“la parole exportée”

I shouldn’t read other people’s posts. Seriously. I end up reading lots of stuff that is not directly relevant to anything I do.

Yet I find all those blogs fascinating, because they refer to things that are sometimes very different to what I can do/should do, and thus get me to think outside the box.

Like this one:

Joanna Young’s post took me to Wordle, and I started playing with it using a selection of words from my tag cloud. (It helped that I had completed all my urgent jobs!!!)

First experiment got me this:

A little bit of tweaking colors, layout, etc. and I came up with this one (strictly identical in terms of colors, font, background colors).

Mmmmm…

I’m left wondering why I find the bottom one more “acceptable,” when the top one “appeals” to me as being untidy, yet more creative?

Apparently simple things like that tell you more about yourself than all the manuals you could read on the subject. Translating is a mental and cognitive activity that requires order and method. But it also needs some creativity. Maybe that’s the explanation?

A better explanation, anyone?

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Many years ago, I was lucky enough to work for a couple of French publishers, translating books on various ‘real-life’ subjects. Gardening was one such topic and I translated a few on tree-pruning, flower-planting, vegetables… One I particularly liked was on how to use colorful plants in your garden. I had just moved to a house with a garden, so I was happy to test some of the advice too!

Philadelphus, or mock orange, or seringa (the last being its French name too), was one of the easiest plant names to translate, if you overlook the fact that it has two spellings, namely ’seringa’ or ’seringat’ in French. But I remember a book on medicinal plants that was more of a challenge.

As ever, when translation is concerned, your own knowledge of the general background is invaluable, and it helped me that my parents had a passion for Botany and had exposed me to all sorts of plants and plant names from a very young age. Not a total country bumpkin, I do have links with Nature! Nowadays I run across urban people who have no idea what a lime tree (Tilia, tilleul) is. Some of them have encountered it in the herbal tea section of their supermarket, but my neighbor has been the source of nightmares around my lime tree, that no herbal tea could cure!

Challenges are said to help you grow. Probably true, at least in the case of the translation of plant names. Faced with a mass of unknown names and species and varieties, I quickly had to find a way around the problem. In the days of real dictionaries and books, no Internet available, I decided that the way to go was to find the plant’s Latin name, and search its accepted French name, bearing in mind that people in different regions may use different names, so it was necessary to sift and choose the most widespread ones. The Internet now makes this task much easier.

My Philadelphus above didn’t have the honor of being planted by me, but it’s been offering a mass of white blossom year after year. Today it’s just having a shower and I wanted to capture this moment. But most of all I wanted to give it recognition for sending a sea of deep, rich fragrance into my office.

A friend of mine -not a translator- was accurately commenting about my previous post, that few people really know how to use spreadsheets.

So why should professional translators be savvier than the rest of the population?

Professionals, be they translators or other, do not get much of a say in this. When your client determines that it’s more productive or cost-effective for them to use spreadsheets instead of word processing files for their copy, if you want to retain that client, there isn’t much you can do, but to learn to use a spreadsheet. Hence my surprise, and the post. The good news is that you don’t even have to learn the rich features of the spreadsheet, since you are using the tool to do something that it isn’t even meant for: word processing.

One of the downsides with that policy is that a spreadsheet has none of the comfort of a word processor. When other factors allow it, I export columns and translate them in a word processor, then re-export the translated copy. This is still quicker than applying my translation memory procedures to the original spreadsheet file.

Another major problem I see is that by cutting up copy such as a marketing pitch, into cell-size bits (one or two sentences long), you run the risk of breaking the flow of ideas and end up translating in a very mechanical way, losing sight of the forest (the overall pitch) for the trees (each separate cell). That entails even more post-editing, since you want to adapt your client’s content to the feel of the foreign language and market.

In this case, the client is a translation agency, the only one I work for. Our relationship is the result of a special situation; I don’t work for agencies as a rule.

So this is part of the brief that came with a translation project:

Please translate all text from column A - and ensure that your translation is also divided into separate cells, as per the source.

My (friendly, yet slightly hurt) reply, when delivering the project:

Do you really think that I don’t know how to use an Excel file? :))))

Client’s reply:

you’d be surprised how technophobic some translators are!!

Seriously!

I’m a member of the baby boomer generation, albeit from the second half… and very soon, you’ll read about how I began my career, with a pencil and a rubber…

But technology has been with us in the form of computers and software for most of my working life, in many diverse forms (using software, translating it, translating its documentation in various forms). I have used spreadsheets for literally ages. I keep track of projects, accounts, even Christmas menus in Excel (I must admit, though, that I strongly object to the use of spreadsheets for translations, hum hum, that will be our secret).

Anyhow I would assume that since their inception sometime back in the… let me see… 80’s, the standard professional translator would be able to use if not to create files using the Holy Trinity of office tools: word, spreadsheet and presentation software.

And in 2008, you’re giving me instructions on how to use Excel?

I want to cry…