The memoQ Regex Assistant Revisited at 15:00 CET on 21 September 2023!

 

Eleven months ago I was supposed to talk about terminology in a three-hour evening class taught by one of my friends at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, but I was so excited about the progress of the quality team I was training at one of my agency clients in Portugal that I twisted what was expected to be my usual straightforward 90 minute lecture on term base best practices in memoQ into an unusual take on the role regular expressions might play in terminology management.

That was a weird one, for sure, but the potential I saw was very real. I was defining "terminology" in rather broad terms to include not only more efficient term base management based on problem patterns but also translation memory clean-up, better filtering and find/replace operations in the working grid and QA.

"What the heck has all that got to do with scary ol' REGEX?" you're probably thinking.

Well, all this was triggered by memoQ's recent release of the One Ring Thing we've been needing to unify our memoQ management processes for the routine use of regex by The Rest of Us. The Regex Assistant. The Nazgul of Trados World are surely jealous.

That quality team I was training, my friends at Linguaemundi. is headed by Inês Lucas, about whom I had heard many good things for years from her enthusiastic professors at university but whom I hadn't actually met until she was hired by the agency a few years ago. At the recent memoQ Fest in Budapest, she explained how changing the approach to regex mastery from the struggles of syntax to organizing and applying packaged solutions in well-engineered processes significantly upgraded their work capacities and reduced stress levels. When you cut the nerdy crap and focus on understanding what solutions are called for particular tasks, everything gets much easier.

I was so amazed to see people who had struggled for years to learn regex well enough for simple tasks suddenly become solution powerhouses that I put together (rather spontaneously) a series of three online 90-minute workshops, which were repeated a month later. And new refinements to these methods come each time the ideas are presented.

The raw recordings of those six workshops are included in the current online course ("memoQuickies Resource Camp"), but one - the first of six - is publicly available on YouTube, where you can have a look.

However in the memoQuickies Resource Camp, a self-guided course that is serving as a platform for me to organize and distribute the best resources from my 14 years as a memoQ user, solution provider and trainer before I retire, I'll be taking another more streamlined pass at teaching some of the best possibilities for using memoQ Regex Assistant resource libraries. The webinars offered in most weeks of the course are simply an overview of the current topic emphasized in the course and also serve as a Q&A platform and a means of offering some different perspectives on information from the self-guided units. Recordings are always added to the course for later viewing.

This coming Thursday at 15:00 Central European Time, I'll give a brief overview of the Regex Assistant much like the public YouTube video does and answer any questions that attendees might have. Further information and an event notice can be found here on LinkedIn.

You can join the webinar with this link. The meeting ID is 878 3540 2561, and the passcode is 385434

memoQ Regex Assistant workshops re-run

The series of three workshops on the use of regex resources in memoQ, with a particular emphasis on the integrated Regex Assistant library, has been updated and will be offered again on March 9, 16 and 23 from 3:00 pm to 4:30 Lisbon time (4:00 pm to 5:30 pm CET, 10:00 am-11:30 am EST).

You can register here to attend any or all of the three sessions:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEpde-sqTkvGtCdMsrBl825tFrpDQ98FkAI

This is an evolving course, with the content continuously adapted in response to new questions, workflow challenges and process research as well as interoperability studies with other tools. Participants in the last series asked quite a number of interesting things during and after the talks, and their questions provided excellent material for new examples and approaches, and I hope for the same experience in this round.

The memoQ Regex Assistant is a unique library tool introduced in its current form in memoQ version 9.9. The little bit of public discussion there has been about this tool is quite misleading. Contrary to the "pitch" from memoQ employees and nerdy fans in the user base, this isn't really a tool for learning regular expressions. There are much better means for doing that. And I have strong personal objections to the idiotic statements I hear so often that "everyone should learn some regex". What utter nonsense.

What everyone should do is take advantage of the power regular expressions offer to simplify time-consuming tasks of translation, review, quality assurance and more to ensure accuracy and consistency in language resources and translations. The Regex Assistant helps with this by providing a platform where useful "expressions" can be collected and organized with readable names, labels and descriptions in any language. These libraries can be sorted, exchange with other users and applied for filtering, find and replace operations, QA checks, segmentation improvements, structured translation of dates, currency expressions, bibliographic information, legal citations and more or exported and converted to formats for easy use in other tools such as Trados Studio, Phrase/Memsource, Transtools+ and more. All without the need to learn any regular expression syntax!

An exported Regex Assistant library converted to a readable format by XSLT

My objective is not to teach regex syntax. It is to empower users to take more control of their work environment and save time and frustration for their teams and enjoy more life beyond the wordface. To help with that, I provide some usable examples in a follow-up mail after each sessions: resources that you can use in your own work and share freely with colleagues. 

And in this next round of workshops, available for purchase, there will be some additional high value resources to help achieve better outcomes for work in particular language pairs and particular specialties, such as financial translations. These complex resources were developed over a period of years, sometimes at great cost. In the last session I'll be getting "down and dirty and a little nerdy" to show you my way of maintaining complex resources like these auto-translation rules and others in a very effective, sustainable way that enables you to adapt quickly to changing requirements and style guides.

Sign up free to join the fun here.

Ferramentas de Tradução - CAT Tools Day at Universidade Nova de Lisboa

The Faculty of Sciences and Humanities held its first "CAT Tools Day" on June 16, 2018 with a diverse program intended to provide a lusophone overview of current best practices in the technologies to support professional translation work. The event offered standard presentation and demonstrations in a university auditorium with parallel software introduction workshops for groups of up to 18 persons in an instructional computer lab in another building.

The day began with morning sessions covering SDL Trados Studio and various aspects of speech recognition.

Dr.  Helena Moniz explains aspects of speech analysis.

I found the presentation by Dr. Helena Moniz from the University of Lisbon faculty to be particularly interesting for its discussion of the many different voice models and how these are applied to speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis. David Hardisty of FCSH at Universidade Nova also gave a good overview of the state of speech recognition for practical translation work, including his unobtrusive methods for utilizing machine pseudo-translation capabilities in dictated translations.

Parallel introductory workshops for software tools included memoQ 8, SDL Trados Studio 2017 and ABBYY FineReader - two sessions for each.

Attendees learned about ABBYY FineReader, SDL Trados Studio and memoQ in the translation computer lab

The ABBYY FineReader session I attended gave a good overview in Portuguese of basics and good practice, including a discussion of how to avoid common mistakes when converting scanned documents in a number of languages.

The afternoon featured several short, practical presentations by students, discussions by me regarding the upcoming integrated voice input solution for memoQ and the preparation of PDF files for reference, translation, print deadline emergencies and customer relations.

Rúben Mata discusses Discord

The final session of the day was a "tools clinic" - an open Q&A about any aspect of translation technology and workflow challenges. This was a good opportunity to reinforce and elaborate on the many useful concepts and practical approaches shown throughout the day and to share ideas on how to adapt and thrive as a professional in the language services sector today.

Hosts David Hardisty and Marco Neves of FCSH plan to make this an annual event to exchange knowledge on technology and best practices in translation and editing work in discussions between practicing professionals and academics in the lusophone community. So watch for announcements of the next event in 2019!

Some of the topics of this year's conference will be explored in greater depth in three 25-hour courses offered in Portuguese and English this summer at Universidade Nova in Lisbon. On July 9th there will be a thorough course on memoQ Basics and workflows, followed by a Best Practices course on July 19th, covering memoQ and many other aspects of professional work. On September 3rd the university will offer a course on project management skills for language services, including the memoQ Server, project management business tools, file preparation and more. It is apparently also possible to get inexpensive housing at the university to attend these courses, which is quite a good thing given the rapidly rising cost of accommodation in Lisbon. Details on the housing option will be posted on this blog when I can find them.

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.

All-round Translator Terminology Workshop Pre-event Webinar

As previously announced, on June 30th in Amsterdam, the All-round Translator (ART) is offering the workshop "Coming to Terms: Mining & Management" covering a range of practical topics for applied corpus linguistics, optimizing terminology management and efficient sharing of terms in teams. This technical workshop will cover a range of tools and techniques as described on the ART event page.

A month before the Amsterdam workshop I will be presenting a free webinar offering an overview of some of the material planned for June as well as related topics with a particular focus on one of the tools I use most - memoQ - with highlights of recent improvements in its terminology features with memoQ versions 8.3 and 8.4.

This webinar is open to anyone interested regardless of whether or not they plan to attend the June workshop. The talk will use Zoom, which I adopted for remote teaching of corporate clients and others because of its greater versatility and superior recording facilities compared to my old favorite, TeamViewer. (Technically it's also a "meeting", not a "webinar" in Zoom-speak, but that's a distinction without a difference for people who don't feel up to 50 simultaneous speakers and 10,000 viewers.) The platform is free for participants to use, and if I'm not mistaken, a web browser can also be used, though interaction is more limited via that medium. (Don't ask me how, I am still gathering experience with this tool and its myriad options.)

The presentation (approximately one hour, starting at 4 pm Central European Time = 3 pm Lisbon time on May 24th) is free, but registration is required: the link for that is here.

Come to Terms in Amsterdam, June 30th

At end of June this year I'll be doing an expanded, in-person reboot of my occasional terminology workshop with new material and workflows for those who want to do more to control quality and improve communicative vocabularies in interpreting, translation and review projects.

Space is limited at the All-Round Translator event, but I hope you can join us to learn about

• Better teamwork through timely terminology sharing
• Faster, more effective discovery of frequently occurring specialist terminology
• Better access to critical terminology in many environments
• More efficient and accurate QA for terminology
• More accurate, efficient and fault-tolerant term use when translating with memoQ
• Greater flexibility to meet client terminology needs

The Early Bird rate for the workshop is €99 + VAT until the end of April, €120 + VAT  thereafter.

The content is applicable to work with many translation environments, but some segments will share particular tips for maximum productivity using the unbeatably practical memoQ environments.

Contract Language Explained for Translation - with Paula Arturo

On February 5th at 5:00 pm GMT (noon EST, 9 am PST, 6 pm CET), translating attorney Paula Arturo will be presenting a webinar for the American Translators Association on the application of language categories in contract translation. This should be an interesting and useful session for persons working into or out of English.

For more information, have a look at the presenter's announcement - and check out the rest of her interesting legal translation blog, Language with a Pinch of Law.

Call for proposals: 2018 Mediterranean Editors & Translators Meeting in Girona, Spain

The submission deadline for presentation abstracts is February 28, 2018.

The Mediterranean Editors and Translators annual meeting is an opportunity for professional education and exchange which has been on my radar for quite a few years. It was a publication by a few of its members which got me started more than a decade ago with corpus linguistics and better approaches to terminology identification and management, and the group's workshops are among the best value-for-money CPD programs I've seen. When I attended the meeting near Madrid a few years ago, I was deeply impressed by the way in which highly experienced, top-notch colleagues mixed well with rank beginners. This year, I'll be extending my time in Spain after the IAPTI conference in Valencia and go a bit farther up the coast to learn from and share ideas with the excellent professional peers there. Why don't you join me?

The 2018 METM in Girona, Spain offers a day and a half of presentations and keynotes, two half-days of pre-conference workshops, and a program of additional events. The city is located about 440 km from Valencia and 100 km from Barcelona and has good local air and train connections. The venue, Centre Cultural La Mercè, is in the heart of the old town, on the site of a 14th-century convent, which is now a municipal cultural center.

Come to METM 2018 for the professional atmosphere and enrichment, stay to enjoy the beautiful Spanish culture and cuisine.

CALL FOR PAPERS: IAPTI Fifth International Conference, September 2018 in Valencia, Spain

IAPTI is inviting all translators and interpreters to submit presentation proposals for its 5th International Conference from September 29-30, 2018 in the beautiful Mediterranean city of Valencia, Spain.

Here experienced colleagues will give practical, relevant talks and workshops on many facets of our profession and discuss current trends with peers from around the world on conference time and in accompanying activities of the social program.

IAPTI stands firmly for ethical, sustainable work in translation and interpreting, uniting language practitioners from more than 80 countries. If IAPTI's mission is in harmony with your professional vision, consider sharing your ideas and methods with the very diverse audience of attendees and receiving feedback from many cultures and perspectives in return. All topics related to translation, interpreting and terminology are welcome.

Abstracts should have a maximum of 200 words and be submitted to the organizing committee at spainconference@iapti.org by January 20, 2018. Please include a title and description, a short biography (up to 100 words) and a profile photo with your proposal. The time allotted for presentations is 45 to 50 minutes, with 10 minutes for Q&A.

Priority will be given to new topics not presented before at other conferences. The organizing committee reserves the right to accept or reject proposals and will notify applicants accordingly. The conference fee is waived for speakers (one per presentation) with no other compensation or reimbursement. For more information, contact the Organizing Committee at the email address above.

Save the date (International Translation Day!) and join colleagues from around the world for an outstanding event in one of the Europe's most attractive cities!

Details on the venue will be announced soon.

The ART of all-round translation....

There is a certain mythology that in Ye Goode Olde Days, life was simpler and more generalist and a whole lot easier. I suspect that is mostly bunk. The stresses and pressures were different, but probably no less when considered objectively. I remember trying to help my wife, a sometime English to German translator, find clients in the early 1990s, and back then if you weren't local, the clients mostly did not want to know. And don't get me started on the time and effort of terminology research for my own translations then and in the decades before.

But I think it is fair to say that today, even the specialist must be a JOAT of sorts, at least when it comes to the bag of technological and project management tricks to subdue the unruly projects that many of us often face. Colleagues Dorota Pawlak and Ellen Singer recognized the difficulties faced by many language specialists in acquiring some of the specialist and non-linguistic skills needed to cope with particular work challenges and designed a program of quarterly, half-day small workshops to provide just the environment needed to cultivate this new knowledge and establish bonds with others in the same endeavor.

Upcoming workshops I find particularly interesting include:

Transcreation with Alessandra Martelli on February 4, 2017 in Leiden and

no kidding, the regex workshop on April Fool's Day 2017 with my favorite tech guru, the brilliant but articulate Marek Pawelec, a first-rate teacher who can make even nasty stuff like regular expressions seem simple for the rest of us. And as I have pointed out in various articles, this knowledge can be extremely useful for those who work with tools like SDL Trados Studio, memoQ, Xbench and more.

I encourage you to have a look at the ART project site and see what else is on the menu; it seems to me that they have the right approach for those looking for a good start in interesting new areas.

And keep up to date with them on Twitter....

European Commission Workshop - Contracts for translation services

What the Linguistic Sausage Producers don't want you to know:

Did you know that tenders for work with the European Commission are not just for the big Wortwurstläden but can be submitted by individual translators who are EU citizens - and that these individuals have equal standing before the Directorate General for Translation? The DGT does not differentiate and many of its best external contractors are individuals, either self-employed persons or dynamic teams of two or three professionals.

The DGT uses taxpayers’ money and must be transparent, with fair and equal treatment for each candidate. Reading their specifications may appear daunting at first, but taking a closer look is worthwhile! Questions may be submitted and are answered during the weeks when the call for tender is open; this can be done in three languages, almost in real time, with all questions and replies made public on the DGT web site.

Quality pays and they will pay for quality: decisions are based on a quality/price ratio of 70/30, in favor of quality. For each job done, a quality note with feedback is sent to facilitate ongoing improvement.

But to get this far, you must first submit a persuasive offer to the selection board.

On November 28, 2015 from noon to 4 pm, IAPTI's UK chapter is hosting a workshop in Manchester (UK) to inform you of what it takes to tender and win at Europe's highest public level for translation. Profit from this important business event at yet another iconic venue! Registration information is available here.

The beautiful Manchester Central Library, venue for the EC tender workshop!

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The speaker: Monica Garcia-Soriano started her EU career as a lawyer linguist 24 years ago at the Court of Justice in Luxembourg. She later joined the Spanish Translation Unit at the European Commission in Brussels and for the last 8 years she has been in charge of procurement at the Commission's External Translation Unit.

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.

Stridonium talks: English legal contracts with Stuart Bugg

Guest post by attendee John Edmund Hynd

On Sunday April 27^th and Monday April 28^th 2014 Stridonium hosted the first in a series of three workshops met at Hotel HoogHolten, in a converted 1919 English-style hunting lodge in the Salland National Park at Holten in the Dutch province of Overijssel.

Forest pathways around the venue

After a delicious networking dinner the evening before, we learnt about everything to do with English legal contracts from our speaker Stuart Bugg from New Zealand and England who together with his German-born wife practices law in and around Nuremberg in the Bavarian province of Franconia.

Stuart’s easy-going and approachable style put us all immediately at our ease, enabling participants from Belgium, Germany, England and the Netherlands to make constructive comments throughout the course of the day. Participants, all experienced legal translators and interpreters, were invited to ask questions during the talk, and this led to lively and informative discussions with everyone getting answers and helpful suggestions to their own specific questions and translation challenges.

Workshop setting: the library

During the morning we learnt about the ‘Great Divide’, the ‘Three Musketeers’, what constitutes a ‘deed’, ‘cross-system contracts’, ‘forum shopping’, why English common law has no ‘law of obligations’, what ‘equity’ is, why we do not have ‘movable’ and/or ‘immovable’ property in common law, why we do not have enforceable penalties in English law contracts, why not all contracts have to be in writing to be valid, what ‘fitness for purpose’ is as well as ‘merchantability’ and/or ‘satisfactory quality’, when is ‘delivery’ nothing to do with sending a contract by registered post, what ‘bailment’ is, who is a ‘bailor’ or a ‘bailee’ and when does adding a glossary at the end of your translation become essential? 

We then adjourned for lunch and were treated to an excellent hot meal of mustard soup, fish and dessert before starting the afternoon session where we dealt largely with legal English terminology and more specific problems related to translation work.

The speaker, the stunning setting, the lush show that Mother Nature had put on for us, the participants and the helpful hotel staff all conspired to make this seminar well worthwhile. The entire group looks forward to Stuart’s next two seminars on Legal Drafting scheduled for May 25^th and 26^th and Commercial Law on June 1^st and 2^nd at the same delightful venue.

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John is Anglo-Dutch and an official legal translator and interpreter based in the south of the Netherlands (Eindhoven), where he has been tackling legal translations for almost 20 years, building on the extensive knowledge of Canon Law imparted to him at Innsbruck by Prof Johannes Muehlsteiger S.J.

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)