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)

Last Sunday was apparently the European Day of Languages, which has been taking place (in great secrecy) since 2001. I did mention it last year, but I decided it wasn’t really correct to publicize something that doesn’t publicize itself.

Today is St. Jerome’s Day, he being regarded by some as the patron saint of translators. I see Robin Stocks did the honours with a picture (fortunately not the same as the one I posted last year).

Now, however, I have received a email from a fellow-translator, who is unknown to me and shall be nameless:

bq. HAPPY TRANSLATOR’S DAY
To translate is to love languages,
to love communication,
and to help the world communicate.

bq. Receive my best wishes on this special day.

This is followed by six lines of address, phone, fax and website details. I suppose if this were sent to clients they would be totally mystified.

I’m not sure if there are St. Jerome’s Day events going on. I looked at the BDÜ list of events, and there was nothing. And all the events were followed by a link for more details – the top screen didn’t show the locations, though, and I couldn’t be bothered to click on all the links to see if there’s anything coming up in an interesting place.

I managed to see these two signs, one in England and the other in Germany, without getting particularly hot under the collar.

There is a book called Standardformulierungen für deutsche Vertragstexte mit Übersetzungen in englischer, französischer und spanischer Sprache, in the terminological series issued by the German Foreign Office. Apparently it’s out of print – my third edition is dated 1992 – but there will be a new edition, probably in spring 2005.

Although the emphasis of the book is on international treaties, it is extremely informative for other types of contract translation too. It has a large number of clauses in four languages, and above all it explains how to proceed when translating and why.

The Foreign Office has a list of the publications in this series online.