A stellar job opportunity November 17, 2008
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Translation Sites.9 comments
I just received the following job inquiry and couldn’t resist sharing it with you all.
Hello,
Looking for an interpreter/Translator that can translate from english to any foreign language or vis-visa.I have a project at hand that demands some vital language learnings. This book has been written to help parent know thier duties and obligation to kids from age of 2 to 12 years. I will like to know your area of specialization? and also what language suit your knowledge.As this book will be publish and distributed around the world.The book contain 25 pages,words counts is 9,000 thousand to 11 thousands..written in english.I will like to know the cost to translate this to your specialization for my usage.I will need your contact information.Once your payment is okay by me,I will update you with the copy of the book through fax or mailing it to you.You can also contact me through my email.If i am unable to pick my call, you can email me back,I will like to have an agreement with you before sending you copy of the book. Note that there will be no editing as regards translating it…I will await your cost to do this with your name and address so that i can send your payment to seal our agreement after which i will send you copy to proceed with your job.I hope you will be able to finish this within 1 month? to aviod mistake.The book is title (WHAT TEENAGERS NEED FROM THIER PARENT). I will await your response asap. Thanks.
Wow, I’m going to jump right at the chance to translate this guy’s no doubt stellarly written English into “any foreign language and vis-visa”… NOT! A book that contains just 25 pages and 9-11,000 words? Sounds like a brochure to me… I love the fact that he is asking what my field of specialization is despite the fact that he states the book is “to help parent know thier [sic] duties and obligation to kids.” Sorry, I don’t specialize in child rearing. I’ll resist my rant about modern day parenting and simply delete this dude’s e-mail. If you received it I suggest you do the same.
Funny how this inquiry differed dramatically with another inquiry I received this morning. It was only one line, but I have no doubt it is on the up and up and I responded with a proper quote:
Dear Jill
Can you please send me a quote on translating the attached document from German into English.
Kind Regards
What a difference proper English and attaching the actual document makes. He’s also going to have to pay upfront for the translation, but I have no doubt that I will actually be paid for the latter job.
TGIF: Font conference November 14, 2008
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Fun stuff.3 comments
Thanks to Metrolingua for posting this video. It cracked me up! The video is an excellent personification of the fonts we know and love. I just want to know why Rage Italic is German…
TGIF: The Matrix runs on Windows November 14, 2008
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Fun stuff.1 comment so far
If you are a Matrix fan and use a computer you will love this video from collegehumor.com.
Take the red pill. Get the blue screen. 🙂
Enjoy!
Take the red pill. Get the blue screen
Favorite tools: CompanionLink November 13, 2008
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Uncategorized.2 comments
I have been searching for a tool to sync my Google Calendar with my PalmPilot. I had been trying to get GooSync to work for several months, but eventually gave up. In my preparation for the ATA conference I did a Google search for a good tool and discovered CompanionLink. It couldn’t have been easier to use.
CompanionLink is a great software application that is painless to install and configure for syncing a Google Calendar with calendars from applications like Outlook, Blackberry, Groupwise, Lotus Notes, Palm Desktop, Treo 700 via Hotsync. In just a few minutes I had synced my Google Calendar with my PalmPilot Desktop and then synced my PalmPilot Desktop with my Palm. I had to tweak the settings to not sync my contacts since I don’t use that feature in Gmail, but that was easy enough to do and now everything is working absolutely perfectly.
If you are looking for an easy solution to sync your Google Calendar with your handheld device or with PIM or CRM software like Microsoft Outlook, you should check it out. I still have two days left on my evaluation and am intending on buying it then. It’s only $29.95, which I think will be money well-spent!
IHOP streusel commercial November 13, 2008
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Fun stuff.10 comments
OK, I just saw the IHOP streusel coffee cake pancakes commercial on TV, and I just want to go on record as saying I find it pretty insulting. My ears start bleeding every time he says “Danke schön” in his horrible fake accent. It isn’t worthy of a TGIF. But judge it for yourself… Although I have to say, the pancakes look pretty darn yummy.
Sharing PowerPoint presentations on LinkedIn November 12, 2008
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Marketing ideas, Tools.1 comment so far
One of my goals from the ATA conference is to learn more about social networking tools. Corinne McKay’s post this morning, New and Noteworthy, about a sundry of topics, including feeding your WordPress blog to your LinkedIn profile, was a revelation and sparked a flurry of investigative work on my part. Luckily I only have about 800 words to translate today. So I’ve now finally updated my web site this morning (another one of my goals) in addition to playing around in LinkedIn, which I have woefully neglected for a while now.
Feeding the WordPress blog to your LinkedIn profile based on freelance journalist Michelle Rafter’s instructions was a breeze, but I also discovered you can upload PowerPoint presentations as well. All you have to do is click on Applications, choose either Google Presentation or SlideShare Presentations, and upload your PowerPoint presentations (be sure to fill out a brief explanation and choose some tags). I chose SlideShare Presentations, but Google Presentation looks like it would work similarly.
I have had my PowerPoint presentations on my web site for years, but this is a great way to bundle all your PowerPoint presentations in one spot and free up some web space on your domain. Plus they were pretty hidden on the site. I now have four of my PowerPoint presentations online, and they have already had some hits. It’s a great way to show potential clients and fellow translators what you can do.
LinkedIn also has some other cool applications like Huddle, which gives you private, secure online workspaces packed with simple yet powerful project, collaboration and sharing tools for working with your connections. I could see this being very valuable when working together with other translators on large translation projects.
Amazon UK launches Literature in Translation store November 12, 2008
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Random musings, Translation Sites.2 comments
Blogging Translator reports that Amazon UK has launched a Literature in Translation store last week. I think I will be bookmarking the site just as a reference for new books to read. The store features a scroll bar with the top 48 Bestsellers in Literature in Translation, and they also focus on one or two authors. They are focusing on Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk and Austrian/Czech author Franz Kafka (he was born in Prague, but was from a German-speaking Jewish family) at the moment. I am always open to new and interesting book suggestions.
This is also a great way to publicize our profession. Even if they haven’t made a huge announcement, we can. Tell your friends. Tell your family. Tell other colleagues.
Having worked at Borders for several years when I first moved back to the States (practicing what I preach to budding translators – get a part-time job to pay the rent while you are just starting out and trolling for clients), I came to realize most customers had no clue they were reading translations, which is a huge complement when you are the one who translated the book but not so ideal in terms of publicizing the profession. Heck, most customers didn’t even know the author’s name… I got really good at trying to figure out what they were looking for based on vague descriptions or knowing what Oprah just recommended. 🙂
I also love that publishers are finally starting to prominently feature the name of the translator on cover pages. I’m reading Out by Natsuo Kirino right now, which was translated by Stephen Snyder, and his name is featured prominently on the cover page as well as in the Amazon listing. This is a great advancement for us. Most literary translators were never mentioned on cover pages in the past.
Amazon UK prefaces their Literature in Translation store as follows:
Welcome to our Literature in Translation store. Browse here for great deals on top fiction from around the globe. You can search by language or by genre to discover new authors, and see what other people are reading and rating.
so check it out.
Alaaf! November 11, 2008
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in German culture.2 comments
Oh, how could I have forgotten that today is also the start of Karneval in the Rhineland! Thanks to my friend Heike, who reminded me. “The fifth season” begins at 11:11 a.m. on November 11th every year when women storm the City Hall and officially begin Karneval (Carnival). Karneval is a festive season which occurs immediately before Lent; the main events are usually during February and March. The Karneval spirit is then temporarily suspended during the Advent and Christmas period, and picks up again in earnest in the New Year, culminating on Rosenmontag (Rose Monday). Weiberfastnacht is the Thursday before Rosenmontag and is marked by lots of drinking and costumes – and men’s ties are not safe, because the women cut them off. Most businessmen wear old or ugly ties today for this very reason.
Carnival is mostly associated with Roman Catholic and, to a lesser extent, Eastern Orthodox Christians; Protestant areas usually do not have carnival celebrations or have modified traditions, like the Danish Carnival. The world’s longest carnival celebration is held in Brazil but many countries worldwide have large, popular celebrations, such as Carnaval of Venice, or the world famous German celebrations. Karneval festivities are especially strong in the Rhineland region (Cologne, Bonn and Düsseldorf), since it was a way to express subversive anti-Prussian and anti-French thoughts in times of occupation, through parody and mockery.
So Kölle Alaaf! I’ll be cracking out my Karneval CD this morning and celebrating virtually with all my friends in the Rhineland.
Google can now OCR PDFs November 10, 2008
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Tools.1 comment so far
Google just keeps offering new and exciting improvements that make our lives easier – from Google Print, Google Earth, Google Video to Google Translate and now the Tesseract OCR Engine. You simply have to respect a company that has the goal of making every last bit of the world’s information searchable. It is an awesome endeavor indeed. I am catching up on my feed reads and just learned that it can now OCR PDFs, and has been doing so since October 31st. For those of you who are not familiar with the abbreviations, OCR stands for optical character recognition and PDF stands for portable document format.
As announced on the Official Google Blog, the company is now performing OCR on documents that it indexes and identifies as having been scanned as PDFs. Google has indexed documents that were saved as text-based PDFs for quite some time, but many documents wind up being made into PDFs through scans, which store the text as images. You can see the words on the screen, but your computer doesn’t. When you put this scan up on a Web site, search engines have been unable to index the content of those documents because it didn’t recognize the text as text … until now.
According to the Google Code Blog:
In a nutshell, we are all about making information available to users, and when this information is in a paper document, OCR is the process by which we can convert the pages of this document into text that can then be used for indexing.
…
For now it only supports the English language, and does not include a page layout analysis module (yet), so it will perform poorly on multi-column material. It also doesn’t do well on grayscale and color documents, and it’s not nearly as accurate as some of the best commercial OCR packages out there. Yet, as far as we know, despite its shortcomings, Tesseract is far more accurate than any other Open Source OCR package out there.
As a medical translator I frequently get my source texts as a PDF. I create a PDF using ABBYY FineReader and generate Word files using OCR to allow me to translate them with the use of Trados. People can use the service to create texts from scanned PDFs by simply uploading them to the web site (caveat: do not upload documents you want kept private – particularly translations and source texts that belong to the client), but I am more excited about the prospects for Internet research.
This is good news to those of us who rely on Internet research to earn our bread and butter. Google’s latest innovation has potential in this respect. The impact on Internet research will be enormous. Since Google will be able to OCR PDFs, PDFs that were images will finally be indexed and searchable. Google’s “View as HTML” feature is quite useful for these documents, especially if you need to copy portions of them for notes or to paste found terms into your translation from them.
Happy St. Martin’s Day! November 10, 2008
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Fun stuff, German culture.3 comments
Saint Martin’s Day is without a doubt my favorite evening in Germany. St. Martin’s Day (or Martinstag, Martinmas, Martlemass, Mardipäev, etc.) is November 11, the feast day of Martin of Tours. Although in the Rhineland it is often celebrated on another day so that it doesn’t conflict with Weiberfastnacht, which is the kick-off for the Karnevalszeit (Mardi Gras) and takes place at 11:11 am on November 11 (11/11) when the women storm City Hall. The parade this year in Bonn is being held on November 10th. Even if you don’t understand German, you might want to click on the link and check out the photos (Bild-Galerie). Watching the kids walk through the dark night with their homemade lanterns simply warms my heart.
Martin of Tours was a Roman soldier who was baptized as an adult and became a monk. It is understood that he was a kind man who led a quiet and simple life. The most famous legend of his life is that he once cut his cloak in half to share with a beggar during a snowstorm, to save the beggar from dying of the cold. That night he dreamed that Jesus was wearing the half-cloak Martin had given away. Martin heard Jesus say to the angels: “Here is Martin, the Roman soldier who is not baptized; he has clothed me.” According to legend, Martin was reluctant to become bishop, which is why he hid in a stable filled with geese. The noise made by the geese betrayed his location to the people who were looking for him.
The day is celebrated in the evening of November 11 in many areas of Northern and Eastern Europe. Named for Saint Martin, the Fourth Century Bishop of Tours, this holiday originated in France, then spread to Germany, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe. It celebrates the end of the agrarian year and the beginning of the harvesting. It also marks the end of the period of all souls, that begins on November 1st, which is why Saint Martin’s Day activities resemble those from Halloween.
Children parade down the street with paper lanterns and candles and sing songs praising St. Martin’s generosity. A man dressed as St. Martin rides on a horse in front of the procession and there are generally geese being pulled along in a cart. The parade is culminated in Bonn by a large bonfire on the Marktplatz. The kids then go door to door and earn sweets or treats by singing songs, dancing, or citing poems.
The lanterns the participants carry have become a distinctive part of the tradition. Every age group has its own lantern design, which becomes more elaborate with the age of the builder. Older youth often opt to take a flashlight and attach craft paper with cutout designs augmented with transparent colored cellophane paper making them appear like stained glass torches. I still have the lantern my boss’s daughter made for me in my room. Unfortunately the batteries corroded and the light on the plastic arm no longer works.
If you live in Philadelphia (Sarah…) you might want to check out the German Society’s St. Martin’s Day Parade.
Musings from an overworked translator 