Escape from Code Hell!

Although I've never met Dave Turner nor have I ever corresponded with him, there are days that I think of him as one of my best friends. Why is that? Because he has made my working life a lot easier. And he has done the same for many other users of CAT tools like Déjà Vu, MemoQ and Trados with his CodeZapper macro collection. Many of us have suffered with "rogue" codes (tags for you Trados users) in RTF and MS Word documents. A typical mess I see almost every day looks like this:
There are many different strategies for cleaning this up, but it is difficult to find one that works in every case. I often run the document through the OpenOffice word processor, but this is a bad idea for complex documents, because the format often gets trashed. Other methods like copying and pasting the content into a new document also have drawbacks. Dave's macros are about the easiest, most reliable way I know of escaping Code Hell most of the time. After running CodeZapper, the sample text above looked like this:
Now that's much easier to translate, isn't it? With results like that, which save massive amounts of working grief, you might wonder how much a cool solution like this will cost you. Update: A mere 20 euros. See the latest post on CodeZapper for information on where to get it.

This is one tool that is definitely worth adding to your bag of tricks.

Charging for formatting with CAT tool work

Last year I had the displeasure of translating a file with particularly heavy formatting. Not only was it loaded with colored text, bold and italic type, it also had a lot of hidden text notes that were not to be translated. It was so bad that it inspired me to write a short guide on how to prepare MS Word and RTF files with content to exclude for translation in Trados or DVX. However, it also got me thinking that I really ought to find a reasonable way to start charging for the extra trouble of all these formatting tags. Clients have advantages from their inclusion in a job, but translators have extra work because of them, and this extra work should be compensated.

One possibility might be to take the count of inline tags (or codes as DVX calls them) and count each as the equivalent of half a word in addition to the usual measured word count. This would represent a fair level of compensation for correctly placing tags for cross-references, character formatting, etc. in a target sentence. It is also simpler and makes more sense than other ideas I was considering which involved statistical measurements of translation time differences as correlated to tag density in a text. Any other ideas? Objections to charging for real effort?

Spring is here again!

... and with it in corporate speeches and newsletters throughout Germany the inevitable quotations from Eduard Mörike's old poem:

Frühling läßt sein blaues Band
Wieder flattern durch die Lüfte;
Süße, wohlbekannte Düfte
Streifen ahnungsvoll das Land.
Veilchen träumen schon,
Wollen balde kommen.
Horch, von fern ein leiser Harfenton!
Frühling, ja du bist's!
Dich hab ich vernommen!

Efforts to translate this poem are, in my opinion, decidedly mixed; some are truly awful. Some of the English texts published on the Internet clearly betray their authors as not being native speakers of English and don't work well no matter how "singable" they may be or whatever other virtues they may possess. Some are quite interesting interpretations.

After surveying the online poetic world for a historic, out-of-copyright version of that famous poem, I finally gave up in disgust and wrote my own bad version:

Spring sets free her ribbon blue
to flutter in the skies again.
Sweet, familiar fragrance drifts
full of promise o’er the land.
Violets do dream,
desire to burst forth soon.
Hark! the harp sounds softly from afar!
Yes, Spring, it is you!
It is you I have heard!

Translation (c) 2009 Kevin Lossner

Please note the copyright and that honor will compel me to pursue you to the Gates of Hell if you even dream of quoting this without permission ;-) You'll be paying license fees and contributions to the German artists' social insurance fund to the end of your days.

A bit of Google searching turns up many efforts. Here are some of the links I found:

• A translation by George Bird and Richard Stokes
  
• One by Emily Ezust
  
• Another by Walter A. Aue
  
• Bertram Kottmann's attempt
• & another one for which I'm not sure of the translator

There are, of course, many more out there. I would be most interested to hear what the thousands of poetry critics among my readership have to say about the virtues and failings of these and any other translations of this poem to be found on the Internet. Or contribute your own best attempt to the discussion :-)