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?

Oxford living dictionaries for "other" languages

I had some difficulties decided how to title this post given the historically loaded connotations of possible alternatives. The Oxford Dictionaries project does a lot of useful stuff, offering quite a number of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries free and by subscription, which are of great value to editors and translators.

I am particularly excited and encouraged to see bilingual and monolingual resources from Oxford for some common African languages now, such as Setswana, Swahili, Northern Sotho and isiZulu. In recent years it has been a great blessing to meet some African colleagues from Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, Angola and elsewhere at IAPTI events, memoQfest or other venues. In some of my education support efforts through IAPTI I have found rather interesting resources in South Africa and a few other places, but on the whole it appears to me as an outsider that colleagues there face a relative shortage of resources for any work they might do with local languages not transplanted from Europe. So it is a great pleasure for me personally to discover and share such resources (and I would encourage others to do so as well in the comments below).

The Oxford global languages also features other important languages such as Indonesian, Malay and various Indian languages like Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil and Urdu. And then there are the usual suspects like English and Spanish.

I fell in love with the Oxford English Dictionary as a child, when I found the long shelf filled with its volumes of historical etymology. The dictionaries mentioned and linked here are focused more on current usage of living languages, but they should have much of the same scholarship and rigor that goes into the making of that marvelous OED. Enjoy.

memoQ Web Search examples for Portuguese

This week I'm in Lisbon teaching a 24-hour Boas Practicas (best practice) evening course for translation technology with David Hardisty and Marco Neves. Tonight we're covering web search with various sites and tools, including memoQ Web Search.

Unfortunately, Kilgray provides examples of configuring the web search only for English and German, and many of the site configurations are defective. And if you have other languages as your working pairs there isn't much you can do with those examples.

In tonight's class we had students working in the following pairs:

• Portuguese to English
• English to Portuguese
• Portuguese to Russian
• French to Portuguese
• Spanish to Portuguese
• German to Portuguese

So we created some example configurations to do web look-ups in all these pairs. And they are available here.

I was a bit surprised to find that I never blogged the chapters of my books that dealt with configuring the web search - I'll have to get around to that one of these days - but the memoQ Help isn't bad for this if you need a little guidance on how to add more site searches or change the configurations of these.

Anyone is welcome to do with the configurations provided here as they please; I hope they will help friends, colleagues and students in the Lusophone world to go a little farther with a great tool.

End February in Madrid: Workshop for Translators and Editors

I have long respected the Mediterranean Editors and Translators association because of its commitment to excellent continuing professional education. Next month in Madrid there will be a workshop presented jointly with the Spanish association of translators, editors and interpreters, ASETRAD. Have a look at the workshop page of MET with information on the schedule of this English and Spanish event. There is a little over a week before registration closes.

MET-ASETRAD workshop day in Madrid
Saturday, February 28, 2015

Mediterranean Editors and Translators (MET), a peer-driven professional association of language professionals working into or with the English language in the Mediterranean area, is proud to announce that on February 28, 2015, it will once again organize a day-long workshop and networking series in Madrid, Spain. Following the success of last winter’s event in central Madrid and on the heels of MET’s tenth-annual meeting in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, the 2015 workshop series promises to draw an even larger crowd thanks to the participation of the Asociación Española de Traductores, Correctores e Intérpretes (ASETRAD) as co-organizers. Both members of the Vértice network of professional associations for translators, interpreters, and editors, the two sister associations will offer participants a unique opportunity to attend three-hour workshop sessions on topics relevant to the field, short presentations by members of both associations, a free discussion on both groups and their aims, and also a lunch and dinner for networking and socializing with colleagues.

The morning session will feature four simultaneous workshops, two in Spanish and two in English. MET members Emma Goldsmith and Tom O’Boyle will each conduct a workshop in English, while two members of ASETRAD will hold their respective sessions in Spanish. Emma Goldsmith, a medical translator and translation blogger based in the greater Madrid area, will offer insight on how to translate a variety of documents according to the standards of the European Medical Association (EMA), including tips on how to use official templates and terminology when dealing with medicinal product information. For his part, Tom O’Boyle will lead a session on punctuation as a tool for improving text flow. Tom is also based in Madrid and works as a freelance medical translator and author’s editor. Participants who prefer to hone their skills in translation and editing into Spanish may choose to attend the architecture workshop facilitated by Beatriz Pérez Alonso or the website-localization session by Manuel Mata.

After lunch at a nearby restaurant, participants can attend a two-hour block of brief talks, two by members of MET and two from ASETRAD. MET CPD chair Alan Lounds will speak of lesser-known false friends between Spanish and English and strategies when encountering these thorny items, while MET webmaster Timothy Barton will speak of the Excel spreadsheet he has designed to facilitate tax declarations in Spain. The other two talks by ASETRAD members will deal with pharmaceutical translation into Spanish as well as Spanish punctuation. Stephen Waller and María Galán will bring the training activities to a close with a free talk to present their respective associations. A special dinner will be held in the evening, offering participants a chance to get to know members of both groups.

Early English books now online!

The University of Michigan has recently made some of the first books ever printed online, including texts from the first printed editions of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton and more than 25,000 other manually transcribed texts from the period between 1473 and 1700. These are all available free here.

This is not just literature; the works include books of history, philosophy, mathematics and science and many other fields like gardening and cooking. This is the first phase in the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership. Another 40,000 texts may be released as part of this project by the end of the decade.

There are no restrictions for anyone to read, reproduce, distribute and otherwise use these texts.

Drunken monkey needs German to English translator to translate from medieval Czech!

You can always count on ProZ.com, The Translators' Workhouse, for a good laugh. Here is yet another #FAIL by staff to screen job postings properly, with a clueless agency desperately seeking a German to English translator to work on a 9th century Czech document. Best rates only, please!

Such competence speaks for itself and further makes the case for disintermediation. If you want a job done right, go straight to a qualified translator; don't put a put a monkey in the middle.

Workshop: juristisches Englisch, aber richtig!

Die drei Veranstaltungen der Seminarreihe mit RA Stuart Bugg, ein führender Experte und Ausbilder für Rechtsenglisch im deutschen Sprachraum, sind eine seltene und willkommene Gelegenheit, sich mit den wichtigsten und schwierigsten Fallen der sprachlichen und rechtlichen Aspekte der angelsächsischen Juristenwelt auseinanderzusetzen. Wieder erfolgreiche Geschäftskommunikationstagung in Cambridge neulich, diese von Stridonium in englischer Sprache angebotene Workshops für englische Verträge, rechtliche Gestaltung und kommerzielles Recht verfahren nach dem Prinzip, bekannte Experten im Fachbereich mit denjenigen, die tagtäglich mit den Themen befasst sind, zusammen zu bringen, in diesem Falle Rechtsanwälten und professionellen Sprachdienstleistern. Herr RA Bugg, Autor des Referenzwerks Contracts in English: an introductory guide to understanding, using and developing 'Anglo-American' style contracts (C.H. Beck) und Mitverfasser des Fachwörterbuches Kompakt Recht Englisch von Langenscheidt, hat Verbindungen mit Rechtsanwaltskammern in vier Ländern (Neuseeland, Australien, Großbritannien und Deutschland) und hat als Dozent an Universitäten und juristischen Fakultäten in Neuseeland, Deutschland und den Vereinigten Staaten agiert. Er ist einer, an den sich Leute sowohl in Regierung- als auch Industriekreise bevorzugt wenden, um Englisch für Zwecke der internationalen juristischen und handelstechnischen Anwendung besser zu verstehen und einzusetzen. Es freut mich sehr, dass die Organisatoren bei Stridonium nochmal das Niveau der professionellen Ausbildung erhöht haben und anstatt die „üblichen Täter“ in den Kreisen der Sprachdienstleister, einen echten Experten aus der juristischen Welt, in der sich unsere Endkunden befinden, für erstklassige Weiterbildung ernsthafter professionellen Übersetzer sowie Rechtsanwälte erworben haben.

Diese Workshops sind eine hervorragende Gelegenheit, bei der diejenigen, die juristisches Englisch schreiben und übersetzen müssen, die besten Ansätze lernen und besprechen können, um häufige Fehler, sowohl sprachlich als auch durch Unterschiede der Rechtssysteme entstehend, zu vermeiden, und die Grundsätze der eindeutigen, rechtsverbindlichen Anwendung der englischen Sprache im professionellen Einsatz zu beherrschen.

Der entspannende Veranstaltungsort in Holten (NL) nah zur deutschen Grenze ist einfach mit Auto bzw. der Bahn zu erreichen. Er ist bestens für formale und informale Austausche zwischen Teilnehmern geeignet, mit wunderschöner Lage am Rande des Dorfes und unglaublich leckerer, kreativer Küche. Alle Workshops finden montags statt; Frühbucher können in der Regel ein Zimmer im Veranstaltungshotel für Sonntag Abend umsonst mitbuchen (soweit noch verfügbar).

Sie können sich für die einzelnen Workshops auf der (englischsprachigen) Veranstaltungsseite von Stridonium anmelden. Der Teilnahmegebühr beträgt 350 € pro Workshop. Falls Sie alle drei Workshops besuchen möchten, können Sie das Gesamtpaket zu einem Sonderpreis mit Anfrage an die Veranstalter (info (bei) stridonium.com) buchen.

Die Anzahl der Verträge in Europa, die sich auf Englisch für Ihre rechtsverbindliche Version stützen, hat in den letzten Jahrzehnten erheblich zugenommen, mit dem Ergebnis, dass immer größer werdender Druck auf Anwälte, ihre Mandanten, Übersetzer und Dolmetscher besteht, die englische Sprache in juristischer Anwendung richtig zu verstehen, damit die rechtlichen Konzepte eines Landes in der anderen Sprache eindeutig und klar zu verstehen sind.

Die geplanten Workshoptermine sind:

English Contracts - 28. April 2014
    - Common Law vs. Civil Law
    - Cross-System Contracts
    - Legal English Terminology
    - Lost and Found in Translation

Legal Drafting - 26. Mai 2014
    - Basic Drafting Principles
    - Legal Terms
    - Principles of Drafting and Interpretation
    - Avoiding Ambiguity: Exercises in Drafting

Commercial Law - 2. Juni 2014
    - Overview
    - Legal Entities
    - Employment Law
    - Bankruptcy and Insolvency

Jeden Sonntag Abend vor dem entsprechenden Workshop findet eine entspannte Networking-Abendessen statt, an der sich alle beiteiligen können. Die Kosten für die Mahlzeit sind nicht im Programm enthalten. Einzelheiten zu den Themen und der Zeitplanung jedes Workshops sowie Registrierungslinks sind in englischer Sprache auf der Stridonium-Veranstaltungsseite zu finden.

Für jeden Workshop werden 6 CPD-Punkte vom niederländischen Bureau BTV und 6 ATA CE-Punkte anerkannt.

Anfahrt (Google-Karte):

Mit Zug
- 10 Minuten Fußeg vom Bahnhof (Beukenlaantje)
- ODER informieren Sie die Organisatoren über Ihre Ankunft damit sie Sie oder das Hotelpersonal Sie abholen können.

Mit Auto (kostenlose Parkplätze reichlich vorhanden)

Aus Richtung Deventer (A1)

A1 Richtung Hengelo/Enschede
Ausfahrt 26: Lochem/Holten
Links abbiegen nach Raalte, den (ausgeschilderten) Weg nach Holterberg fahren
Geradeaus über den Kreisverkehr, nach der Hochbrücke rechts abbiegen, dann links an der T-Kreuzung
Dann links am Kreisverkehr und nach 50 m nach Holterberg rechts abbiegen
Nach etwa 1 km rechts abbiegen (am gelben Gebäude)

Aus Richtung Enschede/Hengelo (A1)

A1 nach Deventer/Apeldoorn/Amsterdam
Ausfahrt 27: Holten/Markelo
Weiterfahren durch Holten, dann am Kreisverkehr die Ausfahrt für Holterberg nehmen und nach 50 m nach Holterberg rechts abbiegen
Nach etwa 1 km rechts abbiegen (am gelben Gebäude)

Legal English: Getting It Right!

That's not the title of the upcoming workshop series by attorney and linguistic specialist Stuart Bugg, but perhaps it ought to be. Like the recent successful business communication conference in Cambridge, these Stridonium courses for English Contracts, Legal Drafting and Commercial Law once again bring together a recognized subject authority with those involved in practice with the topics, both working attorneys and professional linguists. Mr. Bugg, author of Contracts in English: an introductory guide to understanding, using and developing 'Anglo-American' style contracts (C.H. Beck) and co-author of Langenscheidt Fachwörterbuch Kompakt Recht Englisch, has been associated with legal societies in four countries (NZ, AU, UK and DE) and has taught at universities and law school in New Zealand, Germany and the United States. He is one of the "go-to guys" in Europe training attorneys as well as government and industry professionals to understand legal English better and improve their use of it in international commercial practice. I cannot say how pleased I am that the Stridonium organizers have once more raised the bar and gone beyond the "usual suspects" of the translation circuit to connect more effectively with real experts who are at home in the world of our direct clients and offer first-class continuing education for serious professionals.

These workshops are an excellent opportunity for those who write and translate legal English to learn and discuss best practice, common pitfalls based on linguistic issues as well as differences in legal systems, and how to apply the principles of good, professional language for unambiguous, legally sound communication.

The relaxing venue in Holten, in the east of the Netherlands near the German border with excellent road and rail connections, is a perfect place for formal and informal discussions and exchange of ideas and is noted for its beautiful setting in the woods at the edge of town and its outstanding cuisine. Each workshop is scheduled on a Monday, and early registrants can usually secure a comfortable room at no charge as part of the event registration (subject to availability).

Attendees can register for individual workshops on the Stridonium events page; the fee for each full day of instruction is €350. But if you plan to attend all three workshops, a special rate can be obtained by inquiry to the event organizers at info (at) stridonium.com.

The past few decades have seen a dramatic increase in the share of European law contracts relying on English for their binding version. The result is ever-greater pressure on attorneys, their clients, translators and interpreters to understand and use legal English correctly and to understand how best to explain the legal principles of one country in the language of another.

The schedule of workshops is as follows:

English Contracts - April 28, 2014
    - Common Law vs. Civil Law
    - Cross-System Contracts
    - Legal English Terminology
    - Lost and Found in Translation

Legal Drafting - May 26, 2014
    - Basic Drafting Principles
    - Legal Terms
    - Principles of Drafting and Interpretation
    - Avoiding Ambiguity: Exercises in Drafting

Commercial Law - June 2, 2014
    - Overview
    - Legal Entities
    - Employment Law
    - Bankruptcy and Insolvency

There is a networking dinner each Sunday evening before the Monday workshop for early arrivals. Details of each workshop's topics and schedule as well as registration links are on the Stridonium events page.

Each workshop has been awarded 6 CPD points by the Dutch Bureau BTV and 6 ATA CE points.


How to get there (Google map link):

By train
- A 10-minute walk from the station (Beukenlaantje)
- OR let the organizers know when you arrive and either they or hotel staff will collect you!

By car (plenty of free parking!)

From Deventer(A1)

Take the A1 towards Hengelo/Enschede
Exit 26: Lochem/Holten
Turn left for Raalte, follow the signs for Holterberg
Go straight ahead over the roundabout, turn right after the viaduct and left at the T-junction
Turn left at the roundabout and after 50 m take a right turn for Holterberg
After approx 1 km turn right (at yellow building)

From Enschede/Hengelo (A1)

A1 towards Deventer/Apeldoorn/Amsterdam
Exit 27: Holten/Markelo
Continue through the center of Holten, take the Holterberg exit at the roundabout and after 50 m take a right turn for Holterberg
After approx 1 km turn right (at yellow building)

memoQ AutoCorrect: mysteries revealed

Actually, AutoCorrect isn't that mysterious to those familiar with it. Many Microsoft Office users love it or hate it. I usually love it when I type English, but when I switch between languages in the same document, strange mutations occur in my words and I often wonder how I could possibly have typed some of the things I seem to have typed and of course did not.

Last December when I started the research to update my book of memoQ tips (which is still in progress, because the software is a fast-moving target to describe), I found a way to migrate the AutoCorrect lists from Microsoft Word to memoQ (and vice versa). This was a happy day for me, as a Dutch partner had been asking for exactly that for a very long time, and Kilgray's Support had not been able to offer a solution. I never did get around to blogging my findings, but a few months later, a similar solution was published in the Kilgray Knowledgebase. It states that it's perhaps only for migrating AutoCorrect lists from MS Word 2003, but I used an old macro from MS Word 98 when I worked out the problem, and if that still functions for MS Word 2010, then I'm sure Kilgray's posted solution must be fine for new versions. (Just be careful to use UTF-8 as the code page of text files you transfer or there may be trouble.)

But the best solution was actually published a few years earlier by Val Ivonica. In Portuguese. She included the macro code, and I like her macro (or the one she got from someplace) better. For some strange reason, the only really good information available on memoQ AutoCorrect up to now that I could find is in Portuguese. There are some nice examples of useful AutoCorrect shortcuts for periods of a year from William Cassemiro on the Janela Tradutória blog.

I was quite surprised to learn that many users of memoQ have no idea what AutoCorrect is; Déjà Vu offers the same feature, but I think it's missing in the various Trados versions, possibly because of the history of Trados Workbench as an application used primarily in the MS Word environment. The Kilgray documentation I could find was rather skimpy and seemed entirely focused on typing shortcuts. The idea of correcting spelling or vocabulary differences between language variants wasn't anywhere I could find it.

So I put together this "little" overview of how AutoCorrect works in memoQ and how and where to manage the AutoCorrect list resources there. It's a start... perhaps Kilgray or someone else can fill in the missing bits.

Time  Description
0:38  Activating AutoCorrect in an open project
1:47  AutoCorrect in action while typing
3:30  How the "primary" AutoCorrect list "rules"
3:55  Slide show: overview of AutoCorrect
4:59  Slide show: Three places to manage AutoCorrect

Spanish-to-English translators wanted for dissertation research!

Dear readers, I received the request below tonight, which I would like to pass on to my colleagues who work as translators from Spanish to English. I don't think we have enough good research in many areas related to the tools of our trade; I hope you can find the time to assist Mr. Mellinger in his work.

*****

My name is Chris Mellinger and I am a doctoral candidate at Kent State University. I am conducting a study that will help me collect data for my dissertation, which will examine effort in translation when using computer-assisted translation software. This study is being conducted by Dr. Keiran Dunne, principal investigator, and co-investigator, Ph.D. candidate Christopher Mellinger, and it has been approved by the Kent State University Institutional Review Board.

I am currently looking for Spanish-to-English translation professionals who receive some or all of their income from the language industry to participate in this study. The study consists of two parts. The first part is a survey that will be used to determine your eligibility to take part in the second half of the study. The survey questions are about your work as a professional translator, and should take approximately 5 minutes to complete.

Should you qualify, the second part of the study consists of translating a text of approximately 400 words from Spanish to English using a web-based computer-assisted translation tool and without using any external resources. This translation should take no longer than 90 minutes to complete.

If you are a Spanish-to-English translator who receives all or some of your income from the language industry, I would greatly appreciate 5 minutes of your time to complete this survey, and if you qualify, 90 minutes to complete the experiment. Please click on the following link (https://kent.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_2bninsg4a8DYKu9) (or cut and paste it onto your internet browser) to complete the survey.

Thank you very much in advance.

Best regards,

Chris Mellinger

International dates and English

Time and again I encounter problems with texts or translations because of dates. This is something we as translators and quality reviewers for languages products and services must keep in mind.

After a recent patent translation, my agency client was asked to provide translations of my appointment as a translator for the German courts and of my examination certificate for the state exams in Berlin in which I qualified as a specialist for natural science. The agency principal is a decent translator himself, and since translating my own certificates would be a conflict of interest, he undertook the task and sent me the results for approval. As expected, the translations were OK except for one thing... the dates. At the top of one translation, I did a double-take at the revelation that I was born in July, rather than October. The date stood clearly as 07/10/1961, and it took a minute before I remembered that Brits, Australians and some others write their dates differently than Americans do. The German way of writing the same date as numbers (07.10.1961) at least has the virtue of using a different separator than Americans use, and it's a different language, so it's hard to be confused there if you know the German custom. But in English, well... the trap is there.

A day later an English friend fell into the same trap in memoQ. She wanted to export some TMX data from a rather large memory - just the work of the last few days for a particular client. The export was made on the second day of March, and when there were some questions regarding the exported data and I was asked to look at the TMX file, I was surprised to see data going back to the third of February. Fortunately, the TM from which the export was made contained only data for that client, so no breach of confidentiality occurred, but in a general TM this would have occurred. What was the problem? She was thinking in "UK mode" and confused 02/03 and 03/02.

One way to avoid this problem is to use the International date format, as Kilgray does in memoQ's filter for the TM and termbase editors, for example:

I am fond of using the international YYYY-MM-DD format wherever appropriate. I expect technical people anywhere in the world to be able to deal with it. However, this numeric format has its limitations too, because there are quite a number of people who simply aren't familiar with the format or who may be a bit dyslexic with numbers. The best solution in most cases is to use dates which include the month written as a word or a least an abbreviation thereof. For English, I would use a specifically American or British number format only if one is very, very sure that wider distribution will never be required.

Divided by a common language

It happened again today for the third or fourth time this week, possibly the tenth time in the last month or the hundredth this year. A call from a stranger at a strange agency:

"I have a document that urgently requires translation into English. Can you do it?"

"Good question. Your guess is as good as mine. What's it about? Why don't you send me the text and I'll let you know."

A few minutes later the text arrives. Several small documents on automotive technology. Easy stuff, unless...

"What variant of English did you have in mind?"

"Uh... I don't know. British English I suppose. The customer didn't say."

And you didn't ask, either, you git, I thought. Ooops, scratch that. I'm American. Make it "you idiot".

One would think that language service providers would be aware of the important differences between language variants in English, Spanish, Portuguese and a host of other languages about which I know very little, because I don't pretend to provide service for all the world's languages, just from German German and occasionally from the Swiss variant into US English. San Gabriel Valley English to be more precise, with occasional bits of Oregon country thrown in for rustic flavor. We don't use no spanners. Boots are for wearing on feet, preferably with spurs, and bonnets are mostly out of fashion, except with the occasional surviving grandmother. So we don't do no steenkeen British automotive texts, because we pity the technicians in the UK who wouldn't understand a lot of it. Just like my auto mechanic in California wouldn't get far with a British repair manual most likely.

Now there are some fields and situations where I'm not too uncomfortable trying to follow British conventions for spelling, though I won't even pretend to know much about the peculiarities of insular punctuation or the rich British vocabulary one absorbs between floggings in school. What I find more disturbing is that the project manager never thought to ask the customer about the intended use of the translation and the preferences for usage. I recently did a certified legal translation for a client and sent it off for checking by a few pairs of eyes at the agency before producing the final stamped and sealed official version. The corrections came back - lots of them. One was legitimate, a typo I had missed I think. The rest was my beautiful American legalese defaced with British spelling. I went a bit nuts over that, in part because I don't know a thing about contract language and legal conventions in the UK, and the use of British spelling in this case might imply that I do. My choice of contract language in English is governed by my linguistic and cultural background as well as the guidelines for clear language in contracts taught in California law schools like USC in the late 1980s. This time the decision to mess with the text was based on an internal agency style guide that used British conventions. Once again, no one ever thought to ask the customer what was really needed.

Perhaps I'm old fashioned to believe that knowing the intended use of a translation and the variant of the target language to satisfy that intent is a fundamental requirement for professional service in most cases. If there's even a chance that British English is called for, I'll probably fend off the query and send it elsewhere. And I do admit to a certain secret delight in sending the prospects trotting off on a pilgrimage to find a competent British translator, armed perhaps with a few e-mail addresses and telephone numbers from me. Everyone wins: the prospect will probably get a translation, someone I know and like might get an interesting bit of work and make a new business acquaintance and I don't have to give another English lesson when I'd rather be burying fish heads in a meadow to bait the foxes.