. It was not always so, hence (for example) the translations of Russian authors into Italian that were actually translations of the French translations. Even so, it is startling to read that

Caxton's translation is an English translation of a French translation of a Latin translation prepared by a German in 1476.

That German, at last, presumably translated from the Greek.

A very interesting article, well worth reading.

Agency rating lists

How do you know if the new prospect that has just contacted you is going to become one of your best customers, or a headache that will pay (IF they pay) only late and after sundry reminders and threats?

In pre-Internet times, there was no quick answer: a translator could check with some trusted colleagues if they had heard of that particular agency, but that was about it.

Later, translators started to exchange such information online, in an unsystematic way in bulletin boards and newsgroup.

For some years, now, there has been something better: sites or list specifically devoted to collect information about translation agencies from translators, and make such ratings available (usually for a small fee) to other translators.

There are three such services that I use regularly when checking new prospects (or even old customers that come back after a long absence): the ProZ Blue Board, TCR, and PP. There are other similar services, although, for some of them, it is difficult to assess their reliability (I'm thinking, for example of the Translation Directory "black list", since it is difficult to know what selection criteria have been used to add translation companies to this "black list"). There are also smaller free Lists and others that specialize in a specific country or language.

To use most of these services there is a fee to pay, but it is well worth it. For the Blue Board (if you want to use it fully), the fee is the ProZ paid membership; same for the Translators Café area devoted to agency reviews (the "Hall of Fame and Shame). For the other two services, I use Payment Practices (PP) and the Translation Customer Review (TCR) list, the fee is respectively 20 and 12 dollars.

A few pieces of advice. Pay attention to trends, if possible: two companies with an average rating may be different if the rating of one is improving and the other worsening, and a positive or negative rating may not be worth much if too old. (In many of these lists, however, it is possible to ask for more up to date information). Also, if the information is available, check how many people have rated the translation company: a rating that averages twenty responses is more informative than a single one.

If the rating list shows who has given bad ratings to a company, try to verify the reputation of those translators: a bad rating given by a translator known to be unreliable may mean something different from the same rating given by someone who has a stellar reputation.

Follow the rules set by the service, and don't abuse them. In particular, I believe that to threaten your prospect with something like "if you don't pay I'm going to give you a bad rating on XYZ board" is forbidden by these services' rules. In many jurisdictions this would be illegal (blackmail). Even if it worked, you would pay a disservice to your colleagues (a bad payer that pays only because threatened remains a bad prospect, and should be rated as such, to protect other translators).

Try to see why a prospect has a bad reputation: you can probably live with someone who consistently pays late, if they are also known to pay always, eventually, and remember that normally it is better to get a customer that pays on time at, 45 days, than one who sometimes pays at 20, and sometimes at 90: you need to be able to plan your own payments.

Bear in mind that you are usually hearing only one side of the story (and as a translator, you are perhaps naturally inclined to side with your colleagues)

Beware that you can also err by excessive caution: we acquired one of our best customers a few years ago: they had found my name on the ATA site, and called to see if I was available for a big project. I checked them out: they were the successors of a company with a truly bad reputation... however, I had a good impression of the project manager who called me. I called her back with my doubts, mentioning the past reputation of the company. She explained that the company had recently been taken over by new owners, who were trying to overcome the bad impressions and practices left by their predecessors. I trusted her, and my hunch. We never regretted it.

1. PP - Payment Practices
   Fee: $ 19.99 year
   - structured information about the translation companies
   - structured feedback from translators visible
   - information may be updated over time
   - no feedback from agencies
   
   
2. TCR - Translator Client Review List
   Fee: $ 12 year
   - less structured information
   - feedback from translators visible
   - information may be updated over time
   - no feedback from agencies
   
   
3. ProZ Blue Board
   Fee: free for limited access; otherwise included in ProZ paid membership - $ 70 / year for limited membership, $ 129 / year for full membership
   - limited access without paid membership to ProZ
   - structured information about translation companies
   - feedback from translators visible
   - feedback from agencies
   
   
4. Translators Café Hall of Fame and Shame
   Fee: free for very limited access; otherwise included in Translators Café paid membership - $ 120 / year; unrestricted access is also available with any payment to TranslatorsCafé, starting with the $10 fee for credentials verification. Unrestricted access also available for free to active members, and upon special request to moderators, to those unable to pay.
   - (usually) limited access without paid membership (or other lower payments) to Translators Café
   
   
5. WPPF WorldPaymentPracticesFree
   Fee: free
   - Simple yahoo group
   - Fewer members than other lists
   - Feedback from translators visible
   
   
6. Translation Agency Payment
   Fee: free
   - Simple Yahoo group
   
   
7. TranslationDirectory.com "black list"
   Fee: free
   - sent as an e-mail for free upon joining the Translation Directory mailing list
   - Feedback from translators not visible
   - No visible means of updating the list, apart from agencies been added to the list from time to time
   - No feedback from agencies
   
   

Please note that there may be other lists available, and that I have a less personal experience with the rating lists after the first free: for example, I could not explore the Translators Café list better, as my lack of a paid membership did not permit me to access it fully.

Update

I have updated this post with new information about the fee necessary to access the TranslatorsCafé "Hall of Fame and Shame"

An English novelist's take on the translation of his books

David Baddiel struggles with fiction in translation in the Times Online.

Now, say what you like about the irrelevance of authorial intention but the truth remains that I never meant the phrase “careers officer” to be heard in the reader's head a bit sarkily.

An interesting, though lightweight, article about how David Baddiel discovers that his authorial intentions have not been faithfully carried out by his German translator... and about Baddiel's thoughts on the trustworthiness of the translation of fiction.

Blog maintenance

Now that I have decided to post more often, I begun some long overdue blog maintenance.

Yesterday night I pruned the blog roll: there were several dead links, or links to blogs that have been idle for a while. Now all the links are to blogs that have been updated at least in recent months. I might change it further in the future, by adding and removing links.

Any suggestions for links to translation-related blogs are welcome. Bear in mind that I will link only to blogs that I can actually read (that means I will only link to blogs written in English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and maybe Catalan).

Harder to do, and more time consuming is improving the template for the blog. I started with the easy part (adding a picture as a background for the title: that is a stretch of I25 in New Mexico, driving North towards Denver), but I plan to change several other settings, to improve layout and readability. Again, any suggestions are welcome.

Finally, I have removed the security feature from the comments - unless I start to get too much comment spam, I'll leave it off to make commenting easier.

Something about this blog

I started this blog a couple of years ago. I wanted to write about translation, give to the world my unbidden opinions. Mostly, I suppose, it was a case of "me too" other people had blogs, it looked cool (in a nerdy sort of way), and it didn't look like too many translators had one.

At first I mostly posted short comments about news on translation, then I stared to add, at least occasionally, longer articles.

I didn't know who my readers would be at the beginning, but I thought I would mostly write for other translators: share my experience with them, sometime some cool tool I found, sometime venting about problems with a CAT tool, sometime about the translation courses I taught. I find that the readers here, at least those who leave comments, are indeed other translators. My most popular posts seem those devoted to advice for beginning translators, translation education, or translation tools (whenever I vent about some Trados misfeature, my site counter goes up for the day).

The posts I worked the most on were devoted to wildcard searches in MS Word. I often refer to those posts myself to refresh my memory whenever I need to try some new complicated MS search.

In 2005 and 2006 I posted more than once a week on average. Last year it was a difficult year: stretches of much pressure at work interspersed with periods of worry when not enough work arrived. I didn't write much, nothing at all for long stretches of time.

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.

Knowing that someone is interested in what I write makes it worthwhile: thank you for visiting here!

Voting on Trados features

In my previous post I complained about Trados fuzzy matching algorithms.

Among the comments I received there is one from an SDL marketing representative, who sais to enter suggestions and ideas in a portal they created to gather the votes of other users. The address of this portal is http://ideas.sdltrados.com.

If true, that is, if SDL is actually going to act on their user's opinions, this would be a step in the right direction: too many of the features added in recent years were not aimed at helping translators but rather only translation users or companies.

It is time that SDL remembered that Trados was supposed to be a tool for translators.

Shouldn't Trados programmers improve their matching algorithms?

I sometime wonder what the programmers at SDL/Trados think that "similar" means, but I'm sure that what they think must be different from what most translators think.

Take for example the strings

1. "- LEAD DESIGN -",
2. "- LEAD PROGRAMMER -", and
3. "Lead Design".

Most translators, when asked to translate "- LEAD DESIGN -", would find the translation of "Lead Design" more useful than knowing the translation of "- LEAD PROGRAMMER -".

Seemingly, Trados programmers disagree: as you can see from this screenshot,
Trados considers "- LEAD PROGRAMMER -" a 75% fuzzy match for "- LEAD DESIGN -", while "Lead Design" only gets a 67% score.

How the program arrives at this result is clear: both strings 1 and 2 follow similar patterns (all caps, leading a trailing dashes), while 3 doesn't.

But writing a more intelligent algorithm shouldn't be all that difficult: a better algorithm would give more weight to the actual words, and not to such irrelevant characteristics as case or dashes.

Trados programmers should, in short, try to think of what is useful to translators, and implement that in new algorithms, rather than rely on old ones that have probably not changed in over ten years.

Myths and legends about translation tests

• Be wary of translation tests: agencies may use them to piece together a translation for free.
  
  This, as far as I can find out, is one of the favorite urban legends of translation. In 24+ years of professional experience I've never seen any evidence that something like this ever happened. Even if it did, the agency in question would soon disappear: the quality of the resulting translation would be so bad and uneven that any customer would soon flee.
  
  
• I don't want to do a free test: I'll send them some sample of previous work of mine, and they can evaluate that.
  
  You can try, but usually whomever sends out the test does it for a purpose: comparing candidate translators to one another - something that you cannot do with translation samples of different originals. Also, bear in mind that a well designed translation test does not only test the quality of the translation: it checks how well the candidates followed the instructions received.
  
  
• I don't want to do a free test, they should pay for it!
  
  Go for it, if you can get it. The most likely outcome is that you'll just exclude yourself from the selection process.
  
  I used to work as a manager in the translation department of a large software company. To evaluate candidates for staff positions (well paid staff positions), we used tests to compare the quality of the translations done by the candidates, and how well such candidates would follow the instructions received.
  
  The first tests were unpaid. Those who refused to do them were just removing themselves from the selection. The company was not being stingy (we invited the candidates who passed the first screening to the company's HQ, all at the company's expense), we just were not interested in people that would not invest a couple of hours of their time to show they were interested in working for us.
  

Having said that, I recommend against doing free tests longer than reasonable (say, 250 to 500 words maximum). Probably an experienced translator could do away with tests, or maybe limit them to only very good prospects.


But, as I was saying, just refusing to do tests is a quick way to remove oneself from the selection process.

European Commission Translation Memories Available for Download

The European Directorate General for Translation (DGT) has made publicly accessible its multilingual Translation Memory for the Acquis Communautaire.

The Acquis communautaire is a collection of texts and their translation in 22 languages. It comprises the entire European legislation, including all the treaties, regulations and directives adopted by the European Union (EU) and the rulings of the European Court of Justice.

The memories can be downloaded from The DGT Multilingual Translation Memory
of the Acquis Communautaire: DGT-TM, which also contains an explanation of what the materials available are and how they can be used.

I found the announcement on the Global Watchtower, the bulletin of Common Sense Advisory. The original announcement also includes valuable insight about how translation companies (and I think also translation professionals), will be able to take advantage of this multilingual corpus.

Results of Translation QA Tool Survey

Tamara Lukyanova and Julia Makoushina, of Palex Languages & Software, have concluded their work on the interesting survey of translation QA tools we announced here in August.

From August through September 2007 Palex performed a translation community survey to evaluate acceptance of translation quality assurance tools by the translation community, to define where such tools currently are, their advantages and disadvantages and to visualize their future capabilities and their role in the translation process. In parallel with the survey, Palex tested and benchmarked translation quality assurance tools currently available in the market.

Julia has recently given a presentation ("Translation Quality Assurance Tools: Current State and Future Approaches") at the 29th Translating and the Computer conference that took place on 29-30 November 2007 in London. In addition to the presentation (which can be downloaded from the previous link), Julia has also written a paper with the same title. Both paper and presentation are very interesting and well worth downloading (you can do so from the previous links) and reading.

Translation QA Tool Survey

Tamara Lukyanova and Julia Makoushina, of Palex Languages & Software, have set up an interesting survey about translation QA tools.

From 1 August through September 28, 2007 Palex will perform a translation community survey to evaluate acceptance of translation quality assurance tools by the translation community, to define where such tools currently are, their advantages and disadvantages and to visualize their future capabilities and role in translation process.

[...]

In parallel with the survey, Palex is going to test and benchmark translation quality assurance tools currently available in the market. The survey and benchmarking results will be presented at 29th Translating and the Computer conference that will tale place on 29-30 November 2007 in London, as well as in other industry publications.

According to Tamara and Julia, if you respond to the survey and provide your e-mail address, you will be able to receive the survey analysis as soon as the survey is closed.

Please feel free to point other colleagues to the questionnaire.

To access the survey, click here (or on the link at the beginning of this post).

A language that undermines Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar?

The New Yorker has published a very interesting article ("The Interpreter" about Pirahã, an Amazonian language that seems to run counter Noam Chomsky's theories of a universal grammar.

Long, but very much worth reading.

Translation and Interpretation Training Workshops at Denver University

In my previous posts today I gave some info about the workshops I'll be teaching... but there are several more:

• CRN 1652 - Memory Exercises for Interpreters - 7/9, 7/16 7:30–9:30 pm
  
• CRN 1651 - Introduction to Sight Translation - 7/9, 7/16 5–7 pm
  
• CRN 1649 - Proofreading for Translators - 6/19, 6/26 6–8 pm
  
• CRN 1650 - Court & Legal Terminology - 6/21, 6/28 6–8 pm
  
• CRN 1653 - Blogging for Translators: How to Increase One’s Visibility on the Web - 7/10, 7/17 6–8 pm
  
• CRN 1654 - Note-taking for Interpreters - 7/12, 7/19 6–8 pm
  
• CRN 1655 - Freeware, Shareware, and Inexpensive Tools for Translators - 7/24, 7/31 6–8 pm
  
• CRN 1656 - File Management for Translators - 7/26, 8/2 6–8 pm
  

The workshops qualify for ATA continuing education credit.

For more information, please see Translation and Interpretation Training Workshops, in the University College web site (www.universitycollege.du.edu/).

DU Workshop - Freeware, Shareware, and Inexpensive Tools for Translators- 7/24/07 and 7/31/07

CRN 1655 - Freeware, Shareware, and
Inexpensive Tools for Translators

7/24, 7/31 - 6:00-8:00 pm

Translators often grumble about the high price of translation memory software tools, but there are many cheap (or even free) programs that can be surprisingly useful. The aim of this workshop is to introduce translators to some of the best cheap or free tools available, from full translation memory packages such as Omega-T, to a range of other tools including full-featured dictionaries and thesauri, programs used to search
glossaries, and so on. Basic computer knowledge required.

This is the second of two workshops I'll be teaching this summer at the University College of Denver University.

DU Workshop - Blogging for Translators - 7/10/07 and 7/17/07

CRN 1653 - Blogging for Translators: How to
Increase One’s Visibility on the Web

July 10 and 17, 2007 - 6:00-8:00 pm

Blogs are an excellent way for translators on a tight budget to present themselves on the Web.

The aim of this workshop is to introduce translators to blogs, how to create one for free, examples of blogging tools available, and what to do if one wants to create a more traditional Web page (including a very brief introduction to HTML).

This is the first of two workshops I'll be teaching this summer at the university College of Denver University.

Translation and Interpretation Open House at DU - 6/4/07

On June 4th from 6 to 8pm, the Translation and Interpretation faculty of University College, Denver University, will host an Open House at the South Renaissance Room, Mary Reed Building on the Denver University campus.

A panel of our T&I faculty will discuss the current state of the T&I professions and will answer questions from the audience.

There will be opportunities for Q&A, program information, and networking.

Errors caused by corrupted MS Office installation - Trados and XBench

Sometimes Trados refuses to convert or clean-up a document, displaying error message 50202 "due to a OCE/COM or file name error".

There is an article on SDL's web site explaining how to work around this error converting .doc documents to .rtf within MS Word, instead.

The suggested solution works; however, this error message may actually indicate that there is something wrong not in Trados, but in MS Word: some registry setting may have become corrupted.

It happened to me yesterday (I suspect that the actual culprit was the disinstallation and re-installation of McAfee), and I was able to solve the problem by using MS Office setup disk and launch a repair install.

Note that a corrupted MS Office installation may be difficult to diagnose: MS Word was apparently working fine, but I was getting errors in Trados (error 50202) and in XBench, where the QA functions refused to analyze certain Ms Word files, displaying an error message which indicated that a class was not registered.

That error message suggested the key to the solution: to uninstal McAfee I had run a special utility to clean up all traces of McAfee from the registry; when I saw that an error pointed to an unregistered class I suspected that maybe more had been removed from the registry than strictly the McAfee stuff.

So I run the repair install, and both errors disappeared (XBench and Trados).