I know. You have real friends. You don’t need to gather a bunch of virtual ones. Your family lives on your doorstep, or you visit, phone and Skype. As for using it as a business tool, why on earth would you want a professional page on a social networking site anyway? Besides, your work is going just swimmingly without all the extra promotion a Facebook page might—yes, it’s not guaranteed—provide. And you’ve undoubtedly got far better things do you with your time.
La semana pasada acabé escribiendo una entrada motivada por una desagradable experiencia relacionada con la traducción automática (o, más bien, pseudotraducción automática) que quería compartir con todos vosotros. Esta semana me toca hablar de una nueva afrenta a nuestra profesión que por desgracia parece haberse vuelto bastante común a juzgar por las ofertas que recibo por correo electrónico y las entradas que leo en los foros.
Hablo de las herramientas TAO (traducción asistida por ordenador), los descuentos que se espera que ofrezcamos por usarlas y los ridículos plazos impuestos desde el convencimiento de que mejorarán nuestro rendimiento por arte de magia elevándolo a niveles que rozan lo sobrehumano.
Last week, I found myself suddenly rolling out a blog post because of an unpleasant experience involving machine translation (or should I say machine pseudo-translation), which I wanted to share with you all. This week I’m shaking my head at yet another affront to our profession, which sadly seems to have become rather commonplace judging by email job requests I receive and forum posts I read.
I’m talking about CAT tools, the discounts we’re expected to give as a result of using them, and the silly deadlines imposed in the belief they will magically improve our performance to near super-human levels.
Suelo revisar textos para publicación que han sido escritos directamente en inglés por hablantes no nativos (principalmente españoles, porque por lo general soy capaz de descifrar lo que intentan decir). Esta actividad me agrada bastante porque la temática es interesante, la redacción no está del todo mal y el trabajo no supone teclear demasiado, lo que mi brazo agradece ya que estoy empezando a sufrir de una lesión por tensión repetitiva.
Esta semana he tenido dos encargos de este tipo, y no podrían haber sido más distintos. El primer texto (y el más largo) era relativamente sencillo, pero el segundo contenía párrafos enteros en los que no logré entender absolutamente nada. Tras sudar tinta y dedicarle horas y horas, se lo envié a la agencia con comentarios pidiéndoles que me aclararan ciertos puntos y resaltando una buena cantidad de oraciones no solo gramaticalmente incorrectas, sino prácticamente imposibles de desentrañar.
I often edit texts for publication which have been written directly in English by non-native speakers (mainly Spaniards, because I can usually decipher what they are trying to say). This is an activity I mostly enjoy because the subject matters are interesting, the quality of the writing is normally not too bad, and the work doesn’t involve a great deal of typing (which gives my arm a rest as I’ve started to suffer from a repetitive strain injury).
This week I had two such jobs, and they couldn’t have been more varied. The first and longer text was relatively straight-forward, but the second contained large chunks that I just couldn’t get my head around at all. Having struggled to the end, I sent it back to the agency with comments, asking for clarification of certain points, and a fair number of highlighted sentences which were not only grammatically incorrect, but virtually incomprehensible to boot.
Las validaciones de LinkedIn llevan más de un año entre nosotros, y parece que a muchos traductores les entusiasma la idea. Son mucho más fáciles de dar que las recomendaciones, y con tanto do ut des como hay por ahí, coleccionar un montón de caras en el perfil no supone ningún esfuerzo y puede incluso resultar atractivo para ciertas personas, supongo.
No obstante, he de decir que no es una función que me apasione. Aún no me he subido al carro y no creo que lo haga en un futuro próximo, la verdad. Por eso he optado por no mostrar mis validaciones pese a haber recibido unas cuantas de las que me siento orgullosa.
LinkedIn endorsements have been around for about a year now, and many translators seem to have taken to them like ducks to water. Being so much easier to give than recommendations, and with so much quid pro quo going on, collecting a sea of faces on your profile really takes no time at all, and may, I suppose, even appeal to some.
It’s not a feature I’m very enamoured with, however. I haven’t yet jumped on this bandwagon and I don’t think I’ll be doing so anytime soon. That’s why I’ve turned my endorsements well and truly off, even though I have received a few I would be quite glad to display.
If you have a Twitter account and logged in last Saturday, you cannot fail to have noticed that the IAPTI (International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters) was holding its first conference in London. Having grown in numbers over the past four years the association has been up and running, and now with members in 59 countries, its president, Aurora Humarán, and her team decided it was time to get together properly and have a “non-mild” discussion about what’s going on in our industry and what we can do about it. Despite being rooted in Argentina where the IAPTI was founded, London was chosen as the venue so we could all stand in solidarity with UK interpreters.
Nikki Graham - Translation & Editing Services 