Archive for November, 2008

Trusted Translations, the leading provider of Spanish language translations in the United States market, has recently announced its commitment to “go green” by implementing new policies that will reduce the use of paper by using methods of electronic delivery of invoices and projects as well as brochures and other materials related to marketing campaigns. The company’s goal is to reduce paper use by 90% over the next two years.

These policies will affect not only the internal corporate culture of Trusted Translations, but will also be extended to the company’s 10,000 translators in order to attain a tangible effect on the environment.
In addition to these new policies, Trusted Translations has also undertaken an initiative to spread this environmentally-conscious message amongst the Hispanic community in the United States, the country’s largest minority group. The company will pair with non-profit organizations in order to promote environmental awareness and conservation strategies by translating this message into Spanish.

As Trusted Translations is one of the first translations companies to adopt a “green” policy, this constitutes a major step in terms of environmentally-friendly practices for the translation industry.

As I mentioned last week, this will be my last post for the blog. With that said, I wanted to take a moment and welcome the newest members to our team:

-María Cecilia - Spanish Translation Blog

-Scott and Killian - English Translation Blog

Both blogs will have new participants which will make it that much more enriching for everyone.

You are all officially invited to take a look at the new weekly articles and leave your comments.

Enjoy!

As a translator, I have asked myself this a thousand times while I was going to school and I had to work out the answer when I got my degree. Right now I am going to outline some advantages and disadvantages of both situations so that everyone can come to the conclusion that makes the most sense for them.

Autonomy

Being an autonomous, or as it is referred to in the industry, “freelance” translator in an interesting choice from the point of view of comfort and organization of your time. Since you don’t have to go to an office at a specific time, you can work comfortably from your own home and decide the schedule and working conditions for yourself. It also the important advantage of income: once you have established yourself in the market, the jobs you will receive will allow you to earn more than with a monthly salary at a company.

On the other hand, independence has its price. When there is a lot of work and you are tempted to take on more, it is hard to know where to draw the line and decide, for example, to take a break instead of working all weekend. We also shouldn’t forget that unfortunate circumstances can always arise when it comes time to collect on a payment, since the translator him/herself is the one responsible for the organization of how much he/she has worked and how to receive the money that is owed.

Lastly, one of the essential topics for this subject is the social aspect. Working alone at home can be productive, since you are relaxed, but we can’t forget that a group setting is what nourishes us and helps us grow.

Direct employment

As far as direct employment, without a doubt its greatest advantage is security, both in the source of work and in the simple fact that you know there will be some money coming into your account every payday. Likewise, some people enjoy having a structured workday and the ability to check out of their professional responsibilities when the end of the day comes. Another irrefutable positive aspect of direct employment are the benefits associated with most jobs, such as a health care plan, among other things.

However, this working relationship takes away some of our freedoms as far as the chance to make certain decisions and, as a result, limits us. In certain working environments it is difficult to grow, whether in regards to salary or professional development. Additionally, having a set schedule presents difficulties in solving personal situations, whether they involve going to an office to file some paperwork or taking a nap after lunch.

And now revisiting the social aspect, it is the greatest advantage of working as a direct employee, from my point of view. Group work is completely gratifying, as it allows us to learn and, at the same time, to share our knowledge. This setup keeps us from being isolated, which is a vice that is all too common in our profession.

So what is the right choice?

How do we decide? That decision with be the result of many factors: our age, our economic situation, our confidence in ourselves, the translation market where we live, the path we want our career to take, our goals, and, fundamentally, our own will.

In the specific case of translation, localization refers to how a language is adapted to a specific country or culture so that the target audience understands the text on a native level. Not only are the words themselves localized, accounting for spelling differences and disparities in word usage, but aspects such as date and number formats, currencies, measurement systems, phone numbers, images, etc. are also adapted to the target country or audience so that the text fits in perfectly with the culture.

Localization is a fundamental service for businesses looking to expand globally. Not only will these businesses need to have their material translated into several different languages, but they will also need to have their material localized if a product or service is to be used in a specific region. This is often times included in the translation process, although clients will need to specifically indicate that they are requesting this service as well as the flavor for the target language(s). For example, if a company in Spain wishes to translate their material for English-speaking markets, they will need to consider which flavor of English they will use. If their product or service will mainly be used within Europe, it is likely that they will use the U.K. flavor of English due to the number of these English speakers within the region.

One of the main advantages of this service is the personalized attention to your clients, as you are able to communicate with them in a language they understand.

The Oxford English Dictionary, whose corpus of texts now contains over 2 billion words, recently released its list of new words for inclusion in the Eleventh edition in the Revised Edition of its Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

http://www.askoxford.com/worldofwords/newwords/?view=uk

Some of my thoughts:

• “Best”, as used in phrases such as “best of breed” is now in the dictionary. Does this mean that the expression (and eponymous movie) “Best in Show” has been incorrect all of these years? Wow, I had no idea.

• “Crunk” is now identified as a word! There will be quite the celebration tonight!

• “Emulsion” is now a word you can use when you can’t think of “sauce”.

• “Therapize” or “Therapise” are the latest examples of making any noun a verb by adding the “-ize/ise” ending, which is acceptable in a fluid language like English where things change every day, but it is also a somewhat lazy practice.

So, as you can see, English is very much alive and dynamic. Its vocabulary expands non-stop and translators and people who hire translation services should always be familiar with the new words in order to include them in their latest works.

Waste Reduction

Trusted Translations’ goal is to use Internet technology to decrease its printing costs and improve its overall environmental performance in several ways.

• Limited use of mail courier services – Try to encourage clients who insist on sending and receiving hard copies of materials to consider using alternative delivery methods when using our services.  In addition to decreasing the use of printers and other materials such as CDs and DVDs, this also reduces the pollution and use of non-renewable resources that result from freight services.
• Fax to email service – Trusted Translations has implemented Internet Fax Services.  This service automatically converts all incoming faxes into digital files and delivers them to us via email.  This avoids the use of any paper and ink for incoming faxes.  The Vonage Fax service allows for outgoing faxes directly from PDF or Word, hence, avoiding have to a print a document to fax.
• Intra-staff communications – All internal communications should be distributed electronically.  For instance, instead of printing and posting new internal policies, we will upload them to our internal Wikipedia (“TTPedia”) and management will send out an email with a link to the new policy.
• Project-related reference materials – Try not to print any project-related files unless absolutely necessary.  In order to avoid duplicated copies when these project-related hard copies are deemed necessary, please pick up documents that have been sent to the printer without delay.

In-House Recycling Program

• Facilities will be put in place to promote an in-house recycling program of all reusable and reducible office byproducts. Paper, glass, tin/aluminum, plastic containers and plastic bags will be separated.

Trusted Translations is following the 10 Elements for Improving Environmental Performance and Compliance issued by the enforcement working group under the auspices of the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC).

We frequently hear the word “teamwork”, especially in our work environments where so many people are working for the same company, all for a common end result.

Teamwork exceeds individual work by far, even if there is a member of the group that is an exceptional individual, since the sum of the parts always contributes more than each part individually.

Teamwork presents many challenges, since we must respect and accept the different individuals, overcome individual accomplishments, competitive working environments and rivals within the company. To sum it up, teamwork implies a superior degree of both personal and professional growth.

As this is one of my last few posts, I would like to thank all of my team members here for their helpful contributions and ability to work as a team. Thank you!

If you are a translator working with the Trados CAT tool, you may have seen a component called MultiTerm in your product package. So, just what is this tool and how practical is it for every-day translation jobs?

MultiTerm is ideal for translators working with bilingual glossaries or ongoing projects with highly specific terminology. Many times clients will send their glossaries in an Excel sheet with their own translations of product names or terminology for the sake of consistency between terms found in user manuals, online material, etc. In these cases, it is critical to use the glossary sent by the client. What the MultiTerm product does is convert the glossary into an .xdt file which is recognized by Trados and can then be linked to the Trados workbench. What this means for the translator is that instead of searching through countless entries of an Excel file looking for the right term, Trados will automatically recognize if the term is in the glossary, and if so, it will display the corresponding translation in the “Term Recognition” window on the Workbench.

While there are several steps involved in the process, I have found that it is well worth the time and energy to learn how to use this product, as well as its other features. Not only is this ideal for translators, but it is also great for project managers who are using several different translators for a document with very specific terminology.

The history of the European continent has defined countries that we recognize as having regional languages as well as official languages. Because of that, several countries are multilingual and it is quite common to learn several languages at once and use them on a daily basis.

Within minority languages, Catalan is the language with the most speakers in the European Union.

Below is a list of the main minority languages in the EU that include more than half a million speakers.

• Catalan: 7,200,000 speakers in Spain, France, Italy and Andorra.
• Galician: 2,420,000 speakers in Spain.
• Occitan: 2,100,000 speakers in Spain, France and Italy.
• Sardinian: 1,300,000 speakers in Italy.
• Irish: 1,240,000 speakers in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
• Basque: 683,000 speakers in Spain and France.
• Welsh: 508,000 speakers in the United Kingdom.

Source: IDESCAT. EUROMOSAIC Study.

Most translators have heard of the new online machine translation option called “Google Translate”. While many would argue that machine translations have several issues regarding accuracy and the inability to understand the text like humans do, this has become a widely popular tool, so much so that YouTube recently announced the launch of a Translate option for captioned videos.

This feature provides real-time translations of video captions with a variety of language options, all powered by Google Translate. While YouTube readily admits that machine translations have flaws, they hope to make their videos more accessible to a broader audience.
Here are the instructions from YouTube’s blog: “To get a translation for your preferred language, move the mouse over the bottom-right arrow, and then over the small triangle next to the CC (or subtitle) icon, to see the captions menu. Click on the “Translate…” button and then you will be given a choice of many different languages.”

Take a look at how this works with the link below.

YouTube Translation

So what do you think? Will the widespread use of machine translations, particularly Google Translate, cause a stir amongst more traditional translators? Or is this just another way to help tackle the language barriers?

The best example of what shouldn’t be translated is in the case of names. We cannot translate the names of legal persons or physical persons.

Aside from this classic example of words that should remain as they are in the original, there are other cases of words that cannot be translated: international symbols.

In this sense, the clearest example is chemical elements. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_element. For example, if, in our original, “Na” appears, we would not translate it as “Sod.”. Instead, we would leave it as “Na”.

The same happens with measures of length. The abbreviations stay as they are in English and are not translated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units. For example, if in our original, “12 in” appears, we would not translate it as “12 pulg.”. Instead, we would leave it as “12 in.”. What we can do is convert one measurement from one system to another. For example, we can convert feet to meters or vice versa.

If you are a company looking to expand your market internationally, you have most likely already considered using translation services to translate your business material, but have you really thought about which languages you would like your material to be translated into? Of course, this decision largely depends on your target market, location and products and services offered, however you may also want to translate your material so that it is accessible for speakers of some of the most common languages.

Take a look below; you may be surprised at the results!
According to Ethnologue, these are the most widely spoken languages around the world from the year 2000, listed by population of native speakers.

1.    Mandarin Chinese (836 million)
2.    Hindi (333 million)
3.    Spanish (332 million)
4.    English (322 million)
5.    Bengali (189 million)
6.    Arabic (186 million)
7.    Russian (170 million)
8.    Portuguese (170 million)
9.    Japanese (125 million)
10.    German (98 million)
11.    French (72 million)