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New York Information for ATA Conference 2009

For those who will be attending the ATA’s 50th Conference in New York City (2009), h\Here is a post where we can all collaborate for ideas about how to enjoy our trip more. If you  have info to add about cheap flights, restaurants or other activities, add it in the comments below. We can post info on the CTA list too, but this way, it will all be in one place.

ATA Conference 2010 – Please Share Ideas for Visitors

Hello, CTA Members and Friends,

Denver will be hosting the American Translators Conference in the fall of 2010. As the local translators group, we can assist visitors by providing information about Denver and the region. To brainstorm about what information would be helpful to visitors, we have posted this article. Please feel free to add comments with your suggestions about information to share with visitors. As the conference nears, we will publish a list of ideas and share with visitors so that they get the most out of their visit.

It would also be fun to share CTA member’s restaurant recommendations  so visitors can hear it from the locals!

I have started us off below. All comments welcome!

An Interpreter as Eye-witness to History

Denver Plays Host to the Political Elite

by Rhoda Miller

 

I knew the assignment I had accepted would be exciting and even a bit scary, but I never imagined I would end up interpreting a speech by former President Bill Clinton. The five-day International Leaders’ Conference held by the National Democratic Institute (NDI) during the week of August 24-28 brought a host of prominent officials, policy-makers, pollsters and pundits to Denver. They were to discuss the US electoral process and related topics for an audience comprising some of the world’s top political leaders.

 

The first few panels dealt with the US electoral process, the role of caucuses, primaries, conventions, polls, the role of the press, campaign ads and anecdotes. Other sessions featured discussions on topics such as “Ensuring Democracy Delivers Real Dividends”; “Enhancing the US Role Around the World” and “Building a Better, Safer World: What Would an Obama Presidency Do” (A program organized with the Center for US Global Engagement with the foreign policy advisors to Senator Barack Obama).

 

On the first day, I found out that to reach my work station in the Stage Theatre, I had to climb two flights of fire stairs, push open two heavy fire doors and finally a voluminous curtain. On the other side, a guide wearing a headlamp waited to accompany me. Just follow the white line. Beyond that lay infinity. Don’t look down. I kept my eye on the lamp, remembering a tour I made of a coal mine on another assignment, and thinking this space was just as black and ominous. Once I settled safely in the interpreters’ booth, I turned on the small reading light, removed my glossary, notes, pad and set of sharpie pens from my briefcase. Then I put on my headset and microphone and dared to look down.

 

From my dark corner of deep space, the glare of the lights and TV cameras came as a shock. An entire set piece stretched out below. The booth was installed flush with the edge of the catwalk. Looking through the glass, I could have been sitting in the front seat of an SUV parked on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Not being overly fond of heights, I wondered briefly what would happen if I fell out of the sky and crashed onto the heads of hundreds of foreign leaders. I could have come close to shattering the glass ceiling!

 

Bringing me back to reality, the technician rushed in to check my headset to see if I could hear the speakers and to see if my voice carried into the earphones. A man rushed into the room below dangling earphones on one arm, shouting something I couldn’t hear. By this time, my partner had arrived. We discussed how often we would spell each other (every 15 or 20 minutes) and how we’d communicate with each other. Then suddenly Madeline Albright’s voice pierced my headphones as she began introducing the first moderator, Walter Mondale and the former chairmen of the Republican and Democratic National Committees.

 

From then on I had no time for distracting thoughts – no time to worry about a favorability rating or to react to the familiar names and faces of US and foreign leaders –former Senators Mike DeWine, Tom Daschle, Gary Hart, and Tim Wirth, the former prime ministers of Peru, Canada, Yemen and Chile, among others. All the panelists are listed on the NDI website along with their biographies).

 

To do this job, I would need a guru’s powers of concentration powers combined with the deftness of a musician in order to speak in counterpoint without missing a beat. It’s a mysterious process, akin to playing the oboe or the flute. However, there’s nothing magical about preliminary research – in this case scouring the French for terms like “flip flopper” (“girouette”), “go-it-alone” (“faire cavalier seul”) and “running mate” (“co-listier”) – not to mention “Swiftboating” and “Sam’s Club Republican”. (Le Monde has a special section on the US elections that includes blogs and video clips in French aimed at a fascinated public: “Obama et McCain courtisent le vote évangélique,” “Une girouette nommée McCain”).

 

For one of the five days, the conference was moved to Boettcher Concert Hall. This gave students from local schools and universities a once-in-a-lifetime chance to hear Tom Brokaw moderate a discussion of global poverty and the US image abroad with such luminaries as Ben Affleck, former majority leader Tom Daschle, and James Wolfensohn, former president of the World Bank, among others. Miraculously, my headset and microphone materialized overnight in a dressing room adjacent to the auditorium with a monitor to view the proceedings taking place in the next room. The staff at Boettcher was flexible enough to find other dressing rooms on short notice for the Spanish and Russian teams so that we wouldn’t interfere with one another. Ironically, this was the only day we were able to see the proceedings up close, but only on a monitor.

 

The serious ambience inside the two theatres belied the hoopla surrounding the Democratic Convention. Just a few blocks away, Manhattan-sized crowds poured out of the Pepsi Center into the restaurants and cafes of the 16th Street Mall. Outside the theatres, vendors hawked Obama dolls, talking donkeys, stuffed elephants and Hilary pens. On the other hand, I didn’t see a single funny hat anywhere near the International Leaders’ Conference.

 

Before the conference, I had interpreted for many international leaders, but I never thought I would be acting as a go-between (albeit anonymous) for Bill Clinton and a room full of world leaders. I should have predicted that when Denver native and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright puts a conference together for the National Democratic Institute, you never know who will show up.

 

 Not being a world leader myself, I realize that none of those big names would so much as recognize me if they saw me walking down 16th Street Mall. On the other hand, I don’t need a poll to tell me this event served to showcase Denver as a truly international city.  I’m glad to have played a small part in the process.

 

 

 

Searching MS Glossaries

Two Alternatives for Searching in MS glossaries

by Anna Kuzminsky

This article will describe two alternatives to managing Microsoft glossary searches. If you do not have the MS glossaries on your hard disk the only option is the Microsoft Language Portal. If you have the MS glossaries you can also use a nifty little local application called Ransack.

Let’s start with the MS Language Portal.
Use the URL http://www.microsoft.com/language, which will take you to the splash screen. On the bar to the left, select your language or Other Languages (at the bottom of the list) if your language is not listed. On the next screen, on the far right under Search Terminology, enter the English term, select your language and click on the Search button. The next screen shows two sections, Terminology and Software Strings. I do not have to explain the differences. At this point I recommend you bookmark this address (i.e. add it to your favorites), which means the next time you do not have to go through the first few steps described above, all you have to do is enter a new search word in the text box at the top and hit Enter or click on the magnifying glass.

 

Pros: The presentation is clean and well organized. You can see all the files the term occurs in. You do not have to have all the MS glossaries on your hard drive and they will always be current.

Cons: You have to be online. Only works with MS glossaries.

If you have all the MS glossaries you need and perhaps some additional glossaries and do not want to be online, try Ransack. The basic program is free and can be downloaded from http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/.

Once installed the opening screen looks like this:

 

First you have to browse to the folder where your glossaries are located (click on the button with the single folder icon). Then enter your search word and click on the Start Search button. A list of files containing the search word is displayed in the left column. Click on the file you want to look in, in this example I chose Word2007. The resulting screen will look something like this:

 

As you can see this program does not handle extended characters and is a little more cumbersome to use. I have not played around with other types of glossaries, since I tend to convert glossaries to files that I can import to a TM.

Pros: The program runs locally. There are advanced search functions that you can learn and use.

Cons: More complex, you have to click on each glossary to see the translation. And you have to have the glossaries on your hard drive.

A note if you use Vista. You have to download the WinHlp32.exe from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6EBCFAD9-D3F5-4365-8070-334CD175D4BB&displaylang=en to be able to use the help function in Ransack.

 

Training to Translate

by Marla Browne

Humid open-air hallways, chilly air-conditioned classrooms, and coqui frogs make studying at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus (UPR) a unique experience. Bright sun and balmy air fill the morning walk to class, thundering rainstorms thrash throughout the campus during the afternoon hours, and chirping coquis reverberate in the dark.

 

Beginning to offer courses in 1970, the graduate program in translation at UPR is a small and well-rounded program. Housed in a corner of the historic clock tower and with only two classrooms and six professors in its department, students are brought into a close-knit community of experienced and aspiring translators. The program consists of 45 credits, a graduate exam, and a thesis. Courses are offered in Spanish, English and French; however, Spanish <> English translation is the program’s emphasis. There are also opportunities for paid internships as the in-house translator for the Office of the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research.

 

The first-year curriculum focuses on syntax and writing courses in both the students’ native and second languages. Because the classes are mixed with students from different backgrounds, native speakers provide insights of their language to the other students, and vice versa. This approach offers students an invaluable current perspective of the language from which they will be translating.

 

Seminars on practical translation techniques and various subject matters balance the linguistic side of the curriculum. These courses include translating financial subject matter, print media, poetry and literature, and lessons in sight translation. The program also covers different translation theories, semiotics, and computer-assisted translation tools.

 

Once the courses have been completed, it’s time for the graduate exam. Students are given the choice between two 250-word passages of assorted styles and subject matter, and have three hours to complete the translation. With a passing grade on the exam, the thesis process can begin.

 

The thesis involves the translation of a text containing 15,000 to 17,000 words under the supervision of an advisor whose native language matches the target language of the text. The student will first prepare a proposal explaining why the chosen text should be translated, what the expected specific translation challenges are and how to overcome them. The student will also include a preliminary bibliography showing that resources are available and accessible for any needed research.

 

When the translation is finalized and the student has written a translator’s preface, he or she will select a panel of readers. The panel is made up of translation professors, translators, or specialists on the subject of the thesis. Finally, a defense date is set. During the defense, the student will defend the thesis and the translation decisions made before the panel. The panel will then come to an agreement and announce the final grade…and hopefully pop open a bottle of champagne!

Trados Tips by Anna Kuzminsky

Trados Seminar October 2008

On October 18 and 19, Angelika Zerfass, a SDL Trados specialist known in the industry as a “trainers’ trainer” and the “guru of CAT tools” offered a three-part seminar covering Workbench, TagEditor , and MultiTerm for beginners, intermediate and advanced users at Front Range Community College in Aurora. On Sunday afternoon, Angelika was joined in a panel discussion by three local Trados experts for a Q & A session on “Trados tips and tricks from the Pros” and general trends in translation: Micaela Novas, senior project manager at Syntes Language Group; Anna Kuzminsky, formerly with International Language Exchange and a freelance EN<>SW translator since 1991; and Barbara Peralta, Solutions Development Director for ForeignExchange Translations. CTA Secretary Kathy DiCenzo, who first studied Trados under Angelika nearly ten years ago, organized the event.

The Introduction to Trados/SDLX session for beginners on Saturday (attended by 18 translators and agencies) covered setting up a translation environment, interactive translation in TagEditor, creating a target language file, creating a translation project, interactive translation in SDLX, and how to export target language files. Angelika provided a Trados 2007 SP2 Demo Version and sample files so that participants could follow along on their laptops. Besides covering basic functions and setup processes, Angelika illustrated how to use WinAlign to quickly convert old source and target files into translation memories that can be used with new projects. Translation memories created either during translation in Translator’s Workbench or by using WinAlign are compatible with a variety of non-Trados tools, such as Wordfast and MemoQ. She gave an overview of MultiTerm, the Trados concordance tool that interacts with TagEditor and Translator’s Workbench, detailing how to set up a template, how to manually input entries and how build a concordance during translation. She also explained how to print out MultiTerm glossaries in a variety of formats and how to set filters to filter out certain fields. She demonstrated how to deliver “cleaned” and “uncleaned” files, the most basic format usually requested by agencies that require Trados.

Angelika named some of the best freeware extraction and concordancing tools, such as SCP (Simple Concordance Program) and ExPhr32. She especially recommended Oliphant, by ENLASO Tools, which is not only freeware but open source. The most promising tool is MemoQ, a full free freelance version of which may be downloaded at kigray.com, which is compatible with translations memories and concordances created with Trados.

The Intermediate Trados seminar covered how to prepare and translate different file formats in TagEditor, including MS Office (Word, PPT, Excel), and XML files. Angelika showed how to check formalities like tags, numbers, and punctuation with TagEditor QA Checker. She went into further detail on how to create a terminology database with MultiTerm, and how to save terms directly from TagEditor. 22 people attended.

In the Advanced Trados seminar on Sunday morning, Angelika demonstrated how to convert term lists in Excel format to MultiTerm. Most translators have glossaries in Excel format, and MultiTerm allows you to quickly import these glossaries to MultiTerm. She also covered Setup, Project Settings and Translation Memory Options in Workbench. She went into detail on how to run macros on files to prepare them for translation, for example how to batch exclude certain terms and types of terms from translation. A list of these macros and shortcuts were made available to seminar attendees. 15 people attended.

During the “Tips from the Pros” panel on Sunday afternoon, the panel participants shared some of their favorite Trados tips and discussed new trends in the industry. 10 people attended.

Some tips offered were:

• Exporting large Translation Memories and then zipping them to make them easier to email.
• Keep TMs separate using the “Attributes” feature in Trados to maintain confidentiality.
• Anna provided many valuable tips. See “Trados Tips from Anna Kuzminsky”

New trends in the industry:

Barbara from ForeignExchange says that clients are pushing for a greater use of TagEditor (versus Word) and the need for translators to run TagVerifier before delivery. This came as a surprise to many participants due to reliability issues with TagEditor. Most translators opted to translate in Word instead. Now those bugs have been largely corrected and TagEditor is becoming the new industry standard instead of Word, since it will save formatting often lost when using Word. Trados, like other CAT (computer assisted translation) tools, is moving away from support for .doc based files in favor of .xml files, which is likewise becoming the new industry standard. TagEditor also gives higher word counts than Word.

All participants highly recommended using the tw_users Yahoogroup, as well as the Proz.com user groups dedicated to tools and technology. Kathy suggested simply inserting any Trados error message into Google to access related posts from these different groups.

Also discussed were:

• Jost Zetzsche’s sites http://www.translatorstraining.com/sito/ which allows you to test out different tools and http://www.tipsfortranslators.com/links.asp .
• The European Union just made their Translation Memory Tools available at http://langtech.jrc.it/DGT-TM.html#Download .
• Microsoft has made its user interfaces available for download in Excel format at the MS language portal.
• AlignFactory by Terminotics, which is said to be more intelligent and accurate than the comparable Trados tool, WinAlign.
• Limitations of Synergy as a Project Management tool.
• Rumors about Trados’s plans to merge the Passolo, SDLX and Trados platforms sometime within the next 2 years.
• Ownership of TMs
• Other SDL tools such WinAlign, S-Tagger for converting FrameMaker files, and non-Trados translation memory management and project management tools such as MemoQ and Oliphant (a Translation Memory maintenance tool)

We received outstanding feedback for all four seminars and many expressed the hope that Angelika will soon return. We would like to shift focus for now, however, and turn to organizing events on SDLX, Wordfast and “MS Word and Excel Advance Features”. Please contact kathy@kdtranslaitons.com if you have suggestions for speakers.

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Using Auto Text in TagEditor

You can enter a word or a phrase that you find you have to type often into the Auto-text feature in TagEditor. Open the function by clicking on the little icon that looks like a keyboard with a hand typing on it (top row, all the way to the right – unless you have modified the tool bars). Please note that the function does not understand upper and lower case, in such a way that you can have both “Klicka på” and “klicka på”.

The Auto Text window opens. Please note that I have used the second method of entering items (see below).

Type in a word or a phrase and click on Add. Keep adding until you have added all the words or phrases you want – you can add more later. If you make a typo or find a word or a phrase that you don’t want in there anymore, you can select the word and click on Delete.

You can also open the file AutoText.txt – use the Search function in Windows XP to find it, in Vista it is saved in Users,”User name”, Appdata, roaming, trados. There you can enter and acronym or part of the word, tab, entire word/phrase, for example:

akt aktivitet

alt alternativ

Then in TagEditor you enter akt, press Enter and the phrase “alternativ” is inserted.

I suggest printing out the list from NotePad, because you forget and the entire entry does not show in the AutoText window. I find myself deleting most of the terms I have used in one project and entering new ones for my current project to be able to keep all the terms in my head. Sometimes it is faster to just type the word.

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Converting Excel files to bilingual files for cleaning into a Trados TM

Let’s assume you have the source in column A and the translation in column B.

Enter the Concatenate formula in cell C1 or any other cell in the first row of an empty column:

=CONCATENATE(“{0>”,A1,”<}100{>”,B1,”<0}”)

(Replace cell references A1 and B1 if you have your language pair in other columns).

As you can see {0>, <}100{> and <0} are the codes that Trados inserts between the source and the target when you translate a file in Word.

Select the C1 cell, copy the cell, select all the cells in column C that need the copied formula and select Paste, Formulas.

Copy the rows with the bilingual text from column C and paste into a NotePad or Word file. Save the as txt ANSI. It is very important to save as ANSI if your language includes extended characters!

Create a new TM (or open an existing one) and create and/or select any necessary attributes (see my article in a previous issue of the CTA Newsletter). Clean the file into the TM.

Past Newsletter Archives (PDF) Available Here

To access past newsletter issues, from when the CTA newsletter was published in PDF format, click here:

http://cta-web.org/newsletter.php