The inverse way of disrupting translation practice

I recall a sunny colleague calling me a Luddite on the Proz.com platform some years ago. The reason, vaguely recollected now, was that I chose to criticize a technology. It might have been translators using iPads, I don’t know. I confess to feeling jaded after reading numerous headlines about this or that technology increasing a translator’s productivity or how we should embrace AI, MT or some other technoacronym to bring home the bacon.

I also remember a translation agency owner (the agency, Antler Translation Services; Peter Wheeler the speaker) speaking at a New York Circle of Translators meeting in 1991. He spoke about translators pecking at a typewriter and fearing the desktop computer. That statement made a profound impression on me because a) I was a recent graduate with a translation diploma and b) I didn’t yet have a computer. I was enthusiastic, feeling paradoxically both new and at home among these translators who were challenging each other to move forward. Adopt the PC! seemed to be Mr. Wheeler’s proposed mantra.

We’ve come a long way in these intervening decades. That gentle push to embrace more efficient technologies has long been replaced by a less considerate and forceful thrust to board the fast-moving treadmill of technomarvels: CAT tools, TEnT tools, terminology extraction utilities, notebooks, laptops, mobile phones, file converters, project management and invoicing applications, webinars. They all march to the thrilling and shrilling marketing tune of each brand. And speaking of brand, we are told to imagine and develop our “personal brand” and speed network, smile and email our way into the hearts of new clients.

Your mind is not a cog. Don’t act like one.

But serious minds demand facts to support this whirlwind of tech-enabled innovation, creativity and get-the-rates-you-deserve chorus. No matter, the oft-cited Bureau of Labor figures extolling the double-digit year-on-year growth figures for the translation and interpreting profession will see us through.

Happy to quote these numbers, translation associations boost their MLM-grade conference offerings with promises of “networking that works” and other slick slogans. After all, hundreds and even thousands of members can’t all be wrong, now, can they? Is this the age of technomagic to transport us to a new era for translators? Can we really improve our lot as professional translators and the product of our labors with the flick of a technological wand? Call me a Luddite but I propose an antidigital approach to translation as a profession because I don’t care so much about my projected image as much as what I write in the form of translations.

I work with a team of translators. We use SDL Trados 2015. Our workstations hold 65 GB of RAM. All of our tools and applications reside in an internal cloud. That’s right—our desktop computers don’t have a hard drive to speak of. We enjoy a highly collaborative relationship with a team of workflow managers who take care of the mechanics of importing and exporting files, handling vendors and making sure our translation memories, termbases and other resources are on the right portals, waiting for us.

There are some unsettling trends that I thought were just my imagination, when I was working as an independent translator: not knowing how to use dictionaries, overdependence on Google hits to determine language usage, assessing translation quality by terminology choices, questionable research methods to determine sense and meaning in an original text or paragraph, overuse of bilingual dictionaries. I recognized some of these trends in the workplace, and they’re worrisome to me. These habits work to the detriment of two translation-related activities: reading and writing.

Reading is cheap and exposes us to a variety of genres and media, from advertisements to novels to specialized magazines and journals. Writing is likewise cheap and it can be done with almost anything over almost anything. I prefer the old writing instruments: pen or pencil, and a blank or lined sheet of paper. Before the reader tells me that reading or writing have little to do with advances in translation, productive tools and networking at conferences to get more clients, or raise rates to the level we all think we deserve, ask yourself: when was the last time you read something out loud? When was the last time you wrote a paragraph, a whole sheet describing, narrating or explaining anything?

Alone with your pen and paper, faced with the hum of your thoughts, try to make up a story, or describe an imaginary village or animal. Try rescuing a beloved teenage memory: your first day of driving a car, riding a bicycle, or seeing a sad face while riding the bus or subway. Consider what a dear friend told you about her day and try to put that in writing, just for yourself. Your mind, your hand, your eyes, your remembrances need no batteries. You don’t need to plug anything. Your high-definition screen in the mind helps you connect the dots.

Years ago I embarked on a sort of lone crusade to work more slowly, to give my eyes a little more time to read the originals I was given to translate, to read over the freshly mindbaked sentences I wrote on my CAT tool, to reconsider merging “segments” so that the language would flow more idiomatically and more naturally in written form. That endeavor, which I playfully called Keep calm and translate slowly, cost me dearly: rush-driven clients stopped calling me, tight deadlines deserted me, but I kept enjoying working with a select few clients who trusted me and with whom I developed lasting business relationships. But market forces being what they are don’t favor such unusual approaches and I was forced to go to the corporate world, where I am surrounded by technology. At least I am given enough time to work at my own pace as long as I am efficient.

Although our translation memories, built by other translators with different reading and writing habits, govern the way I review translations, whenever I am given a translation, I flex my mind muscles and put my own habits to work. I am free to apply my own research, reading and writing methods, techniques—not technologies— that bring me closer to the reader. I still harbor the hope that there is at least one reader who cares about language, about how things are written, who expects to savor a sentence, parse a paragraph, sense the syntax cadence that is carefully assembled for her use and decision-making. Because, no matter what technology you choose to translate with, the warm, distilled sense of human communication, whether oral or written, will always endure and transcend your technotoys.

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A day in the life of a 21st century translator

I’m not your vanilla-type translator. I’m not a conventional writer. Keen-eyed readers of my blog might have noticed that I never capitalize Every Single Word in my blog headings. I march to the beat of my own drum. However, I didn’t start like that at all. I thought I would be translating articles, business documents or similar media day in and day out for a corporation or organization after I earned my diploma.

Twenty five years ago, with a bachelor’s degree in English and Translation Studies in hand, I did not have one or two specializations in mind. Although I had studied the basics of Law for four semesters as part of the translation studies’ curriculum, I only knew I didn’t want to be a sworn translator nor a bilingual officer of the court (called perito bilingüe in Argentina at the time) nor did I want to specialize in legal translation (as in law-related translations).

The two main forces that shaped my professional decisions over those 25 years were not creativity, inspiration, following a particular leader or influencer or discovering the holy grail of selling professional services. No, sir. The two factors that drove me to where I am today as a diplomate translator were a) market demands on my services and b) my own intellectual interests.

There you have it then: I’m not a translator who just writes translations day in and day out. Today, Thursday, May 5th, 2016, is representative of what I do:

• Write and deliver a rush 400-word corporate translation by 11:30 a.m.
• Finish a medical transcription in Spanish and then translate it into English for delivery by noon
• Insert newly translated paragraph in two InDesign documents, prepare deliverables (PDF files for printing) and deliver them before 7:30 p.m.
• Review the typesetting of a corporate slogan I had translated into Spanish weeks ago and send the annotated PDF file back to the customer, with pertinents recommendations to their desktop publisher for improving copy of the same corporate slogan in RTL (right-to-left) languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.

Translation courses and BA/MA programs for the 21st century emphasize the use of software tools to manage projects, terminology lists and translation memories. These courses also include practical instructions on project management (a related career choice for translators), software localization (another related career) and business aspects of the profession, such as marketing tips. All these components are important and have a place in a translator’s career, but they should not be taught nor emphasized at the expense of a thorough, critical and lively discussion of the craft of translation. After all, a translator is a craftsman. It’s the writing, not the tools, that make a translator, whether in this century or in the millenia to come.

The elusive promise of productivity / La promesa escurridiza de la productividad

It happened again. I woke up at 4:30 a.m. (EST), my mind abuzz with ideas. So I got up and jotted them down because they seemed critical (read awesome) for an upcoming presentation at the ATA Conference in Boston. But the ideas kept coming.

I could stay in bed no longer; I decided to go for a short, brisk run (more like a trot, actually). It was 6:30 a.m. when I got out of my building’s door and out into the cool morning (57 ºF). I must have trotted for about 6 blocks when I started thinking on how important it is to move (my chiropractor keeps telling me that). We seldom make room for physical movement in our sedentary lives. As I was pondering this, cars zipped along to their routine destinations.

It dawned on me then: we use the wheel, the car, to move efficiently and quickly from point A to B, but the movement is unhealthy for our bodies. Why are we in a rush to move in that fashion? To get there earlier so that we have more time to…do what? To do nothing? I am as guilty as anyone else in this car culture in America.

But, what does this have anything to do with translation? Good answers come to those who wait: bear with me.

When I started my career in translation, my tool was the typewriter. The clickety-clack of keys was so comforting, it was music to my ears. I was probably doing 50-60 words per minute, but I spent more time reading, writing drafts, rewriting sentences and clauses, words and punctuation. Even in the heyday of CAT (computer-assisted translation) tools such as Trados Workbench and Transit in the mid 90s, I was still using what has become the equivalent of a typewriter: ah, the muffled clicking of a computer’s keyboard…still at 50-70 words per minute. I would spend a sometimes inordinate amount of time consulting dictionaries, magazines, and related books and websites to find the right expression…or a hint thereof at least.

I succumbed to the lure of the so-called productivity tools (CAT tools included) in late 1998 as a job requirement. I haven’t looked back since. The only typewriter I own is a portable Underwood model, about 80 years old, that I bought in 2007. It looks quaint in my curio cabinet, a reminder of more productive days of yesteryear. Sure, tools such as Trados and Deja Vu help me translate “faster.” But that’s an illusion. Nobody can write faster than they think, and not all of us think at the same rate.

Companies that sell CAT tools, SDLX in particular, promise us higher percentage rates of productivity as translators. But, is that necessarily a good thing, or even a healthy thing? What CAT tools really do is automate certain mechanical (and visible) tasks in translation, such as repeating already-translated texts and reusing partially or fully translated sentences and words. Nothing more. These tools do not make us better translators; it could be as well that they make us worse writers. Like the wheels of a car taking us fast and efficiently from point A to B, CAT tools take us from one language to another at increased speeds…leaving the road littered with misused words, typos, clunky expressions, awkward syntax, horrifying grammar. And those are not always accidents.

No mousewheel scroll in TagEditor

So, what’s new? I have been using TagEditor since version 1.0 in 1998. Scrolling wheels in mice came much later. Yet, the developers of Trados and TagEditor didn’t bother to add the scrolling feature compatible with this new mouse. As a result, the translator or editor have to scroll content manually for pages on end with the help of the down arrow key. Very inefficient.

I recently wrote to the ideas.sdl.com site and posted an idea for an improvement: Add functionality for the mouse wheel in TagEditor. I receive the following response: Hi Mario, this all works in Studio, but we won’t be doing any more development of this nature in TagEditor. Sincerely Yours, The SDL Ideas Team

The upside: a personalized message, quick too (in less than 24 hours). The downside: the message is “use Studio 2009 instead of TagEditor.”

The fact is, I dislike SDL Studio 2009. Its cumbersome, dinosaur-sized interface is cluttered with windows and it is not very intuitive. To add insult to injury, SDL Studio 2009 only works with proprietary TM formats…unlike Trados or other products out there, that work in TXT and TMX formats.

So, a thumbs down on TagEditor, an otherwise fantastic tool for working with files in a wide variety of formats.

Trados, Deja Vu in Windows 7

I have been a staunch supporter and continuous user of Windows XP Home and Professional since 2002. I skipped Vista for obvious reasons. When I needed to replace my old Dell laptop for a new rig, I knew it was time to face reality.

So I purchased a HP with Windows 7 Home Premium (good enough for my everyday uses; I don’t need to connect to any corporate network). I also purchased a Windows 7 Professional license (64 bits) to install on my MacBook Pro’s Boot Camp partition. So far, so good.

I installed my work tools on both Windows 7: MS Office 2007, InDesign CS3, Adobe Photoshop CS3, Acrobat Pro 8.0, Trados and, my preferred tool, Deja Vu X.

Not long ago, my roommate Tamer, an Arabic translator, caught malware on his Windows 7 machine. I then modified my UAC (User Account Control) settings to the value recommended by Windows as a precautionary measure, on both machines. Bad call.

Please see the different positions in the UAC window:

Windows 7 UAC settings

In the “Always notify” setting, Trados 2007 Freelance will be unable to open translation memories (TMs) and Deja Vu X will give a “the file may be corrupt” message every time you try to open a project file or a translation memory.

The setting I recommend is the one indicated in the figure above. I briefly tried to circumvent this limitation by creating a Standard user account and using the recommended UAC setting. Trados TM files can’t be opened and Deja Vu X TM files become invisible.

Obviously, I practice common sense and use a good antivirus and antimalware program, always updated.