Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Translation quality


Corinne McKay

Translating in Lilt: one translator’s experience

This is a guest post by Suzanne Rietveld (suzarieve@gmail.com). Suzanne translates between Dutch and English; she has a background in horticulture and has worked in women’s health—these are her primary translation specializations. She is also an expert reviser and editor and is available for work in these areas.

As a beginning translator, it is quite difficult to decide which systems work and which are not helpful at all. During my Bachelor’s degree program in translation at the Institute for Interpreting and Translation in Utrecht (Netherlands), we had not been introduced to many CAT tools or other digital options at all. We all had to do an introductory course in the CAT tool Deja Vu, (DVX3) and learned how to set up a project, how to import a document, how to confirm segments, and if you were lucky, you managed to export the document as well. It took a lot of time to find the answers to my own questions, and I found out that that is not the way to learn a new system. I managed to acquire the how-to documents which were used with Deja Vu, and that is how I started to use CAT tools.

During my course, I managed to find time to start marketing for paid work as a translator. I really like the challenges that we are faced with. I registered with my first Dutch translation agency and passed their test to translate from Dutch into English, which is my preferred language combination. In the meantime, we still had to work on all school assignments; multiple translations into the two languages. I soon found out that my memory is not always up to scratch and I do not mean the translation memory in my CAT tool. It really takes me some time to think about the right word in the right place. I have always been aware of this—and there’s no chance I will ever become an interpreter—but I needed to address it in my translation business.

So, I was really focused on getting some help from machine translation and tried SmartCat for a while. I was very happy with the results because it helped me with vocabulary. In SmartCat, the source text will be translated for you with machine translation and the target text is filled in for you from the start. I found out that this had some downsides for me. With a full segment translated, the job for me as a translator had been reduced to the job of a post-editor. I am quite fond of editing – I had quite some experience as a Dutch editor-in-chief – and I did get the hang of it, but I did find out that when using SmartCat, I did not get the results that I expected, or the quality of translation that I would have translated from scratch.

That was the moment that I came across the translation tool Lilt. It is quite similar to SmartCat as a translation tool, with the biggest difference being that you will get a translation of your source text, but this appears as a suggestion and not as your target text, which you still have to type from scratch. If you choose the same word as in the Lilt suggestion, you can accept the choice by clicking Enter. If you make changes to the structure of the sentence or choose different words, the Lilt suggestion changes on the go. The system is learning while you go and that is quite apparent.

Because I was eager to use a lot of my own terminology, I started to use the translation memory options right from the start. I managed to align most of my previous translations (including a book on prostitutes in Amsterdam, a website on leadership skills and team building, and my school assignments) and uploaded them to my TM. To use your own TMs in Lilt, you have to become a PRO member, which starts at US $15 per month. With all the school work and paid jobs, this has been well worth it. I managed to translate my assignments quicker and was more confident that I used the right terminology.

It is quite easy to import different documents in Lilt, and this works great. The only thing is that documents should not be open on your screen and saved as docx in Word, but I also managed to import Excel sheets, PowerPoint slides and PDFs. Once the translation is completed, it is again very easy to export the document and save it in the place that you want. At the end of my third year in my program, I had found myself a place to gain some work experience and started to work as a translator for a publisher in floriculture. I translated 30,000 words in three months and used Lilt throughout the entire project without any regrets. In hindsight, I should have let the reviser make changes in Lilt as well. Now, I exported all my texts a little too early on in the process and still made many changes during my own revision round and afterward I accepted the reviser’s changes, also in Word. To achieve the best results, I guess the trick is to stay in your CAT tool as long as possible, but many of you probably learned this the hard way as well.

The support team at Lilt is great. There is a chat option in the right corner, and I have made use of it every now and then. The team is very helpful, and it is evident that they want to become bigger and better all the time.

There is one thing that they still have to get right: the use of capital letters and punctuation marks. In the current version of Lilt, all commas, semi-colons and periods are anchored to the target text. If you choose to use the last word (with the period attached to it) earlier in the sentence, you have to delete the period manually. This is okay-ish, but it seems to happen quite often, and with all the different types of punctuation marks, so it gets quite annoying at some point.

So, I have used Lilt during my work experience, for school assignments, and for some private customers. I trained as a horticulturist and garden designer in the past and would like to specialize as a translator in these subjects. So, I convinced myself to get some experience and translate a lot more documents on this subject into the two languages. Lilt remains a great tool to use and it is good to see how quickly it is learning and improving.

I am now in the position of having to make choices. I guess I should try my CAT tool Deja Vu again and use it with a plug-in from DeepL or something similar. At the moment, I do the odd translation job for different translation agencies. I found out that the ones outside of the Netherlands only let me translate into my mother language, which is Dutch. I do work in their web editors and do miss the help of machine translation, but during my program, it has been better for me to keep practicing without machine translation. I have stopped using Lilt for now, also because of the monthly fee and the fact that I haven’t had much use for it over the past few months.

As I said before, I am looking for the next project which will offer me the opportunity to try a CAT tool with a plugin, and I will give you all an update if this appears to be a better choice. It would be great if you can leave some feedback for me with information about other options.


Corinne McKay

Text to speech proofreading: worth a try!

Because I’m not a naturally gifted proofreader, I’m always looking for new and helpful proofreading tools. I have proofreading issues:

  • I read too fast, and start skimming
  • I don’t enjoy proofreading, so I put it off
  • Because I’m not naturally gifted at this task, I fear that I’m missing things in the text, and I go over and over (and over and over) it to an extent that is not helpful

In a previous post, I wrote about PerfectIt, an add-on for Microsoft Word. I’m still using PerfectIt, and I find it useful; it’s more of a consistency-enforcer than anything else (when you intersperse grey with gray, like-minded with like minded, Chief Executive with Chief executive, and so on), but it always catches more of those errors than I do.

After hearing several other translators rave about text-to-speech proofreading, I decided to give it a try. Simply put, this involves having your computer read your translation back to you. There are various pieces of software that can do this, but if you have a recent version of Microsoft Word, it’s built in. In Office 365, just click the Review tab, then you’ll see a huge letter A (like the big E on the eye chart) with some sound waves bouncing off it, with the button text “Read Aloud.” That’s what you want. Just click it, and the robo-narrator will pick up where your cursor is, and start reading your translation to you.

Once the narrator–in my version of Word, this is Microsoft David Desktop–starts reading, you can adjust the speed to your preferred pace. David’s default pace is about 150 words a minute. So if you want him to read you a day’s worth of work–say 2,000-3,000 words, that would take about half an hour if you never paused him. Of course you do pause–that’s the whole idea–but the point is that this is a doable investment of time. And David…what can I say about David? I wouldn’t want to listen to him read an audio book, but he’s not cringe-worthy to listen to. Which is probably good; he won’t lull you to sleep, but he’s easy enough to understand.

So far, I’ve uncovered a few benefits of text to speech proofreading:

  • Most helpfully, it amplifies (literally) errors that my eyes would probably skim over, but that my ears catch right away. Things like “The employees were direct (instead of “directed”) to keep a log of their activities,” or “There are many guides and reference book (instead of “books”),” or “The Word (instead of “World”) Bank,” and so on.
  • It forces you to slow down to the narrator’s pace. As mentioned above, I have a big problem with skimming. Even if I use the gold-standard proofreading method–printing the thing out and going through it line by line with a ruler–I still have issues with reading too fast. But with Dear David, I can’t do that. He just chugs along doing his HAL-esque thing, so I slow down to his pace.
  • You can look at the source document while David reads the target. Let’s say you have a series of numbers in the text: “In 2016, the project distributed 3,284 boxes of candy. In 2017, this rose 18.52%, and in 2018, it is expected that candy distribution could reach 5,659 boxes.” If you’re proofreading that on paper or on the screen, you have to constantly glance back and forth: was that 5,659 boxes, or 5,596, for example. But while David reads what you typed, you can watch the source document to see if the figures match up. Big win!
  • One caveat: obviously this technique doesn’t help with homophone errors: you’re/your, it’s/its, etc. And–for me at least–those types of errors are getting harder and harder to catch, because we’re exposed to them all the time. A little part of me died when I read “You’re brother” in the New York Times Magazine. That’s a story for a different day, but something to consider.

I’m now a fan of this technique; readers, any thoughts on it?


Corinne McKay

PerfectIt: a good addition to your editing arsenal

One of my longstanding and favorite clients recently suggested that their translators and editors start using PerfectIt, an editing tool that works within MS Word. After trying it, I found its features very helpful for certain types of translations. This is not an affiliate deal, but I think into-English translators should consider adding PerfectIt to their arsenal of editing tools.

PerfectIt is not really a spelling and grammar checker, but rather an enforcer of consistency, and of consistent style and formatting. I may find it more helpful than many people do, because I don’t have the best internal consistency-checker. I’m the person who’s always scrolling back through the document, wondering if I used CEO or Chief Executive Officer back in the previous section. PerfectIt is great for just these kinds of things. Once installed, it works within MS Word, via a button on the navigation ribbon. After launching PerfectIt, the look and feel are pretty similar to MS Word’s own spelling and grammar checker. The tool cycles through a variety of checks, finds any problems, and asks you whether you want to fix them or leave them.

As an example, I used PerfectIt last night to check a 5,000 word translation. I had translated this file in Trados–which has some built in QA checks. Then I had spelling and grammar-checked it in MS Word. Still, PerfectIt found many areas for improvement, such as:

  • Words that I hyphenated in some places but not others (underutilized under-utilized)
  • Words where I had used two different spellings that are both correct, but inconsistent (gray, grey)
  • Expressions that I capitalized in some places but not others (the Government’s agenda, the government’s agenda)
  • Bullet items that ended in inconsistent punctuation; PerfectIt asks you whether you want to end bullet items with no punctuation, a comma, or a semicolon, and then it enforces that rule
  • Inconsistent capitalization in section headings (Initial Caps versus ALL CAPS)
  • Acronyms that I defined more than once instead of only in the first instance
  • Various other inconsistencies that are hard to find in Word unless you enjoy macros and regular expressions: numbers below 10 not spelled out, improper thousands separators in numbers converted from European format, etc.

The checking process for a 5,000 word document took about 10 minutes.

Of course the hitch is that your document must be in MS Word, because PerfectIt does not work as a standalone program or as a plugin (plug-in? plug in?) to any other program. You could (sort of) hack a similar process together using Word macros and regular expressions, or make an extensive QA checklist and run it manually. But I do think PerfectIt is worth a look for most translations. There’s a 14-day free trial, and the paid version is US $99.

Readers, any feedback on PerfectIt or other editing tools?


Corinne McKay

Adding value with client-specific style sheets

Especially if you work with direct clients–although this could definitely work with agencies too–client-specific style sheets are a great way to improve the quality and consistency of your translations, while adding value for your clients. Style sheets are different from glossaries, although they share some of the same features and benefits.

If you Google “style sheet,” the first definition you’ll get is “a manual detailing the house style of a particular publisher, publication, etc.” House style is a concept with which many clients are unfamiliar. As the definition correctly points out, entities like publishers, newspapers, etc. have extensive house style manuals. The comma wars between the New Yorker and the New York Times are a good example; word-based businesses generally care very much about style. Entities such as the World Health Organization also have extensive style guides. But many clients do not, and that’s where you come in.

Before you get to client-specific style sheets, know which style manual you want to follow in your translations. In the US, I’d say that the standard is the Chicago Manual of Style. It’s important to have a preferred style guide. Years ago, Grant Hamilton taught me that when a client asks a style-related question, such as how you feel about the singular use of “they,” or whether you should capitalize “iPads” at the start of a sentence, it’s good to be able to point to a style guide. It certainly sounds more authoritative than saying, “I think it looks/sounds better that way.” So that’s your first step: pick a style guide.

Then, move on to client-specific style sheets. You can create these using a simple Excel sheet or even a Word table. I tend to use Word tables because they’re easy for clients to navigate. A style sheet can contain nearly anything that you find helpful for purposes of consistency, but one thing I find–over and over again–is that my clients are not good about deciding upon and using consistent titles for their employees in English. I translate a lot of content marketing and corporate communications materials where my employees often talk about their employees: who’s doing what, who spoke at what conference, who’s been promoted. So for each client, I prepare a special style sheet, called “Names and Titles,” containing:

  • A list of their key employees, with their names spelled correctly and in the form that the employee prefers. Yes, people within a company consistently spell colleagues’ names wrong, and some people like a certain styling of their name. Some people always use their middle initial, some have two last names but don’t like them hyphenated, or do like them hyphenated, and so on. The list of names is crucial; I find misspelled employee names in my clients’ materials all the time.
  • The employees’ French job titles.
  • My proposed English equivalents for the French titles. Many of my clients’ current English title stylings are all over the map: even within the same document, the same person might be referred to as “President,” “CEO,” and “Chief Executive Officer.” Some clients will have strong preferences about these titles, while others will simply leave it up to you. But the main thing is to create this document and then enforce consistency; every time that person’s name appears in print, it’s in the same style and with the same target-language title.

Style guides can contain a whole range of information: the company’s location names, product names, and any wording preferences. For example I once worked for a client that insisted on using the European floor numbering system in English. So instead of saying first floor, second floor, etc., they said ground floor, first floor, etc. I was not in favor of this, and explained to the client that if you send an American to “the first floor,” they’re going to walk in the door and think that they’re there. But the point of a style guide isn’t to beat your client into agreeing with you: it’s to make sure that your translations are consistent. So, into the style guide “ground floor” went.

I highly recommend creating a style guide for every client for whom you work regularly. Readers, any other thoughts on style guides or what could/should be included in them?


Corinne McKay

The direct-to-direct client route: can it work?

I’ve noticed a trend, or at least a micro-trend, among the students who take my classes for beginning freelancers: more and more of them are interested in working with direct clients right off the bat. Typically, these are students who know that their language skills are solid; for example they currently work in a job where they use their non-native language all the time, or where translation is one of their job tasks, and they have significant experience in the business world, just not as freelancers. Is this a viable pathway? Is it a smart pathway? Let’s take a closer look.

In my mind, a translator has four core skills: language(s), writing, specialization(s), and business skills. In an ideal world, we’d all have those in equal measure. And certainly, some of those skills are deal-breakers: if your source language reading skills or your target language writing skills are terrible, you’re simply not going to make it as a translator. And in countries/regions where, when you say “I’m a translator,” it’s assumed that you have a degree in translation, that may be a deal-breaker (for better or worse, not the case in the US, where translation programs seem to be dwindling rather than expanding).

I’d also theorize that there are some market factors underlying this trend. The hardest market niche to break into is the middle; the edges of the market are easier. And in our industry (my take here…feel free to disagree), the edges are huge agencies, which base their hiring primarily or even exclusively on their own tests, and direct clients, who will trust that you can do what you say you can do. In the middle, you’re mostly looking at small to medium agencies, which often, and understandably, have barriers to entry such as three to five years’ experience, ATA certification or a Master’s in translation, and thus are not a great option for people with solid skills but not much experience. A typical student in this situation will tell me something like The higher-quality agencies won’t take me because I don’t have enough experience, and I’m not interested in working for the Wal-Marts of translation or they don’t need my specialization, so I’m thinking of just going straight to direct clients.

My honest answer to the direct-to-direct client question is “I’m not sure…I see pluses and minuses.” On the plus side:

  • For translators who work in specializations that many agencies don’t handle (sports marketing, art history, nanotechnology), it may be the only way to pursue that specialization.
  • For translators who work in language pairs with a lot of downward price pressure (English-Spanish, English-Russian, etc.), direct clients offer a way around the reverse auction scene that prevails on online job boards.
  • I think that many direct clients are less concerned with formal qualifications than with what you can do for them: if you can solve their problem, you’re in.

But then again:

  • To do this, you have to be really, really sure that your language skills are good enough. The direct client market is not the place to be working on your language skills.
  • You have to get some objective assessment of your translation skills: if you’ve never done a translation that anyone else has reviewed, don’t start pursuing direct clients just yet.
  • You don’t know what you don’t know, and that can lead to a lot of problems. Example: I recently translated a marketing brochure for one of my direct clients. When they sent me the pre-press PDF, it included a bunch of errors (text pasted incorrectly, etc.), and a tagline that didn’t make sense. But I never would have seen this, had I not told them to send me the pre-press PDF; things can go wrong when you don’t even know what to ask.

Wise readers, over to you: thoughts?