A tale for Halloween, perfectly horrifying!

The night of terror began with a puzzling tweet in the afternoon:

 

I clicked the link and read the latest on Susan Bernofsky's Translationista blog,which gave an update on some of her recent work. An upcoming release of her translation of Kafka's The Metamorphosis was mentioned; that caught my eye since I had reread it in German very recently, and I find the variations in its translation quite interesting. I made a note to look at her version when it comes out in January.

Her blog post also mentioned the release last week of her translation of Die schwarze Spinne by a 19th century Swiss pastor writing under the name of Jeremias Gotthelf. The Black Spider? I grew up in a basement  bedroom well-stocked with black widow spiders, so the title had a certain creepy, nostalgic fascination for me. I was unaware of the high regard this novella was held in by so many, but the description of the tale on the blog and in the Wikipedia articles I read intrigued me, so I checked in at Amazon.de and bought a Kindle copy of the new translation. For good measure, I grabbed a copy of the original tale in German and treated myself to an atmospheric introduction of the story with the LibriVox audio recording by what sounds like an old guy with a Swiss German accent, like the grandfather who relates this moralistic tale of mortal terror.

The German audio recording was a bit fatiguing, gave me a claustrophobic feeling with its heavy diet of adjectives and too-familiar village custom. I began to feel a flashback the the Brandenburg hellhole I escaped from earlier this year and the suffocating customs of its denizens. With some desperation, I abandoned my plan to finish the entire work in German before starting Bernofsky's translation, so with a little twitch of guilt, I grabbed my bag and headed off to the cantinho for dinner in a quiet corner with my Kindle. Her translation started off with very much of a period feel, over-rich with its double serving of adjectives and long sentences that reminded me of my first encounters with John Stuart Mill in the tenth grade. I began to get the same claustrophobic feeling I had from the German reading, yes, I was back in Oberkrämer in Brandenburg and that's enough horror for one evening, thank you.

But gradually without realizing the art with which her well-crafted English drew me into the Swiss Calvinist spirit of the tale I was caught in a well-paced story that kept my interest and made me wonder if I would enjoy the original as much in some parts. And so I was drawn, unwitting, into the open jaws of Evil, which closed slowly about my torso and squeezed the breath out of me, leaving me gasping more than once and failing to notice that the liter of sangria had gone too fast before I ordered more to quench the burning horror unfolding. The walk home was too long, and the way could not be lit well enough.

At home I paused for a while, centered my mind by translating a deadly dull document with terms and conditions for purchase, went on a safer bug hunt in the latest beta version of memoQ and then, feeling that the house was much too dark, I screwed up my courage and lay down to sleep... well no, to read just a bit more, because those jaws were still closed around me, and the several dull pains about my sternum and spine made me wonder if my heart and bones would last to the end of the tale. Don't be so dramatic I thought, and I wasn't, really, the real drama was before my eyes, transfixing me in terror as wished the dogs would lie heavier on my legs and chest and distract me from the dark corners of the room I could not see because my eyes were on the shadows in the book and what waited so terribly in them.

This is a damned good translation. Maybe. Let me put it this way: I hope the original tale can live up to what I read tonight. But I'm not going to make the mistake of finding that out in the dark again.

Two years with an e-book reader

Nearly two years ago I acquired my first e-book reader, an Amazon Kindle like the one shown here. I had various thoughts of using it professionally but was in any case delighted with the fact that I could read text without eyestrain on it, even without my reading glasses. Some colleagues shared their experiences, and one was kind enough to mention Calibre, which I use periodically to convert file formats for better use in e-book readers or other media.

So what's the score after two years? On the professional side not so hot, because other distractions have prevented me from exploring all the possibilities of converting reference data for use on my reader. It's possible, but I'm still tweaking the technology to get exactly what I want with formatted, searchable RTF and HTML from terminology exports from my many CAT tool termbases. I could do that all along without much trouble using SDL Trados MultiTerm and various XSLT scripts, but I went down the rabbit hole of trying to make these solutions more accessible to colleagues who don't like a lot of technical fiddling, and though I think the problems are solved, I haven't had time to share most of the solutions or implement them on a large scale myself.

I do read literature related to the translation profession with some frequency. Found in Translation by Jost Zetzsche and Nataly Kelley gave me many pleasant, entertained hours with its Kindle version, attempts to read texts in PDF format by others have been less successful because of display issues, and the current version of my own book with memoQ tips is not a happy experience on a small black-and-white ebook reader. The latter has me thinking about what information might work in formats for e-book readers and smartphones, and the latter has been one of the motivations for my recent experimentation with short video tutorials on YouTube. Not only should we consider the current trends in media such as e-book readers, tablets, smartphones and whatnot for our own professional leaning and teaching needs, but also how our clients and prospects may use these media to create content which we might be asked to translate. This has already begun to happen with me in a small way, and those projects were possible only because of things I learned in my teaching experiments shortly before.

I also copy web pages into text or HTML files "to go" when I want to read up on a subject in the park while my dogs play or in a local café somewhere. My reader has a web browser, but many sites are difficult to view in a way that is friendly to a smaller screen. It's easier to grab what I want in separate files and organize these into a "collection" I can refer to easily later.

I never have done any proofreading or review with my Kindle, though I have used texts on it to translate manually (in a separate notebook) on occasion. However, that's not really compatible with most of the texts I work on.

What I have done most with my e-book reader is carry a growing library of world literature with me, familiar and unfamiliar old works and some new. I still hear some people talk about how they could not imagine reading without the heft of the book and the feel of the paper pages turned by their fingers. I'm just as caught up in the sensuality of a dusty old library as any other obsessive bibliophile, but the heft and feel don't mean much when accumulated nerve damage means that the book is more a source of pain than pleasure after ten minutes in your hands, and my once excellent eyesight has now decided that its term is served and I can find my own way with small type and lousy lighting conditions: there, the e-book reader is gift of great value.

Most important to me, however, are the words. The finest binding, gold-edged pages and elegant type mean nothing if the words mean nothing. Words of beauty and power are worth straining to read in weathered stone inscriptions, on crumbled clay tablets written before the founding of Rome or on crumbling acid-paper pages in books forgotten in an attic. How much better then to have these same words in a legible format on your reader in minutes after a short search in an online database and a quick download or a purchase and transfer.

The Velveteen Rabbit had the same nursery magic on the Kindle in the cantinho last night as it would on the delicate old pages of the original edition, but I didn't have to worry about spilling my sangria on it. In the two years since I received my Kindle I have re-read many books that were lost as my library of thousands was slowly dispersed in my many relocations. Hundreds of new books from classic literature in two languages have come to me, go with me in my small, black volume with its Cloud-based backup, and this library will likely not be lost again wherever I go and no matter how lightly I travel. 

Damn the stinking "captcha" technology

This afternoon I tried to post the following note on my Facebook page:

Recently, I blogged about my new Kindle (http://goo.gl/JJF0q) and some of the personal and professional possibilities I saw for it. Since then, various friends and colleagues have raised the "compatibility" and monopoly issues for published eBook formats. I have found that Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) is an excellent way to overcome this by easily converting between all formats and managing your electronic library. It also does great news compilations.

After a few dozen failures at reading and retyping things like

 

I had to conclude that the idiots programming for Facebook must never have considered the possibility of two links in one comment. In any case, I resent being asked to do security checks on my own page. Even the "audio captcha" attempts were failures.

This form of verification technology is extremely intrusive and makes me less concerned with security, not more. Really, there must be a better way.

Oh, yes... Calibre is an excellent tool for eBook management and seems to overcome many of the barriers which concern some colleagues and friends. And there's nothing Amazon can do about it.

Transcribing with Dragon

One idea that fascinated me with Dragon Naturally Speaking is the potential for using the software to transcribe dictated messages on recording devices. I have often been interested in possibilities for translation away from the computer. In fact, the possibility of translating my by dictation is one that has a long history and which is of great personal interest to me, because I think that it may be possible to achieve a very different flow and quality from that which is typically achieved when writing on a computer. So, while visiting a friend, I purchased an inexpensive Olympus recording device for about €50, then I trained DNS to use it and began my experiment. 

The text above is my first attempt at transcribing from a small, portable recording device to Dragon Naturally Speaking. One small correction (marked). My expectations were not high when I decided to try this. The microphone in my headset is of rather modest quality, and the errors, as noted in my last post, can be devilish. But the recording device gave excellent results. A few other texts I have tested look equally good. So it seems my dream of dictating translation drafts off original printed texts or originals migrated to my Kindle may become true soon. In combination with memoQ LiveDocs, I see some very interesting potential translation and revision workflows. Stay tuned.

Kindled spirits

It was during discussions in the breaks at the recent TM Europe conference in Warsaw that I began to think the previously unthinkable. Later, as the son of a conference organizer showed me his Amazon Kindle, shortly before my dog knocked it into a pond and stole the boy's lunch, and others present told me how well the device worked for them, I decided to go against my grain and get the gadget to celebrate the old GDR's Day of the Republic.

I'm glad I did. I used to be quite a gadget freak in my younger days, an early adopter of generations of electronic organizers before the Sharp Wizard was a twinkle in a corporate marketer's eye. But the volumes of electronic junk to be disposed of in my various moves, as well as the grinding pace of 'e-progress', has made me deeply skeptical of the value of most technology.

The Kindle has made reading easy again for me. I was very surprised to find that no one was deluded in telling me that the screen contrast and reflectivity are much like paper, and with my little leather case and its integrated reading light, I can even enjoy a quiet read in the dark of night up in my loft. I can adjust the size of the fonts to read comfortably with or without my glasses. On my most recent excursion to escape intrusive neighbors and veterinary horrors to get a bit of recuperative quiet and perhaps accomplish some work, I carried a small library of dozens of classic literary works, some familiar, some not, my favorite newspapers, dictionaries, a few blogs and a vampire novel all in my half-pound Kindle, and I enjoyed more relaxed reading than I have in the past six months. It's a godsend.

I've found a few freeware tools for converting documents to readable formats for the Kindle, and I plan to convert some of my important translation glossaries for reference purposes. I have a notion that this little piece of technology might assist me in taking more of certain kinds of translation work off the technology grid to savor it like a fine wine in a more traditionally influenced but integrated working mode. I'm quite a late adopter in this case; when I ask, it seems that quite a few translating colleagues have such devices. But do they use them in some way professionally? Do you?