Translation industry news

Congratulations to the hardworking ATA members who have successfully launched the ATA Science and Technology Division. This division isn’t language specific, it’s open to translators in any language combination who translate science and technology materials. The new division is under the leadership of Acting Administrator Karen Tkaczyk and Acting Assistant Administrator Steven Marzuola.

Back in 2008, I wrote about Jost Zetzsche’s then-new website Translators Training, which offers side-by-side comparisons of 20 different translation tools (and shows how they translate the same Word document). I’ve always thought this website was a great idea, and Jost just announced that all of the Series 1 videos on the site are now free! If you want to go beyond the basics, the site offers a Premium Content subscription for 41.99 euros per year.

Two pieces of breaking news from the translation trenches:

• Judy and Dagmar Jenner’s book The Entrepreneurial Linguist is now available for purchase. Judy is not only a very successful freelance translator but also has an MBA in marketing, and this book offers “the business school approach to freelance translation.” Many of us in the industry have already benefited from Judy’s Entrepreneurial Linguist workshops, so this book promises to be excellent.
• Attorneys and translators Cynthia Hazelton and Marianne Reiner recently announced the launch of TransConnect, their boutique translation studio offering French<>English translation by lawyers, for lawyers. This looks like a great model for translation collaboration as Cynthia is a native English speaker and Marianne is a native French speaker; Thoughts on Translation will try to interview them in a few months to see how it’s going!

Happy Friday!

This past weekend, I had the good fortune to attend Translate in the Catskills, a conference on target language writing skills for translators. Where to start? This conference made me think more about the actual quality and style of my translations than I have in a long time, and made me realize that there are concrete techniques that all of us can use to make our translations sound less like translations.

The presenters for the Catskills conference were really top-notch (you can read their bios on the site linked to above) and we literally talked translation from dawn to dusk. Although it bothers me when people complain that the ATA conference sessions focus too much on general information for beginners, I have to admit that it was really invigorating to get into the nuances of higher-level translation topics in a group of experienced translators. Here are a few snippets of what I learned at this conference:

• Most of us focus too much on the “hard” words in our translations, while it’s the “easy” words that make something sound smooth or sound like a translation. We’re so intent on making sure that our subject-specific terminology is correct that then we write things like “the decision of management” instead of “management’s decision,” and wonder why our translations sound so clunky.
• Every language has its pitfalls. Once you learn to identify these, it’s a lot easier to write around them. For example, French writers, especially attorneys and corporate writers, use a lot of passive voice. Also (and like many other languages), French uses “of” for possessives as in the example above. How we translate these constructions makes a big difference in the readability of our translations.
• It helps to say it in your own words. When you’re stuck on how to translate something but you understand the concept, think of how you would explain that concept to someone in your own language, then start your translation from there. Don’t get so fixated on remaining faithful to the original that you write something convoluted where something simple and clear would do.
• If you use a translation environment tool, always proofread larger chunks of text, not one segment at a time. Personally I am a big fan of TenTs, and I use OmegaT or Wordfast for pretty much every document I translate unless it is a non-OCRable PDF. I find that I can work about 10% faster by using a TenT, and I think that I am much less likely to skip a word or sentence if I’m looking at one segment at a time. However, from the text flow point of view, TenTs make the job harder; you’re probably much less likely to notice words that you use too often, conflicting verb tenses, etc. when you’re only looking at a few words at a time.

This is the first language-specific conference I’ve attended and I definitely came away hungry for more. Partially, I think that many of us are attracted to translation because we really like to write, but we often lose sight of that aspect of the job. Also, I think it’s really, really rare that we sit down with a bunch of colleagues for two or three hours and talk about how we would translate a set of example sentences. I’ll probably write some additional blog posts about this conference, and I’m definitely hoping that there will be another one like it in the future.

Keep Calm and Carry On seems to be the takeaway from Global Watchtower’s recent survey of 277 freelance language professionals. When asked about the fourth quarter of 2008, more than three quarters of respondents said that their business was either good or satisfactory, despite that quarter’s distinction as the most financially disastrous in recent history. Better yet, although “large numbers” of respondents reported feeling pressured to lower their rates, more than three quarters said that they did not plan to charge less during the upcoming quarter. You can read a summary of the survey’s results on the Global Watchtower website, or register there to receive a free copy of the full results.