memoQ&A in Porto - good people, great bagels!

Last night from 6:00 to 9:30 I enjoyed a "memoQ&A Evening" at the Porto Bagel Café as a reward for surviving the long bus ride to Porto/Gaia from Évora to attend the JABA Partner Summit. About 25 local colleagues attended to hear my not-as-short-as-promised presentation and discuss approaches to memoQ and other translation technologies as our working tools. The evening was part of the Translators in Residence initiative and a good start to my second visit to the area after my whirlwind tour last month to investigate venues for teaching events. Many thanks to the sponsors. the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters and Chip7 of Évora for providing the funding and tools (an excellent LCD projector - thank you, Carlos!) to do this.

I very much appreciate IAPTI's commitment to the professional education and continuing development of my good colleagues in Portugal, particularly in difficult economic times when many findit difficult to attend translators' events in faraway places. The evening was free for all attendees, who only had to pay for whatever they drank (great coffee - I had my usual galão) and ate (the best bagels in Portugal!).

After an initial hour of snacks, coffee and chat, the evening began with a discussion of the game-changing implications of speech recognition technologies for our working lives. Not only is it now possible for colleagues to use high-quality speech recognition on desktop computer and laptops in languages such as Hungarian and Portuguese, which are not currently supported by Dragon NaturallySpeaking (using, for example, the integrated recognition tools in the Mac Yosemite OS, as demonstrated with SDL Trados Studio and memoQ in Lisbon the day that SDL conquered Portuguese translation), smartphones are part of the game now too. Since picking up an older iPhone model (4S) for a few hundred euros about a month ago, I have had excellent results testing it with English, German, Russian and Portuguese and e-mailing texts to myself with just a few taps on the phone's screen. Once transferred as an e-mail, the text is then aligned in a CAT tool such as memoQ and subjected to tagging, QA and other procedures of the usual virtual translation working environments.

The use of memoQ and other CAT tools for single-language original authoring and text revision was also discussed. This flexible workflow extends the relevance of translation environment tools well beyond the usual limits within which translators and translation companies live and operate and offers interesting prospects for collaboration and re-use of creative resources. This topic willalso be covered next week in a lecture and workshop at Universidade de Évora and in an eCPD webinar on June 2, 2015.

Interoperability is another important topic for translators; I discussed different ways in which I use SDL Trados Studio and other tools to prepare projects to work in memoQ and vice versa as well as mz highly profitable use of SDL Multiterm to enhance customer loyalty and my professional image with this terminology management ssystem's excellent output management features.

Other tips and tricks in the memoQ&A included the untapped potential of LiveDocs, tracked changes and row histories in memoQ, dealing with embedded objects, graphics and transcription, PDF 3-ways and new tricks for nasty and/or illegible image PDFs, versioning and a concept for transforming translation memory concordancing into something much, much more useful and less prone to errors in editing and translation.

Copies of the slides from the evening's presentation are available here. It is, however, merely a palimpsest of the evening.

Many thanks also to colleague and translation tools teacher Felix do Carmo for kindly chauffeuring me around town and for the interesting tour of the training and production facilities at his company, TIPS.

The Bookshelf: a London-style hangout in the heart of Alentejo

I knew I was in the right place when, as I described the farm to which I would be moving and my satisfaction over the many rosebushes there, which would enable me to make rosewater for my mint tea, my conversation partner said "Oh, you need rosewater? I have some extra!", then fumbled around in his inventory and sent me off with half a bottle of good Algerian rosewater brought from London. I had given up on finding anything like that in the Alentejo. But then I knew it was the right place long before, with the many delicious herb teas, coffees and good food, sometimes vegetarian, offered at this very metropolitan hangout in my sleepy Portuguese university town. The couple who own and operate the business, a local woman and her Kosovar husband, lived for a few decades in London and brought some of that city's style with them to this unique café in Évora.

So when I need a quiet, air-conditioned retreat to enjoy a book, brandy and coffee or perhaps a good curry, I know where to go. And it's great to have a good chat in English about common interests in cuisine and beverages and share the latest delicious infusions of Aswan hibiscus, doum palm fruit and mint from herbs kindly provided by a colleague in Egypt. And who knows? Perhaps some of those cookies for the Portuguese will make an appearance there.

A funny thing happened on the way to learning Portuguese....

When I first moved to Portugal, I stayed in one of the better parts of town, a suburb with some rather good fields and hills to walk my dogs and a lot of nice people with whom I have some things in common. I had been greatly worried by the dire warnings of German friends about what a tick-infested, dangerous place the Med countries are for pets, and how there is naught to be done. The first part is true of almost any country these days, but usually the local vets have a good understanding of how to prevent and treat local pet diseases, and just one day after my arrival I was fortunate to meet a vet in the park across from my house who gave me exactly the advice I needed and took me on a whirlwind tour of the local Neolithic archaeology sites. Can't imagine a better start for me in a new place, really.

But the house there was only available for a month, and the back yard was not well suited to containing my Deutsch Drahthaar, a hunting companion who is a sweetheart with people who likes to jump over 2 meter fences, go on tour and bring back cats as souvenirs. So I went on to another place closer to the university in the historic center of Évora. The back yard was as dog-tight as a maximum security kennel could be with walls and fences at least 5 meters high. But a black cat still managed to drop by as an impromptu snack. His bad luck in this case. The cactus which decorated the edges of the yard also meant a few difficult sessions extracting spines from the bodies of two robust dogs who like to knock each other around rather hard in play. And after the Drahthaar went sailing out a second story window to express his love to the serenading tomcat below and landed a bit hard on the cobblestones I figured it was time to move on.

One of the other problems with the first two addresses was that the neighborhoods presented too many opportunities to speak English or, occasionally, German. If the majority of people I encountered every day were not university educated with a reasonable command of one of the languages I mastered there was usually someone nearby who could serve as social methadone for someone with a lazy addiction to using the wrong language in the right place.

So I moved to the part of town where the other form of methadone is more commonly found. A place where for the first two months the only ones I met with much command of English at all were the local drug dealer and a housekeeper I knew from my favorite hotel, who is also the neighborhood's bootlegger. Aguardente caseira was quickly added to my vocabulary and kitchen shelf. German is not an option here; when the local crime lord introduced himself at the neighborhood's revolution party (celebrating the ouster of Salazar in 1974 and the political reforms which remain incomplete) he was so amused by the fact that I claimed to know the language that he called up one of the addicts who buy from him (an orderly at the local hospital if I understood correctly and a German refugee) and asked me to talk to him and confirm that I really could speak the language.

On several occasions I have had the the opportunity to use the phrase não sou alemão!!! to sooth social tensions which persist here despite the best attempts of German banks to drain the country's sometimes too-hot blood. And using the phrase with my private Portuguese tutor's mother last week transformed me in short order from persona non grata and an object of some dark speculation on a street populated by siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles to a likeable eccentric and for all I know possibly a candidate for legal induction into the family. (My Portuguese isn't quite up to the level of understanding this point, and sometimes it's better not to try.)

The recent brainstorm which resulted in The Great American Cookie Project, sharing the theory and practice of snickerdoodles, soft jumbles and every kinky kind of chocolate chip cookie one might imagine, took my crappy command of the local Alentejo dialect from nearly zero - unable to form a sentence most of the time if it involved more than "I'll have a coffee" or "Six eggs, please" - to conversing in pidgin Portuguese for more than 8 hours on many recent days and has done wonders for my physical condition and blood sugar levels. It's also given me a rapidly improving command of the techniques to cook like my local friends do. Cold cut sandwiches with too much cheese, good bye.

Moving to the sort of place my respectable, educated friends warned me to avoid has been a great experience and also shown that the place is far better than its reputation among my peers, knife-wielding tendeiros who want to break bottles over my head for not having cigarettes for them notwithstanding. A quick smile and a question about how much bigger the puny faca was than the fellow's caralho usually suffices to sooth the tensions.

As temperatures rise, tempers can get short as last night's unplanned visit to a local pub to watch the soccer game (Germany versus Portugal at the World Cup in Brazil) proved. It's been ages since I had to practice disarms, and usually that was with sticks or knives. A beer bottle is a new experience for me, as well as the creative variations of puta I learned which were expressed to my patient tutor for keeping company with the German. How many times do I have to that explain to people here that eu não sou alemão? I think there is a rematch of the discussion planned for Thursday, though to be honest I'm not fluent enough to have caught all the details. Maybe I'll be able to explain them on Friday. Let's hope.

A ride in the sun, rough roads and

"So what happened after he climbed up the tower and rescued her? She rescued him right back."

Mobility again at last! With power assistance for cobblestoned hills from Hell.

Got up after an hour and a half sleep, more or less, thought about work and decided instead to explore the bairros a bit before the morning's physical therapy. A sweet ride in the morning sun, past the aqueduct, the hay-harvested fields and ruins to an ATM, where I picked up cash and decided to enjoy pasteis nata and galão at Café Ebora before gymnastics, soothing fingers and hot packs on the knotted web of my back.

Alas, my Portuguese failed me for a simple order of coffee and pastry, where it worked so well for many hours of language private tuition, long chats to end the day and greet the morning sun, bake cookies, drink sangria, whiskey, learn the secrets of sopa de beldroegas and the right brew of bachalhau and spinach in my only pot, discussing facas, tendeiros and their murderous habits, the quality of local schools, the revolution to be finished, coca, heroin, speedballs and methadone, primos, sobrinhas, filhos, putas, baratas, children buying time for their mother to jump out the second story window and escape another beating, and when a knife in the leg can teach a husband to behave before he needs his throat cut. Still, as I sipped coffee (once the misunderstanding was resolved), I reflected on how, after nearly 15 years of living in cold places with too many cold people, Portugal, its bairros and people, their ability to get on with life and live it, their persistent search for another vein in which to inject some hope after all the blood has been drawn by German banks, have restored my will to live.

Casting stones

I have had a wonderful holiday here in Évora, Portugal, but I am not at all sad to see it end tomorrow. I wish I were back in Berlin now, because then I could go about my business of selling and giving away my excess and planning the trip home with my dogs.

I want to thank my lawyer/linguist friend for her excellent recommendation of a place to detox and for all the information she kindly shared to help me prepare for my first real holiday in a decade. It was mostly spent as I like my holidays best - minimal sightseeing, little shopping and a lot of watching and experiencing very ordinary, daily life.

I have been shown more kindness this past week than in 13 years. This is absolutely true.

I've been doing a downmarket food thing, trying to find a cheap eatery that is not better than the expensive restaurants near my former residence in the Berlin area. I am working on an article to compare bacalhau in various local dives.

Last night I enjoyed the kind hospitality of a small café owner near my hotel. I told him about the wonderful day I had today listening to Angel Merkel jokes at the internal revenue office.

When I went to pay for the meal, I was shocked by how little was on the bill - € 4.80. Then I realized half of it had been a gift. Before I could object, I was offered a cigar, told it was a very good one. I am allergic to tobacco and am a militant non-smoker. But the gifts offered by such people cannot be refused with any honor.

I asked for a light, inhaled the taste of freedom, then walked out into the new world.

Reading the future in olive stones cast.

Sailing with da Gama

Baudolino’s Eco teaches us that if our minds can conceive a thing it must be verdad, so I know that, in the land of Presbyter John, the Common Sense Advisory is truly that and the wit and wisdom of Angela Merkel shall lead the Greeks and Portuguese on the Straight And Narrow Path to Full Economic Recovery. Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

So I realized as the road turned from Lisbon and the highway named for my patron Saint da Gama took me across the ocean bridge toward Paradise. He and I set sail on a sea of asphalt and tears, the canvas full with the wind of song, carrying us to a new world.

We passed through a green and pleasant land of milk and vinho verde, the sun smiling on our journey as I woke slowly from the frigid nightmare of el norte, rubbed my eyes and saw clearly

the signs which would lead me to freedom again.

On the road without tolls, less travelled, I passed through the fogs of thirteen years,

fortified myself with café and sandes mista at roadside inns when my body required sustenance,

passed by Golden Arches with their promises of culinary delights.

Entering the gates of the City Upon The Hill at last, I followed the broad avenue to the palace,

my glance passing in tired benediction over the mendicants and students resting in the sun with the others laughing and quarreling before it.

Quite a knocking indeed I made as the porter, young and lively at his work, turned the key and bade me enter.

Master Policarpo welcomed me and showed me to my chambers, where I changed sweat-soaked garb grimed with the dust of Teutonic Tribulations and dressed in gayer, brighter attire better suited for the feast which awaited that evening.

As I made my way back through the corridors to the room that night, tipsy with tinto, I diverted briefly to the courtyard chapel, where I lit a candle and spoke a prayer of thanks to São da Gama for guiding me safely to this place.