yndigo

Somehow advertising in every form — TV, radio, print, internet — has really turned me off lately. Maybe the economy has made it all sound more desperate but every ad is the same. All the marketing copy I read might as well be written by the same person. Long unswayed by marketing, I remained impressed for a time — especially when I was trying to start my own company — when a new whole-grain-snack or locally-made-T-shirt or retro-fixed-gear-bike start-up company branded itself in that differently modern, wholesome and understated way. No longer.

In a post on the French-language blog Not Just Another Translation Blog, Laurent talks about translation agencies with blogs and asks weather this new openness is just a marketing ploy or weather it signals an authentic altruistic effort to share their knowledge with the masses. My reply in the comments field, briefly, is No, true altruism doesn’t exist in business.

I’ve thought about that reply since. Sounds like capatalism burnout (or maybe a new sales ploy based on hyper-honesty). Either way I’ve reconsidered and already come up with two examples where those that sold best were not trying to sell at all. (and you won’t be surprised if you’ve read me before that they’re both about bikes!)

To anyone involved in the DIY side of bicycles, Sheldon Brown is a household name. The inveterate tinkerer was also a prolific writer. He wrote about bike building, bike maintenance, bike parts, and bike humor. He contributed thousands of posts to cycling forums to help those of us who couldn’t figure out why our Italian bottom bracket wouldn’t thread into our British bike frame.

Sheldon Brown blogged before blogs existed. His website was a frequently updated encylopedia of bike knowledge. As the guru of biking how-to, he put the small Massachusetts bike shop that employed him on the map for an international audience.

Even after his death last year, Sheldon’s site rises to the top of Google’s rating system because so many others on the internet have pointed to him as the expert. He gave good advice. He gave free advice, and most of all, honest advice. And people knew his advice was entirely separate from the products in his store. And many of us felt compelled to buy from his higher-priced store because it came with the gift of his expertise.

Back in 2001, I wrote to Sheldon in the hopes he’d tell me if the e-bay asking price of a bicycle was fair. Despite receiving thousands of emails a day, he wrote back in 10 minutes to say, “If it’s your size, grab it!” I did.

I met Peter Reich briefly at an open-house in his hole-in-the-wall shop near the Gowanus Canal. Peter designed and has been building the Swift Folder bike for 15 years now. Error Ink. describes Peter’s world pretty well.

I don’t know for sure but after having met Peter I was certain someone talked him into holding an open house. He was one of the most reluctant salesman ever. Otherwise very likeable, getting information about his concept and the details of his bikes was like pulling teeth. Every sentence was uttered in mild tones and with the utmost humility. Just spending 30 minutes at his shop, it was clear he never tried to sell a single bike and still, there was a 6-month waiting list for his hand-built machines.

I don’t know if the old adage of “love what you do and the money will follow” is always true. I do know that I DON’T want to buy from someone who tries to sell me something. I want to buy from that person who is so engrossed in their work they haven’t given a moment’s thought to how to sell it. In short the best marketing comes not from the person who builds the bike or does the translation for that matter, but from others.

An artist renders an image. A cook renders fat from a duck. A court renders a judgment. A translator renders a translation?

I’ve always said “produce” a translation. Rather mechanical I know and a testament to my stiffly commercial milieu. The blog transubstantiation has a thought-provoking post asking readers to choose one definition from a first list of four words, and one from a second, and then, by melding and contrasting these terms, to attempt to deepen their sense of just what translation is. The ensuing discussion is great.

Render is far more formal in English than the everyday rendre in French. I won’t for example be rendering anything unto anybody anytime soon the way a French school kid commonly has to rendre his friend’s stylo back.

This definition of render means “to give back.” As opposed to what the cook does, which is “to extract.” On the other hand, who knows? The cook — or the translator for that matter — may not play such an active role here. Maybe he’s just the facilitator. Maybe the sense of verb render has broadened over the years to also mean “to cause to give back.” For it is the duck that “gives back” its fat, and just maybe the source text that “gives back” its meaning. Kind of like the block of marble that needed Rodin only to divine and release the scupture within.

On a much lighter note

Rendering either as a collocation or synonym of translation must carry through to other languages too. While I was clicking through translation blog links, I stumbled upon one of the — unintentionally — funniest posts I’ve seen in a while. It was a list of “Rendering blogs” borrowed from Lexiophiles’ Top 100 language blogs, and then re-rendered either by a machine or a new English learner.

Yndigo was included, as a “blog on version with both penetrations and insights.” I suppose “concealments” is only natural with that type of content. But hey, if it gets us more traffic, I’m all for it!

About Translation has always been good about sharing tidings and thoughts about professional version, yes siree!

Jill at Musings from an overworked translator, although the link to her page is missing, will be happy to know that her reflexions life on both the main industry and the rendering industry have not gone unnoticed.

The parole exportée, whether “keeping it up,” or “maintaining it upwards” will be uplifted by the recognition, I’m sure. (Maybe she could use some concealments too)

Now, I was certainly aware that Corinne at Thoughts on Translation was an expert on the rendering industry, but nobody told me she was “going a transcriber.” You go, Corinne!

And let’s not forget, under “near miss,” the Masked Translator who seems to be moonlighting as a masked transcriber now too. Last but not least, Translator’s Musings whose “nigh missies and the tips for all those postulate versions from English to French” are always welcome to francophiles like me.

Of course the “Dire Missies” didn’t make the cut, but what a great name for a band, no?

I think my translator is unfaithful

I wrote this article for Yndigo’s blog in my native French language and asked her/him to pursue the translation of it into English for posting, but my gut tells me she/he took some liberties. Like Pevear and Volokhonsky’s recent translation of War and Peace, I wanted to use the word “wept” several times in explaining how hard it is to come up with an original blog post, but he/she insisted that wouldn’t look right in war or in peace. I also wanted to misspell “Cheator” in the title and you can see who won that battle.

Naturally, my translator is a native English writer, and I don’t (or do not) argue with the fact that I am not. Where we differ is his or her use of “translator’s license” to give my post a more “native English feel” to it. I wept when she/he told me that! My writing shouldn’t have a native English feel to it, it should feel like French, sacred blue! It would benefit mankind if translated works such as Tolstoy, Dickens, or my web post sent readers back to the original or back to language class so that they could read in the original language. What a tragedy if a translator’s liberties sent the audience to Google the translator’s other writings. The translator is supposed to be transparent, my God!

Fortunately, I am still living and can check back to read this post after the translator has submitted it but before he/she is paid. But what about works of deceased authors? Who will stand guardian of their true and authentic meanings? Perhaps in the near future, we’ll all be so grateful that anyone reads anymore. We won’t have time to regret translators who take liberties. Or time to [cry softly yet uncontrollably].

Very cordially,
J.-M.C.

I was editing a particularly spectacular translation the other day. Creative turns of phrase, source meaning fully intact, and just beautifully readable English. The translator obviously had a nuanced understanding of the source language paired with a level of comprehension of the subject matter that usually betrays an industry insider. My editing was moot. Any retouches apart from the two or three real-word typos that spell-check didn’t catch could only have brought it down.

After editing hundreds of translations over the years–good, bad and everything in between–this translation did a couple things, besides making our client happy, that is. It reconfirmed my faith in human translation (alright that’s a bit over the top perhaps; I hadn’t really lost my faith in human translation, I just tend to forget how far superior it can be), and it led me to consider that too often we let the machines win.

It’s become cliché in translation to say computers will never figure out how to truly replicate what we do, yet between some translations I’ve read and machine output there really isn’t a lot of daylight. Machines are catching up. But please, let’s not go meet them halfway.

Now you may claim with the workload and the price pressure — much of it caused by those same machines — how are we supposed to have time to craft translations that make the client say, “Wow, I’m glad I hired a human!” Good question. The daily grind can sap much of that creative juice that made us choose this career over accounting* way back when.

First, let me say that most translations I come across are better (and quite a bit more accurate) than machine output. However many translators skip the one step that can most efficiently help them leave machines in the dust: Re-reading. While downright essential for new translators, it should not be overlooked by old-hats either.

I know when I’ve translated I often feel I’ve written the most fluent English sentence, only to go back and discover it doesn’t sound like English at all. When we re-read we really discover the translation for the first time as a native speaker. Because, when we’re translating, we are tethered to the idiom of the original and can find it very difficult to take the ideas while leaving the original language structure behind. It’s a two-step process (sometimes more) when done right. When an editor claims a translation wasn’t done by a native speaker, often it’s just that the translator did not re-read.

Of course there are different levels of re-reading. You can look it over quickly to make sure there are no errors or you can read aloud until all the little seams are ironed out. Either way it’s the best way for both beginning and experienced translators to improve and to continue to make the client choose them over the machine.

*I apologize for perpetuating the stereotype of the uncreative accountant. With the state of Wall Street over the past few months, it looks like the accountants have been quite creative in fact. Whoops, now it seems I’ve called them underhanded too…

Translation as learning process

Not all projects go perfectly. The following describes a recent job a friend at another agency told me about (I know — sounds like, “Doctor, my friend has this problem” but it’s true). I too have my share of past failures to learn from, but this was a doozy.

The project: almost 2,000 files due in two weeks! Yes, you read right. Not words. Not pages. But 2,000 files. A lot of them were one page in length. Many were rather longer. File types included Excel, Word, PDF, PowerPoint, html, and a few jpegs for good measure.

The language pair was overwhelmingly Spanish to English with a handful of others thrown in to make the job especially fun. On top of that, existing English in the source files would make the per-word billing particularly cumbursome. The only silver lining was the general subject matter.

Now why would any agency accept such a job? Why promise success when the chances of success seem so slim? The answer of course is simple: money. And the justification, automatic: “if we don’t take it, another agency will.”

I don’t fault them for thinking this way; I’ve had occasion to believe that my team has the experience to handle any translation job as well or better than other agencies. “If someone’s gonna do it, it might as well be us.”

On the other hand, since I opened my own agency, I’ve taken a measure of pride in the fact that we don’t accept just any job, particularly if it cannot be, humanly, done well. Though we often push the limits of volume and speed, we do try to educate the client on what it will take to do the job right. But as we know, client education notwithstanding, sometimes a deadline is a deadline.

And, in these difficult economic times, refusing jobs based on feasibility seems a quaint throwback to better days, so I am especially sympathetic. My criticism of the agency’s decision to accept the job is therefore limited. Its execution however is something I will address.

The major problem in this case was that the agency was never able to assess the full scope of the job before they leapt right in. And there was never time to catch up. From my experience this has become the biggest no-no. If you have a hundred pages due in 3 days, you must, as a project manager, take the first hour to look at each page — no matter how loud the clock is ticking — to foresee complications in terms of subject matter, formatting, consistency, etc., before deciding how to assign it. The mistake here was a shortage of project managers.

A project manager generally handles 5 or more projects at one time. Here, one job should be handled by 5 people, especially in the first couple days. Put enough resources on it — even if you have to hire them on the spot (a luxury the poor economy actually does afford us), so that a set of eyes can see the content of every single file. Otherwise, the last couple days will be full of surprises.

According to the metrics performed by an agency where I worked, a good project manager can handle the equivalent of 200,000 words per month, maximum. So with the two-week turnaround, this project would have constituted a 4 to 5-project manager job. A smaller profit for sure, and an anomaly in this do-more-with-less economy, but using additional resources smartly might have made an affordable world of difference.

Most additional problems on the project — there were many — stemmed from this initial failure to allocate enough management resources to it. Translators must take some of the blame here too. Some failed to look up from their work to see if they could indeed handle all the files they agreed to translate. Still, 95% of the translations were delivered by the deadline, a rousing success under the circumstances, and priceless in the learning process.

A little shout-out to a few sites I recently included in my blog roll. Go check them out if you haven’t already:

1. The Greener Word: Abigail Dahlberg is a German-English translator specializing in environmental issues and waste management in particular. I think of all the non-translators I meet who assume translation is such a niche business to begin with. They’re always astounded to hear about people like Abigail who translate in such a focused area. Anyway, check out her terrific blog. I like the name, “The Greener Word,” which I understand the Masked Translator had something to do with. Brilliant! I also like fact Abigail specializes in the environment, one of my interests too (I’m making the assumption here that she not only translates environmental matters, but cares about the environment — who knows? She might toss her toner cartridges out her Hummer window — don’t hold that against her as you read ; )
2. PM Hut: The Project Management Hut is a site I learned about after my recent post, What’s the deal with Project Managers? PM Hut takes the role of the project manager very seriously and, although it doesn’t seem to tackle the translation project manager specifically, our industry, which often views the PM as an afterthought, could do with some more professionalism. Check them out.
3. Patently Silly: Let me end on a laugh. People try to patent the silliest things. A friend of mine in college proposed a velcro strip on your bedroom wall and a velcro tab sewed into each piece of clothing — who needs a closet? (Hey, that one’s actually not that bad come to think of it.) Check out Patently Silly for some truly bad ideas… and a good chuckle.

Swears in translation

I remember an argument among project managers a few years ago about whether we should translate certain vulgarities, or soften them before they reached the client. I was on the side of leaving them as raw as they were in the original. I lost. The prevailing concern seemed to be that sending a client that kind of language might be unprofessional. And the belief was that, unadulterated or not, the language in question was not material to the meaning of the whole. Squeamishness won out.

To argue my point, I recalled one of my translation teachers, an older woman who had been translating for years, and one of the nicest ladies you’d ever want to meet. She was always emphatic in her belief that we translators have a responsibility to use the same tone as the original, curse words and all.

Let’s admit it, while profanity supposedly has no place in a business context, it happens. What is inappropriate in an annual report, or even on a translation blog, might crop up in an e-mail from an employee to his boss. And if, in place of “[copulative gerund],” “[widely used term for excrement],” or “[orifice personified],” a translator substitued damn, shoot, or jerk, respectively, I’d be upset. Plus, it becomes an exercise not just in translation, but verbosity.

I too care about corporate image. However, in translation, a reputation of accuracy is more important than one of civility. In our business, context is everything. And accuracy, as one must be aware, is fuckin’ awesome!

project managers?

I’ve been a project manager. I still manage translation projects quite often. And I manage other project managers. Project Management, in a translation agency or otherwise, is a tough job if done correctly. But it’s not a profession in the same way being a translator is.

Provocative, right? (Oddly, I don’t fear the kind of backlash Sarah Palin got from Community Organizers.) No slight to project managers. A good one (and I’ve known several) is the very picture of knowledge, efficiency, hard work, patience, charm, clear communication, etc. And these skills can take years to acquire. Many project managers, unfortunately, burn out too soon owing to pressures from above to move a lot of work and the long hours required to do so.

The most elemental job of a translation project manager is to find out what the client requires and communicate this to the translator and editor. The ideal project manager guides the unfamiliar client through the world of professional translation and instructs the translator unfamiliar with the needs of this specific client.

The unskilled project manager on the other hand doesn’t know enough to assess what the client wants or really understand what a translator does. Even with proper training, it can be an uphill battle to disabuse clients of the notion that we spend our days feeding documents into a translation machine, just as it’s hard to convince some translators that project managers have the sliqhtest idea of what translation involves.

Do we always need them?

No. Not always. Project Managers are crucial to the translation agency. Yet, not all clients need educating. Not all translators need guiding. Not all projects require multiple iterations flowing from project manager, translator, editor, proofreader and back again. At agencies we can forget that clients might be adept at finding — by internet — their own translators; and we forget too that many translators serve clients directly. This direct service, as in many industries, is only growing with the internet.

So where am I going with this?

(I asked myself that half-way through this post.) Anyway, with the internet, the ground has been shifting underneath the traditional service model for a few years. Not that Google’s proposed “Translation Center” will make the translation agency dissappear overnight; it sounds like a hit-or-miss operation for both clients and translators. Yet agencies must evolve to compete. For we must acknowledge that on many jobs, the agency’s most important role is to choose the right translator for the project. It seems to me then that the obvious next step for the agency would be to improve upon and refine Google’s approach by not only putting the client in direct contact with the translator, but by offering clients access to a database of reliable, pre-vetted and project-specific translators. Translation agency of the future? Or the end of the translation agency?

I’m not a good speller. Not in my acquired language, French, nor in English. In fact I’m worse in English, but we should all be forgiven; English orthography is about as regular as the M101 bus in Manhattan, winner of the latest Schleppie Award for least reliable bus.

So I’ve gotten in the habit of spell checking my writing when it counts. Like translations for example (I should spell check emails too… or at the very least stick a post-it to my screen to remind me there are two ‘d’s in address). Surprisingly, many translators don’t run spell check, despite it being a feature on word processors since the beginning of time.

More important and more involved than a spell check, of course, is the process of reviewing a translation. But the lack of a spell check is often a telltale sign that the translator has not reviewed or reread the document. Even seasoned translators should understand that the first sentence to roll off their fingers is not always the best. Exempted are those who began in the age of typewriters, many of whom out of necessity learned to compose beautiful sentences in their head before comitting them to paper. Alas, recent evidence tells me those skills have not been passed on.

Provided a translation is accurate — which is another pair of sleeves, as the French say — reviewing your work does not have to be that time consuming. Having been in the business of revising translations for about a dozen years now, I can say that, besides spelling and clean formatting, the two things that make an English sentence sound the least native are:

1. Unnatural order of words or phrases. The placement of subordinate clauses, adjectives, adverbs, differs between languages. “Shake well the bottle.” No thanks. True, an author may stress a phrase by changing the normal order of things, but more often it is the syntax and conventions of a language that determine how a native speaker orders his or her phrases. A college teacher used to tell us that French is analytical whereas English is like a movie scene where the action follows a life-like chronology. In English we say, “He ran up the stairs”; In French, “He went up the stairs, running.” At best, it sounds non-native. At worst it sounds like something’s missing. He went up the stairs, running his mouth? running his mother ragged?
2. Over-nominalizing, as I have written about in the past. English generally features strong verbs and weak nouns. Anyone reviewing a document will — or should — find it very strange to read, “she executed the translation of the document” and opt instead for, “she translated the document.” Formal writers tend to nominalize more of course but overall, we should get out of the habit.

Certainly, taking on rush work, being easygoing, having a deep knowledge of your specialty, being on time, etc., etc., are all very important and appreciated, but submitting translations that require little in the way of syntactical and typographical repair saves headaches, time, and money and will keep your inbox jumping and your phone ringing.

Speakers of French, Italian and some other languages will know that a page of a book would have made a more fitting image for this blog post (tourner la page, voltare pagina, etc.) than a leaf of a tree. The leaf suggests a seasonal metaphor rather than a new beginning.

Whichever image you have in mind, the New Year often inspires change. A desire to change and improve. Resolutions. Most years I don’t make any resolutions. That’s not because I lack self discipline; it’s because I think the behavior changes a person declares (eating less, exercising more, or my wife’s favorite: stop interrupting) isn’t really something they really want or they’d be practicing it already. Right, honey?

But there are three things I really enjoy, and for which I want to take more time:

(1) Cycling: I love going on short rides through the city or long rides through the country. Rides alone, rides with my family. I want to find time every day to get out, rain or shine.

(2) Learning the harmonica (better): I own several harmonicas in many keys, and love listening to blues harmonica players (Little Walter, Junior Wells, Paul Butterfield). I’ve taught myself quite a bit but I know I will continue to be a frustrated player until I take lessons from a pro.

(3) Blogging: I enjoy writing and I have always wanted to get better at it. Starting a blog felt very natural. I read blogs, mostly those of other translators, and I admire their disclipline. Like everything that is worthwhile, it takes some work, mostly just to get started… and restarted.

Happy New Year!