Your working software tools as Xbox "games" in Windows 10!

For the last few days I have been away from the office, working from home on a relatively new laptop which doesn't have a lot of the software installed that I use on my main machine. Then today when I needed to make a screen recording to document a memory leak in one of my software tools, I was annoyed to realize that Camtasia wasn't installed on the laptop and I had to find some other means of video capture.

That was when I found out about the nice little video recording tool included in a somewhat obscure way with the Windows 10 operating system. When invoked for the first time in an application, such as memoQ, the Windows Task Manager or anything else, you'll be asked if the program you are running is a game. Lie and click Yes, this is a game.

The recording bar invoked with the Windows-G key looks like this:

Continuous recordings can be made for long periods of time, but the really cool feature of this recorder is that it can be set up to maintain a history of a defined period just passed and save this history as an MP4 video file.

The default is 30 seconds; in the screenshot above, the backward recording buffer is set to three minutes.

What good is this? Well, one thing you can do is record a retroactive video after the program you use crashes. This can then be submitted to support experts to help them figure out what went wrong, or you can review the recording yourself to see what was done.

The videos are stored in the default path for Videos in a folder named Captures:

A very boring example of this is shown below; it shows the activity in the Windows Task Manager as I launch various applications. The results showed me the steady increase in memory consumption by the memoQ Web Search feature (amounting to over several gigabites after perhaps 20 minutes, leading to crashes and/or other problems) versus exactly the same search in 5 tabs of Internet Explorer using IntelliWebSearch. The latter is rock stable in its memory use, causing no problems at all and offering much greater flexibility, which is why I strongly recommend this search productivity tool, which can be accessed from any Windows application.

Survey on Internship and Mentoring in Translation

Internships are an important part of university translation programs in many places, and mentorships of various kinds play a significant role in professional development in a number of professional associations with which I am familiar. Attila Piróth, a Hungarian translator based in France, has conducted and published a number of very thorough, interesting studies on several aspects of the language services professions and is now undertaking the study of intern and mentorship arrangements from various perspectives. I think the results will be very interesting.

If you have been involved in such arrangements, please take the time to contribute your experience to the study. Please note that in its present form, it is difficult to take on a smartphone, so it is probably best to use a full-sized computer or large tablet of some kind.

In a series of surveys I want to explore translation internship and mentoring programs from the viewpoint of different stakeholders: interns/mentees, mentors, organizations running internship programs, educational institutions and translator associations. 

Through a mixture of learning by doing, expert supervision and building a professional network, internships and mentoring programs serve to accelerate the transition of early-career translators into the profession. Yet graduating students are often under pressure from their educational institutions to complete an internship in order to gain credits, but the internship environment is often quite different from their future work environment. 

Therefore this series of surveys aims to identify best practices for internship and mentoring so that students, mentors and other stakeholders can make better choices in planning and implementing their internship and mentoring programs. 

I would thus like to ask your help in completing this survey. There has been no comprehensive research conducted to date on internship/mentoring practices, even though such practices are becoming more common. All stakeholders can benefit from knowing more about current practices in order to avoid negative experiences, to promote positive ones, and to hear what the perspectives are of other stakeholders. 

If you participated in an internship/mentoring program as an intern/ mentee, please complete https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TR-int-I.  

If you participated as a mentor, please complete https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TR-int-M.  

If you represent an organization that runs internship programs, please complete https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TR-int-O. 

If you represent an educational institution, please complete https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TR-int-U. 

If you represent a translator association that has promoted internship/mentoring programs, please complete https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TR-int-A. 

Please also share information about these surveys among other stakeholders.
The full survey report will be available for free to survey participants and other interested parties. I thank my colleagues, Catherine Howard and Maria Karra, for their help in creating this series of surveys. 

Thank you for taking the time to complete it.

             -- Attila Piróth

Webinar April 8th: Translating in Rhythm with Susan Bernofsky

Susan Bernofsky is my favorite German to English translator of literature. Mind you, I can't name a lot of them if asked. But my usual experience of reading literature translated from German to English is to rush to the original German text out of disgust at a result I could easily better. With Susan, the translation honors the original work and amplifies its best qualities. Her Metamorphosis is more readable, yet more Kafkaesque than Franz's laudable effort. Several years ago, I reviewed her terrifying translation of Gotthelf's Black Spider, which I enjoyed far more than the Swiss German original. Hers is a name worth knowing and remembering, and her work is a standard of excellence.

So when I heard some weeks ago that Ms. Bernofsky would be holding a talk about her education and experiences with her mentor, William Gass, I walked around for some hours with a very big smile on my face. The burdens of workload being what they were at the time, however, I completely forgot to register until this morning.

The registration page is here. If you are interested in literary translation and the philosophy behind it, why not join us for what promises to be a very interesting hour?