SDL QuickStart fail December 18, 2012
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Random musings.2 comments
I woke up this morning to find I had been added to a group called SDL QuickStart “[a]s a valued new user of SDL Trados Studio 2011.” It is a new online community. Super uncool, SDL! First of all, I don’t use my work e-mail for listservs like this. I have a dedicated listserv. I use an out of office notification for my work e-mail. Members of a listserv like this (685 according to SDL) don’t need to get an out of office message from me every time someone writes the list when I am on vacation. A dedicated e-mail address for groups avoids this problem. Secondly, I would like to make the decision whether or not to join the group – not be automatically added. I received seven e-mails before changing my e-mail notifications to none. SDL, you have a good product, but you can’t just add people to online listservs all willy nilly. You didn’t give me a choice. A better solution would have been to send out one e-mail inviting me to join the group. Huge fail, SDL.
TGIF: Cat helps baby with English-Spanish lesson December 14, 2012
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Fun stuff, TGIF.add a comment
This is actually pretty cute.
The myth of the non-paying client December 10, 2012
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices.12 comments
Catherine Christaki (@LinguaGreca) from Adventures in Freelance Translating has an interesting blog post about the results from the Common Sense Advisory survey of freelance translators. Her post was published on the 7th, but I am just catching up with my RSS reader today after a weekend off hosting my cousin from Florida. I found the results of the survey very interesting. Catherine was astounded that so many translators (65.3%) reported never having had to deal with a non-paying client. I don’t find that such a stretch. I think there are way more good agencies than bad agencies out there. It’s just that you never hear about all the clients that DO pay. Translators are more likely to complain about the few black sheep they encounter. I worked in the industry for 16 years before encountering my non-payer. Luckily I also knew to cut them off after the second job request, so they only ended up not paying $60 instead of several thousand dollars. In terms of numbers, that was several hundred paying clients (even if some of them were slow payers) against a single non-paying client. As I have preached time and again (and Catherine also advises), it really helps to do some due diligence on a new client before working for them. I agreed to work for the non-paying client because I was driving in my car, they said a colleague had recommended me, and they were in a terrible bind. Looking back, I should have made them wait until I could go home and check them out. But since it was such a small job I took the risk and accepted the job. If it had been a larger job I would have made them wait.
So the moral of this story is that there truly are many more good agencies than bad out there, and the numbers back this up. 65.3% of the 3,165 translators who took the survey prove this. Be sure to read Catherine’s blog post as well as click the link to the survey she has included in her post.
TGIF: Speech 101 prank December 7, 2012
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Fun stuff, TGIF.1 comment so far
Jose Barrientos has posted a series of prank speeches from his Speech 101 class. He was bored and decided to do his first speech with an accent. He spent the entire semester talking in a Mexican accent and revealed during the final that his accent was fake. He fooled just about everyone in the class. It’s pretty funny. Enjoy!
Speech 1 – he brings in a pinata:
Speech 2 – he talks about his admiration of David Hasselhoff:
Speech 3 was about Cinco de Mayo, but he doesn’t appear to have posted that one on Youtube.
Warning – it’s a scam! November 30, 2012
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Scam alert.2 comments
Someone just posted the following e-mail on the GLD listserv. If you received it DO NOT FALL FOR IT! I seriously doubt a translator owns all 11 of these tools. I have three tools myself, but certainly not four versions of the same tool!
I’d like to quickly sell my unneeded CATTs at reasonable prices, since I am going into the travel business, and since I do not need them anymore, I’d like to sell them to a colleague who really needs them to work with, but cannot afford the high prices:
1. SDL Trados v7.5 2006 at only 100 GBP
2. SDL Trados Suite Professional v8.3 SP3 2007 at only 150 GBP
3. SDL Trados Studio Professional v9.1 SP3 2009 at only 200 GBP
4. SDL Trados Studio Professional v10.2 SP2 2011 at only 250 GBP5. Atril DejaVu X Professional v7.5 2009 at only 200 GBP
6. Atril DejaVu X2 Professional v8.0.505 2012 at only 250 GBP
7. Star Transit XV Professional 2005 at only 100 GBP8. Multilizer Enterprise 2011 v7.8.5 at only 200 GBP (www.multilizer.com )
9. Sisulizer Enterprise 2012 v3.0 at only 200 GBP (www.sisulizer.com )
10. Systran Translator Professional v6 2009 at only 50 GBP (www.systran.co.uk)
11. Babylon Translator Professional v8.0 at only 50 GBPor all 11 software ( ot at least 5 of them) at a discounted price of only 700 GBP. If interested, please, send the payment (for the CAT you want to have) to my bank account (bank details below) or via http://www.moneybookers.com to my MB e-mail as well as send me the mail address you want your software sent to. I will send any software from the list to any mail address by 1st class royal mail or by DHL courier same day I see my payment in my bank account.
My payment details are:
#ata53: Common German Terms That Make Native English Speakers Want to Bang Their Heads Against the Wall November 26, 2012
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in ATA.1 comment so far
In this workshop-style session a panel of experts discussed some of their favorite “thorny enemies,” that is, German terms that are difficult to pin down and frequently mistranslated. Participants were invited to contribute their own “thorny enemies,” and everybody threw out suggestions for the best translations for these. This session had a lot of potential, with a stellar panel of German to English and English to German translators, but I was somewhat disappointed with the final result. The “contributions from the audience” part kind of made it a free-for-all, with people shouting out suggestions. And all of the suggestions were right depending on the context. Some examples included: Absatz/absetzen, abwickeln, Bereich, betrieblich, Es ist zu + verb, Fach- + anything, grundsätzlich, im Rahmen der/des, kompetent, maßgeblich/maßgebend, plausibel, qualifiziert, Sachverhalt, Wahrnehmung/wahrnehmen and wobei.
The session was amusing, but I don’t feel I learned anything new. Then again, that wasn’t the point of the session. This kind of session would be a difficult one to conceive and implement, and I appreciate that the presenters banded together to come up with it.
(Almost) Wordless Wednesday – a day late and a dollar short November 22, 2012
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Fun stuff.3 comments
Sorry I missed (Almost) Wordless Wednesday this past Wednesday. I had a visitor and was buying a car. Hope everyone in the States and all you expats abroad enjoyed a peaceful Thanksgiving.
Musings from an overworked translator 