Tag Archives: xl8

4 takeaways on contract translation

Last month I attended the Dual German / English Contracts Workshop with Rebecca Smith and Angela Sigee at ITI HQ in Milton Keynes. Strictly speaking I don’t ‘do’ legal translation, but for a direct client I have been doing some licensing agreements and legal letters, so I thought that this workshop might give me some useful hints and tips. I wasn’t disappointed!

Some of the main takeaways for me were:
• Who is the translation for? Probably a judge or lawyer, not a layperson as you might expect, so technical language doesn’t need to be explained or avoided.
• Although plain English is favoured, some legalese has particular meanings which can be useful or purposeful. For example: may, shall, hereby – so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel if these expressions don’t change the meaning, just use them!
• Always a tricky one: shall. If you’re not sure if you should use it, try the obligation test – are you expressing ‘have a duty to’? If your sentence still makes sense when you replace shall with have a duty to, you’re using it properly.
• You should try and turn German passive verbs into English active verbs where possible unless it sounds aggressive as an active verb.

RESOURCES
Rebecca gave us some fantastic resources; one for me to read further is this eBook by Rob Lunn (www.legalspaintrans.com): http://www.legalspaintrans.com/wp-content/uploads/book/A_Systematic_Approach_to_Translating_Contracts_into_English.pdf
And this great quick reference from Adams On Contract Drafting (www.adamsdrafting.com ):
http://www.adamsdrafting.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/CoCL-Quick-Reference-2-February-2017.pdf

Overall, an invaluable workshop – I’ve already used some of the expressions we covered when looking at some sample contracts in our groups.

If you want to learn more about the workshop, look out for my write-up in the next issue of the ITI Bulletin in July!

twitterlinkedinby feather

New year, new you?

If you’re starting off the new year with some resolutions, why not add some CPD ones? They’re actually perfect as SMART targets – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely – so you’ll be more likely to stick to them!
There are plenty of providers out there, my favourites being the ITI and the language, regional and subject-specific groups as well as eCPD webinars. You could attend a workshop or webinar learning about something lecture-style or you could try out one of the mentoring schemes that some of the ITI groups run and actually get feedback on your translations, in a new area, for example. That’s what I did when I took part in the ITI German Network’s mentoring scheme. It was a great opportunity and I can highly recommend it!

I wrote about it for the GerNet Netzblatt in June 2017, if you missed it you can read it here too:
I entered translation as a bit of a generalist and was quite conscious that I would probably do better (read: earn more money!) by specialising. So, when an agency I had been working for asked me to take a test for some financial work they were expecting, I gave it a go and was accepted. The work never materialised from the agency but I did start investigating the field; I took some courses, did a few financial translations and proofread some annual reports, but I needed to do more.
I had been considering the GerNet mentoring scheme for a while, and finally took the plunge in the summer of 2016 when I thought work would be quieter. The GerNet coordinator paired me with Laura Byrne, a German to English translator who worked as a financial analyst in a former life. After being assigned to each other we had a Skype conversation to discuss the kind of areas I was interested in and for Laura to find out about my prior knowledge. The idea was to build on what I already knew and Laura managed to find texts that did just that.
The first two texts were very similar but meant that what I learned in the first one, I was able to put into practice in the second, something I found really useful – how often do we learn things and forget them by the next time we need them? So I liked this approach because it helped cement my knowledge. The third text was a slightly different area and a lot more challenging.

Overall we worked together for seven months, allowing up to a month for a piece of work at busy times. I know that’s unusual in the industry, but I couldn’t see the point in rushing a translation to a meet a short deadline and not learn anything from it – for me it was a learning process; I wanted to read through the text, look up terminology and research around the subject a bit before actually translating. Fortunately Laura shared this opinion and could be flexible around deadlines too, often revising my work within a couple of days. Overall I spent far more time on it than I am allowed to put on my CPD record, but it was much more worthwhile.
One of the first things I learned from Laura was about style. My impression of financial writing – limited as it was to the financial press – was that it uses a lot of idiom and metaphor. I thought that if the German used different words to express certain ideas, I would have to do the same – and here I’m mainly thinking of terms like increase/decrease which came up a lot in all three texts. But Laura pointed out that her experience reading and writing lengthy documents as an analyst had taught her that ‘clarity’ is the guiding principle, because as she said, investors or analysts need to “absorb the information as painlessly as possible”. So while it’s nice to be able to dress up a text with synonyms and metaphor, clarity should always take priority for these types of texts.
Naturally, there were many specifics that Laura helped me with; from explaining that I shouldn’t use documents from banks for building a financial corpus (their structures tend to be much more complicated than a simple limited business), to how best to translate anything with Konjunktur in it – despite having studied modules on ‘German economy’ at university, I have never felt comfortable translating this term, but Laura gave me some great tips to deal with it confidently in future. She also explained the difference and when/how to use terms that may seem interchangeable to the untrained eye e.g. Aktien/Renten/Anleihen/Securities…
From the first Skype conversation and throughout the mentoring, Laura sent me a wealth of useful links, and recommendations or suggestions for further reading – this has been one of the most useful things about the mentoring scheme for me, because I can continue to progress with this guided learning – now I just need the time!
Other topics we discussed were possible approaches for getting financial work as a newbie to the field, who to trust or not on dict.cc (which has a large financial section) and the merits of Dragon.
Of course, I know I still have a lot to learn about finance to be able to call myself an expert, but the scheme gave me the reassurance that I was looking for: I am not ill-suited to this type of work and I do have some flair for it. I learned so much from the mentoring, it really was an invaluable experience and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to up their game!
Good luck and all the best for a happy, healthy and successful 2018!

twitterlinkedinby feather

Labrador/ˈlabrədɔː/

If you look up Labrador in the dictionary there are generally two definitions, the Canadian province (Newfoundland and Labrador) and a breed of dog. The dog is named after the place, by the way. But last week I found a third ‘definition’, if you will.

I have always wondered why a pretty bay in Devon would be named after a breed of dog, so last week we stopped at the Labrador Bay car park to find out* and I learned that the origins of the name are believed to come from the French, l’abri d’or or shelter of gold. Well, that makes a lot of sense in those parts; smuggling did a roaring trade on the South West coast in the 18th century and you only have to go into Shaldon and there’s the Smugglers Tunnel. Mystery solved, or maybe not. What if (and I couldn’t find any evidence either way), the name is more to do with the Newfoundland cod trade and fisheries, a big employer at the time? Rather coincidental, don’t you think? But today, on European Day of Languages, I am going to believe that the name was influenced by our closer neighbours and the French language. #europeandayoflanguages

* We walked the coastal path to Maidencombe, but be warned, it’s VERY hilly and not for the faint-hearted or exercise-shy!

twitterlinkedinby feather

Amanda

06/10/2015

The tatty sheet of paper stuck on my wall for checking French and German ALT codes got even tattier when I had my office redecorated earlier this year. I didn’t want to put it back up again because a) it was torn and b) it wasn’t really fit for purpose because I had to get up and unpin it every time I wanted to look at it…no, I had to reinvent the wheel! So now the codes are kept pristine in some cheerful frames within reaching distance. Much more ‘shabby chic’ then just plain ‘shabby’.

2015-09-23 15.17.50

twitterlinkedinby feather

memoQ Level One Certified

A week or so back I had some spare time, so decided to complete the online memoQ training modules. I’ve been using memoQ for a while but I still learned a few new tips and tricks so it was worth doing! I passed too and can now proudly use this logo 🙂memoQ_level1_certified_logoIf you’re a memoQ user, I also came across this useful link from Kilgray for resources and help: memoQ resources

twitterlinkedinby feather

Shedding Light

Published in ITI Bulletin May/June 2015

Friday 20th March 2015. Not your average Friday because of the partial eclipse forecast for the UK. Everywhere people flocked outside in their droves to catch a glimpse (from behind ‘eclipse glasses’ or using pinhole projectors, naturally!) and outside the Main Building at Aston University was no different. Thanks to Emmanuelle Jeannot who brought some glasses along, members of the West Midlands Group were able to safely view the eclipse before getting stuck into their Translation Workshop and AGM. Who said that AGMs are dull and boring?! For me the eclipse was overshadowed by the WMG event! The day was lively with a festive atmosphere, ‘partially’ due to the eclipse but probably more to do with the opportunity for networking with colleagues old and new.

Once everyone had made their way inside for coffee and the welcome, groups were formed for the translation workshops; French, German, Italian and even Danish this time. Colleagues had brought along texts either about solar eclipses or containing rhymes and other translation challenges. The French translation workshop I joined tackled the song Le soleil et la lune a 1930’s song by Charles Trenet. The song is about an impossible meeting of the sun with the moon and is a metaphor for romantic rendezvous between men and women on Earth. The most obvious challenge was to match our translation to the music of the song. Beyond that we also discussed how we would deal with the gender of the sun (Mr Sun?) and the moon (Lady Moon?) and discovered that translating into Polish would be even harder than into English  because the moon is a masculine noun and the Sun is neutral!

After refuelling with a sandwich lunch we moved on to the serious business of the day: the AGM. Fortunately that was all concluded quickly and painlessly and we were soon listening to Lloyd Bingham’s talk about Twitter. Very practical, especially for those of us just starting out because we could then join in at the TweetUp organised by TweetOutWest after the workshop at Aston.

In the afternoon translation session, I stayed with the French group as Emmanuelle Jeannot had brought along some French idioms for us to look at – some of these were really intriguing but Emmanuelle gave us print-outs of the meanings and origins to help us understand them. Who knew that cats feature in so many French idioms! “Chat échaudé craint l’eau froide”, literally a scalded cat is scared of cold water (I wonder if this is where scaredy-cat comes from?) is equivalent to the English proverb “once bitten, twice shy”. Great tip: You can sign up to Expressio.fr and receive French idioms daily.

To finish off the day we relocated to Bacchus Bar in the Burlington Arcade to practise our new-found Twitter skills and socialise with colleagues. Bacchus is a bit of a find; on Birmingham’s oldest street, with its imposing vaulted interior, it’s like being in an abbey and surprisingly the prices weren’t sky-high! Linguist Bingo got everyone networking with questions like ‘what’s your USP?’ or ‘what’s the strangest thing you’ve translated/interpreted?’. One lucky person’s most exciting assignment was interpreting for a contestant in a treasure hunt around London for a luxury cosmetics brand. Sadly, they didn’t get a goody bag! And here’s a great suggestion for an ‘ideal CPD event’: Something combining wine-tasting with translation.

Many thanks to the organisers, Juliet Hammond-Smith and Charlie Gobbett, for such an enjoyable and interesting event. The next total eclipse isn’t until 2090 in the UK but fortunately we won’t have to wait that long till the next WMG event; the 10th anniversary summer walk is on Saturday 19 July 2015! All being well, it will be in the Severn Valley near Highley, scene of the first walk in July 2005.

twitterlinkedinby feather

ITI MAT Tourism Workshop with Oliver Lawrence in London

*Update: was sorely tempted to ‘borrow’ the National Geographic Traveller magazine at the dentist’s as there was an article about Paris 😉

I recently made my way down to Imperial College London for my first ITI MAT workshop on tourism; my Masters dissertation topic was tourism translation so it’s a field of particular interest which I’m still trying to break into…

The workshop was in two parts – a presentation by Oliver Lawrence, an IT to EN translator and copywriter, followed by a panel discussion including Charlie Gobbett, Isabel Brenner, Alison Hughes and Oliver.  The workshop was really interesting but 6 questions (see below) in Oliver’s presentation stood out as being most relevant for a fledgling tourism translator such as myself and I decided to analyse these in this blog. I’ve included highlights of the data Oliver provided at the end of this post after I’ve summarised the findings which were most significant to me.

The presentation was based on a survey that Oliver had sent out specifically to tourism translators in order to fill gaps in his knowledge and learn from other translators in a systematic, rather than ad hoc way (article in the ITI Bulletin soon). His sample size was 73 and he received 37 responses. Questions covered areas such as the type of texts translated and how often translators travelled, to whether translators write for travel publications and have Search Engine Optimization (SEO) skills.

The 6 questions:

  • Have you worked in the travel industry, and has this helped?
  • What do you do to find direct clients?
  • What sales arguments do your clients find persuasive?
  • What are the main skills that a travel translator needs?
  • How did / do you develop your specialisms?
  • What kinds of CPD do you do for travel translation?

Summary of findings

I was rather relieved to learn that it doesn’t matter that I don’t have a background in tourism – you know how important it is in some industries to have proper work experience or a degree in that field – but seemingly for tourism translation it is not the case. My previous work experience, which involved communicating with a range of different clients, means I’m already used to tailoring my writing to different audiences and this should help.

On the other hand, I did find it a bit worrying that there aren’t any surefire things I can do to find new clients since many translators said they rely on word of mouth and being found – but I’m networking at events and online and I can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter etc. As for sales arguments that work, I had intended to approach badly translated websites (my Masters dissertation revealed that many tourism websites do not fulfil their ‘persuasive function’ in terms of promotional tourism language and webstyle) so I was disappointed to find that this tactic tended to yield little success. But it’s not all bad! By changing the slant of my ‘cover email’ to demonstrate the ‘benefit’ of using me (a professional translator)  such as avoiding losing customers, rather than highlighting ‘features’ such as my good writing style I should pique their interest and possibly gain a customer.

In terms of the main skills, some of these can be self-taught and naturally good writing and copywriting skills are paramount – I’m glad then, that I went on the German Network’s copywriting workshop a couple of years ago!  I was concerned that knowing industry specific terminology would be a high priority but it seems it’s more important to have good knowledge about places and be enthusiastic about learning more about them or new places, as well as knowing how to quickly research the things you don’t know. For a naturally curious person (aren’t all translators anyway?) it’s no problem!

I must say that I was surprised that in this field it’s client demand which has helped translators develop their specialism. I really thought it would be more down to people’s love of particular tourist destinations or types of holiday that would motivate them to learn more about them and thus become an expert. I lived in Paris for a year and love it there, so there I was checking off  some of the skills-needed boxes above and thinking I could translate tourism literature on Paris…now I ‘just’ have to find some clients who need their Paris brochure translated into English!

Whilst I was at the presentation, I had already started a list in my head of what I could and should be doing to improve my chances in this field, but the results from Oliver’s survey gave me more ideas for CPD and resources beyond Wikipedia 😉 although I will resist the urge to ‘borrow’ any glossy travel magazines from the dentist’s next week! 🙂

The workshop was well worth attending and has given me the confidence that I can become a specialist in the tourism translation field: my previous experience covers some of the essentials and I can always teach myself anything else! Of course, it was also lovely to meet and put faces to people I otherwise only know from ITI forums. I really enjoyed the networking with (new) colleagues so many thanks to Alison Hughes for organising. The venue was convenient too and I got a gluten free lunch 🙂 just sorry I couldn’t have the famous ‘macarons’!

Brief headlines from the survey data

Sample size:73

Responses: 37

Number of respondents to a question/comment shown in brackets

  • Have you worked in the travel industry, and has this helped?
    • No, not worked in the  travel industry (20)
    • Travel industry experience has helped with: what’s important for clients & tourists; in-depth knowledge of market and trends; corporate communications
    • BUT one respondent commented that they thought it would’ve been a bigger selling point
  • What do you do to find direct clients?
    • Nothing /  they find me / word of mouth / referrals (21)
    • Email / direct mail (11) – postcard campaign; mass mailing; cold mailing to badly translated websites
    • Trade fairs /networking / blogging /website
    • Limited success actively marketing self: contacting badly translated sites; trade fair leads came to nothing or opposite language direction needed
  • What sales arguments do your clients find persuasive?
  • Features
    • Don’t actively sell (9)
    • My experience (6)
    • Quality (5)
    • Good writing style / creativity (5)
  • Benefits
    • Improve client’s business  / increase and attract more and avoid losing customers  (5)
    • Recommendations and examples of work (4)
  • What are the main skills that a travel translator needs?
      • Excellent writing (12)
  • How did / do you develop your specialisms?
    • Client demand (12)
    • Previous experience (4)
    • Personal interest  (2) and personal reading / location
  • What kinds of CPD do you do for travel translation?
    • Reading online travel articles / blogs / newsletters / Facebook posts for destinations / tourist boards, tour operators or expats (23)
    • Travel / country magazines (22)
    • Travelling (keeping eyes open to soak up translations) (19)
    • Collecting leaflets and brochures when on the move (“stealing glossies from the doctor’s surgery”) (10)

twitterlinkedinby feather

ITI WMG Workshop, AGM and TweetUp

Last Friday I attended the ITI West Midlands Group Translation Workshop and AGM at Aston University. Who said that AGM’s are dry and boring?!

The day was lively with a festive atmosphere, possibly due to the partial eclipse (thanks Emmanuelle Jeannot for letting me have a look through your glasses!) but probably more to do with the opportunity for networking with (new) colleagues. The French translation workshop I joined tackled a song, idioms and a tourist brochure – fascinating! To finish off the day, Lloyd Bingham of @tweetoutwest organised a TweetUp with a few drinks at Bacchus Bar, a lovely bar on one of Birmingham’s oldest streets. A great find!

Many thanks to the organisers, Juliet Hammond-Smith and Charlie Gobbett, for such an enjoyable and interesting event, looking forward to the next one!

twitterlinkedinby feather

The Art of Marketing

I recently attended an ITI German Network event in Birmingham to learn the ‘art’ of marketing. Rachel Goodchild (@RachelGoodchild) presenting, taught us all about the worlds of Twitter and Blogging. Being completely new to Twitter, this was a bit of an eye-opener. I’ll be honest with you, I couldn’t see the point of Twitter previously – other than for sending cute cat pictures to your friends, that is! And apparently, that’s allowed (occasionally) even if you’re only using Twitter professionally; it shows you’re human 🙂 (but I don’t think that’s a licence to talk incessantly about a certain singer and her tour, do you?!).

If you’d like to read more about using Twitter and blogging, both Kari Koonin (http://bit.ly/18Ak2cg) and Elisabeth Hippe-Heisler (http://bit.ly/1BBjP4l) have written excellent reports on the event.

twitterlinkedinby feather