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.

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