Lost in Translation

What do you want most in life?

My Margaret Thatcher anecdote mentioned earlier this month caused Peter Hall, an English teacher from Valencia, to contact me with another linguistic anecdote - this time revolving around pronunciation.

It supposedly concerns Madame de Gaulle, the wife of the former French president, who was asked at a diplomatic dinner what she desired most in life.

'A penis', she tartly replied, causing a stunned and embarrassed silence around the table.

'Ah yes, Madame', said a quick-thinking diplomat once normal speaking became possible, 'I'm sure all of us wish for happiness'.

Following the milkman

I was lucky enough to lose all my data within months of acquiring my first computer. This event drove me to despair at the time, but in retrospect, it was a heaven-sent lesson.

Since then, I dutifully made regular data back-ups, and slept soundly at night knowing that my clever foresight would protect me from mechanical failure, acts of God, and forgetfulness.

However, data back-ups seem to be going the way of door-to-door milk deliveries, and printed Christmas cards.

Nowadays, we back-up on the web. All the nitty-gritty details of our professional and family lives are safely stored away ... there ... somewhere. It's safe, but we don't know exactly where it is.

In fact, everything is drawn slowly, but irresistibly, towards the web. Having lots of programs on your PC once seemed like a good idea - but today the idea of buying software is going down the same lonely road as the milkman.

Google is now happy to give away most of the applications that Microsoft's Office can offer for the cost of a second mortgage.

My attention was caught recently by a free web-based translation program.

Ebiwrite seems to be a simple, no bells and whistles, translation memory program. It comes from the same workshop as a nifty notes program called Helipad.

I don't think that SDL Trados - the 'Microsoft' of the translation industry - will be trembling in its boots yet, but the writing is on the wall.

You can try Ebiwrite at:

http://ebiwrite.com/home.html

Battery translating hens

Just watched a horribly fascinating program about chickens.

Presented by Jamie Oliver, one of Britain's celebrity  TV chefs, the program uncovered the unpalatable truth about industrially produced chickens and eggs. Supermarkets have driven producer prices to new lows and the chickens are paying the real price.

The poor birds are kept in the dark, caged in front of a continuous conveyor belt of food, and ruthlessly culled at a young age when their egg-laying or meat-growing productivity begins to decrease.

Somehow, the program also seemed to paint a grim alternative future for 'battery translators'.

Translators must use their feet more

I have an excellent client in Valencia, Spain.

Fortunately, this great city is also where I live. This client  regularly sends me material to translate, pays a very good rate, and always pays on time.

They often invite me to visit their offices to have a coffee - in the Spanish way.

But do I visit? No, of course not.

Instead, I sit in front of my little screen and tap away at the keyboard all day. I know that most translators are like myself. Shy little mice that never leave the nest.

This really is bad business because we eventually lose all personal contact with the client and just become an anonymous email address. Without that personal contact, I am very likely to lose this client to somebody else offering translations at one cent less.

This idea was very well expressed in an excellent article posted by the dynamic Aurora Humarán (www.ndet.org) in an article she published in Spanish at the Proz web: click here.

So my New Year's resolution is to get out more often, use my fingers less, and my feet more.

Too many babies and dogs...and cats

I am a happy member of the biggest on-line community of translators - Proz.com.

As an organisation and website it works very well for me - and some of my best clients have approached me through my Proz listing and activities.

Proz provides an easily searchable site where any agency or end-client can find the ideal translator for the job in hand. However, when I visit other translator's Proz listing pages I am constantly amazed at the number of dogs, cats, and babies that appear in the listing photos.

After a while, I came to realise that these friendly pets and cheerful babies were not actually  translators. It was a relief to realise that I was not being featured alongside colleagues who were happy to be rewarded with a bottle of warm milk or a doggy biscuit.

But what is going on? Why do otherwise normal translators decide to show the world an image of themselves as a purring cat or a gurgling baby. What's wrong with a straightforward passport photo?

Will most clients, or agencies, hesitate before putting their valuable documents into the hands of a baby, or the paws of a cat? I think so.

It seems that some translators, and dare I say, it appears to be mostly women, are unhappy about showing their own image to the waiting world. So c'mon girls, buy a logo, make a logo, use a scenic photo - anything but broadcast the image of an innocent baby or a much loved pet.

Adding some spin to protect communist sensitivities

Translators and interpreters often decide to add some 'spin' to make the contents of a message more acceptable to the intended reader or listener.

One of my favourite 'spin' stories comes from the 1980's when British PM Margaret Thatcher was reluctantly persuaded to meet the visiting communist president of a nation from the French Congo.

As the president sat down opposite Margaret Thatcher, she leaned across to him and said: 'I hate communists'. The quick-thinking French interpreter managed to smoothly explain that:

'Prime Minister Thatcher says that she has never been wholly supportive of the ideas of Karl Marx.'

Well spun!

Pity and scorn for Maria Gustafson

Our picture shows the delightful Maria L. Gustafson from Advanced Language Solutions & Associates (languagesol.tripod.com) from Rockford, Illinois. She is currently looking through the world of Spanish-to-English translators (at Proz.com) for somebody to translate a project for a client. Her client needs 17,000 words translated in just one week - in the popular field of aerospace engineering. Maria is proudly prepared to offer 5.5 US cents per word - payable at 45 days by Paypal.
For those of you that are not translators, these numbers need some explaining. An average translator can handle about 250 words an hour - and so Maria's offer values a translator with experience in aerospace engineering translation at less than 14 dollars an hour or 9.50 euros.
Of course, any scorn we may pour on Maria must be matched by pity for the desperate translator that agrees to these ruinous terms.