Aug 17, 2021

Note-taking for Remote Simultaneous Interpreting: webinar on 21 August 2021

 On Saturday, August 21st at 14:00 UTC, the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI) will present a special webinar on note-taking as a critical differentiation skill in the competitive field of remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI), a staple of international communication in our pandemic times and likely thereafter. The presentation is free for members, with a small fee for members of partner associations (€22) and non-members (€25). Send your registration request by e-mail to: info.request@iapti.org!




Aug 12, 2021

Fail early and often

A guest post by Kevin Hendzel 

Why playing it safe by trying to avoid mistakes is exactly the wrong instinct in translation

We’re all afraid of failure – it’s deeply hard-wired into our genetic code. If our forebears had not succeeded in avoiding all the predators on the primordial savannah by listening to those trembling fears, none of us would even be here today. 

And then there’s the shame of being told we are wrong. We avoid this at all costs because the downsides are so painful -- loss of approval and respect, and a feeling of personal regret.  We’ve all been there.

Novice translators often instinctively avoid these risks by playing it safe, or engaging in what’s called “risk aversion” – clinging to dictionary definitions they can point to later in self-defense, providing literal renderings of the source text and other approval-seeking behavior. 

This is exactly the wrong thing to do.

I learned this lesson as a young rock climber in the arid mountain climate of Arizona.  At high altitudes, novice climbers instinctively cling to the rock face, pulling their face and upper bodies flush to the rock with their arms.  This is totally understandable.  Fear will do that to you when you’re 400 feet up in the air and there’s nothing below you but more rock.

Unfortunately, this is the wrong instinct.  

While your face and upper body feel safer as they cling to the rock, that position pushes the toes of your feet – on which all your weight rests – ever so slightly outward.  It dramatically increases the likelihood that you will slip and fall.

Experienced climbers hold their upper bodies slightly away from the rock face – this pushes their toes and feet into the rock, and gives them greater stability and mobility.  

Experienced translators do this, too.  A lifetime of climbing all over texts has taught them to cling less desperately to that rock face.

Since novice translators lack this experience, another strategy they use is to defend a translation based on their “feeling” for the text, or their “intuition” on how a text should be rendered.  

This is certainly seductive, because we have all experienced how successful this strategy can be in personal interactions with spoken language in social situations where two people are working together to find common ground.  But those conversations are usually in limited domains, rely heavily on visual cues and body language, and are forgiving of errors.

This strategy utterly fails in written translation when it’s just you and the source text staring you in the face.

That’s because it falls victim to a human cognitive flaw. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls it the “WYSIATI Fallacy” (“What You See is All There Is.”)  As Kahneman notes, “It leads a mind to experience high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know.”

Let’s see if I can explain that one a bit better.

Skill in the translation field is a form of wisdom that relies on extended life experience in which we make repeated errors that are then corrected, sculpted and eventually perfected over a period of many years to form the building blocks that we use to convey master-level texts.

This is because translation is not one single skill, but a whole complex chain of specific, precise and in many ways unrelated skills.  These include, among others:

a) The ability to think and navigate in two or more languages simultaneously; 

b) A talent for conveying ideas over complex and often incompatible terrains; 

c) A profound sensitivity to the power and subtleties of different languages; 

d) An artistic flair and ear for composition in your target language;

e) The mastery of exceedingly complex technical, legal, scientific and cultural subjects.

As you can see, “intuition” is a feeble weapon against such a fearsome task.

So try this: Take risks.  Ease away from the rock. Explore different routes and paths. 

In practical terms, when you are first starting out, this means you will fail early and often. But the path to success in translation is paved with an endless cornucopia of errors. We learn and retain more knowledge from the errors we’ve made and learned from than the questions we got right the first time on the test. 

Translation at its best is an essentially collaborative enterprise.  It requires endless learning from each other – mentors, instructors, colleagues and partners – every single day. So take the risk right now of being revised and re-written and corrected.

It’s a lot more fun when we’re all climbing this mountain together.



Aug 5, 2021

Workflow Wednesday: Getting started with memoQ templates

 

Recorded Aug 11, 2021

It has been more than seven years since memoQ introduced the use of project templates, and although the default method of project creation involves templates when the New Project icon is clicked on the Project ribbon, most users stick with the examples provided, venturing little beyond them, or they use the old Project Wizard and avoid templates altogether. It took me some years to really get my head around the use of project templates in memoQ, and the fully configured sample templates included with installation and made to specifications that were seldom aligned to my needs were not particularly helpful.

When I finally did understand how templates could revolutionize my productivity in local and online projects, I responded to help requests by some LSP consulting clients by providing fully configured templates to address all the problems they listed with the often complex needs of their high volume clients. And to my surprise, most of these configurations went unused. The project managers were simply overwhelmed. As I had been for nearly six years.

And then a colleague's request to help with a filter for a package type not included in memoQ's standard configuration opened my eyes to the importance of simplicity. I had to use a template for that particular challenge, and the template allowed easy import of GLP packages full of TXLF files and did no other special thing.

A weekend of training with project managers from a local LSP showed that this approach could clear up the confusion often caused by immediate confrontation with "kitchen sink" templates as an introduction. When the team shared their desires of "just one thing" to make their work easier and saw how simply that one thing could be accomplished, the understood the value of templates quickly and were soon able to build more sophisticated templates as their confidence grew and they dared tread just a bit farther. Step. By. Step. 

So this webinar took a different approach to templates than you have probably seen so far, emphasizing simplicity and simple needs as a foundation for robust processes and automation. I had no intention of talking about all the myriad options for configuration and automation, though some of these were discussed in the Q&A. This talk is for people who are confused by templates. Who think they aren't really of any use for what they do. Or who are even scared stiff of them. So enjoy the recording (best viewed on YouTube, where you can take advantage of the time-coded table of contents).