Christof’s Blog

I know I shouldn’t do this, but I’ve received an email from a translator in Egypt who asked how I cope with the cold… so here’s my answer: Because we had a public holiday on Monday I decided to go for a swim… where? - have a look:
http://kiwigetaway.com/kiwigetaway/assets/homes/871/Waihau%20Bay.jpg. On that pic you might want to focus on the top of the beach - and if you then imagine me in the sea, just enjoying the serenity… then you are spot on.

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Just had to wait in a waiting room which had a PC World from 2001 on the table. The cover story was about 20 years of PC history - from the IBM PC to “today’s” PIII 1500Mhz (no mentioning in 2001 of Ghz!!). Oh those good old days when I inherited a Texas Instruments ZX81 with 4KB memory (and a hugely expensive 16KB memory module. Where you had to write you programmes in Basic and it was a success to have a random pixel firing up somewhere on your scree (which was a TV set). If you wanted to save that delightful moment you could save the programme to a cassette, using the attached tape recorder.

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It is always when it comes to terminology management that I run out of time when teaching that electronic tools for translators course. It is such a shame, because the argument is so compelling: what are the tasks you spend most time on when doing a translation? Usually one of the most time consuming task is terminology research. Now although the internet in most cases allows you to save the time it takes to take the bus to the nearest university library, you still have lived through it yourself: you spend 20 minutes finding possible translations and another 10 eliminating all the wrong ones, finally setting for that best translation decision you can come up with. But what do you do? How do you document it? There are clever people out there - so one translator told me that when ever she finds a difficult term, she writes it down where she looked first - which is her trusted dictionary. I thought that is a cool idea!! But would you have to do anything else? Well - I say YES definitely!!!! (with as many exclamation marks). After spending 30 minutes on that term, you might as well make sure that you document your struggle. So in any case write it down. The next question is “where to write it down”. The answer: wherever you feel it is right - BUT think about what you write down. Is the translation really all you can come up with after 30 minutes search? What about all those terms you came across and they were wrong? What about the date and the job and the client? What about the context of the term in both languages? What about grammatical information, antonyms, synonyms and all those other yms?

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Jack asked that challenging question which formats we translate and I realised that this question takes much more effort to answer than than a client’s question if we can do “his/her” format. Generally you tend to say “yes” to almost everything you get on your plate, simply because everything can be translated. Often, however, the real answer depends very much on what the client wants to do with the translation. If a casual client provides us with a Word document, then we usually “just” translate it and thanks to CAT tools we deliver the translation in the same layout. Usually we simply accommodate the usual expansion of volume, for example from English to German, or shrinkage when translating into Chinese.

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Maxprograms by heartsome - Free Resources for Translators

what interesting tools heartsome offers for free: a RTF styler to do convert XLIFF into unclean Trados RTFs - this is a very interesting approach to the problem how to let translators use their own CAT tools - though I am not sure if it is the best way - it bears the same issues that Trado’s own XLIFF support leaves open). The other one satisfies a long craving for a RTF cleaner to clean Trados tagged files. Gosh what a relieve for those few more years until Trados’ and in particular its close relationship with MS Word will be history.

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It pays to go back to those good old bookmarks from time to time to check if they have changed (wasn’t there a service that does that automatically for you?). Looking for XLIFF related tools, I checked out Martin Wunderlich’s site again on
http://www.martinwunderlich.com/frameset.php4?siteid=links&languageid=en. If I remember correctly that site got me on track to find new Enlaso tools a while ago. But anyway - I looked up his site and found that there is a lot going on in terms of XLIFF conversion tools to round-tripping file formats from and to XLIFF. I like this development - and in particular the jobs done by all those Open Source people. This is a great way for freelancers to get more independent of those expensive tools that have to charge high prices because of the way they have to interact proprietary software and the way they use file formats. Maybe the future strengthening of XML will change this a little bit?

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The more I look at XLIFF (and XML) the more marvelled I am about how straight forward it is. Still - it is a bit of a struggle to develop a way to present it to (often doubtful) “third parties”. To fresh are the memories of giving a presentation about Deja Vu at the NZSTI annual conference where I had not been 100% prepared and I had to change one of DV’s settings. The comment I heard afterwards from a colleague that I very much respect was “well - if Christof had to spend so much time on getting the settings right - how would I cope”.

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Let me quote this from Jost Zetzsche newsletter (to which, by the way, everybody can subscribe by going to www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit - and since you are there - think about buying his e-book. I can only recommend it - and maybe you could mention my name when you buy it.

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Every translation job involves formatting tasks. If you get a hard copy, you’d better asked your client if s/he wants you to copy the original formatting as well as possible. But it is almost a standard expectation that you need to do it. That is where one of the often under estimated advantages of a translation productivity tool, like a Translation Memory software, comes in: and you have received an electronic file, then simply create a project and just focus on the translation. Your tool takes care of the formatting.

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