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| Tin Drums | |
There are many reasons why I feel partial to Günter Grass's The Tin Drum. The most obvious is naturally that the novel's protagonist, little Oskar Matzerath, has the same musical preference as our patron saint Jeromobot, but it's a novel I have always loved. (I must admit that I didn't quite get it when I first read it at the tender age of 14, but there were definitely images in that book that drew me ever closer....)
Why do I mention this here? I recently had a chance to communicate with Breon Mitchell, the translator of a new English edition of the book. And though most of us are not literary translators, I wanted to share this fascinating passage from Mitchell's afterword to the book. (Please notice that the translator not only gets an afterword, but his name is very prominently displayed on the book cover reproduced above.)
On a warm summer day in 2005, the citizens of Gdánsk, Poland, were treated to an unusual sight: one of their favorite sons, Günter Grass, had returned, and he appeared to be conducting a tour. As he pointed out the special features of historical buildings in the Altstadt, the dozen or so men and women gathered around him seemed to be paying unusually close attention. And well they might, for each of them was hard at work retranslating Grass's most famous novel, set in Danzig, into his or her respective language.
The puzzled onlookers had no way of knowing the true nature of this tour. For over a week, the Nobel Price-winning author had been conferring for hours each day with his translators, going over Die Blechtrommel page by page, then emerging from the workshop atmosphere to show them the heart and soul of the novel's geography and history -- the potato fields of the Kashubian countryside, the beach and jetty at Neufahrwasser, the city and suburbs of Danzig, Oskar's home, the grocery store, the old city hall: in short, the still living features of his past.
Grass first raised the idea of his now famous "Übersetzertreffen" (translators' meetings) (...) in 1976:
Not long ago I was (...) at a gathering of translators. . . . during the symposium an idea came to me: to arrange such a meeting of my translators three or four months after the appearance of the new text, one which I would attend as author for three or four days, making myself available, discussing the major problems and helping to get this important process underway. Luchterhand and the foreign publishers could bear the cost. . . . What do you think of the idea?
With his publisher's blessing, such gatherings, which soon achieved a certain fame of their own, would become a regular feature of Grass's literary life, and have recurred with each new novel.
Few authors have the power to generate financial support of this magnitude from the publishers, but, more significantly, few seem to care deeply enough about translation even to ask for it. Grass's desire to meet and discuss a new work with his translators sprang directly from a belief that rendering the style, substance, and linguistic complexity of his writing required a closer bond. And on that summer day in Gdánsk, translators both old and new had gathered once again with a special goal in mind -- new translations to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Die Blechtrommel. . . .
Maybe it's the literary translator hidden deeply inside me, but when I read that description I sense a profound Sehnsucht -- an essential longing -- for such a rewarding, clarifying, and collaborative translation experience.
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| 1. The Sheep Syndrome (Premium Edition) | |
"Sheep syndrome" doesn't have very positive connotations, but in some cases the result of one following another is a lot more beneficial than its negative image might let on. Take technology, for instance. In a competitive landscape, the innovation of one competitor will inevitably lead to others following suit -- if that were not the case, we probably wouldn't have a competitive landscape to start with.
In the case of translation environment tools, this phenomenon has been repeated over and over with quality assurance features, context matches, concordance searches, and, lately, with AutoComplete features, i.e., the ability of the translation editor to predict or suggest text based on a few typed letters in combination with external data, such as the translation memory or other databases.
The latest tool that has now unveiled this feature is Wordfast Classic, and I have to admit that, somewhat to my own surprise, I like its version of AutoComplete the best so far. More on that later.
Long-standing readers of this newsletter know that Wordfast Classic has always puzzled me to some degree -- while truly "only" a combination of Word macros, it has much more power than you might think. Years ago when I wrote about Wordfast, I likened it to "The Little Engine that Could" and the children's story with the same title. What can you do with a collection of Word macros all wrapped up in a four-megabyte .dot template file? The answer: a lot more than first meets the eye.
Everything in Wordfast Classic is managed in the multi-tabbed Wordfast dialog, which can be accessed with the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+W or by clicking on the button that was formerly an "f" and is now, well, dots on stripes -- I'm sure there was an idea behind the design, but it's not apparent to the uninitiated. Once the dialog is open, you can see all settings concerning
- translation memories (that can now be shared among various translators);
- the "Very Large Translation Memory" -- which, unlike the button-that-was-formerly-called-"f", is a rather descriptive designation (besides being large it's online and can be accessed by everyone with matching language combinations);
- machine translation (Google, Microsoft, and, if installed, desktop-based systems);
- terminology databases (that can also be shared with others);
- quality assurance settings;
- AutoComplete features;
- and many very advanced features in the ominously named Pandora's Box.
In the latest version of Wordfast Classic, some of the new features include increased sharing abilities between translators on local networks, enhanced terminology recognition, newly designed separate windows for TM and terminology matches and QA results, as well as the above-mentioned AutoComplete feature.
As I said, it's this last feature that I really like. As with its competitors, you can use data in the terminology and translation memory databases (including subsegments) that will automatically pop up and give you suggestions based on your first few character strokes, but ironically it's the fact that you can also use MT matches of the above-mentioned machine translation engines that actually makes it just a little more useful. While in many cases those matches are less than relevant, the pop-ups are unobtrusive enough to just ignore, and they will dynamically change as you continue typing. And if it's just one in five of these dynamic matches that ends up saving you time and energy, you have reason to be thankful.
So, all is good in Wordfast-Classic-Land? Well, naturally the number of formats are still limited to what can be processed in Word (plus to some degree PowerPoint, Excel, and HTML through a prior conversion), but if those are the formats you exclusively work in, I think you might have a lot of fun with Wordfast.
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| 2. Interprenaut | |
She's a word, she's urbane, she's . . . Interprenaut! Not yet acquainted with the newest language superhero? Well, I can make the introductions (and I'll tell you this much: she's hot!). Be the judge yourself by subscribing to the new and completely free newsletter for interpreters by Nataly Kelly.
Last week I tweeted this:
Someone suggested at the Interpret America Summit that there should be an "Interpreter's Tool Kit" just like my "Translator's Tool Kit." Any takers?
Now Nataly, an interpretation industry expert of great acumen and wit, has risen to the challenge. (Truth be told, it was actually she who told me about the suggestion in the first place, so I'm afraid I can't take much credit for her decision to take this on.)
I've just read through the first edition and, like the suave gentleman from the US commercials for Men's Warehouse, I can say with assurance: "You're gonna love the way it looks. I guarantee it."
You can subscribe right here.
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3. Taming the Beast (Premium Edition)
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Here is the dilemma: Over the years, you've built up large translation memory resources. First everything went into the "Big Mama" database, but as that grew you got more and more frustrated with the increasingly large amount of irrelevant or even distracting content you were encountering. Every freelance translator who's been in the business for a while and has been using translation environment tools has experienced this. Now imagine this scenario for a language service provider who works with a much larger number and variety of projects and often with various translation environment tools. The reality so far is that there has been very little, if any, cross-use of resources, even though in some cases this might have been helpful (provided that clients approve).
Kilgray's TM Repository might very well offer a step toward solving this problem by providing a large, SQL-Server-based translation memory repository that can hold all your translation memories. Since the supported format is TMX, these can come from any tool that supports the format, which means essentially all TEnTs. For every project you can query the repository in a relatively uncomplicated fashion for the data that is relevant to your current project and your current project only. Once the project is finished, the data can be read back into the repository, including the new content as well as the improved legacy data.
It's also possible to track usage of individual translation units. If you feel that zero uses of a certain translation unit after, say, 12 months is a good indicator that this is not a helpful unit to retain, you're free to take it out.
Also, you can perform batch processes on all strings in the repository. This would be helpful after language reforms like we recently experienced in German and Brazilian Portuguese, or to implement global changes to certain terminology.
Furthermore, you can cross-leverage data between different languages of different TMs (making a RU<>EN and HI<>EN into a RU<>HI TM as well).
Lastly, it's helpful to have all the assets in one place to prepare them adequately for a possible use as data for training statistical machine translation.
And what are the drawbacks? In a way, I think the product might not have been quite ready for prime time. In six weeks or so there will be a version of the product that will come with an application programming interface so that you can integrate it into any translation management system, and I assume that at this point there will be a version of memoQ, also a Kilgray product, with the integrated TM Repository. It might have been helpful to wait for that point.
In addition -- and this is not Kilgray's fault but more a reflection of the state of TMX -- the tagging data within translation units between different tools (such as memoQ vs. Trados vs. Fluency) is so different that its transferability is of limited value. In some cases, the tagging data might not be transferred at all, resulting in lower-value matches. This clearly limits the use of this system as a cross-tool approach, but again, this is an inherent problem that is not easily solved. What is nicely solved is the mapping mechanisms by which the meta data (the data about the translation units) can be transferred between different systems. Clearly, this is of extremely high value since it's the meta data that governs filtering.
The tool is presently available only for evaluation purposes. Once it's available for purchase, the Enterprise edition will have a price point between 5,000 and 10,000 Euro, and the Standard edition (which will be limited in the amount of data it can handle) will be, well, less than that.
Are we going to see much more of this tool? If memoQ's rise in the tool market continues as it has in the last few years, I could indeed imagine that we will see more and more TM Repository installations. While it's "tool-agnostic" to some degree, I don't think that there will be many implementations completely apart from memoQ (that's something that Alchemy with its Alchemy Language Exchange product experienced). Also, I think it would be helpful not to exclusively support TMX as the underlying format. XLIFF would be a logical additional choice, and I have a pretty strong hunch that we'll see that in one of the upcoming versions.
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| 4. More Trips and Ticks | |
(A number of folks asked me after the last newsletter whether I meant to misspell this heading. Come on: you really think I'm that stuppid?)
The online website word-counting tool webwordcount is a quick and helpful alternative for counting words in simple websites. You can use it only for static websites (i.e., websites that are not content management system-driven) and only on text-based files (text, HTML, etc.), but if you need to provide a quote for those kinds of websites, it'll be helpful. I also like that it actually explains a bit about how it counts words -- something that's missing in most other tools. Note that I have not tested it with non-Western languages.
Skype has become the communication tool of choice in the translation community (I don't even remember when I last started MS Messenger or another messaging tool), so it's been annoying to many that the latest versions LOVE to gobble up memory and slow things down significantly, even with high-powered computers. How to fix it if you have that problem? Uninstall any Skype version above version 5 and install Skype 4.2. You can download it from Filehippo. While it's true that you won't find many of Skype's newer features in the older version, I haven't missed anything and prefer the processing power I've regained. (Just make sure that you know your user name and password before you uninstall.)
As of just a couple weeks ago, the WordPress Multilingual Plugin (WPML), a fairly inexpensive suite to manage translation for websites built with WordPress, is now supporting XLIFF, the translation file interchange format. In fact, on one of their help pages you'll even find detailed explanations for how to process these XLIFF files with tools such as OmegaT, memoQ, and Trados TagEditor.
One thing that always drove me nuts with Microsoft Outlook was its limited non-Western script ability. While it was possible to display Russian, Hebrew, and Chinese in bodies of emails, the text always showed up garbled in the subject lines. Well, it turns out this was my own fault (please tell me I wasn't alone!). From Outlook 2003 on, the underlying Outlook .pst repository files have all been Unicode. This includes the ability to display all languages appropriately everywhere in the program (and increased the storage capacity by a few hundred percent). However, I didn't realize that when I updated from earlier non-Unicode versions of Outlook to a later version by simply using the same .pst file, the repository file remained its old limited self. Only when my Outlook recently balked at me for having too large an email repository did I create a new Unicode .pst file (there are plenty of tutorials on the web that show you how to do that). I copied everything over, and I can now see everything as it's supposed to be (and now I can receive your emails without Outlook telling me that it just can't take anymore).
Lastly, I don't even know where to begin highlighting all the many things Jeromobot has encountered these last few weeks. He made cameo video appearances in Spain, played tourist in Washington, DC, and lived through a traumatic encounter with a white-faced capuchin monkey in Costa Rica. But perhaps the most amazing occurrence was stumbling on a song about him -- or more accurately, about The Thunderer, his time-honored ancestor St. Jerome. Unable to contact Dion, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame artist behind the song, to ask for permission to share the song, I've decided to share just a sample to whet your appetite. I think you'll like it.
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5. New Password for the Tool Kit Archive
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As a subscriber to the Premium version of this newsletter you have access to an archive of Premium newsletters going back to May 2008.
You can access the archive right here. This month the user name is toolkit and the password is costarica.
New user names and passwords will be announced in future newsletters.
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| The Last Word on the Tool Kit | |
If you would like to promote this newsletter by placing a link on your website, I will in turn mention your website in a future edition of the Tool Kit. Just paste the code you find here into the HTML code of your webpage, and the little icon that is displayed on that page with a link to my website will be displayed.
Here is a website that added the Tool Kit link this week:
www.ampletranslations.com
© 2011 International Writers' Group
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