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?

Flirting with a Fiverr & more

If you always want to get paid...

Payment practices are a perpetual pain in Trashlation World. What professional translator or interpreter has not, at some point, faced difficulty getting paid for work delivered. Or in my case, consultant, independent solution developer and instructor, since I retired from translation three months ago and no longer accept such tasks in the increasingly thankless environment where they are requested.

Net never has become the modus operandi of too many wankers in the NMT-AI-MOUSE Fanboy and -gurl Klub, and when B of A, Barclays, Santander of some other clan of thieves fails to provide the desired credit for the Incredible Journey to Ruin, there will always be those AI Artists Formerly Known as Trashlators who understand that in matter of money, all that really matters is mindset.

Fuck you. Pay me. Well, imagine getting paid! Isn't that exciting? Fuck you. Pay me. I'm more excited by the structure of your fucking kneecaps and how fragile it is... SET YOUR MIND TO PAY ME.

But wait, Paulie, there may be a better way!

A perpetually solvent friend who owns a couple of German service companies once shared his secret: when in doubt, demand payment in advance. When there is no doubt, demand double. But what if the prospect just walks away? Offer them a peck on the check and hold the door for them in gratitude for the grief they are about to save you.

Times are hard. But payment practices are, alas, too often limp. Like a little mushroom past its sell-by date and full of mold and other things best not named.

I'm personally fortunate not to deal with many deadbeats; avoiding business with Italian and American companies certainly helps. Well, I have a soft spot for the Portuguese, but let's not go there.

I have another problem. I had administrative work even more than I hate not getting paid, and since I acquired a retired surgeon as a billing assistant and, at about the same time, took on a new role as a trainer for incoherent billing software like SAGE, not getting paid has been a source of surprising pleasure. But our five dogs still demand food, and if it does come in bags and come on time, well... there is that extra weight I'm carrying, the Portuguese pit bull is fond of reminding me.

And I am sure that many clients and friends and friends with the misfortune to be clients keep a special dartboard with my face on it for those times I get around to writing the bill after a year of so.

Fuck you. Pay me. Well fuck you. Write the fucking bill. Yeah, right, you tell me again how all that works here in Portugal where the tax laws are so screwy that almost none of the invoicing tools typically used by translators, companies involved with language services (regardless of whether they actually provide any) in other countries are compliant with Portuguese tax law, so I often feel myself well and truly fucked.

Enter the performance platforms such as Fiverr, which I am beginning to consider for certain recurring requests where I have asked Dios for a better intake process in which people tell me exactly what they need, provide the means of doing that, including the money to pay for the electricity to drive the tools I use to reach their goal and, well, just let me get on with it and make something nice and bless them for a change.

I started toying with platformed pre-payment about four years ago, when I started using Teachable as a way to demonstrate to memoQ and others how professional tools instruction could be improved and content could be shaped in more useful ways. I may not have been successful in convincing others to Do the Right Thing, but now that I have more time on my hands and have resigned myself to take a shot at that myself and maybe actually charge for all that knowledge that so many people mint money with, I am really, really glad that the Portuguese tax mysteries are handled in a way that does not involve me at all and is completely correct. No more constant special requests for special invoices for special people in special countries and special claims on my non-existent admin time.

So, that's the news, I guess. Next time you need a training video, a dash of regex for your project soup, a magical mysterious import filter for Formats Unknown or the like, there's a process. And it's not "fuck you". That's between consenting buyers and the platforms from which they draw their services....

10 Tips to Term Base Mastery in memoQ! (online course)

Note: the pilot phase for this training course has passed, free enrollment has been closed, and the content is being revised and expanded for re-release soon... available courses can be seen at my online teaching site: https://transtrib-tech.teachable.com/

In the past few years I have done a number of long webinars in English and German to help translators and those involved in translation processes using the memoQ environment work more effectively with terminology. These are available on my YouTube channel (subscribe!), and I think all of them have extensive hotlinked indexes to enable viewers to skip to exactly the parts that are relevant to them. A playlist of the terminology tutorial videos in English is available here.

I've also written quite a few blog posts - big and small - teaching various aspects of terminology handling for translation with or without memoQ. These can be found with the search function on the left side of this blog or using the rather sumptuous keyword list.

But sometimes just a few little things can get you rather far, rather quickly toward the goal of using terminology more effectively in memoQ, and it isn't always easy to find those tidbits in the hours of video or the mass of blog posts (now approaching 1000). So I'm trying a new teaching format, inspired in part by my old memoQuickie blog posts and past tutorial books. I have created a free course using the Teachable platform, which I find easier to use than Moodle (I have a server on my domain that I use for mentoring projects), Udemy and other tools I've looked at over the years.

This new course - "memoQuickies: On Better Terms with memoQ! 10 Tips toward Term Base Mastery" - is currently designed to give you one tip on using memoQ term bases or related functions each day for 10 days. Much of the content is currently shared as an e-mail message, but all the released content can be viewed in the online course at any time, and some tips may have additional information or resources, such as videos or relevant links, practice files, quality assurance profiles or custom keyboard settings you can import to your memoQ installation.

These are the tips (in sequence) that are part of this first course version:

1. Setting Default Term Bases for New Terms
2. Importing and Exporting Terms in Microsoft Excel Files
3. Getting a Grip on Term Entry Properties in memoQ
4. "Fixing" Term Base Default Properties
5. Changing the Properties of Many Term Entries in a Term Base
6. Sharing and Updating Term Bases with Google Sheets
7. Sending New Terms to Only a Specific Ranked Term Base
8. Succeeding with Term QA
9. Fixing Terminology in a Translation Memory
10. Mining Words with memoQ

There is also a summary webinar recorded to go over the 10 tips and provide additional information.

I have a number of courses which have been developed (and may or may not be publicly visible depending on when you read this) and others under development in which I try to tie together the many learning resources available for various professional translation technology subjects, because I think this approach may offer the most flexibility and likelihood of success in communicating necessary skills and knowledge to an audience wider than I can serve with the hours available for consulting and training in my often too busy days.

I would also like to thank the professional colleagues and clients who have provided so much (often unsolicited) support to enable me to focus more on helping translators, other translation project participants and translation consumers work more effectively and reduce the frustrations too often experienced with technology.

Adding time codes to YouTube videos

For years now, I have advocated the use of tables of contents for long instructional videos, recorded webinars and suchlike. I saw these in a few instances, but it was never clear how the indices were produced, so I suggested merely writing a list of relevant points and their play times and scrolling manually. Understandably, not many adopted this suggestion.

Then I discovered that my video editor (Camtasia) could create tables of contents for a video automatically when creating a local file, an upload to YouTube or other exports if timeline markers were added at relevant points. The only disadvantage for me with this approach was the limit on the length of the descriptive text attached to the markers. Worse than Twitter in the old days.

But when I accidentally added a marker I didn't want and removed it from the YouTube video description (which is where a TOC resides on YouTube), I saw that things were much simpler than I imagined. And a little research with tutorials made by others confirmed that any time code written at the beginning of a line in the video's description will become a clickable link to that time in the video.

So I've begun to go through some of my old videos with a text editor opened along side. When the recording gets to a point that I want to include in the table of contents, I simply pass the cursor over the video, take note of the time, and then write that time code into the text file along with a description of any length.

Afterward, I simply paste the contents of that text file into the description field in YouTube's editor. When the Save button at the top right is clicked, the new description for the video will be active, and viewers can use the index to jump to the points they want to see. Because only a few lines of the description text are visible by default, I include a hint at the beginning of the text to let people know that the live table of contents is available if they click the SEE MORE link.

If Kilgray, SDL, Wordfast and others involved with the language services sector would adopt techniques like this for their copious recorded content on the Web, the value and accessibility of this content would increase enormously. It would also be very simple then to create hot links to important points in other environments (PowerPoint slides, PDF files, etc.) to help people get to the information they need to learn better.

Not to do this would truly be a great waste and a shame in many cases.

Zooming inside iceni InFix for PDF translation: web meeting on 21 June 2018

Over the course of the last nine years, I have published a few articles about ways that I have found the PDF editor iceni InFix useful for my translation and terminology research work. Throughout that time iceni has continued to improve that product as well as develop other technologies for PDF translation assistance, such as the online TransPDF service now integrated with memoQ.

It's one thing to have a tool and in many cases quite another thing to know how to make the best use of it. This situation is further complicated by the very wide range of scenarios in which an editor like iceni InFix might be useful and the great differences one often finds in the needs and expectations of the clientele from one translator to another. In the product's early days I followed the commentaries of José Henrique Lamensdorf, a Brazilian engineer with long experience in technical translation, desktop publishing and other fields, and while I consider him to be among the most useful sources of good technical information for me in my early days as a commercial translator, his project needs were very different from mine, and most of the things he mentioned a decade or more ago, though very relevant to people heavily involved with publishing, weren't a fit for my clientele.

That changed as iceni expanded the feature set over the years and I began to encounter many cases where OCR and a full Adobe Acrobat license did not quite do what I needed in a simple way.

Some weeks ago I had an online meeting scheduled with a client company to discuss the advantages of certain support technologies with that company's translation and project management staff. We tried to use TeamViewer for the discussion, but unfortunately my license could not accommodate the 6+ people involved, and I was reluctant to fork over the extra cash needed for a 15 or 25 participant license, especially because some other clients had issues with TeamViewer which I never clearly understood, leading their IT departments to ban it. And the TVS recording files, while generally quite decent for viewing and of manageable size due to an excellent compression CODEC, are a nightmare to convert cleanly to MP4 or other common video formats. Just as I was caught in this dilemma, my esteemed Portuguese to UK English translation colleague and gifted instructor at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, David Hardisty, enthusiastically re-introduced me to Zoom videoconferencing.

I had seen Zoom before briefly when IAPTI decided to ditch the Citrix conferencing solutions and use it for webinars and staff meetings, but at the time I was too distracted by other matters to remember the name or notice the details. And, as we know, there one finds the Devil.

Zoom is powerful and flexible. For about €13 a month for my Pro license, I can invite up to 100 people for a web meeting, with quite a few useful options that I am still getting a grip on. Being used to the relative simplicity of TeamViewer, I am a little overwhelmed sometimes, and I have had a few recorded client meetings where the video was flawed because I got the screen sharing options mixed up. But the basics are actually dead simple if one pays a bit of attention.

A Zoom "web meeting", by the way, is what I would call a webinar, but that term means something else in Zoomworld, involving up to 50 speakers and something like 10,000 participants for some monthly premium. Not my thing. If the crowd is bigger than 10 in an online or a face-to-face class, I start to feel the constrictions of time and individual attention like an unruly anaconda around me.

But in any case, for someone who has spent many years looking for better teaching tools, Zoom is looking pretty good right now. And it enables me to share what I hope is useful professional information without dealing with the organizational nonsense and politics often associated with platforms licensed by some companies and professional associations. All for the monthly price of a cheap lunch.

So I've decided to do a series of free public talks using Zoom, not only to share some of a considerable backlog of new and exciting technical matters for translators, translation project managers and support staff and language service consumers, but also to get a better handle on how I can use this tool to support friends, colleagues and students around the world. Previously I announced a terminology talk (on May 24th, mostly about memoQ); now I have decided to share some of the ways that iceni InFix helps me in my work and what it might do for you too.

Soon Thursday, June 21st at 16:00 Central European Time (15:00 Lisbon time) I'll be talking about how you can get your fix of useful PDF handling for a variety of challenging situations. You are welcome to join me for this.

The registration link is here.

SDL conquers translation at Universidade Nova in Lisbon

The day started inauspiciously for me, with a TomTom navigation system determined to keep me from the day planned at Lisbon's New University to discuss SDL Trados Studio and its place in the translation technology ecosphere. When the fourth GPS location almost proved a charm, and I hiked the last kilometer on an arthritic foot, swearing furiously that this was my last visit to the Big City, I found the lecture hall at last, an hour and a half late, and managed to arrive just after Paul Filkin's presentation of the SDL OpenExchange, an underused, but rather interesting and helpful resource center for plug-ins and other resources for SDL Trados Studio victims to bridge the gap between its out-of-the-box configurations and what particular users or workflows might require. There are a lot of good things to be found there - the memoQ XLIFF definition and Glossary Converter are my particular favorites. Paul talked about many interesting things, I was told, and there is even a plug-in created for SDL Trados Studio by a major governmental organization which has functionality much like memoQ's LiveDocs (discussed afterward but not shown in the talk I missed, however). In the course of the day, Paul also disclosed an exciting new feature for SDL Trados Studio which many memoQ users have been missing in the latest version, memoQ 2014 R2 (see the video at the end).

I arrived just in time for the highlight of the day, the demonstration of Portuguese speech recognition by David Hardisty and two of his masters students, Isabel Rocha and Joana Bernardo. Speech recognition is perhaps one of the most interesting, useful and exciting technologies applied to translation today, but its application is limited to the languages available, which are not so many with the popular Dragon Naturally Speaking application from Nuance. Portuguese is curiously absent from the current offerings despite its far more important role in the world than minor languages like German or French.

Professor Hardisty led off with an overview of the equipment and software used and recommended (slides available here); the solution for Portuguese uses the integrated voice recognition features of the Macintosh operating system. With Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac it can be used for Windows applications such as SDL Trados Studio and memoQ as well. Nuance provides the voice recognition technology to Apple, and Brazilian and European Portuguese are among the languages provided to Apple which are not part of Nuance's commercial products for consumers (Dragon Naturally Speaking and Dragon Dictate).

Information from the Apple web site states that

Dictation lets you talk where you would type — and it now works in over 40 languages. So you can reply to an email, search the web or write a report using just your voice. Navigate to any text field, activate Dictation, then say what you want to write. Dictation converts your words into text. OS X Yosemite also adds more than 50 editing and formatting commands to Dictation. So you can turn on Dictation and tell your Mac to bold a paragraph, delete a sentence or replace a word. You can also use Automator workflows to create your own Dictation commands.

Portuguese was among the languages added with OS X Yosemite.

Ms. Bernardo began her demonstration by showing her typing speed - somewhat less than optimal due to the effects of disability from cerebral palsy. I was told that this had led to some difficulties during a professional internship, where her typing speed was not sufficient to keep up with the expectations for translation output in the company. However, I saw for myself how the integrated speech recognition features enable her to lay down text in a word processor or translation environment tool as quickly as or faster than most of us can type. In Portuguese, a language I had thought not available for work by my colleagues translating into that language.

A week before I had visited Professor Hardisty's evening class, where after my lecture on interoperability for CAT tools, Ms. Rocha had shown me how she works with Portuguese speech recognition as I do, in "mixed mode" using a fluid work style of dictation, typing, and pointing technology. She said that her own work is not much faster than when she types, but that the physical and mental strain of the work is far less than when she types and the quality of her translation tends to be better, because she is more focused on the text. This greater concentration on words, meaning and good communication matches my own experience, but I don't necessarily believe her about the speed. I don't think she has actually measured her throughput. My observation after the evening class and again at the event with SDL was that she works as fast as I do with dictation, and when I have a need for speed that can go to triple my typing rate or more per hour.

In any case, I am very excited that speech recognition is now available to a wider circle of professionals, and with integrated dictation features in the upcoming Windows 10 (a free upgrade for Windows 8 users), I expect this situation will only improve. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this technology for improving the ergonomics of our work. It's more than just leveling the field for gifted colleagues like Joana Bernardo, who can now bring to bear her linguistic skills and subject knowledge at a working speed on par with other professionals - or faster - but for someone like me who often works with pain and numbness in the hands from strain injuries, or all the rest of you banging away happily on keyboards, with an addiction to pain meds in your future perhaps, speech recognition offers a better future. Some are perhaps put off by the unhelpful, boastful emphasis of others on high output, which anyone familiar with speech recognition and human-assisted machine pseudo-translation (HAMPsTr) editing knows is faster and better than what any processes involving human revision of computer-generated linguistic sausage can produce, but it's really about working better and doing better work with better personal health. It's not about silly "Hendzel Units".

It has been pointed out a few times that Mac dictation or other speech recognition implementations lack the full range of command features found in an application like Dragon Naturally Speaking. That's really irrelevant. The most efficient speech recognition users I know do not use a lot of voice-controlled command for menu options, etc. I don't bother with that stuff at all but work instead very comfortably with a mix of voice, keyboard and mouse as I learned from a colleague who can knock off over 8,000 words of top-quality translation per short, restful day before taking the afternoon off to play with her cats or go shopping and spend some of that 6-figure translation income that she had even before learning to charge better rates.

Professor Hardisty also gave me a useful surprise in his talk - a well-articulated suggestion for a much more productive way to integrate machine translation in translation workflows:

David Hardisty's "pre-editing" approach for MpT output

The approach he suggested is actually one of the techniques I use with multiple TM matches in the working translation grid where I dictate - look at a match or TM suggestion displayed in a second pane and cherry-pick any useful phrases or sentence fragments and simply speak them along with selected term suggestions from glossaries, etc. and do it right the first time, faster than post-editing. This does work, much better than the sort of nonsense pushed too often into university curricula now by the greedy technotwits and Linguistic Sausage Purveyors, who in their desire for better margins and general disrespect of human service providers and employees fail to understand that good people, well-treated and empowered with the right tools, will beat the software and hardware software of "MT" and its hamsterized process extensions every time. Hardisty's approach is the most credible suggestion I have seen yet for possibly useful application of machine pseudo-translation in good work. Don't dump the MpT sewage directly into the target text stream like so many do as they inevitably and ignorantly diminish the level of achievable output quality.

After the lunch break, Paul Filkin gave an excellent Q&A clinic on Trados Studio features, showing solutions for challenges faced by users at all levels. It's always a pleasure to see him bring his encyclopedic knowledge of that difficult environment to bear in poised, useful ways to make it almost seem easy to work with the tools. I've sent many people to Paul and his team for help over the years, and none have been disappointed according to the feedback I have heard. The Trados Studio "clinic" at Universidade Nova reminded me why.

Finally, in the last hour of the day, I presented my perspective on how the SDL Trados Studio suite can integrate usefully in teamwork involving colleagues and customers with other technology and how over the years as a user of Déja Vu and later memoQ as my primary tool, the Trados suite has often made my work easier and significantly improved my earnings, for example with the excellent output management options for terminology in SDL Trados MultiTerm.

I spoke about the different levels of information exchange in interoperable translation workflows. I have done so often in the past from a memoQ perspective, but on this day I took the SDL Trados angle and showed very specifically, using screenshots from the latest build of SDL Trados Studio 2014, how this software can integrate beautifully and reliably as the hub or a spoke in the wheel of work collaboration.

The examples I presented using involved specifics of interoperability with memoQ or OmegaT, but they work with any good, professional tool. (Please note that Across is neither good nor a professional translation tool.) Those present also left with interoperability knowledge that no others in the field of translation have as far as I know - a simple way to access all the data in a memoQ Handoff package for translation in other environments like SDL Trados Studio, including how to move bilingual LiveDocs content easily into the other tool's translation memory.

Working in a single translation environment for actual translation is ergonomically critical to productivity and full focus on producing good content of the best linguistic character and subject presentation without the time- and quality-killing distractions of "CAT hopping", switching between environments such as SDL Trados Studio, memoQ, Wordfast, memSource, etc. Busy translators who learn the principles of interoperability and how to move the work in and out of their sole translation tool (using competitive tools for other tasks at which they may excel, such as preparing certain project types, extracting or outputting terminology, etc.) will very likely see a bigger increase in earnings than they can by price increases in the next decade. On those rare occasions where it might be desirable to use a different tool or to cope with the stress of change from one tool to another, harmonization of customizable features such as keyboard shortcuts can be very helpful.

I ended my talk with a demonstration of how translation files (SDLXLIFF) and project packages (SDLPPX) from SDL Trados Studio can be brought easily into memoQ for translation in that ergonomic environment, with all the TMs and terminology resources, returning exactly the content required in an SDLRPX file. Throughout the presentation there was some discussion of where SDL and its competitors can and should strive to go beyond the current and occasionally dubious levels of "compatibility" for even better collaboration between professionals and customers in the future.

One of the attendees, Steve Dyson, also published an interesting summary of the day on his blog.

OmegaT workshop in Holten (NL) November 18th!

is free software, but time is money, and to use this excellent Open Source tool effectively and enjoy its many benefits, expert guidance can be enormously helpful. This software holds its own with commercial leaders such as SDL Trados Studio and memoQ in many respects and surpasses them in some cases (for example, in its ability to read embedded objects, including charts, in the Microsoft Office document formats 2007, 2010 and 2013).

On November 17 and 18, the Stridonium Holten Lectures will feature Marc Prior in a workshop for OmegaT, a professional computer-assisted translation environment originally developed by Keith Godfrey and currently maintained and extended by a team led by Didier Briel. It is available in nearly 30 languages and includes:

• fuzzy matching
• match propagation
• simultaneous processing of multiple-file projects
• simultaneous use of multiple translation memories
• user glossaries with recognition of inflected forms

Document file formats include:

• Microsoft Office: Word, Excel, PowerPoint (DOCX, XSLX, PPTX, etc.)
• other translation tool formats such as TMX, TTX, TXML, XLIFF & SDLXLIFF
• XHTML and HTML
• Open Document formats (LibreOffice, OpenOffice.org)
• MediaWiki (Wikipedia)
• plain text

... and around 30 other file types as well as

• Unicode (UTF-8) support for non-Latin alphabets
• support for right-to-left languages (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.)
• an integral spelling checker
• MT integration with Google Translate

Marc has been a technical translator since 1988, working primarily from German to English. In 2002, he joined Keith Godfrey, the original author of OmegaT, to launch the program as an open-source (free) project. Since then, he has been involved in the project in various capacities, including 

• project co-ordination
• Match propagation
• authoring of manuals
• localization co-ordination
• website management and
• programming of auxiliary tools

He is a frequent source of advice and support on OmegaT user forums, contributed to the knowledge of the user community in many other online venues (including this blog) and has spoken on OmegaT at events in Germany and Belgium. He also introduced a module for computer-assisted translation tools, based on OmegaT, to the Professional Support Group (PSG) of the UK's Institute for Translation and Interpreting (ITI). He currently lives in Gelsenkirchen in the German federal state North Rhine-Westphalia.

The day will start with a conceptual overview for OmegaT, followed by a session demonstrating a sample project and responding to any questions from participants.

After lunch, the first afternoon session will present some extensions and advanced functions of OmegaT.

In the final session of the day, Marc will discuss “drawbacks that aren’t”, answer questions and debunk myths (appropriately entitled “Myths, FAQs and Workarounds”).

The workshop fee is €250 (€225 for Stridonium members), which includes a room at the venue for Sunday night arrivals who can enjoy an optional networking dinner and get a fresh start in the teaching sessions the next day. The availability of rooms included in the workshop fee is limited, so book early! 

The workshop is designed for translators and language project managers interested in the many possibilities for using this Open Source tool in their work.

Further information and updates can be found on the Stridonium events page, which also includes a button link for registration and payment ("Register for the Holten Lectures 3") below the course description.

You can also follow @stridonium on Twitter and watch the hash tags #strido and #Holten for announcements.

CPD points have been applied for with Bureau BTV in the Netherlands.

Previous Stridonium workshops in Holten have included corpus linguistics with the NIFTY method last June (participant's report here) and the recent teamwork day which presented ideas for overcoming distance in collaboration and using free and Open Source technologies as alternatives or addenda to more restrictive, proprietary commercial server solutions (participant's report here).

Future event plans include legal English for the insurance sector with a UK attorney and a series of three workshops on legal English for contracts (April 28, 2014), legal drafting (May 19, 2014) and commercial law (June 2, 2014) with attorney Stuart Bugg. These events would also interest practicing attorneys and others involved in the drafting and revision of contracts.

How to get there:
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)

By train

- A 10-minute walk from the station (Beukenlaantje)

 - Let the organizers know when you arrive and either they or hotel staff will collect you!

 

Teach the translators well

My colleague Jayne Fox recently offered a list of various continuing education opportunities of interest under the title "Free webinars for translators and interpreters". It's worth a look.

I find her blog post title unfortunate but astute. Many colleagues caught in the Poverty Cult mentality won't look at anything unless it is "free". Free, software, free training, whatever. Very often a waste of time and money though. Translators and everyone else would do better to set their personal filters to seek the good first, and then apply cost criteria. If I'm flat broke, I'm not going to be paying my bills faster by wasting my time on crap. I need to focus on what will really build my skills and help my marketing. The fact that some of the things that will cost little or nothing is a matter of almost secondary importance no matter how empty the refrigerator and bank account might be.

In the same way, fat and happy translators billing €40 per word will not benefit from the fastest, most expensive computer hardware and software available. Anyone can benefit from good tools and some very good ones, such as OmegaT, can be had for no investment but your time. Whether OmegaT is better than SDL Trados Studio, Fluency or memoQ would depend on the task to be accomplished. That's one of the reasons why interoperability is such an important topic for me in translation technology: for thirteen years I have tried to use the best combination of tools to optimize the ergonomics of my work and get the best results.

Most of the web presentations Jayne listed are very good. She gave us an excellent overview which can help a great many people. One of my favorites in the list is the translators training site which Jost Zetzsche has been involved with for so many years: it has pay-for-few recordings that show specific, important and profitable tasks which should interest many translators, but it also offers free short video tutorials for every CAT tool I can think of (about 20 of them), comparing how each performs the same simple translation job, records terminology, etc. Often these little tutorials would be all someone needs to make a good start with their chosen CAT tool, and the videos are a good way to get a simple overview of the different "feel" of the various environments.

But we can do better.
How? I don't have all the answers. I have a few notions, and for some time now I have been researching past and current practice, pestering people with questions, wasting time and mining ideas. Along the way I've stumbled into a few interesting business opportunities as a provider of language services, I've learned a lot and had fun. Some have seen my experiment and been motivated to start their own. I hope that they and others will continue to question the models of online and offline instruction which currently dominate our practice and question whether there is something more to be had.

Let's take the webinar as an example. These are very popular, and rightly so. I have learned a lot from them and probably could have learned a lot more. But to date I have resisted all attempts to draw me into teaching one myself, despite the fact that I have been committed to teaching in various forms for over 30 years. This is because many webinars are a waste of time. Even the best webinars waste time I think. Maybe not. But I think it's fair to say that someone watching the best 30 to 60 minute webinar I could offer would have a lot of their time wasted, and they would have a harder time making use of the lessons later than if these were presented differently.

Many times I have wanted to go back and review some useful technical point in a Gábor Ugray webinar on memoQ, and I just can't find it in the hour presentation, the dog ate my notes, and by the time I do find it, said dog needs to go for a walk and I forget the whole matter.

There is no indexing for most webinars. If you must leave that long talk in one big chunk, why not put an index under it which notes important points and the time at which they are discussed. There is probably some clever way to make this a clickable hyperindex which immediately skips to that point, but I don't mind being low tech and dragging a slide bar to get to the part of the video that interests me.

One hour is too f-ing long most of the time. I swear if I ever do an hour-long webinar, I will edit down to the twenty minutes that really matter and then slice that up into the three to five individual topics of interest. And I'll add a little text and perhaps some graphics to a web page in which the individual clips are embedded if this can reinforce or supplement the message in some useful way.

If the visuals don't matter I might even just extract the audio from the video and offer an MP3 "podcast" you might listen to in the car on a long drive or on a jog through the neighborhood (though I refuse all liability if you get killed at an intersection while not paying attention to your route).

If I'm trying to teach you about software and how to use it for a task like handling particular file formats or types of information, I might think about providing a demonstration file with which you can practice. How many people do this now? Doh. It's all very well to talk about how much a particular translation environment tool can do, but if people can't apply that and gain confidence before they are asked to quote on a big job, they might well be too afraid of failure and leave their refrigerators and bank accounts understocked.

The same applies to skills that have less or nothing to do with translation and multilingual matters. Current teaching paradigms are underdeveloped, and improving them is not usually a matter of better editing, flashier effects and easy listening soundtracks. Real value can often be simpler, faster, cheaper and cruder than that. Integrated instruction is more a matter of imagination than technology and budget.


My current "research" is being performed in most cases with production tools which are free and usually Open Source and which, most of the time, are definitely inferior to the premium Adobe software I used for similar tasks in the 1990s. This is my concession to the Poverty Cult and my own sometimes involuntary priorities, and I fear that if I download the latest copy of Camtasia, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Captivate and other fine tools someone with something useful to teach might confuse the medium with the message and not make a valuable tutorial they could create quite adequately using free and easy tools. There is always time to upgrade after the point has been driven into the ground and the stake is there for all to see.