Sometimes a great customer

I think that sometimes we get so caught up in the often nutso routines of the translation business that we don't recognize a big gold nugget in our own pans. Someone has to take it out and hit us over the head with it first.

Communication is important in most businesses, and translation is about communication really, so I would suppose you could say this applies even more so to translators. But there are many forms of communication and each exchange is unique. Maintaining the alertness to recognize that uniqueness and to respond in the best way to each individual situation is not easy at all, even for some people who are considered "good communicators".

I had an interesting project several months ago that was a bit of a nightmare in several ways. The source document was in MS Word format, but heavy footnoting and commentary as well as a huge number of hefty graphics caused most of my various translation environment tools to choke. After two days of trying to get the project set up, I finally discovered a complex conversion workflow involving several tools that enabled me to translate. Then the real nightmare began. The source text was a disaster. Written by Germans living abroad for many years, some of whom had no access to a German keyboard and showed obvious signs of having forgotten the proper use of their native language, it also showed signed of having been slapped together in a big hurry. Whole paragraphs were repeated, sometimes consecutively. Sentences ended like staircases into the ceiling at the Winchester Mystery House.

The rational thing to do in such circumstances is to have a chat with the customer about the state of things, perhaps suggest a bit of editing if possible before the actual translation begins. But I think more than a few of us have dealt with customers who become irate at the suggestion that a source text could be less than perfect, and too often I've received responses that essentially mean "shut up and translate what's in front of you". In one case there was a mushroom cloud seen over a small city in North Rhine-Westphalia as an end customer responded to ten pages of corrections for bad grammar, typographical errors and mislabeled diagrams in a source text. So gradually I've begun to give less feedback on the problems I see with source texts unless I see them as precursors to inevitable death or lawsuits. Simply looking stupid doesn't always count any more.

Well, as luck would have it, there were complaints about the aforementioned project. The exchange dragged out for more than a month (largely my fault as I tried in vain to get someone else to review the text and identify serious translation errors that were not apparent to me and I simply didn't feel like engaging in a conversation that seemed a bit Kafkaesque in the clarity of its issues). The customer asked repeatedly that I look at the edited text (which had been subjected to extensive, necessary editing of its content, the faults of which were the legacy of the source text) and make a "proposal" (for some sort of discount, obviously). I had told the customer that I was quite willing to reduce the invoice for the tardiness that resulted from the difficulties involved, but that I couldn't see anything in the translation to fault beyond a few typographical errors my proofreader had missed. In fact, the editor engaged by the customer had introduced serious errors into the text while making a few good suggestions for alternative terminology. That answer wasn't satisfactory.

Finally, after weeks of stress over the matter, I had largely ceased to care at all about the rather large invoice. I decided to put the ball back in the customer's court, accept whatever suggestion was made and if I didn't like it, then I was unavailable for further work. End of story. So in a relaxed state of mind, I called up the customer and we resumed our chat. I asked for a "wish", saying I simply wanted the matter resolved to their satisfaction, and they know better than I do what they might consider "satisfying". I was surprised (though I shouldn't have been) that the requested invoice reduction was less than what I would have considered acceptable. So that point was resolved immediately, and I could feel the muscles in my back loosen a bit. Then the interesting part of the discussion began.

My understanding at the end was that the real issue was not quality of the translation per se, but the quality of communication. The person with whom I had dealt with for years was rightfully upset at not being informed that she had passed on garbage to me for translation. And I was so caught up in various matters that I didn't stop and consider the particular nature of that specific customer relationship and the fact that this was a customer who is open to criticism and wants to see the best result in the end. A customer who understands that things can go wrong when people work under pressure and who tries to make intelligent decisions if the information to do so is available. In other words, for many of us the ideal customer! Gold in my pan, and I was too blind to notice. My other half, who had been very irritated about the whole matter, nearly broke out the champagne to celebrate when she realized how reasonable our customer really is. This is the kind who is really worth extra effort.

I'm sure this won't be the last such mistake in what I hope will be further busy decades of translation. But I hope that the lesson will stick for a while, and I'll ask myself more often if I am really responding to the situation now confronting me or to a completely different one with a different customer last week.

Results of the Trados user survey

After my first fling with the Google Blogger polling tool, I decided to look a little more closely at the breakdown of the "Trados users" who had responded to the poll.

The new poll asked about the use of various Trados versions. Personally, I use two older versions (2007 & 2006) and once in a while I trot out MultiTerm 5.5 for clients with Stone Age termbases. I'm still testing Studio 2009, though most of my objections have been dealt with adequately over the past year, and if good people like Paul Filkin and Roger Lai can effect a change of culture at SDL Trados so that insulting marketing campaigns like the disgusting "amnesty" a while back are not seen any more, I could envision myself accidentally recommending an SDL product beside MultiTerm or Passolo for productive use. It might take a lot of Unicum to get there, however.

But SDL Trados Studio 2009 looks good on a netbook for the most part. I'll have to give them that. The Hungarians in whose technical footsteps they follow have some optimization to do for that environment. And as requests for Studio 2009 projects pick up, I'll inevitably look more closely at interoperability issues with that environment, and from what I've seen so far, I don't expect to be terribly irritated.

The responses in this poll were not exclusive (as anyone with rudimentary addition skills can discern). So someone who uses both the latest version and the previous one for various clients should have (and presumably did) mark both responses. To me, the results indicate however shakily (due to the low number of poll responses) that SDL has moved successfully to the new generation of technology and established a sufficient base of licenses that it will remain viable for the present generation of translation environment technology. That was to be expected given the momentum involved. But there remains great skepticism among the old user base, and when I talk to agency owners who describe the technical challenges they face with data conversion and interoperability, very often I must point out that what they are looking for is currently offered only by the memoQ Server at a friendly price that might make those who invested in other TM server technologies reach for the Alka Seltzer. In one big Berlin agency I'm close to, the license for SDL Trados Studio 2009 was purchased months ago, but there's no hurry to install it as the project managers ask me to write up procedures for Déjà Vu and memoQ to handle insane character mapping problems for Java properties files in Greek, which the last Trados 2007 could no longer handle well. I assume Studio 2009 can deal with the problem, but the trust seems to be gone. Similar reservations have been expressed by other agency owners who have used Trados since version 1 and are frustrated that when problems arise, the chaps on the support line know far less than they do and read from a script. Meanwhile, in the Wild East, software-slinging CEOs and heads of development still provide competent, detailed, personal support for devilish technical challenges at odd hours.

On the whole, I would say "good job" to SDL for having kept so many users "in the boat" by getting them to buy Studio 2009 licenses. And I hope they can keep them there by expanding the usefulness of the product for all by not only improving its performance (use of resources) but also all aspects of interoperability so that it can become a true universal work tool for translation, even including connectivity to other server systems for its desktop users. To the extent that one can claim any tool provider is in that race, they are not yet in the lead.

Crowdsourced language learning

A recent New York Times article made me aware once again of something I've heard of a few times and encountered occasionally on places like the BBC web site: online opportunities for learning languages. The sites mentioned in the NYT article are a bit different though. Many are a form of crowdsourcing, with ordinary people interacting with voice and written submissions, coaching and correcting each other. Not what you need to get a bit more polish as a university lecturer, perhaps, but this strikes me as an interesting opportunity to be exposed to the rough-and-tumble of everyday usage. Where else will you get skateboarding Algerian teenagers to tell you how much your Arabic sucks?

As an experiment I set up a free account at one of the sites mentioned by the article (Livemocha). It's interesting correcting little exercises from learners around the world or putting together online flash card sets for German hunting terminology and other subjects. Read the article, try out one of the sites that interests you, and enjoy! Even for professional translators, exposure to an environment like this may have value, depending on the types of texts you do. Some of the authors of the German texts I translate have rotten educations, or they simply can't write, or they simply can't write High German. Texts like these might be a problem for someone in Kansas who never encounters the language of the street in Stuttgart until they have to translate a manual patched together by an overworked, verbally challenged engineer.

In my copious free time I'll try to revive my Russian and pick up a bit of Farsi and French this way. (The latter two will surely come in handy when I start selling nuclear secrets on the international market.)