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.
Nubbin
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!
Euro vs euros: why translators need each other
Every once in a while, I get a glimpse of some of the ways in which translators (and probably other obsessive “word people” too!) are different from the rest of the population, and thus why we need to stick together. Earlier this week, a French translation listserve that I belong to engaged in a lively discussion of whether, in English, the correct plural of “euro” (as in the currency denomination) is “euro” or “euros.” While a non-translator might feel hopelessly nit-picky for even thinking about this type of issue, the listserve members had clearly spent some time mulling it over even before the question came up. One member pointed out that the actual bank notes say “100 euro” “50 euro,” etc. and that other currencies (yen, yuan) are invariable in the plural (1 yen/1,ooo yen, etc.); others pointed to the Guardian style guide’s use of “euros” (“he will be fined a few thousand euros”) and to the fact that the New York Times uses “euros” as well. Yet another example of the value of associating with like-minded translators!
This blog's banner photo
I’ve received several e-mails from people asking about the banner photo on this blog. I purchased it from iStockphoto, and the photographer is Hanoded Photography. Those of you who have traveled in the Himalaya will recognize this as a Buddhist Mani stone, bearing the inscription “Om mani padme hum,” often translated as “Hail to the jewel in the heart of the lotus” (but also translated as many other things, and often deliberately not translated at all). The photographer’s description of this photo is “A Mani stone (prayer stone, inscribed with the Buddhist mantra: ‘om mani padme hum’) in the Bumthang Valley in Bhutan.” Hanoded Photography has a large collection of beautiful photos on iStock, I purchased this one because it reminds me of one of my favorite places, Nepal.
IBM's new English>Arabic translation device
Here is an interesting article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on IBM’s new English>Arabic translation software and hardware, with an interesting comment from ATA public relations guru Kevin Hendzel. I actually found the most disturbing part of the article to be the statistic that of 1,000 employees at the newly constructed U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, only 33 speak Arabic and only 6 of those are fluent. Here’s a thought: what about allocating some of the $75 million that the Pentagon spent on translation research last year for foreign language education? Just a thought!