Thoughts On Translation

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.

Here is an interesting post from the blog “Masked Translator,” focusing on the ways in which home-based translation is an exceedingly environmentally-friendly job. Masked Translator makes a number of great points, including a separation between true home-based workers and “home-based” workers whose carbon footprint is actually quite large because they travel from home to work-related appointments which necessitate a professional wardrobe, reliable/presentable car, fuel use, etc.

This post highlighted to me the ways in which home-based translators (and in general, people who work exclusively from home) live an “environmentally light” life. In our case, the fact that my husband and I both work from home in jobs that don’t require travel has allowed us to have one 17 year old car since we can bike and walk almost everywhere we need to go during the week. Because we’re home most of the time, we have time to cook real meals and have a large vegetable garden, so we almost never eat out. Work clothes are almost a non-issue, with a few presentable outfits (largely purchased at the local thrift store) for meetings and conferences. Check out Masked Translator’s post for more ideas on how to reduce your freelance carbon footprint!

For better or for worse, the translation industry does not currently have a standard procedure or body for resolving disputes between translators and clients. So, clients who feel that a translator has delivered substandard work and translators who feel that they’ve been unfairly treated by clients do not have a standard avenue of recourse and must either resolve the issue themselves or pursue it through traditional legal means such as small claims court or collections services.

A typical translation industry dispute situation often goes like this:
Translator: “My translation was perfect and now the client is refusing to pay. Several of my friends even looked over the translation and agreed that it was perfect. The client has to pay me.”
Client: “The translator came highly recommended but the translation is horrible, unusable. We’ve nearly lost one of our biggest clients because of this. We shouldn’t have to pay for this work.”

Disputes between translators and clients arise over various issues; quality issues are the stickiest, since they are so subjective. In other areas, a dispute may arise but it’s more clear-cut: either the translator met the deadline or didn’t; either the client paid on time or didn’t. But when it comes to quality, it’s often a “your word against mine” situation that quickly turns acrimonious. Following are some tips for avoiding and resolving dispute situations, both from the translator’s point of view and the agency’s.

First, every translator should belong to an a translation agency rating service (see a post on About Translation listing various services) and should check it before accepting a job from any new client. To me, this is an absolute requirement of running a successful freelance business; recently, I received several e-mails from translators complaining about a non-paying agency. In about two minutes spent on Payment Practices, the agency rating service I subscribe to, I was able to see that this agency had a track record of non-payment going back several years. While these translators certainly didn’t deserve not to be paid, I see no excuse for not investing $15 or $20 per year and a few minutes of your time to check out what other translators think of a potential client.

Second, translators need to be honest about their abilities; the vast majority of the quality issues I hear about (in which the translator admits that he/she did a poor job) involve a situation where the translator took the job for the wrong reasons: was afraid to say no, really needed the money, didn’t look at the documents before accepting, etc. Finally, translators need to be able to hear and learn from feedback about their work. Here in freelance-land, we don’t have annual performance reviews, and even those of us who are ATA-certified take the certification test only once, so outside assessments of our work are few and far between. If a client has legitimate complaints about your work, take them as a learning opportunity and avoid getting defensive; apologize and ask what you can do to regain the client’s trust.

From the client perspective, vetting a translator ahead of a job is somewhat harder, since there aren’t yet any services devoted to critiquing specific translators. A translator might be asked to provide references, but chances are that these will be positive. And, as with investments, “past results are not always an indicator of future performance.” Even a qualified translator will have an off day, technical problems, etc. and either miss a deadline or deliver substandard work.

I think that when this happens, the most important thing from the client’s perspective is to provide specific examples of what was wrong with the document, not just say “It was terrible and we’re not paying you.” For example, a client could provide a document with tracked changes, indicating the revisions that an editor made. Or, the client could provide a list of specific examples that show why the document had to be retranslated. If the document was sent to the end client without being reviewed and the quality objections are coming from the end client, the document should be reviewed by another translator before the quality objections are addressed, since the end client’s objections may or may not be valid.

The hardest-to-resolve situation arises when all of the above steps have happened and there’s still no agreement on whether the translation is acceptable or not. This brings up the question of whether a standard dispute resolution procedure or a dispute resolution organization is something that would benefit the translation industry overall. What we’re missing right now is a neutral arbitration setting, where the translation can be evaluated by someone who has no stake in the outcome. As it stands, the translator is likely to call in a colleague who is in turn likely to agree with him or her that the translation is fine, while the agency is likely to use another translator it works with, who will probably agree that the translation isn’t up to snuff. As of now, in the U.S. at least, there is no third party who will intervene in this type of dispute; maybe it’s a niche waiting to be filled?

Here is an interesting post from Nataly Kelly’s blog “From Our Lips to Your Ears,” about the real costs of using unqualified or incompetent interpreters.

If you’re a freelancer, chances are you’ve worked on “one of those projects” (or maybe more than one!) where you wished you had another one of you to take on some of the work. And if you’re Judy or Dagy (short for Dagmar) Jenner of Las Vegas and Vienna-based Twin Translations, you picked up the phone, called the other one of you, and the problem was solved. Judy and Dagy, identical twins who grew up in Austria and Mexico before attending college in the U.S. (Judy) and Austria and France (Dagy), now work together as a translation company that never sleeps, offering translations from and into German, English and Spanish, with Dagy adding in some French.

I recently asked Judy and Dagy if they would be interested in being profiled for Thoughts on Translation (in the spirit of disclosure, Judy and I are friends, but I don’t have any business associations with Twin Translations). Here’s what they had to say!

Q: Are you two really twins? Or just really good friends?
A: We are definitely twins. Identical twins. Which means we pretty much look the same, talk the same, gesture the same way, like the same literature, music, things in life, etc. There are a few small differences, though. Dagy prefers vanilla ice cream and Judy is much more of a chocolate addict. Also, Judy goes for ketchup, Dagy goes for mustard. Dagy is Judy’s younger sister, by 10 minutes.

Q: So where exactly are you from? Europe, Mexico, the US?
A: We are citizens of the world, in a way. We were born in northern Austria. At age 10, our dad got a job offer to run the Latin American operations for iron and steel division of his employer, which is now part of the German conglomerate Siemens. We moved there in 1987, and finished grade school and middle school at the German School of Mexico City. We moved back to Austria for our junior year in high school, and graduated there. After college, Judy took a full tennis scholarship to the University of Nevada Las Vegas, where she also received her M.B.A. in marketing. Dagy studied French and Communications at the University of Salzburg and in Tours, France, and afterwards studied Translation and Interpretation in Vienna, where she is currently getting her master’s degree. Since college, we have been flying all over the world to see each other and spend time with our family. Dagy has been to Las Vegas, where Judy has lived since 1995, a total of 14 times. And it’s the best day of the year every time we see each other at the airport. Dagy lives in Vienna, Austria, with her boyfriend and Judy’s cat, who moved there from Vegas because Judy’s husband is allergic to cats.

Q: Tell us a little about your language combinations.
A: Our active languages are German, English and Spanish. We both translate into all of these. Dagy also has a passive language, which is French, meaning that she translates from French into any of the other languages. Most clients ask us for translations from German into English and vice versa.

Q: What’s your biggest translation pet peeve?
A: When a client asks for a free sample translation. While nobody would even consider going to an attorney and requesting a sample contract, people have no such qualms when it comes to translations. This is a professional service, and we are happy to provide future customers with references. And it also bothers us when clients tell us that they would’ve done the translation themselves if only they had had time. No wonder the world is full of awful translations (or translation attempts). We actually run a German-language web site for bad translations: www.uebelsetzungen.com

Q: What’s the most challenging project you have translated during the last couple of years?
A: One of the toughest projects was the translation of a technical brochure for Bösendorfer, an Austrian piano maker, from German into Spanish. It took us a while to understand how a piano works. We purchased a dictionary for piano terminology that also included pictures, which helped a lot. At that time, all we knew about pianos was that we had taken classes as kids and that we were awfully untalented. Now we know a lot more than that and that’s the beauty of the job. Another challenging job was the translation of the huge web site of the Austrian Postal Service into English in merely two months. While Dagy translated during the day, Judy did the proofing at night.

Q: Do you have a sample of your favorite incorrect translation?
A: Too many to count, but here is one. A major translation company in the US outsourced a big Vegas-related translation project to dozens of freelancers who were not familiar with Vegas. Hence, the Las Vegas Strip (the main road where all the hotels are on) became „la franja de césped“ (=the strip of grass). It never ceases to amaze us that large corporations, who hire the top attorneys, top CPAs, and the most highly trained software developers, want to save money on translation. The written word is every company’s business card, and the translations also have to be top-notch if the company wants to be taken seriously in the country that it tries to do business in.

Q: So what language do you think in?
A: No idea. Another thing we don’t know is what language we dream in. We’re still trying to find out how to determine that.

Q: What language do you speak in with each other?
A: A wild combination of our common languages, German, Spanish, English. It’s similar to the language that was spoken at the German School in Mexico City that we attended, but with a bunch of English thrown in because Judy is so Americanized now.

Q: Which fields do you specialize in?
A: Legal, business, technology, banking, marketing, etc. Lately, we’ve been doing a lot of music-related translations (they say Vienna is the world capital of music), logistics and a combination of legal and financial translations for the Austrian National Bank.

Q: What kinds of translations do you not do?
A: We are not licensed to do certified translations of birth certificates, etc.

Thanks to reader (and outstanding colleague!) Jill Sommer for sending the link to this post from the blog “Resumé Hell” (amusing takes on job searching, written by a recruiter), featuring a cover letter produced by an online translation tool.

Translator and translation agency owner Glenn Cain recently started a blog on his Yndigo translations site. It’s a great read and covers topics ranging from the use of sic to translator certification to how to select an interpreter. Give it a look, especially if you’re inside on a snowy day like the one we’re having in Colorado!

Test translations, whereby a potential client, often a translation company, asks a translator to complete an “audition” translation for free before beginning work with the client, are a frequent subject of controversy in the industry. Translators wonder if they should complete unpaid translations, if they should set a limit on the length of test translations, if they should offer to provide samples of their work instead, or if clients will be reluctant to use them if they do not complete test translations. Clients understandably want to hire highly-skilled translators, and one element of this is often to give the translator a test that many other translators have taken, in order to compare the new translator’s work with that of established and trusted translators. In rare cases, translators either suspect or have proof that unscrupulous clients have used “unpaid tests” as a way to get some translation work done for free, which adds to the atmosphere of distrust surrounding tests.

One of the most common questions surrounding test translations (from the translator’s point of view) is “should I take unpaid tests?” In and of itself, this question doesn’t provide enough information to ensure a reliable answer, since the answer depends on a variety of factors. How long is the unpaid test? Who is the client? Is the test a tryout for a specific project? How much does the translator need or want the work in question? All of these are important factors to consider when deciding whether the time investment in taking an unpaid test is a good one.

Interestingly, item D of the ATA Code of Professional Conduct and Business Practices for “employers or contractors of translators and/or interpreters” reads: “I will not require translators or interpreters to do unpaid work for the prospect of a paid assignment.” Although I guess that there is some room for interpretation (so to speak!) here, i.e. what constitutes “requiring” work; is a test translation “unpaid work” or something else entirely, this clause seems to take a stance against unpaid test translations, at least when they are given by translation companies that are ATA members.

For translation companies, the alternatives to unpaid tests, such as paid tests or small paid assignments, are more expensive and more risky, unless they have vetted the translator’s background and experience before administering the test. For an agency that receives many unsolicited resumes, it’s much easier to have the next step in the application process be “if you’re interested in working for us, complete this test and return it” (which is likely to weed out many candidates). Also, translation is not the only profession where unpaid testing, even if it’s not referred to as such, occurs. Within the past few years, I’ve conducted my own “unpaid tests” on a primary care doctor and a financial planner, both of whom offered a complimentary half-hour consultation before I committed to using their services.

Ideally, translation companies should consider paid translation tests as a cost of doing business, in the same sense that they see recruiting, hiring and training their in-house employees as a cost of business. Barring that, I think that it makes sense for translators to set some guidelines on when and how they take unpaid tests. In my own case, I ask the potential client to confirm two things before I take an unpaid test: 1) that they currently have or anticipate having a need for additional translators in my language combination; I do not take unpaid tests for the purpose of being added to an agency’s general pool; and 2) that my rates (and I provide a rate sheet) are within the range of rates that they pay for my language combination. If the agency cannot confirm these, I don’t take the test; other translators at a different point in their careers may have a different opinion about this. In addition, I think that it makes sense to put a limit on the number of words that you will translate as an unpaid test; I think that half an hour’s work (for me this would be 200 to 250 words) is a reasonable limit, but again this is a personal decision.

Yet another option is for the translator to offer the prospective client some samples of work that he/she has done in his/her areas of specialization. To me, this is a more reliable indicator of the quality of the translator’s work and it also allows the agency to review a larger sample of the translator’s work than it can by administering an unpaid test.

Translation environment tools (TenTs), also referred to as CAT tools or translation memory tools, are the subject of numerous passionate discussions among translators. Some people prefer a standalone tool, others a tool that works from within a program like Microsoft Office, some users are adamant that their tool has the best matching algorithm out there while others criticize the competition’s pricing, support, you get the picture.

Over the past few years I’ve primarily used two TenTs with which I’ve been very happy, Wordfast and Heartsome. Wordfast has the advantage of being quite similar in look and fee to, and quite compatible with the market leader SDL Trados, and Wordfast’s developer, Yves Champollion, is a very smart and helpful guy who provides excellent support for his product. Heartsome is a powerful tool at an attractive price, and it’s, in my experience, the best of the commercial TenTs if you don’t run Mac or Windows, or if you like to use OpenOffice.org file formats.

Lately I’ve been feeling like my quiver of TenTs needed an addition; I don’t have any complaints with Wordfast, but in order to run on my Linux computer system, it requires not only Microsoft Word, which I only use for Wordfast-related work, but also a program like CrossOver Linux that allows Windows software to run on Linux without a Windows license. So, this adds a few layers of upgrades for software that I really only use when I’m running Wordfast. Next, (and I’m not blaming this on Heartsome, it may be something to do with my computer) I have had major frustrations with Heartsome slowdowns, when it has taken 15-20 minutes to convert a 5,000 word document to XLIFF format (required in order to translate) and four to six seconds to add a segment to the TM and then progress to the next segment, which adds up over the course of a 500 segment job.

Enter OmegaT, which I’ve tested out before but never really delved into using for my day to day work. Portuguese translator Thelma Sabim gave an impressive presentation (including a live demo) on OmegaT at the 2006 ATA conference, and ever since then I’ve been thinking that I should give OmegaT more than a passing trial. This week I’ve been using it on some non-rush work, and I’m really, really enjoying it. OmegaT runs on any computer with a Java 2 Platform (i.e. Linux, Mac, Windows 98 or higher), and the OmegaT team (all volunteers) has helpfully provided a download of the software that includes a Java 2 Runtime Environment so that you don’t have to figure out if you have the correct Java version or not.

Once you’ve downloaded the software, you need your source document to be in a format that OmegaT supports, which include OpenOffice.org files (note that OO.o now includes a wizard that can batch process the conversion of MS Office files into OO.o files; go to File>Wizards>Document Converter), Open XML files, text files, HTML files, Open Document Format files, INI files, Java resource bundles, XLIFF files, .po files and DocBook files. Then, OmegaT’s quick start guide (which promises that you can “Start using OmegaT in 5 minutes!” and I would agree!) shepherds you through the easily mastered basics of translating in the software’s interface. I am finding many of OmegaT’s features to be just what I need in a TenT. For a long time, OmegaT may have been best known for its “love it or hate it” feature of segmenting at the paragraph level. Now, you can select paragraph or sentence-level segmentation. Also, under Options>Editing Behaviour, you can select what you want to see in an untranslated segment: the source text, nothing, or the best fuzzy match with a percentage that you define. An additional feature that I like is OmegaT’s use of folders that it creates within your project. For example, it creates a “target” folder into which it places your translated documents once they are created. So, you can give the target document the same name as the source without having to worry about overwriting anything or figuring out which document is which.

I also have to mention that this software is *fast,* and not just because I’ve recently had some speed issues with other tools. OmegaT’s processes (segmenting a source file, compiling target files, pulling up fuzzy matches) are so fast that you almost don’t realize they’re happening; in one case I actually clicked “Create Translated Documents” again because I didn’t realize that OmegaT had taken only a few seconds to compile the translations in the 15-file project I was working on. Other translators with different needs may have other opinions about OmegaT, since my use of TM is largely for my own productivity rather than because my clients request it, so issues such as exchanging TMs with other translators (which OmegaT can do) are not very important to me. If you’re looking for a new or additional TenT for your office, I highly recommend OmegaT; even if you just test it out, it’s free, it’s easy, and it’s fast!