English to French translation

Comma splice

March 1, 2010

I’m sure you’ve been there too: you’ve had a hard day at work followed by a strenuous workout at the gym and all you want is a nice, relaxing bath. You get in and start enjoying a bit of peace and quiet when the phone rings. You ignore it. It rings again, so you decide to get out and pick it up. This happens not twice, but three times, which leads to the following text conversation:

Me: CAN I ENJOY MY BATH WITHOUT HAVING TO GET OUT EVERY TWO MINUTES???

Bath-ruiner: You’re in the bath??!!

Me: Well I was, I got out as people are clearly intent on ruining it.

Bath-ruiner: Tee hee. (Awful comma splice in your last text, btw).

Follows a lengthy text argument on the finer points of English punctuation. Unfortunately, my "friend" was right, as was confirmed by wikipedia:

Comma splicing is the use of a comma to join two independent clauses, instead of a conjunction, semi-colon, or period. For example:

It is nearly half past five, we cannot reach town before dark.

Comma splices are generally considered errors in English, although they are acceptable in some languages, including French and German, and compulsory in others, including Russian and Ukrainian.

So, my sentence should have said “Well I was, but I got out as people were clearly intent on ruining it” (or rather “Well I was, but I got out, as people were clearly intent on ruining it”). See the wikipedia article for a handy summary of acceptable uses and corrections and the Purdue Online Writing Lab for a more complete set of guidelines for the use of the comma in English. I think French people should definitely be exempted from following this particular rule, especially in a text conversation.

Shower curtain photo by Darwin Bell.

Upper and lower case

February 18, 2010

Have you ever wondered where “upper case” and “lower case” come from? I hadn’t until I came across an explanation as I was trying to work out whether it should be Beaux-Arts or beaux-arts. The “case” (from Latin cassa, “box”) refers to the type cases used by printers to keep their movable type. Capital letters (from Latin caput “head”, as these were used at the beginning of a sentence or a word) were put at the top of the case, while minuscules were at the bottom of the case, hence upper case and lower case letters.

Typewriter photo by Marcin Wichary.

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?