English to French translation

The White Ribbon

February 8, 2010

This entry has nothing to do with English, French or translation. I just really want to share a film that I saw at the weekend. Once again, it’s directed by Michael Haneke, who is fast becoming my favorite director. After Caché, a powerful portrayal of France’s colonial guilt, The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band) (2009) is an amazing study of the decomposition of a repressive, hypocritical society where power is concentrated in a few hands. Visually, it’s incredible. In these times dominated by multi-million pound computer generated effects with bright colours and supernatural landscapes, it is wonderful to be reminded how expressive, subtle and stunningly beautiful a black and white film can be. I could go on and on, but this Guardian review encapsulates it perfectly.

Nut roast

February 1, 2010

I spent last Monday interpreting in East Sussex. After a busy day, we all ended up in a lovely pub with an interesting history in Lewes to have dinner and talk about forthcoming projects. Little did I know that a major incident had only just been averted thanks to the keen eye of the British lead partner.

A few days earlier, a menu had been sent to the French partners so they could make their choice for dinner. For the main course, one of the options was “nut roast”, which was translated as rôti de noix. The problem was that, in French minds, rôti is almost inevitably associated with meat, and noix happens to be a cut of meat: “eye” in English. So the meat-loving French all picked the nut roast. Thankfully, the British project lead knew that her counterpart wouldn’t be impressed with a meat-free dinner, so she made sure he was served a good old steak-frites. The others got their nut roast (which I translated in French as terrine végétarienne) and enjoyed it.

The translation of cuts of meat is generally very difficult and I haven’t managed to find a good English to French glossary on this subject. If you know of one, I’d be grateful if you shared it with me, otherwise I’ll have to compile one myself!

Nuts (and bolts) photo by paulmoody

___________
UPDATE

Thanks so much to my Twitter buddy @falena84, who gave me links to a beef glossary and a meat cuts manual.
Also on Twitter, @neliafahloun chirped in with a very nice post on buying meat.

Fanlation

January 20, 2010

Fanlation is a term that I've come across very recently, and I came across it again when I received Jost Zetzsche's Tool Kit newsletter:

I had just suggested that we use a new term for the kind of crowdsourced translation that the likes of Twitter and Facebook do when they engage hordes of enthused users to translate their products: fanlation.

When I wrote my post about crowdsourcing, this is exactly the process I had in mind, but actually, it's not necessarily how crowdsourcing work. What I was talking about was "fanlation", only this term didn't exist yet. These new translation concepts are evolving all the time, with language playing catch-up, so I thought it'd be useful to compile a short glossary of these terms as I understand them.

Fanlation
Translation done by enthused users ready to donate their time for a product.

Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is a neologistic compound of Crowd and a short for Outsourcing, for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an "open call" to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions.
Word coined by Jeff Howe, a Wired Magazine writer, in 2006. Definition from Wikipedia.

Collaborative translation
Emerging approach to translation in which companies use the elements of crowdsourcing in a controlled environment for working on large corporate projects in short periods of time.
Definition taken from Common Sense Advisory.

CT3
CT3 mixes community, crowdsourced and collaborative translation to offer a translation which is quick, good quality and in tune with users' experience. It can involve professional translators or not.
Coined by Global Watchtower.

So will fanlation have an impact on my work? One of the criticisms of fanlation is that the quality is likely to be inferior to the output of professional translators, but nowadays, some markets are driven by speed and usability rather than quality. A translation that is "good enough", quick and cheap may well be sufficient to satisfy some clients. Personally, I don't currently see fanlation as a threat to my work, the bulk of which requires specialist knowledge and strong writing skills. I can't imagine that there are enough people out there combining free time, passion for the subject, language skills and in-depth knowledge to create a community able to take on the kind of translation that I do.

As for collaborative/crowdsourced translation, I think that, as long as projects are well-managed and use people with sufficient skills, these processes, by making more information more widely available, will be hugely positive: any improvement to global communication is to be welcome. By opening new markets, the surge in material translated brought about by collaborative processes could even provide us professional translators with work opportunities, with companies increasingly seeing it as compulsory to communicate with their potential clients in their own languages. I would also be interested in participating in a crowdsourced translation, to see how it works from the inside: with web-based tools being created all the time, working as part of a multinational team of translators is a very exciting prospect. Maybe that should have been in my objectives for 2010!

A translator's resolutions for 2010

January 15, 2010

I thought it’d be a good idea to cast my mind back on 2009 and give myself some vague pointers objectives for 2010.

2009 was meant to be the year where I took advantage of a move to Leeds to work less, discover a beautiful region and resurrect my moribund Spanish. This didn’t quite work out and it ended up being the busiest year of my career so far. I just didn’t have the heart to turn down many interesting projects for excellent clients. I utterly failed to relax and expand my horizons, but I did achieve a few things:

• Out of 60 invoices, only 5 were to translation agencies. I consolidated my direct client base, which is good thing. Although the translation agencies I work with do an excellent job and are a pleasure to deal with, I prefer building long-term relationships with my clients, which allows me to give them the best possible service
  
• I vastly improved my invoicing and accounting system (see my entry Accounting for freelancers)
  
• I gave one talk about translation in front of French students
  
• I attended 3 webinars and one workshop. This doesn’t sound like much, but it’s much better than 2008 (0 webinars and 0 workshops)
  
• I really got to grips with social media: I learnt how Twitter can work for me, I gave up on LinkedIn for ethical reasons and I’m thinking of how I can use Facebook
  
• I redesigned this website, which is my main marketing tool
  
• I started looking at other translation and productivity tools

In 2010, I intend to:

• Start learning Spanish again, this time via Notes in Spanish‘s podcasts and worksheets.
  
• Start using dictation software (probably MacSpeech) and OmegaT
  
• Carry on attending webinars and workshops and hopefully a conference
  
• Get one more direct client in the field of international development, which I find particularly interesting (strategy yet to be decided)
  
• Join the Institute of Translation and Interpreting
  
• Get involved in the business community in Brighton, where I’ll be moving back
  
• Focus on blogging again
  
• Accept at least one invitation to give a presentation
  
• Keep an eye on translation’s rapid evolution (crowdsourcing, collaborative translation etc.)

What are your goals?

Departed

January 3, 2010

I spent a lovely Christmas and New Year at my parents’ new house near Bordeaux, in the Entre-Deux-Mers region, surrounded by vineyards and châteaux. We flew back on Saturday. My mother is always anxious when we're travelling, particularly when the weather is bad, so she went online to track our flight from Bordeaux. She entered our flight number on the KLM website and one word appeared: Departed. She guessed it meant that it had left, but used Google Translate to check. The result was: défunt, disparu (defunct, deceased). A slightly better French translation would have been parti. Should she sue Google for emotional trauma?

Happy 2010 everyone!

Accounting for freelancers

December 7, 2009

Do you hate doing your accounts? Keeping track of invoices? Do you shudder with dread whenever you see an email from your lovely accountant in your inbox? Do you burst into tears at the mere thought of having to file a VAT return? Freeagent is for you. This is what this SaaS (Software as a Service) does:

• Taxes
  
• Invoicing
  
• VAT return
  
• Online banking
  
• Real-time accounts
  
• Project management

All this in a simple, attractive interface. It will even put reminders in your calendar to make sure you don’t forget important tax and accounting deadlines. I can honestly say it’s the best thing I have bought this year. Go and check it out and if you decide to use it, click on this badge and we’ll both get 10% off.