Musings from an overworked translator

If I don’t have a domain do I exist? August 7, 2012

I’m at the end of a harrowing couple of days. It turns out that when I cancelled my contracts with my German ISP earlier this year I didn’t realize that my domain would not be automatically renewed. I woke up yesterday morning to no e-mail. I thought it was weird, but simply chalked it up to a server outage. Then a client sent an e-mail to my backup e-mail at Gmail informing me that my e-mail was bouncing and I started looking into it. The first thought was that my domain had been “sniped” as soon as it had become available, but thanks to ICANN’s Redemption Grace Period sniping has become a thing of the past. I contacted my ISP through their U.S. contact number (which I had no idea even existed) and started the process to get my domain back. I also sent out e-mails to all my active clients and anyone who may have been trying to reach me.

I have since received word that the domain is being transferred back to me, and it should take 6-12 hours to be active again. In the meantime, I truly hope none of my less regular clients were trying to reach me. Thank heavens for Gmail! I’ve been able to send out invoices and deliver my translations through Gmail.

One of my closest friends called me this afternoon in a panic since her e-mails to me were bouncing. She was relieved to hear everything was fine. So if you have been trying to reach me since the evening of August 5th I am fine. Just feeling very non-existent without my domain and main e-mail addresses.

How stupid do you think I am? August 1, 2012

Check out the e-mail I just received. How stupid does this guy think I am? I think I would remember someone named Dustin. It isn’t a common name. Plus, it isn’t like translators wouldn’t remember someone they met “the other day”, since most of the time we can be found behind our computers in our home offices. I don’t want to give him free advertising, so I’ve redacted the name of the “amazing new website.”

Hey,

It was great meeting you the other day!

Remember I told you about this amazing new website for online translation services called [XXX.com]

Please call me on 214-200-XXX if you have any questions.

Let me know what you think of it, I think it’s a pretty cool business model, don’t you agree?

Later, Dustin

Later, Dustin. Much, much later… like never…

Separated by a common language July 6, 2012

This morning I was asked by a client if I translated into UK English. This is a new client, so I don’t fault them for asking. However, I have lost track of the times I have been asked to translate something into UK English. I don’t know if it is a German thing, but German clients seem to think one can run the Word spellchecker over a document and it’s UK English. As anyone who follows the blog Separated by a Common Language knows, UK English and US English are most definitely not the same. It goes beyond throwing a “u” in color or favorite or spelling tire with a “y” instead of an “i.” Just as with the word potato in German (Kartoffel in Germany, Erdapfel in Austria), there are lots of different words for the same concept (truck vs. lorry, eraser vs. rubber, paper towel vs. kitchen towel). They also regularly use words like “whilst” and “amongst.” Someone who has grown up in another culture may not know the different word even exists despite growing up watching all kinds of British TV. It just isn’t the same as growing up in the culture and just knowing it.

The grammar is also quite different. UK readers can read my posts and understand them – and I can understand theirs. However, as I learned when I was an intern at a translation agency in Bonn, the Brits have very different rules when it comes to comma placement, which tends to mirror German much more closely than US English. Heck, they even put their periods/full stops outside the quotation marks and apostrophe signs instead of inside them like we do in the States. I tore up several translations by excellent translators and after discussing the changes with them quickly learned that it was the perfectly correct way to state it in UK English. It was a valuable lesson for someone just starting out. I learned to be much more judicious with my editing.

So when my client wrote me this morning I shook my head for a second, but sent off a cheerful reply explaining, “No, I am an American and live in the U.S. I don’t translate into UK English. Sorry.” They won’t know I don’t if they don’t ask, right? No need to be snarky about it. I just wish that German clients would learn that asking me to translate UK English is like asking someone in Hamburg to translate into Austrian or even Swiss German.

Aloha! May 29, 2012

As predicted, as soon as I go on vacation it seems like my clients realize they need me. The first day I had several requests and am averaging about one a day. I’ve accepted two small jobs that I was easily able to squeeze in at night (including one 6 a.m. phone call this morning), but for the most part I have been sightseeing and getting burnt to a crisp. I guess the solution to being underworked is to go on vacation. I am recharging my batteries and looking forward to starting a new marketing campaign when I get back. I also received a tempting contract job offer, which I am seriously considering applying for.

In the meantime I have spent my days swimming in coves and beaches, hiking to out-of-the-way places and scenic overlooks, and relaxing. I’ve been burned to a crisp, started peeling, and have now reburned the fresh skin under the peeling skin. The first few days were spent on the island of Molokai, a 38 by 10 mile island that is considered to be Old Hawaii. Life there is slow and very, very basic. The highlights for me were the unspoiled beauty and the live slack key guitar/ukelele music and hula dancing we enjoyed several times. We flew on a tiny 9-seater plane to Kona on the Big Island on Saturday afternoon (they weigh your luggage and then put you and your carry-ons on the scale to calculate load and balance the plane). We spent the entire day yesterday exploring the west and north coasts of the Big Island (including the breathtaking Hapuna Beach) and had a fabulous meal in a little town called Hawi. Tomorrow night we are doing an evening sunset dinner cruise on a glass bottomed boat to see the marine life and maybe do a little dancing. We head to Hilo on Friday, where I plan to hole up in a posh hotel and enjoy some alone time as well as visit the volcano lava flows and fly over it on a helicopter. Hope you all are having a great week too.

Have the Top 100 Language Blog awards run their course? May 20, 2012

I received a reminder the other day that my blog had been nominated, but it just occurred to me that I had completely forgotten all about it – and none of the other language blogs I follow have even mentioned the awards either. Bravo, fellow bloggers, for seeing the awards as a way for a website to get a ton of hits without having any substance behind it and not trolling for votes this year.

Musings from an underworked translator April 30, 2012

Karen’s guest post on Corinne’s blog today made me question whether I should keep up the blog, but I know deep down that I don’t blog for notoriety or to attract clients. I use my blog as my emotional outlet to vent about situations in the industry that upset me or share my experiences with others. I used to complain on listservs. Most people have no choice but read or at least glance at the various posts that are sent to a listserv. When I blog, people can choose whether or not they want to listen to me. When I was teaching the graduate translation students at Kent I hated the grading, but loved sharing my experience and the wisdom I had gained from so many of my colleagues over the years with the students. I consider my blog to be an extension of this. I also enjoy sharing the occasional video or comic strip about our field. I had hoarded them on my computer, but they needed to be shared and enjoyed.

You might have been wondering why I have been posting less often here in the last few months. The fact is that business has really dried up for me in the last six months. It was slowing down all year last year, as I struggled to find time to translate while settling my uncle’s estate. Then the three week stint at the law firm had me turning down work while working on a large translation at night. After both job assignments finished in early December I have rarely had lots of work. I haven’t needed to use my job board. The jobs come in in dribs and drabs (a thousand words here, 800 words there), with long days of nothing in between. I don’t know the cause of it, but the fact remains that I am woefully underworked. And when I am underworked I start to question things – my life, my abilities as a translator, whether I should continue freelancing or get a “real job.” I start to wonder whether this blog is a detriment to my job – if customers are turned off by the “overworked” moniker or if my complaining about bad clients or bad business practices repulses potential clients or my readers. My motivation wanes: my motivation to blog, motivation to tweet, motivation to sit at my computer, motivation to market myself. I am in a weird position at the moment where I don’t need to work, but want to work. There are only so many books I can read and so much television I can watch. Judge Judy is awesome, but when I have time to watch her twice a day that’s a problem. I know that this can’t continue indefinitely though. Working makes me happy. It makes me feel fulfilled. Like I have a purpose in life. When I am underworked I get bored. listless. depressed.

I know that this too shall pass, but it’s hard to experience. I need to contact my existing clients and let them know I’m available for work. I really need to send out some marketing e-mails and find some new clients. Maybe even reach out to new direct clients like the local law firms and hospitals here in Cleveland. I just need to find the motivation. The death of Dr. Lee Wright has kind of been a kick in the pants for me. I have taken over his responsibilities as Membership Chair of NOTA. His wife Sue Ellen (my mentor and the person who motivated me to be a translator in the first place) brought me his files on Saturday. We went to dinner and reminisced about Lee and his passion for translation, for his students, and for the arts. It was a lovely evening. We enjoyed the Baroque orchestra Apollo’s Fire perform Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos together. They had season tickets, and Lee used to take me when Sue Ellen was out of town on business. I miss him so much. Sue Ellen told me that when he was told that his cancer had come back Lee made a bucket list, although he never managed to do anything on the list. I am inspired to make my own bucket list. I am healthy and alive and should not squander that. And neither should you.

First on my list is to get away and enjoy a much needed vacation in Hawaii at the end of May. I think I desperately need to reenergize. The flights are booked, the hotels and car rental are arranged, the clothes and swimsuits are bought. I can’t wait. I’ll start the marketing campaign when I get back. Until then please bear with me.

A new kind of spam comment? March 20, 2012

This is a question for all my fellow bloggers. I was going through my “spam” comments today and found a couple that I would normally deem to be spam since they follow a pattern of deliberately misspelling a word in the first sentence. However, in reading the comment I found someone took the time to actually write about translation. Here are some examples:

Comment on my “Wie gut ist dein Deutsch” TGIF video:

Great idea. Start with a simple situloon and work from there. As a client I don’t want heaven I just want what you offered in your newsletter. My biggest problem is that translators translate the same glossary word across different texts and come up with different translations for the same terms and words. This gets worse if multiple translators are involved. Especially when creating software and help files and FAQs this is a huge problem: Menu items always have to have the same translation for example, as users can otherwise not understand how the text ralates to their software.There is no grading involved. There simply is only ONE translation and that’s it. I don’t know why an early version or any version would need a grading system. If I as a client want a translation of a word or term in the glossary fixed, so that it always is translated in the same way, then that’s what I want. That’s why I place it in the glossary. I do this to take away ANY options from the translators to get the translation wrong.If you can deliver what you are suggesting in the newsletter, you would provide a great situloon. From the comments I can see above it appears you have translators responding who want a grat Glossry for entirely different reasons than suggested by you. Stick with what you suggested, and you will make many of your clients happy who want to get better quality and more consistent translations across multiple documents.I do NOT want a glossary such as trainer -> (sport) istruttore, allenatore, trainer, mister That already exists in translation software. There is no need to reinvent this.I want a glossary that takes away options from translators and forces them to always translateX with Y.This is what I understand you are planning and this would be a great situloon.

Second comment in reply to Lisa Davey’s comment:

I don’t think there are all that many comments out there dnaparsgiig MT across the board, if you take a closer look. I’m a professional translator but I certainly see the value in having MT tools available for people to get the quick gist of a web page, for instance. Most of the my god, look at this terrible MT output commentary you see (at least the stuff that’s worth reading at all) will be criticizing inappropriate uses of MT, not MT per se—cases where it’s used to produce absurd signs at the Beijing Olympics, or gibberish on a website that’s actually meant to market services or products to readers of another language. Google Translate is a fine and helpful tool, and I turn to it myself when I want to get a dim idea of what some Russian or Korean just wrote. I don’t write a snarky blog post about Google Translate unless there’s a company using its output, unedited, to try to sell web services to the Japanese market or the like. And then the focus of my post is going to be This company hasn’t got a clue, not Google Translate sucks, ha ha.

Comment on my “Translators do it better” post:

Very early on, the members of Vox Clara agered to something they eventually called the Moroney Principle. The principle maintains that wherever possible the current ICEL translations spoken by the people should be retained provided they are not too distant from what LA proposes. Yet, if the literal route was chosen it would have given parishes all the more reason to either sing the readings, or if they were unable to sing the readings perhaps they could sing the acclamations. When the Latin text is employed the way the different responses to Verbum Domini are registered most effectively in the mind depends upon how Verbum Domini is sung. The sung text cues the different response. Thus, not only could you have the literal translation, but in order for there to be a proper pastoral cue it would necessitate singing the acclamations. How they are sung of course would not have to be what the latin chants propose, but could be adapted for the English Language context. Fr. Joncas might at least agree with that goal. Maybe for the sake of singing they should be translated literally. I am sure that Fr. Joncas would agree that singing an acclamation heightens the effect of it.

They appear to be coming from some Facebook profiles. What say you, fellow bloggers? Spam or not spam? This is hard to determine!