Thoughts On Translation

I will go back to writing translation-specific posts, but here’s an update on the treadmill desk based on my (admittedly still limited!) experiences this week.

• So far I still really like it, the adjustment has actually been much easier than I thought. I had planned to start by using it a few hours at a time, but I’ve found that I can use it for almost all of my work time. If I need to really focus on something on my screen, I just stop the treadmill and stand on the belt, then turn it back on. I haven’t noticed a major change in my work speed or accuracy.
• It’s worth experimenting with the treadmill speed. So far I’ve found that the recommended pace of 0.8 or 0.9 miles per hour often feels unnaturally slow. Right now (as I’m typing this) I’m using 1.2 miles per hour and it feels much more comfortable. Also, I find that if I’m just reading, for example reading my RSS feeds, I can do 2+ miles per hour.
• It’s amazing how quickly the distance adds up. Last night I checked my e-mail and almost didn’t turn the treadmill on because I thought I would only be at the computer for a few minutes, and lo and behold I walked half a mile. And we’ve all heard the health recommendations about walking 10,000 steps a day; even at a very slow pace of 50 steps a minute, you’ll reach 10,000 steps in a little over 3 hours.
• A vibration dampening mat really helps. My office has a hardwood floor and my treadmill, a ProForm Crosswalk LS, is on the loud side. In the Home Depot flooring section, I bought a thick rubber “anti-fatigue mat,” which you sometimes see in restaurant kitchens, and put it under the treadmill’s motor section. This cuts the noise drastically, to the point where it’s now at the “white noise” level. The Steelcase Walkstation promises that it’s “whisper quiet,” but for $125 for the used treadmill and $20 for the rubber mat, I’m quite happy with my setup.
• There’s a Ning group for people who use treadmill desks, Office Walkers.

As one of those translators who’s always said, “I love everything about my job except sitting at a desk all day,” I’ve been intrigued for a while by the idea of the treadmill desk. Exercising while you work has been in the news of late, ever since Dr. James Levine, an obesity researcher at the Mayo Clinic, posited the idea that most desk-based workers would lose about 50 pounds a year if they walked at a very slow (1 mile per hour or less) speed while working, rather than sitting in a chair. Levine’s research also showed that most people can do normal office work such as reading off a computer screen, typing and talking on the phone while walking slowly on a treadmill. Here is an article about it from USA Today.

Here in Boulder we’re always looking for new ways to exercise; not surprisingly the Treadmill Desk blog is written by a guy in Boulder, and after reading it I got inspired. I fall into the category that fits many home-based office workers; the flexible schedule allows me to exercise enough to stay in decent shape, but on many days, my run or bike ride gets pushed from before lunch to after lunch to the end of the work day to “now it’s time for dinner” and either never happens or is radically abbreviated.

Since I don’t have $6,000 burning a hole in my pocket, the commercially produced Steelcase WalkStation wasn’t an option. Based on the advice from the Treadmill Desk blog, I bought a used treadmill for $125 off Craigslist and with the help of two old shelving boards we had in the basement (one to hold my monitors at treadmill eye level, one to put across the treadmill’s arms to hold my keyboard, mouse and day planner), I was in business in about half an hour.

So far, I like it. Although the treadmill I bought, a ProForm Crosswalk LS, doesn’t get high ratings for snazziness, it is constructed really well for use with the treadmill desk. For me at least (5′7″), the treadmill’s arm rails are exactly the right height for use with the keyboard, and the treadmill works well at a very slow speed, 0.7 or 0.8 mph, which I turn up when I’m talking on the phone and don’t have to look at the computer screen. On the Crosswalk, I can put my cordless phone in the MP3 player holder and a cup with pens and pencils in the water bottle slot, and it has wide side rails that I can stand on if I need to stop walking for a minute. And it’s amazing how the distance adds up; even at 0.8 miles per hour, if you do that 5 hours a day, you’re already at 4 miles.

Anyone else out there using one? Here’s a photo:

It’s interesting how some linguistic issues seem to get solved and then are up for solution again, as seems to be the case with gendered pronouns in English. The first wave of gender-neutral language was inspired by the realization that many professions that had traditionally been all male (fireman, mailman) were now becoming more gender integrated, giving rise to terms like firefighter and letter carrier. Likewise, we realized that the default “he” might rub half the population the wrong way, and the proposed solution was to always include both genders, like “Every student should bring his/her own calculator.”

As gender-neutral language has evolved, he/she has fallen out of favor and been deemed clunky, and a few alternatives are floating around. The easiest end-run around the he/she issue is to pluralize the subject and use “they” or “their,” as in “Translators must bring their own dictionaries to the exam,” “When students go on field trips, they must wear sneakers,” except in situations where the subject clearly refers to one gender or the other, as in “Every egg donor receives compensation for her time.”

On the other side of the coin, we sometimes need a new term when the habitual gender of the person who holds a certain role changes. The term “maestra” is seeing more exposure as the number of women orchestra conductors increases, and the U.S. now has a number of “First Gentlemen,” the husbands of women governors.

It goes without saying that translation adds a whole other layer of mystique to the gender issue, especially since many of us work between English and a language that makes much more liberal use of gendered words. In French, you just can’t get around the issue that a table is feminine and a book is masculine, but at least they both become “the” in translation; on the other hand, French doesn’t have different words for his and hers, but instead uses son/sa/ses for both, which puts the issue in the translator’s lap when those words are translated. French, and other languages like it, also have the interesting issue of words that are always masculine or feminine no matter who they refer to. I have to admit that it cracks me up to see French male movie stars referred to as “une grande vedette,” (a big star), where they’re not only feminine but get an “ette” to boot.

However, this too may be changing. Last month’s issue of Champs Elysées featured an interview with Roselyne Bachelot, the (female) French Minister of Health, Youth and Sport, in which she responded to the interviewer’s first question (you don’t have to speak French to understand this!): Madame la ministre ou Madame le ministre, Roselyne Bachelot? by saying “On dit Madame la ministre, parce que c’est un mot épicène, qui suppose la possibilité de le mettre au féminin ou au masculin, comme secrétaire ou d’autres.” (We say Madame la ministre, because it’s an epicene word, which implies the possibility of making it feminine or masculine, like secretary or other words).

It’s worth noting that Bachelot’s assertion that Madame la ministre is just fine has been vigorously opposed by French academics, but who knows, maybe John Malkovich will one day be un vedet.

Here is an interesting post from the blog “Working Languages” about the EU’s shortage of qualified into-English interpreters. The EU blames the candidates’ poor English skills, characterized by overuse of the word “like,” while the blogger argues that a larger culprit is the lack of financial incentives for qualified interpreters.

What with the U.S. economy on a downward slide and the euro continuing its climb above U.S. $1.50, many translators are marketing these days. Following are some tips on writing a translation-targeted résumé that will pass muster with potential clients.

• Let’s start with the obvious but often overlooked: prominently state your language pair(s). It sounds crazy, but I’ve read many a translator’s résumé that buried this most basic information deep within the body of the document. My advice: put your language pair(s) right below your name at the head of the résumé, like “Melissa Thomas, Italian to English Translator.” I would avoid using the generic “Italian Translator;” if you are truly qualified to translate in both directions, put “Italian <> English Translator” or something equivalent.
• Include some sort of geographical information, at least your city. Although I don’t have a P.O. box myself, I think that a P.O. box is a good option for your work address since it avoids having to give out your home address.
• Use a professional e-mail address. This is one of my top five pet peeves when it comes to translator résumés. Anything @hotmail.com or an address such as “beachbabe2008,” “kittykat” or “soccergod” (and I’m barely exaggerating here!) doesn’t belong on a professional résumé and is also likely to be caught by a client’s spam filter. My advice: if you want a free e-mail address or prefer webmail, use Gmail, I think it’s the most “legitimate” of the freebies. I think that the best e-mail address is one that’s associated with a domain name that you own, so that you never have to change it if you change ISPs.
• Double and triple-check your contact information. Make sure it’s a) correct and b) information that is “durable;” don’t include a cell phone number that you might be getting rid of.
• Give specific examples of your translation work without violating client confidentiality. “Extensive experience in patent translation” is much less impressive than “Translated 100+ patents: topics include automotive components, household appliance components and packaging.”
• If you’ve been translating for a substantial amount of time (I would say three to five years, others might go longer or shorter), eliminate all non-translation work experience that isn’t relevant to what you do. If you worked as an engineer and now translate engineering documents, it’s worth leaving that information in. But if you switched careers completely, say from managing a restaurant to doing translation, I wouldn’t include it.
• Include something about your computer setup. If nothing else, this tells the client that you are reasonably technology-savvy. You can also inspire confidence by including “with daily backups,” “dedicated backup computer,” etc. If you use translation environment/CAT tools, you can also include them here, or not, depending on whether you want clients to know that you have them.
• I’ll admit to being a traditionalist when it comes to résumés, and I find fancy graphics, catchy slogans and “creative” formatting to be a turn-off. Also, I think that a photograph, which is common to include on a European-format résumé, is inappropriate on a U.S. one.
• Some features I’ve seen and liked on other people’s résumés: the date when the résumé was updated (makes it clear that the document is up to date); information about recent professional development such as conferences and courses; a few very brief testimonials from past clients.
• Remember that you are applying for language work. Although poor grammar, typos and incorrect punctuation have become commonplace in business documents, be the exception. Show your potential clients that you are worthy of their language work by making your own work error-free.
• Lastly, keep it brief. For use in the U.S., one page is best, two pages is an absolute maximum. Put the most important information first. Remember when your high school guidance counselor broke the news that after you had sweated and cried over your college applications for six months, the average admissions counselor would spend twelve minutes reading them? Have the same attitude toward your résumé and you’re on the right track!

The issue of translation memory discounts, whereby a translator charges a lower rate for words that appear as repetitions or fuzzy matches in a translation environment/CAT/TM tool, is a contentious one. On the one hand, a client might reasonably argue that changing “press the green button” to “press the red button” doesn’t involve translating four words, but rather one word. On the other hand, a translator might reasonably argue that reading that sentence, finding the difference and changing it takes about as much time or maybe even longer than just typing the translation from scratch.

Translators and clients have a few options to choose from: no TM discount at all; a TM discount only for high level matches such as 100% matches and repetitions; or a graduated pricing structure where fuzzy matches down to a certain percentage, say 75% or even 50%, are priced at a certain percentage of the translator’s per word rate.

At a past ATA conference, I heard a translator argue that there are two translation markets out there: the TM market and the non-TM market, and you have to decide which one you’re going to compete in. While I’m not sure that the choice is as binary as that, I think there’s some truth to the idea. Many legal and financial translators I know are rarely if ever asked to give discounts for repetitions, and use a TM tool mostly for their own consistency and productivity. On the other hand, many technical translators I know would be out of business if they didn’t use TM and give discounts for repetitions.

For some projects, such as product manuals that are regularly updated, it seems to me to border on ridiculous not to give TM discounts since the majority of the text will be recycled. However, I understand translators’ frustrations with clients who nickel and dime over every repeated word simply out of a desire to pay as little as possible for the translation. Your thoughts?

Michelle Vranizan Rafter’s blog, WordCount, has an excellent post about ways to promote your freelance writing, most of which are applicable to translation as well.

When it comes to things like blogs, e-newsletters, podcasts and even websites, part of the appeal for translators is that the market is quite open. While some demographic groups (moms, artists and political junkies, to name a few!) seem eager to write and podcast as much as, or maybe even more than people want to read, translators are amazingly reticent about putting their thoughts out there. So, it’s comparatively easy to draw a lot of readership or listenership to what you’re doing.

Of the tips that Michelle offers, I also strongly agree with her advice to attend conferences and visit clients in person. As largely web-based workers, I think it’s tempting for translators to think that e-mail does it all, without the need to even get out of your pajamas. In my own experience, every face to face encounter I’ve had with an existing or potential translation client has more than paid for itself.

Lastly, Michelle’s advice about “being the best at what you do” is fantastic. Bottom line, being a compulsive overachiever is very good for business when you’re self-employed. Take a look at Michelle’s post for more excellent tips on marketing!

Over at Yndigo, Glenn Cain has a wonderful post entitled Make mine plain, about, among other things, the push for plain language in legal writing and the resulting effect on legal translators.

As I read this post, I found myself thinking, “but I love legalese,” and I’m actually not kidding here. To me, there are certain situations in which a word like “hereinbelow” or the dreaded “shall” (featured in Glenn’s post) just says it like nothing else can. For some reason, it just sometimes strikes me as less effective to say “later on in this document” or “will” rather than using the legalese equivalent. And sometimes, when I’m really on a roll, the more horrifically complex the sentence I have to translate, the better; why say it the way anyone could when you can say it in your own peculiar way, with as many subordinate clauses as possible?

In addition, I think that we translators are often incredulous at the level of jargon and “ese” (i.e. legalese, computerese) in other people’s specializations while we embrace those characteristics in our own work. Some time ago I was working on a scientific/legal project and queried the project’s scientific translator about the abbreviation “Pa s.” She immediately responded, “oh sure, it’s Pascal-seconds,” a unit used to measure dynamic viscosity. As a non-scientist, my immediate reaction was “Pascal-seconds? As if regular seconds aren’t good enough? Can’t we call it something simpler?,” exactly the opposite of my reaction to the idea of simplifying legalese. My scientific colleague’s answer was “just don’t ever make me translate ‘pursuant to’!”

As promised a few posts back, here’s some information about David Russi, an English>Spanish translator here in Colorado, who after many years of freelancing, has gone in-house as a translator for COMET (Cooperative Program for Operational Meteorology, Education and Training) and loves it. COMET’s outreach efforts including Spanish translation have clearly paid off, as their website notes that they were awarded the 2006 “Excellence in Geophysical Education” award.

David localized COMET’s entire MetEd (Meteorology Education and Training) website into Spanish, and reports that he has so far translated about 80 hours of meteorology instruction into Spanish as well. David says, “This material helps meteorologists in Central and South America use and understand our satellite data and train for their work, it is really useful stuff that is being used by hundreds of people (for now, I’d like to see it get to thousands) to grow in their profession.”

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), according to my unscientific observations, seems to be gaining some traction in the translation industry. FOSS, software for which the source code is publicly available, is often (though not always) cost-free, and is often localized into more languages than is proprietary software. Now that I’m going steady with OmegaT, my own freelance business is running exclusively on FOSS, so it seemed like an opportune time to revisit the options for open source-minded translators.

The most basic choice in the FOSS spectrum is whether you want to run an open source operating system (such as our home’s distribution of choice, Ubuntu Linux) or run FOSS on top of your current operating system. If you don’t know anything about Linux and would like to learn more, check out your local Linux Users Group. Even if you live in Qatar or Kyrgystan, there’s a LUG there!

Nowadays, a lot of FOSS runs on non-free operating systems too. You can take your current machine, let’s say you’re running Windows, and install OpenOffice.org’s free office suite, OmegaT, Firefox’s web browser and you’re in business. Let’s take a look at the FOSS a translator might use, and what’s involved in staying compatible with the market leader proprietary software.

• Office software: For best compatibility with Microsoft Office, use OpenOffice.org. It contains a word processing program, spreadsheet, presentation program, database and drawing program, and as long as you are not using macros, is essentially completely compatible with Microsoft Office. Just go to File>Save As, then select the appropriate format, such as “Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP.” In 5+ years of freelance work, I have never had a client notice that my OO.o documents were not created with MS Office (and if they had asked, I would have told them). OO.o’s main incompatibility with MS Office is macros; because of the enormous differences between the two macro formats, software such as Trados and Wordfast, which depends on MS Office macros, will not run in OO.o. OO.o comes in Linux, Windows and Mac formats. And it’s cost-free.
• Web browsing: This isn’t big news, since Firefox is quite mainstream. It’s a great web browser, and eminently customizable with lots of plugins, and runs on basically any operating system.
• Translation memory: Heartsome jumped the proprietary gap by becoming the first commercially supported translation environment tool to both run on Linux (as well as Windows and Mac) and use OpenOffice.org file formats. I like Heartsome, although it has some speed issues on my computer (not necessarily Heartsome’s fault). Heartsome is inexpensive by TenT standards, but it’s not free. Personally I prefer OmegaT, which also runs on pretty much any operating system (definitely Linux, Mac and Windows) and uses OO.o file formats. I find it much faster than Heartsome, the people who develop and manage it are very pleasant and helpful, and it’s free.
• If you want to run Linux but still have to run some software that doesn’t have a Linux version (i.e. Photoshop, Quicken, Lotus Notes, FrameMaker, etc.), check out CrossOver Linux (the same company produces CrossOver Mac), a handy tool that allows you to legally run Windows software on your Linux machine without a Windows license. If you want to run Wordfast on Linux, it will work if you use CrossOver Linux. First install CrossOver Linux, then MSOffice, then Wordfast. You can read a page on my website about it here.