Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

A little bit of this, a little bit of that

Gabe Bokor’s blog post “Specialist or Generalist” gives some excellent insights into the fact that translators need to be both specialists and generalists. Gabe gives the example of a medical translator who also needs to be familiar with electronic instrumentation, or an environmental translation project that might also include subjects like chemistry and meteorology. I think that Gabe’s point holds true for most translation specializations, and emphasizes the need for all of us to be well-informed about a range of topics that are seemingly unrelated to our stated specializations.

In the case of legal translation (so to speak!), high-level lawsuits are about laws. That’s how you end up with the late Anna Nicole Smith at the Supreme Court. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that opinion, the primary issue before the Court wasn’t whether Anna Nicole was entitled to her late husband’s vast fortune, but whether state probate courts have the authority to oversee wills and the execution of estates. In other words, a legal question.

However, lower-level lawsuits don’t deal with the intricacies of the law so much as they deal with a specific factual question. Did the landlord know about the asbestos-laden tiles when he put the office building up for rent? Was the employee fired because she was a woman, or because she didn’t produce results? Did the company increase its cash reserves to deliberately mislead investors? And how thick was the sheet metal on the hull of the ship that sank? So, although a legal translator certainly has to be familiar with legal terminology, the translator also learns something about a very wide range of topics along the way.

Likewise, patent translation deals partially with the terminology specific to patents, like inventive step and prior art and the European Patent Office Oppositions Division, but a patent is also about something, like a car part or a cancer drug or an ergonomic computer mouse. So, the “patent translator” may be what we would call highly specialized, someone who translates nothing but patents, while in reality the translator works in a new “specialization” nearly all the time.

To me, this aspect of translation work is one of the most interesting. Although about 60% of my work is discovery documents for corporate lawsuits, these lawsuits involve something different nearly every time. So, instead of feeling like “same old, same old,” this variety keeps things fresh!


Corinne McKay

Translating into non-standardized languages

The Google Alert for “translation” was all abuzz today with the controversy over translating the Bible into Jamaican patois. Here’s hoping that the Bible Society of the West Indies reads Translation: Getting it Right before forging ahead with the project, which it estimates will take 12 years and cost US$1 million; moreover, this story highlights the issues faced by translators who work in languages that are not standardized.

For most of us, a real dilemma of word choice results when two of our trusted terminology resources conflict, or when the meaning of the source text seems to be deliberately ambiguous. However, few of us have to cope with translating from or into a language that has few/no/radically conflicting written resources. For example, the Wikipedia entry for the Jamaican language states “Because of its status as a non-standard language, there is no standard or official way of writing Jamaican Patois (for example the word ‘there’ can be written ‘de’, ‘deh’ or ‘dere’; and the word for ‘three’ is most commonly spelt ‘tree’, but it can be spelt ‘tri’ or ‘trii’ to distinguish it from the noun tree). ” By comparison, coping with a disagreement between the Grand Dictionnaire Terminologique and the Presses Pocket French-English Dictionary of Computing seems hardly worth complaining about.

An interesting side note to the issue of non-standardized languages is the role that e-mail, texting and the Internet at large play in creating written language. Until the advent of e-mail and texting, most people’s writing was done in a formal context; i.e. school assignments, letters to the newspaper editor, complaints to the gas company, etc. Today, most of us write a great deal in informal contexts such as e-mails and text messages. Here in the U.S. we can see that spoken forms of words are now, for better or worse, often used in writing as well (“See ya!” “Gotta go!” “Gonna get back to work!”). In countries where the spoken language has historically had a more formal written form, for example Swiss Standard German (largely written) versus the many variations of Swiss German (largely spoken), many young people now e-mail, chat and text in the dialects that they speak, rather than the more formal language used in schools, government and the media.


Corinne McKay

Skype wish list

Skype is a fantastic tool, especially for those of us who remember the days of $100+ phone bills for calls to other countries. I like to keep Skype running while I’m working, so that if I want to ask a colleague a quick question, I can easily see if the person is online and send a chat message. Sometimes I use Skype’s calling feature when I want to type and talk at the same time (taking advantage of the headset rather than squeezing the cordless phone between my ear and shoulder) or when I don’t want to tie up my work phone line for a long period of time. Overall, I find Skype very useful.

My one issue with Skype (and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, which would actually be fantastic!) is that unless you set up multiple profiles, you are confined to using one online status with all of your contacts. When you log on to Skype, you have to choose an online status; I’m not sure I understand the connotations behind all of these statuses, but the main ones I use are Online (when you want all of your contacts to see that you’re logged in), Do Not Disturb (when you are logged in but don’t want your current chat or call to be interrupted) and Invisible (when you are logged in but appear to your contacts as being logged out, which allows you to chat or call someone without your other contacts seeing that you’re online).

All of this makes me feel a bit like the middle-schoolers I used to teach French to, but here is my Skype wish: that without setting up two separate profiles (i.e. one for work and one for friends), I could set up groups of contacts and select the status that I want to display to each group. For example, during the work day it would be helpful to appear Online to my work contacts, but Invisible to my personal contacts, and vice versa in the evening, unless I happen to be working.

As far as I can tell, the only way to achieve this right now is to set up two different profiles, which when added to profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning, ATA, CTA, various translation portals etc. is more of a step toward multiple personality issues than I’m interested in taking. Am I missing something, or do other people have this wish about Skype too?


Corinne McKay

Treadmill desk update

I’ve now been using my treadmill desk for about six weeks, and the concise update is that I love it. I find it easy to work at and much more pleasant than sitting in a chair all day, and I’ve also found that I can do almost all of my translation and related work while on the treadmill. Here are a few specifics:

For most of my work time, I walk on the treadmill at about 0.8 miles per hour and I find that I can translate (either from a PDF/hard copy or using a translation environment tool), talk on the phone, read and respond to e-mail, read web pages, do accounting, etc. while on the treadmill at this speed. The one task that really doesn’t work for me while in motion is proofreading. I proofread from a hard copy, and I think it’s just too much motion for my eyes to scan between the two documents (or maybe I’m one of those thirtysomethings in denial about needing glasses?). So, when I’m proofreading I work at the kitchen table, but otherwise I spend most of my work day on the treadmill, and I really enjoy it.

A few questions that people have asked me about working at a treadmill desk:
–Is it noisy? Not really. I don’t have a high-end treadmill, it’s a ProForm Crosswalk that I bought off Craigslist for $125 and even so the noise factor is not bad. For example, my husband and I work in the same office in our house, and he isn’t bothered by the noise level although (since he sits at a traditional desk), the motor is a lot closer to his ear level than to mine. In addition, no one has ever said “what’s that noise?” when I’ve been talking on the phone while on the treadmill.
–Do you get tired? If you’re used to a very low level of physical activity you would probably need time to work up to long stretches on the treadmill, or you would need to set the desk up such that you could alternate between walking and sitting. I’m not in Ironman shape but I’m fairly active to start out with and enjoy walking, and I find it to be a pretty pleasant level of exertion.
–Does it get you in shape? It depends on how you define “in shape.” A treadmill desk isn’t going to train you to run a marathon, but it’s more exercise than you would think. Even if you walk 5 hours a day at 0.8 miles per hour, that’s 20 miles a week, and I’m betting that most of us don’t walk 20 miles a week to start out with. In my case, I used to believe that I gained 10 pounds when my daughter was born, and now I realize that I gained 10 pounds when I started sitting at a desk all day.

Another good use I’ve found for my treadmill is taking “fast walk breaks” during the day. When I’m feeling tired or struggling with a difficult passage to translate, I turn off the computer monitors, put on my iPod and walk at about 3 miles per hour for 15-20 minutes. This really clears my head, and it’s another good fitness boost.


Corinne McKay

Update on tags in OmegaT

A while ago, I wrote about both my love of the free and open source translation environment tool OmegaT and my frustration with tags in OmegaT. Since then, I’ve found that the easiest solution, as long as the document doesn’t contain complex formatting, is to save the document as plain text, then translate in OmegaT and then use your word processing program to put the formatting back in.

In order to make sure that the tags are really gone, I save the document as .txt in OpenOffice.org, then open it in a text editor (I use Kate, but any text editor will do) and save it again, then place that file into the source folder in the OmegaT project. This method is especially helpful when a client sends a “Word document” that is actually an OCR of a PDF (talk about tags!!).