The Great Translation Rate Conspiracy in France!

The French Society of Translators (SFT) is conducting another of its periodic rate surveys. Although the American ATA treads fearfully in matters of rates, deferring to corporates who prefer to keep everyone in the dark, afraid and focused on more important matters like the Kramer vs. Kramer spectacle of TransPerfect and the latest venture capital conquests of Dopeling's Stormin' CEO, European organizations occasionally pander to the masses like the sleazy socialists we all know them to be and do these surveys that injudiciously gather and publish real data from real translators in inconvenient contradiction to the usefully manufactured figures of the Common Nonsense Advisory which aforementioned corporates employ as their rightful negotiating bludgeon to keep 'em down in The Bulk Market Bog that is the world to all those who think that translation is mostly about proZtitution for the sake of Larry the Language Lizard at thepigturd and other industrial luminaries of word sausage.

The survey from those cheese-eating surrender monkeys includes 25 questions and is expected to take 20 valuable minutes of your time which might be better spent translating political propaganda praising Robert Mugabe for Translators Without Borders for free or registering to pay Lionbridge for the privilege of receiving lowball bulk market offers to churn words into sausage to feed their better bottoms' line.

The survey is open to anyone who can puzzle out its French, and those who foolishly believe in the value of free information in a free society for free-thinking translators to make informed decisions with a knowledge of current compensation statistics can support this leftist plot by clicking the link below and not selflessly sacrificing their futures for the good of their Big Bog betters:

http://sondage.sft.fr/index.php/765913/

The lightning passed.

The difference between the right word
and the almost right word
is the difference between
lightning and a lightning bug."
- Mark Twain

RIP Chris Irwin, a friend and example to many

Known by some by his business pseudonym Textklick, Chris Irwin was an extraordinary man in his quiet way. His unexpected death recently has left many shocked and grieving for the loss of a friend and colleague whose wit, kindness and good judgment were usually understated but of a quality seldom surpassed. In over a decade, he enriched my life in ways I will remember to its end.

One of his qualities I appreciated most was his reluctance to take sides in a fight and his consideration that a human being is a complex construct, one we should judge with care. I do not, however, think anyone will decry a lack of care in judging him a good one and an example to follow in many ways, both professionally and personally. The many entries in his Kondolenzbuch attest to just some of the ways in which he will live for a very long time in the memories of those who knew, loved and respected him

In the last week I have thought a lot about how, despite challenges he faced, he never forgot the importance of savoring life's vintage, even the sour notes, and he remained an active part of our professional community with his good wife through all the good times and those which were less so. Life is good. Enjoy it to the last drop. Even the lees.

Authoring and Editing with memoQ (webinar)

Last February I described my initial work with translation tools as environments for authoring and editing documents in a single language. Some people have been doing this quietly for a while; occasionally I would hear puzzled comments from a trainer who had held a class on SDL Trados Studio, OmegaT or memoQ which had been attended by a technical writer or someone with other professional writing interests not related to translation. But to my knowledge there has been no systematic approach to this.

Some weeks later I began to discuss and present some new possibilities for speech recognition in 38 languages which go well beyond the limitations of Dragon NaturallySpeaking for automated speech transcription in the eight languages for which it is available. These possibilities include a number of mobile solutions which are quickly gaining traction among translators and other professional writers.

On Tuesday, June 2nd (two days from now), I will be presenting a one-hour introduction to "MemoQ for Single-language Authoring and Editing" in the eCPD Webinar series. The registration page is here.

This presentation will be an update of the talk I gave earlier this year which discussed CAT tools in general as authoring and editing tools. Although any tool works in principle (and even a user of SDL Trados Studio, for example, can probably draw enough ideas from the upcoming eCPD talk to make good use of the approach), memoQ has some particular advantages, not the least due to its corpus-handling features in LiveDocs and its superior predictive typing facilities, including "Muses" (which are like SDL's AutoSuggest with more flexibility and without the onerously high data quantity requirements).

The presentation will include an overview of some of the latest advances in speech recognition in 38 languages for ergonomically superior writing by automated transcription as well as discussions of version management and dictation workflows which can be applied for greater ease in editing monolingual documents or even translations, including post-editing of machine pseudo-translation (PEMpT by the "Hardisty Method"). I've been fairly quiet on this blog in recent months due to conference organization and travels and the considerable time put in to researching improved work ergonomics for translation, writing and editing processes. (In fact I didn't even find time to blog the memoQ Day on April 22nd in Lisbon yet!) Elements of all these efforts, which have sparked no little interest at recent conferences and workshops I have presented at in Europe, will be part of Tuesday's talk, which will include Q&A afterward to explore the interests of those participating.

So if you are a translator involved in a lot of revision or editing work (bilingual or monolingual, a technical writer or other professional writing in a single language for publication, someone working on a thesis or authoring for other purposes, the eCPD presentation may help you to do this with better organized resources and greater efficiency. As one friend of mine who wrote a thesis just before I developed this approach put it, with this she would at least have been able to keep track of the feedback on her work from its five or so reviewers without going completely nuts.