“la parole exportée”

There’s a good test. Read this ad:

We need freelance translators for all language pairs. We are willing to pay $0.01-$0.03 for small projects (1-10,000 words) and $0.01-$0.02 for large projects (10,000 and more).You will have to translate a sample text as test translation. You must give the amount of words you can translate in 1 hour for your language pair. A sample text will have to be translated as test. Please note that MACHINE/SOFTWARE TRANSLATIONS will not be paid for.

If you are proud of the job you are doing, then accepting the offer is digging your grave with (or maybe despite?) your neurons.

1. Such rates aren’t even minimally acceptable. Forget that you ever invested in learning a language, became a full-fledged professional, gained years of experience, accumulated knowledge of your subject. Even a beginner cannot live on that.
2. Beware of sample texts used as free tests, they are often a way of donating perfectly usable translations. I remember a company that would give different chapters of a book to translate as test pieces, to different translators (usually beginners) and they did not pay any of them, because they were test pieces. Not only that, but the result was judged “not acceptable”, so none of the guinea pigs ever got the rest of the project. One translator checked… and found the book on the market, his translated chapter unchanged…
3. The amount of words you can translate in 1 hour varies a lot, even between individuals, and has only a limited bearing on the final quality. A “slow” translator might be an excellent translator, whereas someone who doesn’t bother to check anything – grammar, spelling, etc. might deliver with mistakes. Also, if you’re experienced, you can spit something acceptable in no time (and being an interpreter as well I have an advantage here, I do translate fast, at least for the preliminary version). But you still need to do Quality Assurance and that takes a little time.
4. “Machine/software translations will not be paid for”. This makes me laugh. No professional translator in his or her right mind would deliver unedited machine-translated documents. But some translators do use machine translation software that has a cost. Translation memories and user dictionaries take time to build up and maintain, and mean knowledge. So yes, it has a cost that the translator should be able to recover.

So, what do you think?

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photo credit: J.P. Esperança

About a year ago – already! – I posted about the Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus, to be found here: http://www.visualthesaurus.com/.

I’m not a frequent user of thesauri myself, although upon Joanna Young’s advice at Confident Writing, I did get the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, which I promise will not sit on my shelves picking up the dust. But I like the Visual Thesaurus for at least one feature, the Word of the Day, which I receive by e-mail.

Due to e-mail overload (and work overload) I don’t have the time to read every definition every day, but I check every word that I don’t know.

Many English words are derived from Latin or Greek. But even more interesting are French loaners: among recent deliveries were ‘de rigueur’, ‘chaine longue’, ‘galosh’, ‘mise en scène’, ‘outré’, ‘déjà vu’, ‘vol-au-vent’, and plenty more.  Believe it or not, I even check those, because when borrowing a word, foreigners have this tendency sometimes to provide it with a slightly or a totally different meaning.

Every person having their quirks and idiosyncrasies, I find great pleasure in using the phrase ‘raison d’être’ whenever I can. I love the sound of it, and the ‘foreign-ness’ of it in English. You could say I can be a bit of a snob!

French is obviously not the only language that provides loaners to the English language, but as every historian of languages will tell you, many French words have crept into the English language over the centuries. A historical truth that should come as a solace to those on this (European) side of the Atlantic who are endlessly complaining that the French language is becoming contaminated by too many English words.

It’s a fact that languages seem to have lives of their own, beyond any attempts made at protecting them from foreign (and therefore bad) interference. Even though translators have a duty to maintain high linguistic standards, there is no denying that this is very much context-dependent: at a recent conference, I interpreted a presentation made by a French expert about the Internet, communications, etc. Apart from the little words ‘le’, ‘la’, ‘les’, that were in French, the rest of his speech was a sea of English nouns and verbs. He did make an effort at times to use the ‘proper’ French words, but you could tell that this was a real effort. And there was no haughtiness about it. He was simply speaking his usual language: a mixture of French and English.

Interpreting at IT conferences is very interesting in this respect, as you witness the whole spectrum of people’s backgrounds, involvement in state-of-the-art technology, early adopters or followers, in the language they use. So, what can you do about it? Should we turn into ayatollahs of languages, or go with the tide?

Two good projects in the first week of the year, both in my areas of specialization, which means I feel quite comfortable with them.

That’s what I call a gooood start!