Translating in the trenches....

The other day I was chatting with a colleague about snarky communications with clients and vendors, and she reminded me of a delightful gem of a blog which, though it only had a run of five months, provided a lot of smiles and laughs to fellow translators, most especially those involved in some way with German translation. This was in the days before all the foolishness of "branding" and style over substance.

For a good time, check out https://trenchtranslation.blogspot.com/

The case of the disappearing blog

When I finally got done with my morning goat and chicken chores and rolled into the office for another long translation slog, I found a number of concerned messages from friends and colleagues wondering at the sudden disappearance of Translation Tribulations.

Rumor has it that the champagne flowed freely in many a den of iniquity where bulk market bogsters and Linguistic Sausage Purveyors do their dirty deeds. Many a shot of vodka was downed with a robust cry of Чтоб хуй стоял и деньги были! in honor of Putin's man in Pennsylvania, presumed to have done one better on his work in last November's election, and his punk, the Plump Pygmy of Porto, thought to have eradicated this troublemaker's soapbox so translators can be nailed more securely to Across and the Borgian HAMPsTr progress can continue unhindered as well. 

Alas, the blog is back. What actually happened is this: for more than a month I have been receiving notices that the domain (translationtribulations.com) was about to expire, but every attempt to log in to my so-called Google admin console ended up in a confusing, circular mess of web links telling me that I could not add an admin account for my stupid Google profile. Today I finally figured out that I had two Google accounts, one of which I knew nothing about, which was somehow linked to the blog and used a non-existent e-mail address as its login. Apparently the last time a domain payment was made on this account was three years ago, so I am actually surprised that trouble did not hit sooner. Google is a bloody, confusing mess, and if they have a customer service department to deal with such things (and a dozen other messy little service subscription problems), then I have no idea how to contact the bastards.

In any case, it looks like this agitator will be online for another year at least unless someone figures out where to send the drones for a strike. I hear that the French have been training eagles to deal with such menaces, and I am considering taking up falconry here, so maybe I will be ready for that challenge as well.

Social media: a waste of time?

In the past few years, a number of friends and colleagues have informed me quite indignantly what an utter waste social media are, a few implying that participation in platforms such as blogs and Twitter is simply filler for those without work. I'm sure that may be true in some individual cases, but my personal experience and observations tell a very different story.

My involvement began some years ago in translators forums while doing research for writing projects and expanded to blogs and private forums when the deterioration of ProZ as a public forum for professional discussion drove most of the serious professionals away or gagged them. While Twitter was still derided as a tool for keeping the world updated on your breakfast and bowel movements, I discovered that it was fast becoming one of the most efficient tools for the quick exchange of tips and professional tidbits among serious professionals. Facebook? Well, I don't like the shifting ground of the company's information policies, but used judiciously, even that platform has socially redeeming value.

The value of all these platforms will vary according to one's goals and the overall balance sought. But let there be no doubt: social media are valuable and sometimes surprisingly effective. I've had a very large number of financially worthwhile projects result from the the time spent sharing information, but more importantly, I have been able to get to know great professionals in distant places, sometimes help them and receive help in return. Maybe some day I'll throw out a few statistics or examples from my experience, but today I would like to share an inspiring example from two colleagues in the US and Austria, the Jenner twins.

At Christmas time, they issued an appeal for assistance for the co-founder of the Nevada Interpreters and Translators Association, Álvaro Degives-Más, who has given so much to help others in our profession. Hoping to raise a few hundred dollars to help him and his wife defray crushing expenses from uninsured surgeries, in two weeks, the generosity of colleagues and a few companies has yielded over 7500 dollars. A small part of the total bills, mind you, but an impressive achievement nonetheless, made possible through the power of social media. Read the update here, and if you are able to, please consider doing a small bit to help these people see a light at the end of a very dark tunnel.

A ♥ for Language Blogs

Judy and Dagmar Jenner, the translating twins behind the Translation Times blog, recently suggested that fellow language bloggers post a list of their "ten favorite" language-related blogs and offered their own favorites. I find it hard to pick ten since there are quite a number in the two languages I read well which I enjoy for diverse reasons, but since the motivation behind the suggestion is to give exposure to interesting writing which might otherwise be overlooked, I shall deliberately omit any favorites I have found posted elsewhere under this title to date. Except Mox's Blog, which I described in a recent post. That brilliant little strip about our profession can be considered necessary comic therapy for any serious translator who reads English and deserves all the promotion it gets and more. Here are my recommendations for eleven (well, twelve actually, or a lucky 13 counting Mox) interesting, unique language blogs in German and English, grouped by language:

German

• 300 words by Susanne Schmidt-Wussow (@frenja). I love her concept: as a writer with an overabundance of vocabulary, she disciplines herself to make a relevant point with each post in 300 words or less. God help me should I ever try that.
• Über-Setzer-Logbuch by Gabriele Zöttl. A friend of mine in Munich sent me so many links to brilliant, thoughtful essays here that I became besotted with the blog and its author before I realized it. Not for the weak-of-German but always worthwhile for a mental stretch and linguistic massage.
• Fidus interpres by Fabio Said. A trilingual blog (English & Portuguese too) with a very large following by a Brazilian translator based in Germany. I've enjoyed and benefited from his posts for years and once learned a lot about traffic analysis from its author. My only regret is that I can barely get the gist of the Portuguese content, so I know I'm missing a lot.

English

• A Pragmatic Eye by Charlie Bavington. The author is an irreverent Brit who translates from French to English and has great good sense as well as an unerring nose for bullshit, both of which make him a suspicious character in a ProZian world.
• Language Mystery by Victor Dewsbery. I became aware of Victor about a decade ago, possibly earlier, because of his many helpful contributions on the Yahoogroups dejavu-l list. He has a rare, thoughtful competence and solid professional ethics, and his occasional well-informed commentaries on his Christian faith are interesting and enjoyable even for a Richard Dawkins fan like me.
• Words Matter by Doug McCarthy, a thoughtful linguist based in Paris. The blog is only a few months old, but Doug's points are well considered, well expressed and carry real weight. Words do indeed matter there as do the ideas.
• Financial Translation Blog by Miguel Llorens. Don't let the tile fool you: most of the content hasn't a thing to do with finances. Miguel takes on and exorcises the major demons of today's translating world, including MT, Lionbridge and content farms. He's possibly crazier than I am, but he's right more often and more entertaining.
• Diary of a Mad Patent Translator by Steve Vitek. Steve also has a range well beyond patents and brilliantly deconstructs the bullshit behind MT (which he uses for some of his work), rate issues and many other topics of current interest for translators. Even when he's trying to explain some obscure linguistic point about Japanese I find his contributions interesting, and even if they're not I enjoy the music videos on every post (and occasionally emulate this when the mood strikes me). I disagree with nearly everything he has to say about translation tools but still like to read it.
• The Greener Word by Abigail Dahlberg, a German to English translator from the UK, now based in the US. She writes a lot on waste management and recycling topics (her specialty), and I often learn a lot from her posts.
• Translating Berlin. Since author Sarah Vilece took a day job her posts have been far less frequent than they once were, but I have always enjoyed them for their content, local relevance (I live near Berlin) and their beautiful style.
• Translationista by Susan Bernofsky is a recent discovery from another world - literary translation. The great thing about reading her blog is that I can enjoy the insights regarding the translation of literature without having to engage in the field's usual habit of starvation. And the writing is good. She also has a good culture blog about Berlin.

Addendum: I see that a number of others have joined the effort inspired by Judy and Dagmar. I'll list links to these posts in no particular order as they come to my attention. I'm particularly pleased that there are few redundancies, and a number of blogs I enjoy but omitted from my own list for no good reason are to be found in these others.

• Jill Sommer's picks on Musings from an Overworked Translator
• Michael Wahlster's list on Translate This! 
• A Culture of Language and Thought by Lisa Carter
• The Interpreter Diaries offered a good list for interpreters
• A Spanish and English list by Silvina Jover-Cirillo of Around The Globe Translations
• Translation and linguistics blogs suggested by Alexandra Milcic Radovanovic 
• Eline Van De Wiele at Jade Language solutions offered a few interesting ones
• Here's a list on Bootheando. Looks like Spanish to me. 
• Miguel Llorens' list has an English blog collection that I read frequently and a very substantial list and commentary for Spanish translation blogs 
• A list from The Delaware Valley Translators Association blog
• Katherine Osgood's favorites
• From Outgesourct, mostly German
• And, of course, the original list from Judy and Dagmar at Translation Times
• And last, but not least, Margaret Marks' unique favorites with the unforgettable comment, "I don't read a lot of translation blogs in detail. There are lots out there directed at people who want to make their business grow, whereas I sometimes want my business to go away." There are days when I know very well what this means. 

I've also noticed that various scumbag spamming content scrapers have taken some of the posts above as well as my own, changed some words and tried to use the content to draw traffic. Apparently they haven't heard the latest fatwa that makes the perpetrators of such actions fair game....

Choosing a blog software platform

Since starting my translation blog in late 2008, I've launched two others reflecting my personal interests with dogs and the experience of hunting in Germany. I don't update the others nearly as often as I could or probably should, because I need to reserve a little of my non-working time for eating and sleeping. But these other blogs have been very useful for gathering personal experience in how to work with certain blog software and what to avoid.

Having worked with other types of content management systems in the past, I find that blogging tools are relatively easy to master and offer a better alternative to most static HTML-based sites. Informal tests I have conducted show that content posted in a blog environment is indexed better and faster than on sites with older designs. This means that CVs, descriptions of services offered, etc. will probably get viewed more often by potential customers and business partners. The wealth of widgets and plug-ins available for different platforms also offer a lot of flexibility for customization and experimentation.

One thing I've learned is that some mechanism for filtering comment spam is critical. There are many different mechanisms practiced for comment vetting; on a number of translators' blogs the practice seems to be "once approve, always passed through". Others (like me) check every comment, though if I do find a "white list" function somewhere in the tools for this blog, I'll certainly add most of the regular respondents for administrative convenience. What I do try to keep out are spurious comments or self-serving links that add nothing useful to a discussion. On the one blog I operate without comment spam filtering, I get dozens of trash messages each day like the one show here. The purpose is to add a link to a scam site for gambling, drugs or other undesirable things. I don't see that on my translation blog - Google's Blogger environment filters garbage like that out quite effectively - nor do I see it on my dog blog, because the filter plug-in I use has been very effective.

My time to deal with technical troubles outside my main revenue-generating activity (translation) is very limited, so I appreciate the convenience of the hosted solutions. As far as I know, I don't have the full control over every aspect of the format in the same way I do with the two Wordpress blogs hosted on my own domains, but then perhaps I do: I can modify the HTML code of the template here directly if I am inclined to do so. And when I decided to change the URL for the blog to a domain name I owned, it took about ten minutes to arrange the switch; old URLs are forwarded automatically. And dealing with graphics (adding photos, screenshots, etc.) has been generally easier to manage than with the two blogs where I have "more control".

The Google platform I use also appears to have good facilities for creating migratable backups of the templates and content. If I were interested in fooling around with "monetizing" options like AdSense or Amazon, many of these are already integrated in the infrastructure and are simple to implement. That's not something that interests me much, as I lack the time for something that I consider deadly dull, and if I want to generate cash there are more interesting ways to do so. My rare flings with such things are either experiments or a deliberate endorsement of a company whose products I feel are beneficial to translators (like the AIT links currently in the sidebar and at the bottom). Nonetheless, for those with an interest in such things, I think there is less work involved in setup and maintenance if you use someone else's infrastructure to the greatest extent possible.

That feels like a strange recommendation given that I programmed and developed applications on mainframes, desktops and web environments for about 30 years. And I'm sure that a number of people I know and respect will be able to explain very persuasively why I really should tinker with every last bit of the configuration for the blog myself, but they remind me a little of my friends who always called me an idiot for not building my ow PC from individual components. I listened politely to the criticisms, made lame excuses about a lack of time and went back to work on my functioning systems while theirs seemed perpetually out of service due to endless compatibility problems and hardware failures.

I think each of the "canned infrastructure" solutions available for free, such as Google's Blogger, Wordpress (hosted) and TypePad have particular advantages that may fit an individual language service provider's needs better or worse. It's worth experimenting with several briefly to see what feels right, though I have no hesitation in recommending the solution I use for this blog as a simple, effective communication platform. It's far from perfect, but it's good enough, and I don't have time for more.