On-Time Updates

Teleport Pro, Translator's Abacus

In preparing a quote for a recent job possibility, I encountered a couple of useful programs:

The first comes by way of Jost Zetzsche's helpful newsletter, the Translator's Toolbox. Teleport Pro is a web spider that allows you to retrieve the entire contents of a given website. This makes it much easier to employ word-counting programs to create an accurate quote. I've only used it once, but it seems to do its job well. It's a shareware program that is free to try.

Once you've got the website downloaded, you can count words in HTML pretty easily with a program like Translator's Abacus. This one is free and seems to be pretty good at extracting text from the source code and only counting the words that matter. It creates a webpage showing the itemized results of your count on your hard drive, allowing you to count up an entire site with just a few clicks.

If anyone out there has other tried-and-tested methods for preparing quotes for website translations, I'd love to hear about them.

Three Finds

A few online finds of note today:

A site called AlfaTrad has an online word counter, which might be of use to someone working in a program that doesn't count words itself. Helpful advice is also given for counting words in more common programs where the solution isn't extremely obvious.

While browsing through recent NETA listserv messages, I came across a message from Abby Clay, a DE-EN translator living, in all places, in Burlington, Vermont. Always nice to find a peer nearby!

Finally, an interesting find that I haven't yet tested: a free telephone service provider (via internet). This could come in handy for anyone who makes a lot of calls overseas, provided that it works well enough...

Translation Office 3000

I've been looking with interest at Translation Office 3000 as a possible solution for improving and streamlining my invoicing, job record keeping and contact information.

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who knows about the product, especially anyone who has experience using it.

Commentary Spam

I have a sizeable list of banned IP addresses that has grown since I started using Movable Type. I collect these numbers from people who post spam in the comments on my entries. It's really annoying, because it forces me to go through and delete individual comments from the system. Luckily, MT does me the service of recording the IP address of every commenter, so I can ban them from commenting again. (This isn't always 100% effective, of course, because it is dependent on the person's type of connection to the Internet and the individual computer they are using, but it's better than nothing).

I find it bizarre that people do this, though. I'm sure they must be using some sort of spider or other automated system that combs the Internet looking for Movable Type blogs and automatically posts spam content in them. That seems even more bizarre to me than email spam. Who is devoting the time to do something like this? And is it even worth it? Is anyone taking this bait?

On another note, my computer is driving me insane. It recently went through a bizarre series of crashes and faulty restarts. My wit's end having been reached, I opened it up and blew the dust off everything on the inside with my compressed air duster. Now Windows is not recognizing all of my RAM for some strange reason. It recognizes that two slots have RAM in them, but it says that they are only 256 MB each (in reality they are 512 MB each). What's weirder is that when I look at the "System" item in Control Panel, it shows 1 GB of RAM under the "General" tab. When I look at "System Information" under Accessories, however, it shows "Total Physical Memory" = 512 MB. Bizarre.

I ran this diagnostic tool, and that reported that there were two bars of 256 MB RAM installed for a total of 1024. Which doesn't make any sense at all.

Computers make our life so easy.

Translators' Rights

A friend of mine recently forwarded me this article from the German Embassy Online newsletter:

Highest court strengthens translators' rights

Literary translation has always been a labor of love, an activity with many personal and intellectual rewards but seldom a way for linguists to stay afloat financially. Even in Germany, where every other fiction book on the market is a translation, it is difficult to make translating pay as a profession. That's why it is even more remarkable that Germany's highest court issued a decision this week on a case that strengthens translators' rights to royalties when books become bestsellers.

Karin Krieger, an acclaimed translator of the Italian language into German, had been translating the work of writer Alessandro Baricco for years for the Munich-based Piper Verlag before the author achieved critical and financial success in the country with his work "Silk." The book went through an astonishing seven printings in 1997 alone, making it one of the most successful books of the year.

But when Krieger demanded the royalties due to her according to her contract, the publishing house abruptly pulled all five of the books she had translated previously and had them translated again by someone else, rendering them — according to Germany's intellectual property law — new works and denying Krieger any type of compensation. An author's royalties normally amount to between 10% and 15% of a book's set price, while translators receive just 3%.

The court this week ruled that the Piper Verlag had the obligation to distribute and market all five of the books parallel to any versions translated later, although the publisher is not required to producing further printings of any book. Any new translations for additional printings can only be considered for objective and justified reasons.

TC Problems

Translator's Cafe seems to be having technical difficulties lately. My subscriptions have stopped coming in and I haven't been able to load the site for days. This doesn't bode well.

All in Moderation

I was recently invited to become a forum moderator over at Translators Cafe. Naturally I accepted this honor and I'm now the moderator of the "Working as a Freelancer" forum. I'm excited to have this opportunity to get to know my industry better, as well as to meet some peers in the field.

This should also help me stay in touch with my work in general, I think, by encouraging me to concentrate on the field of translation and what it means to work as a freelance translator.

Language Selection

One of my greatest pet peeves is websites that have a bilingual option that redirects to a different page than the one you are currently looking at.

That is, you find a website that claims to have content in English and in German. You find a particular page on that site in German and you want to see it in English, so you click the language selection button on the site. Do you get the English version of the page? No. You get the homepage. And then good luck finding that specific page in the language you want, especially if you surfed in from Google.

This is terribly annoying because it's one way that I occasionally do research for translation. Finding webpages that are "live" uses of the subject matter I'm working with is a great help in confirming word choice and understanding things in a functional context. If I'm translating something about construction equipment, it's useful to look up certain pages on the manufacturer's website, for example, and see how they use certain terms. It would be even more helpful to switch directly between languages, but alas, it is rarely so convenient.

Rest assured, when my new website goes live, the language selection option will switch you to the other language without sending you away from the content you're looking at. It's the least I can do after all my complaining.

I'm a Star!

Yay for me! I got a star!

As it the case with most discussion forums on the Net, after you have posted a certain number of times, your rank changes at Translator's Cafe. I, having posted the incredible number of 25 messages, have the pleasure and honor of receiving this glorious and illustrious designation of my rank:

Amazing, isn't it?

I've always been sort of fascinated by these little ranking systems. They really signify nothing at all besides an indication of how often you like to post messages. At most they are a symbol of seniority (in the Internet sense of the word, which is basically "having been around longer.")

Yet the initial impression is that they represent the expertise and knowledge a person has, especially when used on a site like the Cafe. If you see someone who's posted enough to receive 5 or 6 stars, you usually assume they know what they're talking about.

A lot of times they do, of course. But little stars are certainly no guarantee.

The Little Blue House

The Little Blue House is a bakery start-up in Hawaii. One of the owners posted a comment here recently and I checked out their page. I think it's a fascinating idea.

One particularly interesting excerpt:
More good news is that Chris did some research, and while a cord of Kiawe wood (4x4x8, so big that it would take two pickup trucks to move) costs over $400, it should take us about a month to go through a whole cord. Someone in Ottawa even claims that the cost to bake bread is only 2 Canadian cents per loaf. But that is Canada, and they have lots of trees... And last I checked? They probably weren't in the middle of the Pacific.

I don't have any idea what Kiawe wood is, but it sounds great. I've never thought about how Hawaiians get wood before. That's a business start-up challenge I'll never encounter.

I don't need wood for my business of course, but where I live, you could probably get yourself a cord of firewood just for fixing your neighbor's toilet.

Name Taken

I should have known that my idea for the title of my blog was too good to be true...

Turns out there's already at least one "Translate This!" blog out there, courtesy of Michael Wahlster. Darn it all! Of course, I'm left with no choice but to take down the name for now until I come up with something more original. Anyone have any good suggestions? (Thanks to Margaret for pointing it out).

Poor communication in business rears its ugly head again. In this case, it's probably my fault - I took on a large job without a clear enough, written description of what I was supposed to be doing. The client is very trusted so I'm not really worried; it's just a matter of clearing up what wasn't done that was supposed to be done.

It's a pain, though, and awkward at times. I need to keep in mind that you can't be too clear about these things right from the start.

I Know the Artist

The girlfriend of a friend of mine in Germany created some art that recently appeared on the set of an episode of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." You can see the art hanging on the walls in the pictures on this page:

http://www.bravotv.com/Queer_Eye_for_the_Straight_Guy/Episodes/111/recap.shtml