Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before...

The Naked Translator stole my scoop today, but the story is so important that it deserves double billing.

Here's a selective quote from the BBC article:

Booker Prize to award translators

A new award honouring translators has been announced by the organisers of the international Booker Prize.

Chairman of the international Booker judging panel John Carey said: "We became increasingly aware of the huge role translators play in making first-rate fiction accessible to a global audience".

Is this just another prize? Hardly. The Booker Prize is hands down the best literary prize in the English language. The Nobel Prize is highly politicized. The Pulitzer is vanilla mainstream. But the Booker? It’s take-no-prisoners innovative. Last year’s winner was excellent, if a bit straightlaced. The also-ran Cloud Atlas, however, is the literary equivalent of a brain transplant: you never see the world the same way again.

Now take that cutting-edge approach and apply it to translation. Beautiful. I can’t wait. I really can’t.

The Wages Of Sin, Or: Does Sin Pay?

Knowing we are all sinners at heart, ClientSide News LLC decided to publish the most brazen whore of a translation journal I have ever seen. It is a shameless, vapid, blatant vehicle for translation vendor advertisements.

Interested? I knew you would be! Click here, and be sure to check your scruples at the door!

Why I Love My Agency Clients

A little while ago, a client "fixed" a press release I had translated. Call me a frustrated poet, but the changes squelched any aspirations that text ever had.

So what did I do? I complained to the agency and got an immediate response. They told me to ignore the changes - they would talk to the client for me.

Who, me bitch about agencies? Never!

New Translation Portal

Among translation portals, the new kid on the block is BabelPort.

Unlike the other portals, it offers translation industry news. Hmmm. Maybe it will be a real competitor for ProZ.

Their opening page is refreshingly casual:

Why babelport.com and what's the deal with this ugly logo?

I agree. Their logo is absolutely hideous.

Their explanation is slightly surreal:

We saw was the Monument of the Battle of Nations, the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, commemorating the Battle between Napoleonic Troops and the Prussian and Russian Allies of 1813. So we figured: “This thing is huge, monstrous, old, and it still stands!“.

That's as good a reason as any, I guess.

Google AdNonsense

People say the internet has revolutionized translation. Bullshit. Google has revolutionized translation. Now, if you can’t find a word on Google, it doesn’t exist.

So many of us have become Google drones that we advertise in droves with Google’s AdSense program. Enter “translation agency” in Google and you’ll pull up a bewildering array of AdSense ads and hits, all basically the same.

I, too, rode the AdSense bandwagon. At first, I hovered near the phone with sweaty palms and a dry throat, expecting a deluge of clients. In a four-month period, I had two destitute Ph.D. students ask me to translate their 600-page dissertations. (One of them even requested a per-word rate “because I’ll be revising it later.”) There was one inquiry from an electronics firm who answered neither my calls nor my e-mails. And, mysteriously, six inquiries for English into Dutch.

The vast majority of inquiries, however, went something like this:

From: PrettyGirl16
To: Trench Warrior
Sent: Monday, March 21, 2002 3:35 PM
Subject: PLS PLS PLS HELP!!!!

Cn u translaet this!!! I need it real bd!!! THX SO MUCH!!!!!!! ;-) ;-)

Ill chx 4 it 2morrow!!! THX THX!!!!!!

Attached was a ten-page term paper downloaded from a cheat site.

Suffice to say, I cancelled the service pretty quickly.

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…