Here is a useful post, from Translator Support, about RSS feeds and some translation-related sites that offer feeds. For a long time I was mystified by feeds (and I’ve now publicly admitted this!), but Blogging With Beth removed my feed-based shame and confusion, and I’m now a devotee of Firefox’s Sage plugin. Sage is tied to your computer, which can be a plus and a minus. When I’m traveling I kind of like being liberated from my feeds, but if you like to take your feeds with you, a browser-based feed reader is probably better.
The first step in translation quality: a qualified translator
Last week, I was visiting the website of a certain country’s embassy in the U.S. (yes, I’m deliberately protecting their identity because they’ve promised that the issue is being rectified!) and just out of curiosity, checked to see if they had any information about translation, since this country’s official language is not English.
I was at first excited to see that they did, in fact, have a section about translation, but my elation soon turned to something akin to horror when I saw that their translation advice was to visit the yellow pages to find a translator since the embassy itself does not offer translation services. This made me think that many such establishments are in a similar bind: they get requests for translation services, but don’t want to handle the requests themselves and therefore need to direct people somewhere else. So, here are a few tips on finding a translator, and on why the yellow pages aren’t the best option:
- Being bilingual does not a translator make. Translators need other skills such as specialized vocabulary, familiarity with the conventions of the industry, business management skills, etc. In addition, professional translators should be working into their native language only, not into their second, third, etc. language. Using someone who is established as a professional translator is key.
- Finding a qualified translator is the first step in procuring a quality translation, and a sloppy translation is expensive, embarrassing and time-consuming. Why not do it right the first time? Your brother’s girlfriend may have studied abroad in Italy, but she’s probably not the best choice to translate your annual report into Italian.
- Probably the best resource for finding a translator (assuming that you are not plugged in to the industry and don’t have access to a word of mouth referral) is a professional association for translators. In the U.S., the American Translators Association has its member directory online and you can search using pretty much any criteria you would like: location, specialization, language pair, ATA certification, etc. In addition, many states and large metro areas have translators associations with online membership directories too, for example our local Colorado Translators Association also has one, and using a local person can be a good option when you are new to purchasing translations or may need someone with whom you can meet in person.
- Various other countries have active translators associations as well, for example the SFT (France), the ITI (UK), OTTIAQ (Quebec) and many more. These are excellent resources if you are located in those countries, or if you would like to use an in-country translator.
- In certain cases, online translation marketplaces such as ProZ and TranslatorsCafe can be helpful too. Unfortunately, these marketplaces have a bit of a “reverse auction” reputation in the industry, as places where translation buyers go to get rock-bottom rates or insane turnaround times. However, I think that they can be useful when the translation buyer is dealing with an obscure language that is hard to find otherwise, and when the buyer, instead of posting the job on the marketplace’s job board, contacts the translator directly via the website.
An April Fool from Trados?
Although Taco Bell garnered an estimated $1 million in additional revenue from its April Fool’s Day Taco Liberty Bell joke in 1996, I’m guessing translators may be a little less amused by Trados’ announcement that it will discontinue upgrades for Trados 6.5 and earlier and SDLX 2004 and earlier on April 1. Thanks to sleuth Jill Sommer for pointing this out. We’ll see if Trados takes Taco Bell’s “just kidding” approach once the word spreads, or stands by its current policy.
A bestseller of sorts
Lulu, the print-on-demand service that I use to publish my book, is a fun place to visit. I like to think of it as Amazon’s slightly nutty cousin, the weird but cool one who eats the cranberry sauce right out of the bowl at Thanksgiving. Ever since I published my book in the summer of 2006, I’ve made a habit of browsing Lulu’s top 100 sellers, which cover an amusing range of topics from IT to self help to crafts to dating and everything in between. However, I’ll admit that I was, well, ecstatic to see that as of this morning, the humble How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator has broken into the Lulu top 100 at #95, and is in the top 10 for Business and Economics books.
I say this not so much to toot my own horn as to say that successful self-publishing using print on demand is possible, and the market is wide open. If every translator out there has at least one book lurking inside her/him, think what all of us could be reading!
Juvenes Translatores
School outreach, the idea of getting high school students and even younger children interested in and informed about translation, seems to be picking up speed as the current generation of translators reaches out to the next. Today, 27 teenagers, one from each EU member state, will be in Brussels receiving their awards as winners of the first Juvenes Translatores (Latin for “young translators”) contest. At the risk of sounding overly casual, I have to say, how cool is that?
In reading the press release about this contest, a few aspects of it struck me as particularly intriguing. First, over 1,300 17 year-olds from across the EU participated in this contest, in which they had two hours to translate a text about sustainable tourism into one of the EU official languages. Thinking back on my own foreign language skills as a high school senior, I find it very inspirational that over 1,000 European teenagers are even capable of doing this type of test. You can read the passage on the Juvenes Translatores website, and it’s not simple!
Second, the Directorate-General of Translation used this contest as an opportunity to highlight not only the work of the young adults who participated, but also that of its own professional translators who evaluated the students’ translations and picked the winners. Leonard Orban, the European Commissioner for Multilingualism, remarked that “These young people have shown that they are the actors of their own and of the EU’s future. They have built bridges between cultures while assembling words for their translation. I am also proud that the work of our translators, often invisible but indispensable to the EU, is in the limelight today.” This contest struck me as one of those win-win PR/education/outreach events that benefits everyone involved; as part of their prize package, the student winners get to travel to Brussels for the awards ceremony and to visit the Directorate-General of Translation, where they will see the DG’s team of professional translators in action.
School outreach is happening on this side of the Atlantic too; The American Translators Association’s School Outreach Program even supplies all of the materials that ATA members need to give a presentation about careers in translation at their local schools. As the School Outreach Program’s web page says, “The linguists-to-be in America’s classrooms today are sitting next to a whole lot of clients-to-be. The more these future doctors, lawyers, and businesswomen know about our field, the more likely they’ll be to appreciate the importance and complexity of our work and compensate us accordingly.”