“la parole exportée”

Networking means a lot more than building relationships within your own community of professionals, and I have accepted to contribute one blog post monthly to the Passion Project Blog that Katherine Reschke has started putting together, with the help of the lively community that she is building online.

Lately, unfortunately I haven’t been able to participate as fully as I’d like, but I am looking forward to offering posts. I am also eager to read other members’ posts. As I don’t have much time to go round their individual websites and blogs, this will offer a way to keep updated and learn at the same time.

Katherine’s own website is here. She will be introducing the Community blog shortly.

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Although there is no statutory obligation making it compulsory for translators and interpreters in France to acquire on-going training, it’s our professional duty to keep up to date regarding developments in our fields of specialization. Not only is this good professional practice, it also makes our job easier when we are hired at short notice and are not given a lot of time for preparation.

photo credit: robertpaulyoung

I interpret on a fairly regular basis in Agriculture and other closely related fields –biotech plants and biofuels– and I therefore I need to keep tabs on what is happening in those areas, not only in the obvious areas of world markets trends and the present food situation, but also more down-to-earth subjects such as farming techniques, plant biology and pathology, pests, farmers’ income. This by the way fits nicely with my other area of interest, rural development.

NPR has a series of short podcasts on the US Farm Bill, which is still under discussion, despite the fact that it should have been finalized and adopted in 2007. There was also an interesting link to a fairly general, but complete description of the Farm Bill history and content, dating back to last fall. The New York Times also runs articles on food and the development of biofuels in the United States on a regular basis. The recent unhappy state of affairs in world markets has not sprung on us suddenly, it’s been in the making for some time, but only when people start rioting do the general media start to take notice.

This is only part of our ‘general’ on-going preparation. Looking at what happens in the World Trade Organization, at the future of the Common Agricultural Policy in the European Union, at developments in Eastern European countries, amongst others, is only a part of the knowledge that a translator in this field needs to build.

This is just the framework. When we are preparing a specific conference, and therefore a specific topic, more specialized documents have to be read and analyzed. Those effectively used in the meeting are normally provided by the client or organizer. But more is sometimes needed. That’s when the power of the Internet reveals itself fully. How otherwise could we access, for instance, the mass of documents available within the European Union? EU Directives and many other webpages provide the necessary background and explanations, and much of the terminology needed. This involves a lot of searching, but it’s also much more specific and focused than press articles.

Not to forget other sources of information, such as podcasts, which are now widely available.

photo credit: cking

What happened to me yesterday as I was slightly behind schedule finishing a project, and therefore ’slightly on edge,’ is a good excuse for a cautionary tale.

What I was doing well:

• concentrating on finishing on time
• answering the phone, and scheduling an appointment for today, rather than getting more delayed
• telling a relative that we couldn’t speak -and meet- until I had finished that project
• not checking on Facebook, Twitter etc. and various sources of distraction
• not checking and reading all the interesting links posted there
• not letting myself be distracted by the strange MSN pop-ups that suddenly came in rapid succession, about 8 or 10 of them

What I did very, very wrong:

• getting annoyed beyond all measure by all these pop-ups that had “Ebay” and “TV set” on them (I wasn’t auctioning any TV set)
• rushing to open my Hotmail account to see what was going on
• clicking on the last e-mail from Ebay that confirmed my change of password…

Change of WHAT?

At the very same time, Hotmail went dead, MSN went dead, Ebay was dead.

Thankfully, Hotmail is not the account I use to communicate with my clients. And I have several alternative e-mail accounts, in case one has a problem.

But I am left negotiating with Ebay and MSN, to claim my accounts back. They were swifter in responding than I expected, they seem to understand, but we’ll see. The irony is that of course, there is no TV set listed under my Ebay ID. I checked as a guest.

This has been said and written a million times: Be careful.

[End of story: both accounts are now recovered, without any damage. I'd like to thank both Microsoft France and Ebay France for acting swiftly and efficiently]

I’ve just posted a note on Facebook to call people’s attention to my Facebook Page here, the one that I set up for my professional service, not my Profile page.

Understandably, my Facebook Page doesn’t attract many visitors. Thanks to View Insights I know that there are a few visitors, they probably take one look, and move on in search of more interesting stuff. What’s in it for them? Nothing of value, unlike “10 Hot Tips To Get Caviar With Breakfast Tomorrow.”

Translation may be a boring topic, but that’s mainly due to the fact that people take translation for granted, so they have forgotten its real value. So the short comment I wrote to go with the note got me thinking. And this leads me to:

Imagine a world without translators. By now you know that I mean, of course, human translators.

photo credit: we-make-money-not-art

How would countries and people communicate, beside telepathy, smoke signals, or learning 6,000 different languages? Some argue that translators are not needed anymore, that machines are a cost-efficient replacement, that a universal language would be sufficient. Some believe in science-fiction and Santa Claus. But I don’t think that even in prehistoric times humans spoke one language. My guess is that they had translators already, back then. And translating is probably, probably, one of the oldest trades.

Back to our modern world: Take the current French PR mission in China. How could the French government hope to talk to the Chinese government, given the present situation, through robots and GTalk, and not start a war between France and China? A machine-translated document almost escalated into a diplomatic incident between The Netherlands and Israel last year.

Are you are a reader? If you read foreign fiction, how would you understand the plot, get a mental representation of the characters, unless someone, picking words with utmost care, weighing this one against that one, hadn’t for example produced the best translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude?

Are you interested in what is going on in the world? Are you prepared to learn at least 5 or 6 equally difficult languages?

Are you a marketer, a businessman trying to sell goods and services in foreign markets? How are you going to convince the rest of the world of your intrinsic importance, unless someone, somewhere is there to relay your pitch? Do you think that Seth Godin wrote this in French?

So I don’t know about you, but I’m finding it difficult to imagine a world without translators. Or am I mistaken?