Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Technology


Corinne McKay

Switching to a nettop

Desktop PCs are generally intended to last two to five years, so when my desktop turned seven I started to worry. It’s a great computer (home-built using D.J. Bernstein’s standard workstation specifications), but it’s getting a little slow, it sounds like a 747 taking off when it boots up, the front USB ports have fallen slightly inside the case and the hard drive is about 80% full. Everything on the computer is backed up on a RAID 1 system and in my online backups, but I was starting to get nervous about the possibility of a catastrophic failure. Time to go shopping!

I used to be a little skeptical about tiny computers until I bought an Asus Eee netbook and fell in love with it. So when my husband in-house tech support suggested a nettop (Internet+desktop, it took me a minute to get it!), it seemed worth a look. After comparing various machines and their capabilities and features, we settled on an ASRock Ion (I purchased mine from NewEgg but that exact model seems to be sold out). We purchased a second internal hard drive to set up a RAID 1 system and also ordered a video cable to support my second monitor. Here’s the new setup: I posed my glasses case on top of it to show how small it is:

As with most nettops, the ASRock Ion machines consume very little electricity as compared to a standard desktop. This machine was about $400 total, and we estimated that it will pay for itself in about three years through decreased electricity usage. So far I’m extremely happy with it; any other translators out there making the nettop switch?

I also treated myself to a Unicomp ultra-clicky keyboard. The model I purchased is similar to an old-style IBM keyboard and treats you to a very audible “click” when you strike the keys. I don’t mind the sound and I find that the hard-strike keys improve my typing accuracy and cause less hand strain than my old “mushy” keyboard. Plus you sound very productive when you use a keyboard that makes that much noise!


Corinne McKay

A few LinkedIn tips

On Monday evening, Eve Bodeux, Riccardo Schiaffino and I presented a professional development session on “Social Media: Web 2.0 for Translators” for the Colorado Translators Association. I covered LinkedIn and Facebook, Riccardo handled Blogging 101 (you can download Riccardo’s excellent presentation from his website link above) and Eve wrapped things up with Twitter. Given that we covered all of this in an hour and a half, it was a very brief introduction to these topics. However, as one attendee commented, “I feel like for now I can get away without using these technologies but I can’t get away without knowing what they are,  and now I know,” which I thought was a good observation.

My overview of LinkedIn was just that (an overview) without any power-user tips, but I thought I’d share a few suggestions for sprucing up your LinkedIn profile and controlling who can view your information. Feel free to add your own tips too!

-To create a customized link for your LinkedIn public profile (the view of your profile that other people see), click “Profile” and then in the blue shaded box
at the top, look for the line that says “Public Profile.” Then click the “Edit” link at the end of that line. This allows you to change your profile URL from www.linkedin.com/pub/abunchofrandomcode to www.linkedin.com/in/yourname , for example.

-To see how many people have viewed your LinkedIn profile and how many times you have appeared in LinkedIn search results, click “Home” and then look down the
right sidebar for the blue “Who’s viewed my profile” box. If you have the basic (free) LinkedIn account, you can’t see much information about the people who viewed your profile but it is interesting to see how your profile views increase or decrease over time. On a side note, Viadeo (a LinkedIn-esque site directed at Europeans) shows you the identity of everyone who views your profile even if you have a free account.

-To control who can see your profile photo, click “Settings” (this is not in the main navigation bar, it’s in the small grey type in the upper right hand corner
next to where it says “Welcome, Your Name”. Once you are in “Settings,” click “My Profile Photo” and then select either “My Connections,” “My Network” or
“Everyone.” A few people at the session were concerned about the general public being able to see their photo. If this applies to you, I would either restrict your photo to only your connections or upload something other than your photo (i.e. make a .jpg of your company name or create a professional-looking avatar of yourself).

-To control who can see your status updates, do as above but click “Status Visibility” and then select an option. Personally, if you are using LI for networking/marketing purposes, I would recommend making your status visible to everyone on the site. I do this, and I am just careful never to say anything that I would not want the whole world to know, such as my physical whereabouts, client gripes, etc. In my experience, more people view your profile if they can read your status updates (and of course if your status updates are interesting).

-To add various outside elements  such as your blog, presentations, travel schedule, etc.  click “Profile” and then scroll down until you see “Applications.” Click that link and you will see a bunch of options; I use the WordPress application to feed my blog into my LinkedIn profile. I think that this keeps my profile looking fresh without much effort on my part.


Corinne McKay

Reader survey: the best and worst things about your CAT tools

In preparation for the  second edition of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator, I’m revising the chapter on translation technology. I’d like to include some “best and worst” observations from translators who use various translation environment tools, so if you are interested in having your comments included (anonymously) in this chapter, please submit them. They can be short: for example I would say:
Wordfast: Best: Excellent documentation, fast, friendly support, love the three years of unlimited upgrades. Overall, I find Wordfast Classic very intuitive to use, and the two-toned interface is easy on the eyes. Worst: I waited years (sounds dramatic but it’s true!) for their new platform-independent version so that I could finally run Wordfast on an all open source system, only to find out that Wordfast Pro does not recognize Microsoft Office-format files that were created in or have ever been opened in OpenOffice. I just don’t get it: a Linux-specific version of a program that requires Microsoft Word (and doesn’t say that up front)?
OmegaT: Best: Free! Simple! Fast! And a great user community. I love OmegaT. Worst: Can’t produce Trados-style uncleaned files without a lot of tinkering. And the tags inside the segments… I know, the tags are there for a reason, but when I’m translating a file that’s been created using OCR software and is thus full of formatting tags, they’re annoying.

Anyone else?


Corinne McKay

Using image searches for translation research

When you’re doing research for a translation, don’t restrict yourself to searching only on text sites. Image searches are really useful as well, and sometimes more so than text searches. Following are a couple of examples I’ve come across lately.

I recently translated a list of advertising keywords for a fashion company. I always find these types of assignments disproportionately hard because you have no context; the source document is just a list of words in a spreadsheet. Doing an image search (I use Google Images but I’m sure there are other good image search engines out there too) really helped, because I wanted to know “what is this thing” more than “what is the meaning of this word.” I also use image searches a lot when I’m translating a document about machinery or manufacturing processes, and I want to see a visual of how the whole apparatus works so that I can translate correctly. In addition, sometimes when I translate non-European French documents (i.e. from West Africa or the Caribbean), certain local terms don’t appear anywhere in my usual text-based term resources but they do appear in image searches.

A colleague in our local translators association clued me in to another great use of image searches: determining someone’s gender based on their name. Obviously if someone has a gender-neutral name, this technique doesn’t help; but when it’s simply a case that you don’t know whether a “foreign” name is typically male or female, it helps a lot. I’ll admit that when I come across many uncommon names, it’s not always obvious to me whether they’re typically male or female and it feels awkward to ask the person to clarify. Often, putting the person’s name into Google Images will immediately give you an entire page of pictures of all men or all women.

Any other translation-related uses for image searches out there?


Corinne McKay

What weather balloons teach us about social networking

If you listened to today’s episode of Science Friday on NPR, you already know this, but it’s still very cool! To mark the Internet’s 40th anniversary, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held a contest, offering a US $40,000 prize to the first team to correctly submit the physical locations of 10 weather balloons moored in public places around the U.S. DARPA correctly surmised that teams would rely on various Web-based strategies, from iPhone apps to Twitter to Facebook, to find the balloons.

The winning team, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (disclosure: my husband’s alma mater, although he had nothing to do with the balloon-finding contest) Media Lab’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, combined a social networking and financial incentives system to obtain the coordinates of all 10 balloons in just nine hours. The team, made up of post-docs and grad students, took just four days to devise and implement their strategy of trackable, personalized referring URLs and financial incentives ($2,000 to the person who  submitted the balloon’s coordinates, $1,000 to the person who referred that person into the network, $500 to the person who referred the referrer, and so on down the line). You can read all about it here.

Obviously for those of us who proudly bear the “geek” label, this contest has a lot of interesting implications. Not least of these is the ways in which this collective problem-solving method could be applied to other “hunting” problems, such as finding missing people, locating rescue equipment needed in natural disasters, etc. Definitely worth a Friday-afternoon read!