Post about Common good and Sex with Strangers

It is actually about the revamped web site, but I will start from afar.

January is a strange month for L10N crowd. December is traditionally hyperactive — every translation buyer and reseller is eager to make it by Christmas no matter what, getting rid of all the loose ends, accumulated for the whole year of indolence. And all the tin soldiers, including yours truly, are expected to run the extra mile for the common good, so that GPM, and the team could go on holiday with an easy mind, and considerable bonus.

But we don't mind, more work means more cash, and annual December tsunami of crash jobs transforms our pupils to dollar signs, when it comes to invoicing.

But then suddenly it's all over. Christmas and New Year holidays are followed by [relatively] lethargic January, but we are still in high-throttle mode. Bored, and agitated, we are desperately looking for occupation to channel all that energy. Computer games, blogging, moving furniture, sex with strangers, extreme sports... You name it.

For me January 2013 was a month of web tinkering. I completely reworked visual part of my site, and made some major changes in its content. It was fun, though not nearly as much fun as sex with strangers would be. Here's how it looked before:

Look around and compare. B&W rules, is it not?

On content side there's a Dashboard (hit Googies button on the left, for now it includes Acronym Finder and Multitran scripts, as well as a couple of interesting links), Freelance L10N Quote of the Day page, and snippet (more on that later), various dynamic elements across the site, and modified messaging. Yes, that was a marcom speech.

Note that it's still WIP, so expect minor hicups. Suggestions, and bug reports are welcome. Did I say that black and white rules? I guess I did...

Bookshelf update — controversial Russian reference

On Monday I have announced a «very special reference» to be posted the same day. Obviously it didn't happen, but it's better late than never. Without further ado I give you ГОСТ 2.105-95 Общие требования к текстовым документам. What's so special about it?

First of all, being an active [inter]national standard, this document is mandatory, and you are formally  obliged to follow it, at least for technical translation.

At the same time, it contains huge amount of outdated, unneeded, unrealistic, and controversial provisions, that nobody follows these days. Obviously, this opens a wide array of abuse possibilities for a willing reviewer. Here's some examples:

• You can't use any acronyms, unless they are outlined in National Standards.
• You can't use minus sign (-) in the continuous text, type the whole «minus» word or die.
• Table of contents title should be centered.
• You can't use borrowed words, if Russian analog exists (:trollface:).
• Table column is actually called «графа», my friend.
• A zillion of conventions for tables, UOMs, external, and internal references, you are definitely violating all the time.
• Etc.

Have fun.

PS: <Serious mode on>Those who are making their first steps in this business, and aim for hardcore technical translation, should learn this this paper by heart, as well as all other relevant standards. We have all become too relaxed, too casual with all that MS Office apps, CATs, search engines, and online dictionaries around us. Being uncompromisingly rigorous, and precise in the world casual Margarita-drinking dabblers may become one's real competitive edge. Note however, that this path is tough is unrewarding for most.<Serious mode off>

PPS: I'd like to know more about applicability of government-imposed National Documentation Standards to real word translation work in different countries. Have you heard about those? Are they relevant? Usable? Feel free to post a comment, if you have something to say.

Comeback... sort of

I am posting this after a really long break, caused by a couple of local crunch periods, as well as one major flood, which once again changed my idea of peak, and sustained productivity. Besides, there was Mass Effect 3 (Shepard... Noooooo!), which has also taken its toll on my time. Anyway, I'm back, and willing to invest some more time in this blog, whether anyone reads it, or not.

Today I will publish a very special reference that will allow a peaky, sore, or simply bored reviewer to soundly fail any Russian translation in technical domain. No kidding!

I am also poring over a couple of big posts, that will most likely make their way here:

The 1st one is about stepping above, and beyond the limits of freelance career. Our means to evolve are quite limited... Or are they? Think about it. I know one thing: when I am fourty, there should be no crunches, or floods in my life.

The 2nd one is based on several online discussions I followed, or took part in. Quite a lot of people are upset about low rates, unfair agency practices, competetion... and they seem to think that translation market can, and should be regulated to solve these problems — mandatory translator accreditations, forced rates, more demanding unions... What a bunch of pinkos. Nyet, Molotov! Not a chance!

Stay tuned!

Oh, one more thing. According to successful bloggers, one should engage their audience into discussion to become established. Soooooooo... How do you like Mass Effect 3 ending?

Android phone for a Freelance Translator

This may sound unobvious, especially for a conservative bunch, skeptical about all that gadgetry, but Android qwerty slider is arguably one of the best productivity/GTD tools a Freelance Translator can get. I am pretty sure, that Windows Phone 7 devices can also do the job with different tools and methods, and so does Blackberry, but I don't know much about those two. And no, iPhone is not an option here. Give it to your kids. In this post we shall cover capabilities of Android phones in context of Freelancer's life, and workflow.

Mail Client with Push notifications

All your customers naturally want you to reply their emails ASAP, and you want to comply. From my experience, reaction time is one of top Translator's qualities from PM perspective, 20 minutes during your business hours is a good figure, and in case if you think that it would be like "conforming to a customer", you are right, that's exactly what it is.

Why Android? Because of its integration with Google Apps, and specifically Gmail. You are getting immediate push notification on incoming emails, the phone can vibrate if necessary. When you receive such notification, you simply swipe the screen, and type your reply. The experience is as smooth as with your regular texting.

Why slider? Onscreen keyboard would make it much slower, and more painful. Trust me, you don't want to try that.

Your phone provides seamless access to your business email when you're away from home, AND when you are on your couch, in your kitchen or your garage. You don't have to attend your desktop to check the email anymore, which is a good thing. Spending 10-30 minutes less per day in front of the monitor can actually help you live longer.

Wi-Fi Tethering

Any freelancer needs a backup Internet connection. Period. If you don't think so, wait untill you loose a customer because of missed deadline. Android phones can tether (share) their 3G connections via USB or Wi-Fi, which means that all your Wi-Fi devices will stay connected during the outage, and switchover will be relatively transparent. I know, that there are lots of smarter/more efficient/cheaper ways to get a backup connection (you can buy a USB 3G/LTE modem, or a router with two WAN inputs), but this one is good enough to stay online, use email, and various online resources. Besides, if you already have the phone, you don't need to buy anything.

The feature is called 3G Mobile Hotspot, and it's available with all newer versions. There should also be unofficial mods/apps with the same functionality.

Getting Things Done

Another great feature is project tracking/GTD across all your devices: tablets, laptops, PCs, etc. At any point of time you may have 4 to 10 and more projects on your shoulders with deadlines ranging from "ASAP" and "in 3 hours" to "in 5 weeks" and "whenever you have time" (the worst of them all). Even seasoned translators make mistakes here, forgetting about very small tasks with very large timeframe, confusing "Noon" with "EOB", and "EOB our time" with "EOB your time" (happened to me recently).

You can register your project emails as events or tasks in Google Calendar, and access your project schedule from all your devices — PCs, tablets, laptops, et cetera. Even from Internet-enabled TV, if you have one.

This will work not only for your projects, but also for other stuff your need to do at some point as a business, or house owner (financial reporting to government, paying your bills, and taxes etc.), and even as a partner/spouse/parent/child (birthdays, and other important dates, school events, you name it). Adding GTD to one's lifestyle requires a major change of habits, and it is not for everybody, but anyone will benefit from using this approach for production, and bookkeeping.

There are plenty of free, and paid apps, that synchronize with Google Calendar. My preferences are Gtasks, and Pure Grid Calendar.

Social Media

I am only starting to use Social Networks for marketing, my Twitter account is like 2 weeks old, so I don't have much to say on the subject. Pretty obvious however, that it makes much more sense, if one maintains their social influence (tweeting, retweeting, answering comments, etc.) on a small screen, and while doing something else, like travelling in a subway, or waiting in some kind of line. There are plenty of native and 3rd party clients for your social accounts. Things to try: Hootsuite, Twitdeck.

Conclusion

To sum up: qwerty phone improves your relationships with your customers, ensures peace of mind as a backup connection media, helps to maintain your schedule, and bookkeeping, as well as to stay away from your monitor. In the end it saves great deal of time. Worth a try, don't you think?

I have probably missed one or two interesting use cases, so comments/additions are welcome. I also encourage WP7 owners to describe their solutions for issues above.

Bookshelf update

I have added another good reference for Russian translator's bookshelf. Unlike Milchin it contains no typographical rules, but includes the exhaustive description of every possible use case of every single "official" punctuation rule, which may be useful in QA battles. This particular edition was issued to revert some notorious changes that were introduced in previous version, and inscribed illiteracy into norm. Format: FB2+DOC. Link: Правила русской орфографии и пунктуации

Why do I hate Logoport (aka Translation Workspace), part 2

Part 1 can be found here

As we have found in Part 1, Translation Workspace is a business model based on charging your suppliers for the privilege of working with you. It was never intended to act as a "real" CAT tool or tested as such. I don't think that TW developers have ever heard about such illusive ideas as productivity, ergonomics or user experience, and even if they have, they couldn't care less. The result is major usability flaws, which make Translation Workspace even better target for our devoted hatred. I wanted to make a numbered list, but I couldn't decide which flaw is the worst to put it on top, so it's unordered bullets.

• Repetition handling. Surprisingly, Translation Workspace doesn't save a segment to TM immediately when you close it. I think it happens once in several minutes, so if your file contains considerable amount of reps, you'll have to retype them, use copy-paste or save the file before opening each repeated segment. Major waste of time.

• More on repetitions. "Master" TM overrides your changes no matter what. It means, that if a segment is present in Master TM and occurs in a file more than once (imagine 20 instances), and you need to edit it, you'll have to go with retype, copy-paste or find and replace. In the ideal world, where nobody is hungry, everyone is using solar power, and can date Megan Fox or Johny Depp if they want to, Master TM would contain only perfect, thoroughly checked and approved translation units. In real world however (goodbye, Megan) Master TM is the legacy of the time, when nobody cared about localization for developing countries (Russia in my case), content was sourced to very cheap local sweatshops and published without any checks. Being a professional, you have no choice but to correct all that is wrong, so even more of your precious time goes to waste.
• Stability. All facets of Translation Workspace are highly unstable on my scrupulously clean finely-tuned working system with the best broadband you can get (believe it or not, I can watch a 1080p movie from Netflix server on the other side of the world without any hiccups). Every 30 minutes or so Translation Workspace hangs. Sometimes for good, sometimes it returns to normal in 10+ minutes. And no, I am not the only one with this problem. Guess what it does to your precious time?
• Latency. Moving between segments is always accompanied by a delay. It can be anywhere between several seconds and half a minute based on the server workload. Having delays like this for such a small packets of data is a major failure in the world of Telepresence and MOO shooters. This is bad for two reasons. First you loose ~2h per 1000 segments compared to any real CAT tool (This is big. 1000 segments may often correspond to ~2000 adjusted words which take approximately 4 hours to translate in a normal tool. 4h+2h=6h => ~50% overhead). The second reason is described in the next bullet.
• Pop-ups. Lots of pop-ups. Obviously, the process of translation implies strong concentration. Open the segment -> Type your translation -> Place tags if needed -> Move to a next segment > Go on. Carefully set up hotkeys, no pauses, no distractions. For experienced translators it develops into a meditative state of mind, in which one almost completely ignores the external irritants, which may include TV, construction work outside or your wife saying something about supper or taking away the garbage. Loosing this concentration is painful, and that's exactly what happens when continuity the process is interrupted by a pop-up window. "Are you sure that you are freaking sure sure?" Pop-up when you move tags in a fuzzy TU, pop-up when you're closing a segment with different spacing around a tag, pop-up when "new segment is coming from TM" whatever that means, pop-up for no-specific-reason-just-for-the-fun-of-it, etc. I haven't used Logoport for a while, so this list may be incomplete. Anyway you work slower, and guess what, waste your time.
• XLIFF editor doesn't support any export. Yes, it's true. Not only poor souls have to buy Logoport, they actually must work in it. No choice at all.
• Various minor, but still irritating bugs. For example, hotkeys may just stop working for reason unknown. It can be solved by restarting the application, but given the exhaustive five-step login process, it converts to even more time waste.

No big conclusion here, sorry. Just one thing: time is money; everyone who wastes your time is as good as thief and should be treated as such. Feel free to post your experiences here, I am sure I have omitted something.

Dixi

The best definition of Transcreation so far

A transcreator would take the concept of sexiness in English and turn it into something that was as relevant, as impactful and would have a similar impact on my target audience in that other territory as my concept of sexiness would in English© John Dalziel

Feedburner

Just wanted to let you guys know, that I have added Feedburner — supposedly "smarter" subscription/feed service — to this humble collection of rants.

Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/localization/rants

It provides seamless one-click subscription for pretty much any reader, sparing a few moves, so make yourself at home and hit the fancy  button on the right.

Cheers!

MT vs. Transcreation

Yes, it's another MT-related post.

No, I am not scared.

Really, I am not.

I can't help but notice two curious trends on modern L10N market. They may look unconnected, or even opposite, but I think they represent two sides of a single market polarization process at its earlier stage.

On one hand we see the marching Mighty Translator (MT), which is said to produce decent results in some pairs. Evangelists even predict that it will completely take over certain segments within few years. I am not sure about that, hyped statistical MTs are still useless between EN and slavic languages... algorythmic/rule-based systems are slightly better, but they don't get much investment. Anyway the trend exists — researchers are researching, customers are asking for case studies, GPMs are launching pilot or even production projects, CAT developers are implementing MT plugins... A lot is going on the scene and behind it, and many find it disturbing.

The 2nd trend is more subtle. The populariy of Transcreation concept has been growing for last few years. It was mentioned much more often in 2011 than in 2008, when I received my first Transcreation PO. Bloggers are writing slick posts (<envy mode on>What can I do to make my English that slick?<envy mode off>), theme discussion groups appear all over the Web, companies and freelancers quickly change their positioning or at least tune it with new idea. It happened with two good customers of mine, whose specialization has mutated from "marketing and communication" to "transcreation" within 2011. This is not a hype, but you surely can't miss it.

Now to the point. MT is a logical development of Henry Ford's workflow-oriented "more eyes see more" approach to localization. Supplier chains are long, resources are cheap, but sloppy, quality is "normalized". Customer is supposed to be protected by a long sequence of steps with multiple feedback links that looks fancy on the whiteboard. Every step is supposed to improve quality, though usually it does not. Good news is that nobody will ever read the bigger part of content produced this way. So if you replace the initial node (cheap human translator) with MT, nothing changes. Price drops a bit, and that's it.

But the whole workflow thing has never worked for marketing and advertising copy, and majority of translation buyers have learnt this lesson hard, harder or the hardest way. That's why agencies, who specialize on such content, are applying different approach: do it right the first time. There is one qualified translator, and one qualified editor, both not cheap. They usually work in close contact to produce a fluent copy that sells stuff. Imagine a CIO reading an MTed collateral for six-figure product.

The logical development of this "do it right the first time" approach is Transcreation, which is [IMHO] about giving a translator more freedom and responsibility to produce a copy suitable for local audience expectations. No more source limitations, the goal is to sell stuff, not to stick to the original. Do whatever you want with idioms, wordplay, and overall emotional temperature. Do whatever you want, as long as they buy it. Such translation is essentially a new copy, [loosely] based on the original with all that it implies.

So let's return to the beginning of this post — polarization thing. Here's my layman's prediction: High-volume technical projects with low to medium level of sophistication (high-volume software, consumer manuals, tender docs, etc., you name it) will be slowly moving to human-edited MT. It's happening already. Sad but true, sorry MS translators. The change will be driven not only by costs, but also by volume of translatable content.

At the same time Trascreation wave should rise for stuff with higher fluency/creativity requirements, particularly marketing and games (hopefully), training materials perhaps. May be they will even be selling MT under the Translation label, and rename regular professional human translation to Transcreation. And I don't know, who will make more cash per hour, MT-editors or Transcreators [hehe]... Think about it.

Traditional technical translation should remain under some name for highly specialized texts, which require hands-on experience in the narrow field. I won't tell why — tired of typing.

One more thing, I wanted to use "Transcreation equals Translation in hipster glasses" joke, but couldn't fit it in the main text, so I'll just put it here.

Cheers

Mox strip based on my post [On discount policy]

Thank you, AlejandroJ