“la parole exportée”

The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation held a conference in Brussels (Belgium) yesterday, Towards a European Master’s In Translation.

This EMT Conference 2008 was the second of its kind. Its stated goals were to:

• bring together translator training specialists from the EU and prospective member countries, as well as employers and international organisations
• discuss issues related to translator training in the EU and implementing an EMT
• seek consensus on a common EMT curriculum and implementation criteria
• build a network of universities in the EU to implement the EMT
• establish cooperation between universities in different countries
• professionalise translation as an occupation within the EU.

The next EMT Conference will be in 2009.

With 27 member states and 23 official languages, the European Union is now actively pushing for an official status for translators. The Translation DG has also published a model curriculum for the proposed European Master in Translation, an 8-page document, the detail of which you can read here. I noted with interest and satisfaction that most of the prerequisites and contents of the proposed EMT are identical to what my translator’s school, E.S.I.T. (Paris), has been advocating and teaching for years. This is most encouraging.

“The main objective of a European Master’s in Translation programme should be to produce highly qualified translators who possess all the basic skills required of a professional translator and who are capable of carrying out demanding translation and translation-related tasks and of acting responsibly as members of their profession.”

I do hope that the entire effort and the ensuing recognition will make our profession more visible. This can only be in the interest of businesses and individuals who need to have access to properly trained and responsible translation professionals delivering high-quality services.

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I dedicate this post to my American friend who said this: “I read that book. Ate lots of the leek soup she recommended. Hmm. Maybe you must be French for it to work. “

I’ve just read Mireille Guiliano’s best-seller, “French Women Don’t Get Fat.” I bought the French version of the book because I wanted a quick read. It is a delight, exquisitely written and full of sensible eating ideas.

A friend of mine got me onto this. She and I need to lose a few kilos, enough to boost our morale. So she bought her leeks and I bought my leeks. I haven’t seen or talked to her since, but with the book’s help, I’ve lost about 200 grammes in 2 weeks. The leek broth was delicious, by the way. The good thing about the book is that it encourages you to be in charge: eat less, more regularly, fresher food, one square of chocolate every other day, drink plenty of water.

So as a manifesto for food and healthy habits, the book is perfect.

Admittedly, there was something about it, a soft mantra that got me to google the author and then I knew: over and over in the press, on TV, “We French women do this”, “I as a French woman…”

photo credit: TanjaN1

Hmmm… in other words, we French women are so good at keeping fit and slim. The power of the myth. I understand that another book is being published and from what I read in an interview, we French women are always very well dressed and let me guess… we decorate our French houses with style and taste and our French table manners are impeccable.

One interview in particular left me speechless, and feeling terribly cheated:

“French women don’t have to discipline themselves about walking up the stairs or not having seconds at dinner. It is natural for them. It is part of their culture. They are not enforcing any special rules. So, developing and embracing a healthy lifestyle means developing good habits as part of your culture.”

Please, take me to that perfect country. I want to be that self-disciplined woman. Oh, but wait… I’m living in it right now, and I am a French woman!

Maybe I don’t deserve my citizenship: I am lazy sometimes, and I eat at McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. But I also eat at Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Indian and other restaurants. If there is an elevator anywhere, walking up the stairs doesn’t come naturally to me. I only take the stairs when the elevator is out of order, or if I make myself walk up the stairs, or if it is definitely quicker to take the stairs.

Not all French women are slim. I took a short break at a vacation center once, and was utterly shocked at the size of fairly young mothers in their swimsuits, revealing months and months of unhealthy eating habits. I was shocked only a couple of years ago to discover that I had a better shape (with very little, well, with no exercise) than many adolescent girls.

French women are diverse, like everywhere else. There are those who are overweight, those who are slim not by choice but because Nature was kinder on them, those who are lazy and those who can eat cakes and not put on one gramme.

Making it exclusively cultural is not fair. It’s not fair on the French, and it’s not fair on the foreigners. There is no such thing as a unified French culture, although there are generally-recognized traditions. Each social group has its culture, not everyone likes Champagne (I do!).

Yes, despite the fun and criticisms leveled at Microsoft’s ubiquitous presentation tool, I have decided to launch into a totally new -for me- project: designing my own MS PowerPoint resume!

This was triggered indirectly by a client who has kindly given me names and e-mail addresses of several of his contacts, and I needed to use something to attract at least a fraction of their attention; business people, as we all know, are very busy.

I have been mulling this since last weekend, and yesterday, eurêka, I think I had an idea.

The hitch here is that I have never designed a PowerPoint in my whole life, although I have had my share of PowerPoints for translation or as presentation aids at conferences, these are useful tools for interpreters, as I pointed out here. I am not a PowerPoint expert, but I have been able to help out fellow translators who were not familiar with the tool, and felt quite intimidated. I must admit that the flexible fonts got me in a panic the first time I translated a PowerPoint, but I’ve got over it now I was introduced to presentation tools, in fact, by working on Lotus SmartSuite’s Freelance Graphics quite a while ago.

So there was I last night, when I should have been taking a deserved rest, between 10pm and 2am, working at my PowerPoint resume.

I enjoyed myself so much that I didn’t realize it was 2am until I decided to let it rest for a little while! Learning by doing is what works best for me (except for house-cleaning, which I willingly delegate to my cleaning lady, she’s the expert and I’m hopeless!), so I happily played with layouts, right to left, left to right, image here and text there, one column? no, two columns is best… Wow. Maybe I’ve discovered myself yet another passion… who knows?

For those who believe that needlecraft and business have nothing in common, let me tell you that several years of patchwork and quilt design, working on visual effects and colors, is an extremely useful introduction to designing presentations. The best effects are achieved by streamlining, not piling up information (be it visual or literal). Ideally, PowerPoints should be Modern Art with a readily accessible content.

And even in terms of content, the limited space offered by a slide should force you to include only the most relevant information, not your entire pedigree, which is a problem when you have been in business for as long as me. You have to be selective: Young translators tend to want to list everything they have done (if not more) as they are trying to build confidence, older translators like me have to sift through projects and tend to have much shorter lists, as they can concentrate on the essential.

The result so far is not exactly as I envisioned, and there is always that additional element that you want to cram into the presentation, but I think I’ll get there after a few more days of mulling (my favorite activity), sifting, reworking and playing with the tool. I have a couple of ideas I want to implement, but to do this I need to research PowerPoint’s features… or delegate that part to someone else. One thing that is surely easy to do is adding my blog’s header image as background, for communication consistency. Don’t laugh at me if you know how to do it, just give me a hint. I love that image immeasurably, it has its own story and it belongs to me.

Who said that PowerPoints are boring? That may be so for the audience, but the author can have a really good time. And provided that you focus on the result (grabbing your audience’s attention while making it work for your own interests), and not on the exercise itself (producing the best, prettiest, fullest, etc. slide show), I feel you can produce something that you’ll be proud to show.

And so much more interesting than a bland resume on MS Word (sorry, Word, I love you, but there you are…).

Can’t wait to go back to it…

This manifesto, the ‘10 ½ Commandments of Visual Thinking’, is an interesting addition to a question that has been nagging me for many years. This particular example focuses on how to solve business problems using pictures. It is not based just on pictures, but pictures are used to highlight a core idea or object; the explanation, or the whole reasoning, is built around them. This method can be used to get the sharing of ideas going between people who speak different languages.

It follows a trend that has been developing over time, with the increased use of pictograms, for example at airport terminals. People of different nationalities can understand them, even though their meaning is often written in English and in the local language. Dan Roam, the author of the manifesto, developed his theory when he was working in Russia.

Whenever I have translated lengthy manuals in the past, I have always felt that many would be greatly enhanced by containing fewer words and more diagrams. In a more global society where communication is increasingly visually-oriented, with television and now Internet-based video, it will certainly make sense for the younger generations to use mainly images, especially in situations where several languages are needed. This will in turn require less paper and help save our forests, our water, and the environment in general.

So a new kind of communication may emerge, that translators will certainly not like, but it would undoubtedly solve many problems. Is there room for a new, visual language?

Consecutive interpreters have been working in a similar way for many years. While we listen to the speaker, we do not write down his speech in extenso, which would be impossible even in shorthand as the amount of energy required to write everything would distract our mind from the necessary effort of processing the message being conveyed by the speaker. Each individual interpreter therefore develops their own system as a way to support their memory. Memory remains the core element. It, with the aid of our note-taking system, enables us to listen to up to 5 minutes, or longer and still be able to interpret the whole speech accurately.

In this example, which I made up minutes ago, hence its nonsensical content and absolute fictional nature, the speech I would be listening to could be:

“He/she/they/the President of the World Bank/my friend (whoever we are talking about) said (quotes) that this country’s GDP (the country we are talking about, so no need to write it down) has increased tremendously or any variation of the idea (arrow and 3 lines underneath).”

The next bit would mean: “It has reached the same level as Germany, and it is now richer than the USA.” On second thought, I would have written USA+ if the USA had done better.

The elements not written down are stored in the interpreter’s memory, making the whole system highly contextual and extremely short-lived.

Delegates come after the meeting sometimes, as they are curious to see our note-taking system. They are usually baffled when they see these series of symbols, pictures, arrows and short words on the page. This system doesn’t make sense in the usual way, but it makes sense to us. It is our own visual language. It is a very valuable one, because it is a component of our expertise.