Holiday cookies for the Portuguese, Part 2

Feliz natal, everyone. Around this time of year, I think of various friends and family members with their particular repertoires of seasonal cookies and other treats, which are always something I look forward to and tell myself I'll learn to make one day. This year I decided to try my hand at a favorite German cookie, which is a bit like a shortbread with its high butter content and low sugar. There are, of course, a number of recipes available online, but I wanted to try one I've enjoyed intermittently for 24 years now, and when I asked for it, this is what I got:

Heidesand: 250 g Butter schmelzen, etwas bräunen, wieder fest werden lassen. 100g Zucker und etwas Vanillezucker damit verrühren. Ein Ei, zwei gestrichene Teelöffel Backpulver und 400g Mehl hinzugeben, verkneten, kalt stellen. Rollen formen, in Zucker wälzen, in Scheiben schneiden. Ca. 15 Minuten backen bei 180°C.

Heidesand: Melt 250 g butter and brown it a bit, then let it solidify again. Cream in 100 grams of sugar and a bit of vanilla sugar. Then add an egg, two level teaspoons of baking powder and 400 g of flour; knead the dough and chill it. Form the dough into "logs" and roll these in sugar, then cut off rounds of the dough and bake them at 180°C for about 15 minutes.

I was a bit suspicious of that baking time in my oven and reduced it by several minutes, which was still too long. The first successful batch of cookies baked for about 9 minutes and probably would have been better with a bit less time.

Adjusted for US measurement units, the recipe would be

Heidesand
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
½ cup sugar
1 packet vanilla sugar or 1 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg
2 level teaspoons baking powder
3 cups white wheat flour

Melt and brown the butter somewhat, then let it cool and cream it together with the sugar, add the vanilla flavoring and egg. Then add the flour, sifting it in with the baking powder, and form the crumbly dough into rolls, which can be rolled in sugar if desired (or sugar can be sprinkled on the cut cookies before baking). Wrap these in parchment paper or other suitable material and chill the rolls in the refrigerator or freeze them. Cut off slices from the rolls and bake these at 350°F (180°C) for about 8 or 9 minutes, depending on the conditions in your oven.

I used self-rising flour for a little "boost" and carmelized the sugar, though not completely to a liquid state (throwing in a teaspoon of ground cinnamon in the process), so after it cooled I had to crush and grind it in a mortar. This resulted in cookies with an interesting speckled appearance. I also didn't bother adding extra sugar in most cases, as I prefer these cookies less sweet. They are a little dry, and crumble like sand into one's mouth when bitten.

No matter how much leavening agent is added to the mix, these cookies will not rise much due to all the butter and can be spaced closely together on the tray. This recipe is not very sweet, with about half the amount of sugar found in other versions, so those with more of a sweet tooth could adjust the sugar content accordingly.

SDL Trados Studio in Lisbon – January 22, 2015 – possibilities, experience and expectations

SDL TRADOS - PAST EXPERIENCES,

PRESENT POSSIBILITIES AND FUTURE EXPECTATIONS

Thursday 22 January 2015, Auditório 2, piso 3, Torre B, FCSH

The Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the New University of Lisbon is pleased to invite you to a day of talks on SDL Trados, with special guest speaker Paul Filkin, Director of Client Communities for SDL Language Solutions.

Event schedule (subject to updates)

10:00 Welcome 

10:15 – 11:30 “SDL Open Exchange” with Paul Filkin 

11:30 – 13:00 “Voice Recognition (Portuguese and English) and CAT Tools for translation and PEMT” with David Hardisty, Isabel Rocha and Joana Bernardo. This session will show how to use voice recognition to post-edit machine translation, how voice recognition is available in Portuguese, and how it can be used to cope with physical disability (such as cerebral palsy). 

LUNCH !!!

14:00 – 15:40 “SDL Trados Clinic” with Paul Filkin. In this session Paul will invite the audience to raise common issues they have with Trados, and cover other common issues and solutions. 

16:00 – 17:00 “SDL Trados and Interoperability with other CAT Tools” with Kevin Lossner. This session will present various ways to use SDL Trados to work successfully with those who have other translation environment tools such as memoQ, OmegaT, etc.

Presenters

Paul Filkin has worked for SDL Language Solutions since 2006. His main focus is evangelizing and helping users of SDL technology get the most out of their investment and is often found on social media providing advice wherever needed.  His blog “Multifarious” describes some of the practical challenges for translators and translation companies and how to resolve these with SDL technology in the mix.

Kevin Lossner has a healthy skepticism of translation technologies where it is not clear if they serve their users or the other way around. His blog “Translation Tribulations” discusses SDL Trados Studio, memoQ and more and is the ultimate authority on chocolate chip cookies in Évora, Portugal.

David Hardisty has taught Translation Tools at FCSH/UNL to undergraduate and postgraduate students since the inception of the Translation Programmes at FCSH. He has also worked with Technology in the teaching of ELT and in the last 25 years has co-authored five books published by Oxford University Press.

Isabel Rocha is a Spanish to Portuguese translator with thirty years of experience. She has completed the curriculum component of the Masters in Translation at Lisbon University and preparing to write her thesis.

Joana Bernardo is a Masters Student at FCSH/UNL. She has also studied Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the same university. She became interested in Translation after a summer internship at a subtitling company.

All professionals and students with an interest in modern translation technologies and working methods are welcome to attend this free event. For more information, please contact: David Hardisty [david1610.dh (at) gmail.com] – or just surprise us with your smiling face at the door.

Where the heck is this?

Click this graphic to see the location using Google Maps!

memoQ 2014 Release 2: beware of Hungarians bearing updates!

Just kidding, actually. Facebook groups are, of course a buzz with tales of bugs and crashes the day after Kilgray's milestone release, and in my own office I heard a flurry of curses behind me as my Portuguese translator discovered the "can't quit" bug that someone had written about. This was just a short time before I delivered the last files for one of the busiest weeks of translation I've been hit with in months, weeks where I decided to live dangerously and do all the work with the bleeding-edge beta for yesterday's release. For me it was actually a rather bloodless experience.

Sure, I saw bugs. Screen refresh weirdness in the first few beta builds and my favorite (non-lethal) quirk: multiple instances of memoQ web search. I guess the developers figured we can't get too much of a good thing!

Triple play, anyone?

I didn't write as much about this release as I intended to originally, partly because I was too busy, but also because I took a very different approach this time, using the beta opportunity to do a little informal psychological research to support some upcoming tutorials I'm working on to help people make a smooth transition to the new interface and cope better with the costly challenges of flipping between versions if required to by some projects (for example with conservatives who still use old memoQ servers.

Those who are not absolute newbies on the technology scene are well aware that the months after any release from any provider of translation technology are always a risky time for those eager to get started with a new version. The prudent advice to anyone is don't hurry. There's no use slamming Kilgray or SDL or anyone other firm for the inevitable bugs after any release, at least not until two or three months have passed and the version has put through the real-life wringer in a way no testing program can do. After that, fair game as far as I'm concerned. Those first months are usually a critical time in which many improvements not even anticipated by the designers occur. So regardless of the official line, people, for the next three months any of you using memoQ 2014 R2 are beta testers. And that's a good thing, a chance to participate in a good development process. SDL Trados Studio users, DVXn fans and everyone else are on more or less the same curve each time a big upgrade hits.

In my beta test over the past month I made few attempts to explore new features. Instead, I focused on my usual workflows to see how they felt in the new environment. As I indicated in my first blog post on this release I was not entirely comfortable after a week of work just with thew new version. And I'm still not. I am less productive than I want to be, because changing the translation environment interface is always a costly process associated with reduced productivity. This is why I am such a strong advocate of interoperability and tell people to go deep with their environment of choice and learn how to work with information prepared in other environments with just your favorite tool for maximum efficiency and better earnings if you work at full capacity.

What I have learned so far is that this learning curve will be longer and steeper for me than I anticipated. However, the Kilgray ribbon designs for the new memoQ are well-designed for the most time, and I can reason my way through them and find anything. It just takes time right now. So make the transition when you aren't going to be under the gun for a while. Kick the tires soon (you can install versions in parallel at no risk) but take it slow and easy. The trip may be long, but it is clearly worth it in the end for a design that will benefit most in the long run.

And focus on keyboard shortcuts. The more you depend on those, the easier your work will be in the months ahead. Stay tuned.