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.
Technology
An interesting post on open source machine translation
Serdar Yegulaip wrote an interesting post entitled “Talk to Me, Openly” that is up on InformationWeek’s site, dealing with open source machine translation. While there are a number of very active open source translation memory projects out there, with OmegaT being one of the most popular among freelancers, open source machine translation hasn’t sparked the same level of interest.
Personally, I find machine translation more interesting than threatening. I think that the day when human translators will be put out of business by MT is far, far off, likely beyond the lifetimes of any of us who are working in the industry now. However, I think that MT’s use in areas where speed and cost are more important objectives than quality, or where writers are willing to use a very restricted vocabulary, is really interesting. For example, at a translation technology seminar that I attended this summer, the presenter gave an anecdotal example of MT being used to translate online knowledgebase pages for a large technology company. Apparently, when the company then surveyed people who read the machine-translated help pages (and who knew that the page they were reading had been translated by a computer rather than a human), their rates of satisfaction with those pages were only slightly lower than the satisfaction rates of people who read similar documents translated by humans. To me, that’s more intriguing than anything else, and I’m interested to see if the open source community jumps on the bandwagon.
Blogging about my book; Google alerts
Freelance Translators From Scratch is running a number of interesting posts about my book
How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator. Although the book has been out for about a year and a half (and I’m brainstorming about the second edition!) it seems to have gathered a lot of momentum lately; maybe everyone who’s in love with someone bilingual is buying it for Valentine’s Day? Yesterday was actually its highest Amazon sales rank ever, in the 14,000s, meaning that it was the 14,000th most popular book out of the several million on Amazon, and #80 in its category, Job Hunting and Career Guides. At any rate, thanks to the Freelance Translators From Scratch for these articles!
A tip to go along with this: I found out about these posts because I have a Google Alert on my name. Someone in the local freelancers’ group I’m in turned me on to Google Alerts, which she called “a clipping service for the Web, but it’s free!” Of course, unless you add some additional identifiers to your name, such as “Corinne McKay translator” or “Corinne McKay book” (in my case I also have an Alert on my book title) you get alerted to the electronic goings-on of everyone else with your name. Personally I enjoy keeping tabs on the world’s other Corinne McKays as they go about their business selling real estate in Massachusetts or coaching volleyball teams in the Yukon (no, really!); but maybe that’s just me!
A helpful post on translation client ratings
About Translation’s most recent post is an excellent summary of translation client rating services. These forums, which are either e-mail lists or websites, can help both beginning and established translators determine whether a translation client is a reliable payer. Definitely worth a visit!
A helpful post on text-to-speech (TTS) tools
Naomi de Moraes just posted some excellent introductory information on text-to-speech (TTS) tools on the blog of the ATA Language Technology Division. Most translators are familiar with speech-to-text tools such as Dragon Naturally Speaking, which allow you to dictate your translations. Text-to-speech tools are the opposite; software that reads text to you. Naomi’s post has some interesting ways that translators (and other people too!) could use these tools.