A new edition of Gabe Bokor’s online translation journal, Translation Journal, is online.

Among other things, in ‘Translation Taken Seriously’, Danilo Nogueira reports on a financial translation seminar organized by four clients (international financial institutions of IFIs) to help their translators. The remarks on CAT software are heartening:

bq. I do not know about your clients, but most of mine can be divided into two categories: a diminishing one that confuses CAT and MT and an increasing one that says: “Buy Trados, or else.”

bq. It was very refreshing to learn that IFIs belong to neither of the above groups. They know MT is one thing and has its uses, and that CAT is another thing and there is more than one CAT program worthy of consideration. It was great to learn that we should expect segmented files in the future and will be free to deal with them as we think best, provided the results achieved are acceptable to the IFI that requested the job.

I also looked at Fire Ant and Worker Bee’s agony aunt column. I always thought the readers’ letters were invented, but I have it on the highest authority that they’re genuine, strangely enough. The first letter, from ‘Litter Bug’, addressed a situation I know well, and I suspect the answer was from Fire Ant.

bq. I am a freelance translator with an office in my home and a reasonably successful business serving clients in the UK and the Netherlands. The other day I was caught off guard when a client phoned me out of the blue and insisted on dropping in to review a text in person (he happened to be in the neighbourhood, and the text was urgent).

bq. It was a chastening experience—not for the text itself and our discussion, which went very well, but because my office is a shambles, with papers papers papers and files files files as far as the eye can see. I will spare you the details, but from the look on this man’s face as he crossed the threshold, I don’t think my frantic hoovering accomplished much.

Suggested solutions include intercepting the client at the door and directing him or her to a café, tricks with lighting and plants, quickly piling stuff into removal boxes and claiming moving is going on, or putting crime scene tape around a pile of stuff and claiming it results from a burglary and may not be touched.

I was confronted with this situation a week or two ago when two young American soldiers turned up needing a sworn translation. I thought they’d all left, but even the law office still exists, with my address of ten years ago. It took them two hours to find me. Standing at the counter in my office, one of them reached into a container full of writing instruments but failed to get a functioning pen. Not surprising, since three-quarters of them are no use and the only thing I frequently use from there is a small screwdriver.

bq. (Langsam und mit Bedacht)

bq. Sehr verehrte Fahrgäste,
hier spricht Ihr U-Bahn-Fahrer zu Ihnen. Wie Sie vielleicht in den letzten Wochen bemerkt haben, fährt die U-Bahn nur langsam zwischen Eberhardshof und Muggenhof. Dies ist zurückzuführen auf Sanierungsarbeiten an den Weichen. Dies führt natürlich zu Verspätung, dient aber Ihrer Sicherheit.

bq. Die VGN und meine Wenigkeit wünschen Ihnen einen schönen Tag und einen schönen Sommer.
Ende der Durchsage.

Heard on the underground (subway) between Fürth and Nuremberg in August.

Passauer Neue Presse:

bq. Nur gebürtige Bayern haben so viel Sprachgefühl, dass sie das abgewandelte Götz-Zitat „Mich leckst am A…“ nicht nur als Beleidigung, sondern auch als Ausdruck des Erstaunens verwenden dürfen. Diese Erfahrung musste ein Bosnier machen, der sich in Landshut wegen Beleidigung vor Gericht verantworten musste. Er wurde zu einer Geldstrafe von 1000 Euro verurteilt.

A newspaper in Passau reports that a Bosnian was cycling in the pedestrian zone in Landshut. A man from the Sicherheitswacht , that is, a kind of Neighbourhood Watch figure authorized to supervise traffic, asked him to dismount, and, when he didn’t dismount, pulled the Bosnian off his bike by grabbing the handlebars. To avoid spammers, I have to rephrase the Bosnian’s words – he suggested that the man should apply his tongue to the Bosnian’s nether regions. Germans sometimes call this the Götz phrase, because the words were used by Götz von Berlichingen in Goethe’s play of the same name which I had the misfortune to study for A Level (I like a lot of Goethe a lot, but not this play).

The Bosnian was fined 1000 euros for insult. He said in court that he did not mean the words as an insult, but as an expression of astonishment at the speed with which he was grounded. I suspect this argument cooked his goose.

There was an academic discussion between the defence, the prosecution and the judge. The judgment stated inter alia that only a Bavarian, who had ‘imbibed the finer points of language with his mother’s milk’, could appreciate the nuances of this expression.

I got this from Udo Vetter, who says a Bavarian wouldn’t have been punished. I don’t know quite how to read this sentence of the court’s myself. The expression is not limited to Bavaria, nor is it only Bavarian breastfeeding mothers who use it. And of course, that might be all the more reason to treat a non-German more leniently (I’m thinking of all the Germans I’ve encountered who think certain English words are part of everyday British conversation).

This is what I found out about Trados Translators Workbench 6.5, Multiterm iX:

1. However many terms in your sentence are in the ‘termbase’, you only get to see them one at a time.

2. If you change a sentence, you have to ‘open’ and ‘close’ it again for your changes to go to memory.

1 and 2 above mean there is a model of the translator as machine, doing one sentence perfectly and moving on to the next, never to return, and entering one translation, unadapted, per term, in the sequence of the source text, into the target text.

3. You can overwrite the source text. You can forget search and replace (there are other ways of doing this though).

4. There’s something called ‘cleaning’. This seems to mean you have to do all sorts of copying to keep hold of your work in various stages.

I write this as a happy user of STAR Transit and Termstar since 1998. Thank goodness projects can be exported nowadays!

P.S. No flames in the comments, please. I know this is a religious war, usually between Trados and Déjà Vu, like Word vs. WordPerfect.

LATER NOTE: 5. You can look at several dictionaries in Multiterm, but you can link only one dictionary to the Workbench.

6. The memory is a mystery, not a bunch of ASCII files.

7. When Multiterm contains a term, that term is not highlighted or shown in a different colour in the text window: it has a red line above it. This means you have to stop and look twice, to see which words the red line is marking.

8. You have to deal with files individually. You can’t just load ten related files together and treat them as one for checking and processing.

I borrowed this picture (described as ‘public’) from Tom Coates’ photos at flickr.

bq. Today exciting lamb sausages, on a bed of mash with some kind of sauce (tomato? onion gravy?) underneath. Walking back to our offices after lunch I noticed a plate left deserted with precisely none of the gravy (?) left, none of the potato left and two almost perfectly preserved sausages with one small slice removed and presumably eaten. Evidently about as appetising as they looked…

The picture reminds me of a University Challenge question where pictures were supposed to suggest titles of books or films. A plate of mashed potatoes was greeted not with ‘M.A.S.H.’, but ‘A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’.

Tom has a nice wedding cake picture too.

(Via Wortfeld)

Lynne Truss’ publishers have now published Vivian Cook’s ‘Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary or why can’t anybody spell?’ (I pasted that. I can’t be bothered to misspell). Amazon.co.uk already has a five-star review, containing the word ‘recieved’. I wonder if there are any spelling mistakes in the book? Spelling test available on author’s website, but it doesn’t tell you your score, although it’s a very easy test.

I tried to find if Mike Elton had been bribed to write this review. A Mike Elton also wrote in praise of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, including one punctuation error. And there is a list of favourites by ‘Mike Elton, 12 year old reading fanatic’.

(Via Eamonn Fitzgerald)