Jun 14, 2024

Substack in #xl8 & #l10n

 As related in my last post, I've been testing the Substack platform as an alternative means for distributing and managing the kind of information I've published for many years now on this blog, professional sites and social media, course authoring platforms, YouTube, Xitter, Mastodon and probably a few other channels I've forgotten. And I'm quite surprised to find any expectations I had to be exceeded at this point. On the whole I can do a better job of creating accessible tutorials and other reference information there, and there is far less effort involved with maintenance, style sheet fiddling and whatnot.

All my various projects there can be found here on my profile page.

Currently, these are the
Other plans include The Diary and Letters of Charles Berry Senior, a US Civil War veteran from Yorkshire, England, who participated in Sherman's march to the sea and who is my great-great grandfather. Some of his records exist in very deteriorated form in a university archive in the United States and can be found online, but much is missing, and I am in possession of the complete transcript prepared by one of the man's daughters more than 100 years ago when the family feared the information would be lost to the forces of material decay. I'll be preparing clean text from her handwritten record (the typescript done by a cousin about 50 years ago was lost and probably contains more errors) and probably an audio reading. There's some hard stuff there, as well as some surprises and interesting lessons in how our world has changed in the past 160 years.

And at some point I'll probably share some of my culinary obsessions as well as what life was like traveling on the other side of the Iron Curtain sans papers or in dingy Paris bookshops and refugee hotels 40 years ago and more.

This past week, I've done a big blitz on memoQ LiveDocs, for which there are still another dozen or so drafts to be finished, and a lot of stuff from my CAT tools resource online class from last year should be appearing there in updated form in due course. There isn't a lot of translation-related activity that I've found on Substack, at least not for the technical side of things, but a lot of historians and authors I follow are very present there, so I'm hoping the better half of my translation technologist friends will join the Substack party at some point.

Most of my new text, video and teaching content will appear on those Substack channels. It's simply far easier to manage, and there you won't have the same RSS headaches you might have here. And the damned editor of Google Blogger just keeps accumulating bugs I don't have to cope with in Substack. And don't get me started on bloody Wordpress!

I hope to see you in my Substack channels soon! I think there will be something like a memoQ QA course there before the summer is over....

Jun 2, 2024

A change of platform?

 


As some readers of this blog may already know, recently I have begun to use the Substack platform for some of my writing. But why?

This blog and my YouTube channel have become, over the course of about 16 years now, leading sources of information for a variety of technology topics related to translation and localization, not all of them having to do with memoQ. As well as a venue for other personal and professional expression. I've also got a presence on a few e-learning platforms and sporadic participation in several microblogging platforms.

The online professional landscape for language services has evolved so much in the past two decades that it is often rather difficult to determine the best messaging venues for educational content for working professionals, Quersteiger aspirants and students. To a large and unfortunate extent, a lot of the relevant discussions take place on commercial platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, where the content is quickly buried in the infamous, often preposterous noise of those spaces. There is also the problem of curation, which was one of the reasons this blog was founded back in 2008 after Proz dot comjob lost its value as a professional space with the imposition of extreme censorship and expulsion of its most experienced and helpful community members, many of them former moderators.

Because of this fragmentation of the translation information space, I often find myself spending too much time digging up old (free) information for people with limited search skills or motivation, and in doing so I recognize time and again how much user interfaces for my professional tools have changed over the years, which also poses navigation problems for those who wish to apply the lessons. Menus are now ribbons, many functions have been renamed or moved to other places in the application, or new features have made some of the old solutions less relevant except for those still using very old software (and there are still many of these, which is why I am careful about "updates").

And several times in the past year, I've been contacted by blog readers who had difficulties getting an RSS feed for this blog, which is apparently a rather oldtimey thing now.

So... in the past few years, I noticed that several authors whom I follow use the Substack platform (the historians Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson, also professor Marco Neves at Universidade Nova de Lisboa FCSH, whom I think of as a "Portuguese John McWhorter", and John McWhorter himself). A brief investigation on my part revealed several advantages to this, including fairly painless ways to organize a mix of free and paid content. So I decided to experiment.

After a month now, I would say I am largely pleased as a user of the website and iPhone app. I am still learning the best practices for using insertable buttons and unexpected features like "Notes" and "Threads", probably making more mistakes than I realize, but this does appear to be a good platform for tying together the rather scattered educational content I've been producing for more than two decades now and adding updates to these summaries. And perhaps the venue will prove more useful for discussions, more so than social media where they are quickly buried in platform noise.

I'm not abandoning this blog nor YouTube. There will still be content posted on both which may never appear in any form on the Translation Tribulations Substack. But that's probably the best place to look for now if you need current overviews of language service technology topics or you want a peek at some of my course content tests or textbook-related projects. I may post occasional pointers here on the blog to content on Substack, but the (free) subscription mechanism there is really a much better way (than RSS here, for example) to keep up to date.

So won't you join me?



Apr 11, 2024

English for Ukraine!

 

Recently I discovered an online volunteer opportunity that is worth sharing. The war in Ukraine is in its tenth year now, with the escalation of a full-scale orcish invasion now in the third year. The current phase of the conflict is particularly worrisome, with Putin's agents in the US Congress successfully holding up needed assistance for six months now. Ultimately, Ukraine will prevail despite the cowardice and complicity of the criminally insane and terminally stupid in a number of governments that should be solidly allied with the defenders. 

There are many things that ordinary citizens can do to support the sovereignty and democracy of our Ukrainian friends. If you're into direct support of the military response to ruZZian aggression, Estonian blogger Artur Rehi has done good things with fundraising for vehicles and drones, which you can learn about on his website. For those concerned with the morale and psychological health of children, British children's author and illustrator Debbie Howard has an ongoing program to put books in the hands of kids to help them deal with the disturbing experiences of war, and support for that effort is very welcome. These are just a few of the options on my personal readar, and there are many more.

There are many narratives in the Ukrainian defense against imperialist aggression from the orcs of Putin's cesspit and from the growth of a democratic, multicultural civil society in Ukraine, but the ones that matter most are those from the Ukrainians themselves. The voices there matter and should be heard, and to facilitate that, I am pleased for the opportunity to support individual Ukrainians, children and adults, to improve their communication skills in the international language English so they can become ever more a part of our circles of culture, trade and friendship.

For years now, the ENGin volunteer program has coordinated the pairing of "language buddies" to improve the English conversation skills of people in Ukraine to help their academic and professional development and support them in talking to their many friends and future friends abroad. Recently, the program has also expanded to include assistance for civil servants in Ukraine, which is the particular effort for which I have recently become a volunteer.

When I underwent training for this volunteer effort, I saw people from many countries, continents and native language backgrounds who were committed to helping Ukraine speak to the world. Won't you join us?



Mar 27, 2024

#IAPTI2024 Call for presentation proposals for the conference in Bursa, Turkey



The 7th International Conference for the International Association of Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI) will be held on September 28-29, 2024, in Bursa, Türkiye. The Call for Papers is still open and we will continue with the proposals selection process until April 30, 2024.

Abstracts submitted should be a maximum of 200 words and be sent to the Organizing Committee at bursaconference@iapti.org. Priority will be given to new topics not presented before at other conferences. 

Please include a title and description, a short bio (up to 100 words) and a profile photo with your proposal. Speakers will have 45-50 minutes for their presentations and 10 minutes for Q&A. 

The Organizing Committee reserves the right to accept or reject proposals and will notify applicants accordingly. The conference fee is waived for speakers (1 per presentation) and no other monetary compensation or reimbursement is offered. 

For more information, please contact the Organizing Committee at the e-mail address above. We look forward to welcoming you at another outstanding IAPTI event. See you in September! 









Resources for learning European Portuguese (A1-B2)

When I first moved to Portugal eleven years ago, I resolved to avoid the difficulties I had experienced as an exchange student in Germany many years before, where my northern German accent and academic style of speaking caused bartenders and salespeople in the Saarland to refuse service shortly after my arrival. So in Évora, I decided to learn the language "of the street" from neighbors, shopkeepers and daily tasks. It was a slow process to be sure, but I soon learned that other options were hardly available in the interior; even the local university offered essentially nothing except an A1-level course for Erasmus students, which was poorly attended (and often canceled) due to the lack of coordination among the faculty. In that city and in the border town I moved to a few years later, there were also neither language schools nor established, reliable tutors available. The few who could be found had issues with low business volumes and soon ceased their registered commercial activities.

In the heavily populated coastal regions with a large number of immigrants or tourists with money, there are a number of good programs at universities or private institutions, but the time commitments for these (typically weeks or months of full-time attendance) were not really compatible with my lifestyle and work schedule, and the most highly recommended programs cost thousands of euros that I needed for other things.

When it came time to take the CIPLE exam to certify A2-level competence for my permanent residence (which is also required for citizenship for those not married to a Portuguese citizen), I enrolled in online courses offered by the Camões Institute in Lisbon. These had three options: an entirely self-guided program, and two programs with some level of interaction with an assigned tutor for 30 minute sessions each or every other week. I opted for the latter, and the excellent tutors (who in my case were usually native Portuguese enrolled in some graduate program in Spain) were probably the main reason I was able to pass the exam and get my título da residência permanente. The actual exercises in the online courses weren't very good (except for the writing assignments), and I found a lot of functional errors in some of them. Plain sloppy programming, which is really shameful in a country that hosts the Web Summit every year.

My early explorations of apps available for language learning a decade ago were not very satisfying. Flashcard programs like Anki or Memrise are really too limited for achieving any kind of functional competence, and at the time I found nothing with any kind of systematic structure for acquiring basic grammar and conversational skills. I could open and read an entirely Portuguese grammar book and understand the content without difficulty because the concepts were largely familiar to me from other language study, but without some systematic practice or more social opportunities in the country, the grammar books were of little real use.

One hears that "immersion is critical", and when I moved to Portugal, I assumed that my learning curve would be even faster than it was years before for German, Russian and Japanese, but there's immersion in the shallow end of a language, with simple, comprehensible input to build a foundation of basics, and then there is immersion in the fast river of daily adult life with bills to pay and neighbors and authorities of all kinds to deal with, where in the comfortable slumber of a language novice, it is more likely that "human voices wake us, and we drown".

For a long time, the only "comprehensible input" (in Krashen's sense) that I could find to help improve my Portuguese was the podcast "Portuguese with Leo", which is intermediate level, about right for me by the time I discovered it, but still lacking the content I needed to patch up gaps in my competence.

Duolingo, allegedly the world's most popular language learning app, while helpful for basic Spanish, simply sucks whale dork when it comes to learning Portuguese for Europe or Africa. People have no idea how bad and useless its teaching of Brazilian Portuguese is for a visit to Portugal until they get here and realize that what they hear sounds nothing like what they learned. There's nothing wrong with Brazilian, and if I were planning to visit Brazil or spend a lot of time with people from there, I would certainly spend time mastering the quirks of pronunciation and the great differences in vocabulary and grammar in informal speech particularly, but for Portugal all that is simply unhelpful in the extreme. The differences are far greater than between ordinary speech in the UK and the US, for example, and on my first visit to London in 1977, I understood almost nothing of the directions people gave me on the street. In what was supposed to be my native language. So don't expect to get far with Brazilian in Portugal. Even if you are a native speaker from Brazil, the pace and manner of speech here may make you feel like a victim of a traffic accident.

But meanwhile, there are a few good apps and sites that focus on European Portuguese and may help you prepare for holidays or life in Portugal. The best of these I've found are described below.



I didn't realize until someone in a Facebook language learner's group mentioned the Practice Portuguese app that I had actually discovered and subscribed to their YouTube channel some time ago. But I didn't pay enough attention to the YouTube content to realize that there was something more on offer and that this something was, to a large extent, something useful for me, even after eleven years of living in Portugal and a competence level that allows me to conduct daily business and socialize in my hunting club without a lot of difficulty.

I'm currently working my way through the A1 level of the Practice Portuguese iOS app and website, though I also skip ahead and enjoy a lot of the B1/B2-level content in lessons, videos, podcasts, etc. After a few days of looking at the free content, I decided to subscribe (the best deal here is via the web site, not the online app stores for phones and tablets), and I am finding a lot of useful material to fill basic knowledge gaps even at the simplest level. I'm also impressed by the well-considered and somewhat original options for review, including the recently introduced "audio review" option.

One of the things that distinguishes the content of Practice Portuguese from Duolingo, for example, is that the voices used in the app are real ones (sometimes with shitty audio and a lot of background noise, but there is always a button to click and hear the same expression in a clear, noise-free native speaker's voice). The use of a large number of different speakers is helpful, I think, to recognize some of the different pronunciation one might encounter, and this is often dealt with explicitly in the lessons. Not differences between Brazil and Portugal but rather how one might here something in Lisbon as opposed to Beja or Braga.



Another resource I found recently is "Conversa Portuguese". It uses the Learnworlds platform (similar to Teachable, which I use sometimes to offer online CAT tool instruction for memoQ) and has what looks like a well-structured program for those needing Portuguese competence for countries other than Brazil. The platform also offers quite a number of useful, free resources for practice. I've looked at these resources, and I like them, but I haven't tried the commercial instruction program (yet) for lack of time. I hope to do so later this year and offer an in-depth report on what I find.

***

Some may wonder how it is that I can still find useful learning opportunities for European Portuguese with programs like Practice Portuguese or Conversa Portuguese, given that I've lived in the country for so long, I have a Portuguese partner with whom I share a farm and a life, and I've had a lifelong reputation of being "gifted" with languages (said reputation being largely unearned and taken seriously mostly by monolinguals). Well, I ask myself that too sometimes, but it is what it is, and "fluency" is really context-dependent, and depending on one's needs and commitments may differ greatly between individuals. It all really comes down to comprehensible input, I think, and that depends a lot on interests and background. Within a few weeks of coming to Portugal, I could grab an organic chemistry textbook in the library and read it, understanding everything in Portuguese (even though I could pronounce none of it). But it was probably a year before I could reliably order a pizza or tell the butcher just what I wanted.

For my friends and colleagues and others who plan to visit Portugal for a holiday or a professional conference or who may consider living here at some point, the options I have described in this article should give you a good foundation for coping with the variety of Portuguese you'll encounter here and perhaps make the culture of the country a bit more accessible. Portugal is not the Paradise some claim it to be, but of all the places I've lived in my life, I find it the least problematic for the things that matter most to me. Your mileage may differ, but equipped with some basic language skills, you'll be more fit for the journey.

Mar 26, 2024

Adventures in Language Learning

 


In 2021, feeling more than a little claustrophobic from the ongoing restrictions of life in pandemic times, I enrolled for a time in an online masters course, Português Lingua Não Materna, at Portugal's Universidade Aberta. The course itself was a mistake, or at least the language acquisition unit was, being taught by an insecure older professor who demanded perfection in writing from the course's students while being unable to write a page herself that I can remember not being full of errors (most, but not all being an inability to come to grips with the current orthographic convention), engaging in bizarre linguistic harassment like forbidding me to use Portuguese adjectives ending with -avel (WTF?) and existing in a state of imperviousness to modern research and theory.

The semester of academic involvement did me a world of good, however, leading me back to reading in a field I greatly enjoyed as a young exchange student in Max Mangold's linguistics and dialect courses at Universität des Saarlandes in the early 1980s. In particular, the work of Stephen Krashen was a welcome discovery, as it put many of Mangold's recommendations for language learning into a more effective context. For example, Prof. Mangold often recommended listening to radio or other audio sources (such as tapes) as a means of acquiring a new language, but when I tried this years later with over 100 hours of French on a long train commute to work, it got me exactly nowhere. I was getting plenty of input in French, but as I had no background whatsoever in languages derived from Latin, none of that was comprehensible input. Things might have gone quite differently with the French language had I bothered to learn Spanish in high school, for example.

The following Spring I was in Lisbon for a Covid superspreader conference of colleagues, when someone introduced me to the Duolingo language app, which he was using to review Russian for keeping up with the news on Russia's criminal aggressions against Ukraine. I tried the app myself to review my mostly forgotten Russian from the 1980s and found that my comprehension returned quickly and I could soon follow commentaries online with some effort. However, after a few months of Russian practice, my companheira announced that she had booked a holiday in Spain for my birthday four months later. So I started using Duolingo to learn Spanish, doing parallel courses for learning Spanish from English, German, Russian and Portuguese. My idea, I suppose, was that connecting the Spanish to my other languages of use might reinforce what I learned better and avoid the kind of interference I would occasionally experience many years ago when trying to speak Japanese and finding only Russian words in my head. It sort of worked.

After several months of practice with Duolingo, I discovered interest groups for that app on Facebook, the most interesting one for me at the time being Duolingo Spanish Learners. I skipped right over the idiotic discussions with fools demanding that the language somehow conform to their flawed concept of its "rules" and found a wealth of interesting recommendations for supplemental and alternative learning resources. These included books, YouTube channels (among the best for comprehensible input at many levels was Dreaming Spanish), tutorials and conversation opportunities and more.

After about a year of Spanish practice, including several months of intense conversation practice on Baselang (referral link here), I actually found myself more comfortable conversing in Spanish than in Portuguese, despite having lived in Portugal for a decade. Access to good quality comprehensible input at the beginning and intermediate levels in Spanish was the key here, and my frustration with the lack of such resources for European Portuguese grew as my proficiency in Spanish increased. I have since found some good options for Portuguese, which I will share in later posts, but since I live in a border town just across the river from Badajoz, the capital of the Spanish state Extremadura, I can usually fall back on Spanish if I'm at a loss for words in Portuguese, and I do most of my major shopping over in Spain anyway.

In the last two years, I have spent a lot of time with language learning apps and other resources not just for Russian, Spanish and Portuguese, but also for other languages I do not know but for which I have had occasion to develop special resources for translation and quality assurance in memoQ. These included Ukrainian, Hebrew, Yiddish and Arabic. Using the apps to learn the alphabets for these languages has made it easier to deal with sample texts in testing and to understand some of the challenges presented by colleagues and clients in need of assistance with regular expressions in languages that most technical gurus can't do anything with.

So henceforth this blog will include information and tips gleaned from my personal and occasionally professional forays into languages and alphabets for any purpose that fits my fancy. And if you, the reader, have interesting things to share in these regards, please do so in the comments.

Mar 17, 2024

Best memoQ Translator Pro deal ever — until March 28th, 2024

In the fifteen years I've been using memoQ, I have never seen a discount this good on new perpetual licenses for the desktop translator version of memoQ: 50% off the retail price. For those whose service and maintenance agreements have been lapsed for three years or more, this is also the best price you'll see for getting up to date with the latest version and a new SMA covering any releases in the 365 days following your purchase. The current version of memoQ is 10.5.


Now lately I've heard some people claim that there have been no worthwhile improvements for individual translators since memoQ 205 (version 7.8) or so. Nonsense. Have a look at the "What am I missing?" page to see what changes have occurred since the version you currently use and whether and upgrade is worthwhile for you. If your version is older than 8.0, all you'll see on that page is changes since that version, but there are a lot of good ones to benefit individuals. memoQ server revenue may comprise the vast majority of profits for the company, but the rest of the user base has hardly been neglected. (What has been neglected is good teaching and reference tools for the most part, but that applies to server customers too.)

In the versions 8.x, major improvements were made to term bases that I personally begged to see for years, and a lot has been done to upgrade the user-friendliness of LiveDocs corpora, backup processes for projects and entire memoQ installations, improved regex handling with a special library tool that allows us to focus on getting work done, not idiotic syntax to drive mere mortals mad... and more. These are just a few of the many things that have confirmed time and again that my friends at memoQ Ltd. really are top class and well ahead of the pack.

So take the plunge if you need the latest features, and tell others not to miss a chance they aren't likely to see again anytime soon.