This is another image from iStockphoto, “Uluru at Sunset II” by Timothy Ball
Dealing with tags in OmegaT
I’m still very, very happy with my recent switch from Heartsome to OmegaT, but one thing I’m still mastering in OmegaT is the use of tags in formatted documents.
Tags in OmegaT aren’t a big issue if your translation work consists of documents that don’t have much formatting, or in which the formatting isn’t very important. However, most of my clients want their translations to look exactly the same in English as they do in French, so the formatting tags are critically important. If you’re used to working in or at least looking at a markup language like HTML, the tags that OmegaT inserts don’t look that odd. When you’re translating in OmegaT, you have to reproduce these tags in the target segment in order for it to be formatted like the source segment, and OmegaT has a handy “tag validation” feature that lets you know if you’ve missed any tags.
The issue that I have is that, as OmegaT’s user manual says, “Tags are usually not taken into account when considering string similarity for matching purposes.” My problem is that I get a lot of fuzzy matches where the text in two segments is identical or very similar, but the tags are completely different. For example, the segment “1.3.1) For ongoing needs” would come up as a fuzzy match for “<f0>1.3.1) For ongoing</f0><f1>needs</f1> “. So far, I haven’t found a way to deal with this other than either a) going character by character through the suggested match and inserting the tags into the text or b) inserting the tagged source segment into the target segment field and then copying and pasting in the matching text from the fuzzy match box. If anyone has suggestions on how to deal with this, I would love to hear them!
Another option that OmegaT’s manual suggests, and on some documents I think this might actually save time, is to remove all or most of the formatting from the source document in order to minimize the number of tags that appear in the source segments. Then, the translator could go back and re-format the document after the translation is finished. I also find it helpful to keep an OpenOffice.org document open with the source text so that I can refer to it when I can’t easily see what the tags’ purpose is.
Proofreaders' marks reference pages
If you’re looking for a quick reference sheet of proofreaders’ marks (and I promise, using them is so much faster than doing the corrections in longhand), here are two that seem useful: one from Merriam-Webster and one from Espresso Graphics. Both of these can be printed on one page, and they include helpful examples for each mark. Jenny Frost also recently sent me a link to her free online grammar checker that might be useful as well!
Some thoughts on social networking tools
Like many independent professionals these days, I’ve started using a few social networking tools such as Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn and MySpace. My experience with them is fairly limited, but I’ve been thinking about some of the positives and negatives of using these websites for networking and marketing.
To me, the primary advantage of social networking sites is that they make it very easy for someone to find and contact you, especially if you don’t have a very visible website for your business. Rather than having to have your e-mail address, or searching for your website and then finding your contact information, the person who’s looking for you can simply type your name into the social networking site’s search box and contact you right from your page. In addition, social networking sites make it easy to find “friends of friends” who you might want to contact or work with, and you can also easily search for people who share a certain characteristic with you, like your alma mater, profession, home town, etc. Social networking sites also eliminate the need to keep an updated e-mail address book for people who you contact infrequently, since you can just contact them via the site.
Social networking sites are also a good way to cross-promote your blog if you have one. Facebook and Ning both allow you to feed your blog directly onto your page on their site (other social networking sites may offer this feature too, I just haven’t tried it!).
Of the sites listed above, LinkedIn is, to me, the most “professional” and also the most controllable. There is almost no room to include personal information, and other people can’t post anything to your page without your approval; for example if someone writes a recommendation about you, it doesn’t appear on your page until you approve it. On Facebook, you have to adjust your privacy settings quite carefully if you don’t want all of your “friends” to be able to see photos, comments, etc. that people have posted of and about you. Even if the most sordid moments of your life are far from tabloid fodder, you might not necessarily want your clients to see photos of you with 80’s hair or comments from your friends asking for your lasagna recipe, so this is something to consider when setting up your profile.
Ning is interesting in that it allows you to create your own social network for a group of people. Recently, the all-women freelancers group I’m in, Boulder Media Women set up a Ning site, and I also joined Office Walkers, a Ning group for people who use treadmill desks.
Overall, LinkedIn is my favorite of these networking sites; I don’t have to wade through a news feed about who’s playing online Scrabble or deal with flashing ads for weight loss products, and LinkedIn allows me to easily browse for people who I’d like to add to my network. So far, I’ve gotten many more business contacts through my blog than through LinkedIn or Facebook, but I think that these sites are worth joining in order to make yourself more visible on the Web.
Editing skills; the USDA Grad School
Recently I’ve been taking some copy editing classes with Alice Levine, a Boulder-based editor and trainer whose praises I’ve sung here before. In the translation industry, I think it’s not uncommon that translators who earn a client’s trust are often “promoted” into the role of a translation editor, although very few of us have extensive training in editing in our target language. These classes have brought me to a few realizations about editing and how it applies to translation.
- I should have paid attention in 11th grade journalism class when we studied proofreaders’ marks. Now that I’ve spent six years writing longhand corrections on my own and other translators’ translations, I’m completely sold on the value of proofreaders’ marks. They’re much faster than crossing out and rewriting all of the corrected words, they fit better on a single-spaced page and they make the editing job a little more interesting too!
- Target language editing skills are critical to our work as translators. In my case, I’ve invested a great deal of my professional development time in maintaining and improving my source language skills, but very little time in improving my English language skills, which are critically important to the quality of my work.
- We translators get complacent about our target language skills. It’s rare that I hear into-English translators really get into the nuances of effect versus affect, insure versus ensure, that versus which, and in which cases you need or don’t need serial commas. Again, concepts such as these are critical to the quality of our translations and shouldn’t be ignored.
Another great tip I picked up in Alice’s class is the variety of correspondence courses offered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Grad School. It’s an unlikely location (or maybe not!) for affordable (about $355 each) graduate level correspondence courses on topics such as Editing, Proofreading, Project Management and Business Law, but this looks like a true gold mine of topics that relate to the work that most freelance translators do. Many of these are traditional/offline correspondence courses where you complete the work on paper and mail it in to an instructor who gives you feedback before you progress to the next lesson. Has anyone out there taken one of these courses? And if so, what were your impressions?