The Translator's Survival Kit

Inevitably, you will want to brave the elements and actually leave your house. Don’t be afraid; many translators have left their homes and lived to tell the tale. It’s a dangerous enterprise, though, so make sure you’re properly equipped. Here is a non-exhaustive list of essential items that will help you survive “out there”.

1) Shoes.
Yes, I know your slippers are so much more comfortable, but these days, fashion-conscious pedestrians wear more robust footwear with soles and actual laces.

2) A coat
Note: Only in winter.

3) Combed hair.

4) Pants.
Note: Make sure to pull and zip them up. The "ankle look" went out of fashion while you were pulling an all-nighter to finish that text on O-ring selection.

5) A dictionary.
Someone may say a word that you don’t know the translation for.

6) Pen and paper.
Someone may say a word you can use in a future translation.

7) Your cell phone.
In case your six-year-old needs to call you from her cell phone. Clients won't call you on your cell phone. They will leave an incomprehensible message on your answering machine and then give the job to someone else ten minutes before you get back.

8) Your laptop.
You might have about two minutes to spare while waiting in line at Wal-Mart. Put it to good use – churn out three lines’ worth of work!

9) Your PDA.
The CEO of General Electric may be waiting in line behind you, see what you’re doing and want to give you his number.

10) Your business cards.
The CEO may not have his PDA on him. Carry at least five hundred – better safe than sorry.

11) A bottle of water.
Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate.

Patently Obvious

This is absolute poetry. Here's a quote:

A patent gives the owner the right to stop others from reproducing the invention. The patent is virtually the garden fence around the sowed seed and protects and ensures, that the harvest belongs to that person who made the effort to sow the seed in the first place.

These attorneys are not only elegant, they also cut right to the chase. For example, here's something I've often wondered:

What other Intellectual Property Rights do exist?

For technical inventions a so-called utility model exists besides patent. For aesthetic models or design a design patent is available.

The copyright protects works of art, science and literature as e.g. books as well as computer programs. Words and logos for goods and services can be protected through trademarks.

Further property rights follow from the plant variety protection law for plants and the semiconductor protection law for microelectronic semiconductor devices.

I’ve often wondered about the differences between patents and utility models. Here are some:

1) Utility models expire after 10 years.
2) They are easier to get than patents.
3) They are not examined by the patent office prior to registration. Their protectability is only checked after a lawsuit has been filed for infringement.
4) They only cover the shape, structure or combination of articles, unlike patents, which also cover processes.
5) They are better if you want to protect a short-lived product.
6) They are better if you don’t want to wait for a full-blown patent.

There is also a discussion of the different types of marks here.

Olde English Laws, Anyone?

ContractsProf Blog reports on the first Anglo-Saxon contract statute, the Nine Dooms of Ethelbert. They are full of references to the familiar-sounding "leodgeld", defined as the "fine paid for killing a man".

Makes you glad you weren't alive back then, doesn't it?

Translators: The Magazine Mavens

Any translation professional will tell you to read trade journals obsessively. What I hadn’t expected was the specificity. Doing hardware reviews? Check Anandtech. Redesigning your kitchen? Kitchen & Bath Design has some ideas. Relocating your company? Pore over Area Development and Site Selection. It wouldn’t shock me to come across a magazine for back-office hotel-management-software developers programming only in FORTRAN. Finding it’s the only real hitch.

My absolute favorites, the magazines no one told me about in college, are the free ones from manufacturers. There’s SAP Info for business-process geeks, ABB Review for power-generation black belts or IBM eServer for – er, people who do that stuff. Admittedly, they’re chock-full of shameless plugs and you can’t believe any of the product claims, but the buzzwords are all in there. And, if you are doing SAP-related stuff, where else should you go but the horse’s mouth?

If you’re hankering for more substance, you can even get free newsletters from PwC, Accenture and Forrester Research, which deliver more bang for your non-existent buck.

The only problem is finding time to read it. I just slip it under my pillow, in the hopes that, yes, osmosis really does work like that.

On Sex and Violence

Today, at the gas station, I realized how inured I’ve become to pornography. Instead of deliberately glancing above the racks of big-bosomed, lip-licking trucker porn, I felt my gaze just brush by and over it as I cruised out the door. It was so anticlimactic that I thought it must really mean something.

It’s hard to explain pornography’s role in Europe to anyone who’s only lived within the U.S. Naked breasts appear on a fairly regular basis in Spiegel, the Germany’s equivalent of Time Magazine, and on an extremely rigid schedule on the front page of Bild-Zeitung, a rag which has no equivalent in the U.S. You go beyond accepting porn; you gradually assimilate it into your world view. It’s no longer surprising to see softcore action on public TV after 10:30 p.m. Gratuitous nudity is often used in comedies as a cheap laugh. Off-color jokes now seem only stupid; not stupid and embarrassing. Eventually, you become European in your outlook.

Then, you watch an American film and become overwhelmed by the sheer brutality of it all. I’m certainly not the first to note that most action-film heroes are homicidal psychopaths. And they always triumph by meting out to the villain a horrifically gruesome death. Over the years, I’ve developed a theory that this violence is America’s pornography. Lacking its natural outlet, the animal sex drive appeared, distorted and distended, as America’s love affair with guns, knives, boxing, you name it.

Caught Red-Handed

Is culpa in contrahendo Greek to you?

Check out this link. And this one.

God, I love the internet.

Three Short Months.

I occasionally scout out translation agencies. Partly out of curiosity or boredom, but mostly to reassure myself that I’m not getting a raw deal with my current agency clients. One website gave me a particular chuckle the other day. They talk about clients being “stupid” or “smart”. I stopped cold, though, when they said that 98% of their native-language translators live in their mother countries. They paraded it around like it was a real benefit. And here’s their reasoning:

“How long do you think it takes a person to start to lose their mother-tongue fluency after they have left their mother-country?

• A year?
• Two years?
• Five years?

The answer is three months. Just three months.

Language is fluid. It changes quickly. Both style and vocabulary evolve relentlessly. In the last decade, for example, more than 30,000 new words entered the English language. That's 3,000 new words a year. More than 8 new words every single day. One new word every 3 hours.

No surprise then that a translator living outside of their mother-country finds it difficult to produce contemporary texts - using appropriate style and terminology. So, whenever possible, we work with translators that live and work in their mother-tongue countries - something made possible by our investment in high-speed data and telecommunications technology.”

Did I resent that? Not really. They’re right about the three months, though.

As to their reasoning, here’s some food for thought:

1. Shakespeare is still widely read, despite the fact that, by the above reckoning, 1,164,000 new words have entered the English language since his death. He is also widely misunderstood.

2. Most English native speakers have an active vocabulary of 800 words. Most German native speakers have an active vocabulary of several thousand.

3. In Germany, there are enormous Turkish communities where only Turkish, not German, is spoken.

4. 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Eugenides lives in Berlin. Samuel Beckett lived in Paris.

5. The concept of “togethering” was presented and debated at a recent trade show. One of the expert panelists confessed that she didn’t know what “togethering” meant.

6. I don’t know any translators who memorize 8 new words every day. I haven’t memorized vocabulary in almost a decade.

Stigma of Slang

I’ve noticed that whenever I make a linguistic flourish, German clients will pounce on the phrase as “slangy” and ask to have it removed. I’m a professional, so I wince ever so slightly, and do it.

I wince because invariably these changes strip the voice out of the text. Once, I wrote something like “you don’t want to squander your time.” This was struck and replaced with “you don’t want to waste time or money.” Both are idiomatic, but one makes me want to continue reading. The other makes me want to yawn.

Agony of Advertising: Part 2

Irony of ironies - a copywriting course came in the mail today.

In my first post, I make my view abundantly clear that translation is a subset of writing. Sure, translation bridges languages and cultures, but the finished product is still black-on-white verbiage. And if you do it right, no one will know it’s a translation.

If you're an ivory-tower type, you can probably reel off a list of exceptions to my hard-and-fast rule. I’m the first to agree that word-for-word translations of the Yanomami language are anthropologically useful. But they don’t pay my bills.

What pays my bills is my ability to write (no catcalls, please!). This is a point novice translators miss. They figure that if it sounds authentic, then no one can quibble with it. Problem is, authentic English is often crap. You need to write excellent English. Hence my desire to polish my writing skills.

I picked this particular course because it offers ten graded assignments. So I’m forced to write ten texts, and someone has to critique them? Beautiful. Mainly because then I have no excuse for not writing.

Agony of Advertising

An entire German ad campaign was slung onto my virtual doorstep today. The catch: the one-hour turnaround.

I've never pulled my hair or gnashed my teeth like an Edgar Allen Poe character, but I came damn close today. The copywriter had crafted a miniature masterpiece: tight copy that felt loose. The ads allegedly sported quotes from real people, but someone had obviously sweated over those lines for hours until they were just so.

The bastard. I knew, I just knew he was only being that good to piss me off.

The Next Big Thing

Investment banking sounds like stodgy work. Not so. Just read what Monkey Business has to say about the thrills of writing pitch books:

“[The Strategic Considerations] section is a lot like a game of Boggle. The associate [investment banker] puts a bunch of sexy-sounding financial words into a shaker (“capital,” “synergy,” “efficiency,” value” …), then shakes the words up and peppers them randomly through a bunch of sentences that contain other random words. None of it makes any sense, but if it begins to sound enough like it’s out of a business school textbook, then the potential client will sometimes buy off on it and retain the investment bank to do a deal.”

Maybe I could offer this service directly to my clients. You know, cut out the whole investment banking middleman. It might be the next big thing.

The Greatest Gift

In some ways, agencies are the greatest gift to translators. They keep clients off of our backs so we can work. They tell clients “no” and why. They take all the shit for us, and let the texts filter down through to us. They’re like having a great secretary, in a way. Except they get paid more than your average secretary. Much more.

Wait a second here…