Tips 'n' Tools for Translators

"Best Practices – Übersetzen und Dolmetschen. Ein Nachschlagewerk aus der Praxis für Sprachmittler und Auftraggeber", (Hg.) Angelika Ottman

Dieses vielversprechende Buch erscheint demnächst beim BDÜ Fachverlag. Hier eine kurze Beschreibung dazu:



"Best Practices sind bewährte Verfahrensweisen, d. h. Methoden, Prozesse, Arbeitsweisen und Modelle, die sich in der Praxis bewährt haben und von einem Großteil der Praktiker angewendet und unterstützt werden. Das Werk wendet sich an alle, die mit den Dienstleistungen Übersetzen und Dolmetschen befasst sind, sei es als Ausführende (Übersetzer, Dolmetscher), als Vermittler (Agenturen) oder als Auftraggeber (Unternehmen, Behörden, Institutionen). Die Best Practices legen die Standards der Branche zu Vorgehensweisen beim Übersetzen und Dolmetschen dar. Mehr als 40 Autoren aus der Praxis geben ihr Expertenwissen weiter.



Bis 31.12.2016 gibt es das Werk zum günstigen Subskriptionspreis.



Für BDÜ-Mitglieder gilt bis Jahresende ein einmaliger Sonderpreis."



(Diese Angaben zum Buch sind zuerst am 21.12.2016 auf XING erschienen. Ich gebe sie hier nur wieder. Das Werk klingt, als würde es eine sehr nützliche Informationsquelle für Übersetzer und Dolmetscher sein. Auf der Bestellseite vom BDÜ Fachverlag findet man eine PDF des Inhaltsverzeichnisses als "Leseprobe" zum Reinschnuppern ...)



Frohe Feiertage! Carl



P.S.: Mehr über die Inhalte des Buches erfahren Sie in der Februar-Ausgabe der Fachzeitschrift MDÜ. Einige Aspekte werden darin einen Themenschwerpunkt bilden.

PDF files are constantly being created by businesses and non-profit organisations to show colleagues, customers and other interested parties what material has been written or drawn and what its layout will be like once it's printed. Basically, they are exact images of documents and can be viewed on computers running on various operating systems, not just Microsoft Windows.

PDFs can either be created from other electronic file formats such as Word .docx files or they can be generated by a scanner. Depending on what settings have been made in the software, the PDF files that are created may or may not be searchable. If they are, then individual words can be found in them thanks to a processing step called optical character recognition, or OCR for short. It's usually quite easy to create an editable Word file thanks to this kind of data processing; in Adobe Acrobat XI, for example, you just select these items in the 'File' menu to export the contents into a new Word document:

The 'tough nuts', in contrast, are the scanned images of paper documents we sometimes get sent, as it can take a lot of time and effort to create a reasonable editable text from these that can then be typed over and translated. To do this, you will need to use OCR software on the file in question to try and turn the image of the document into a set of legible and hopefully correctly rendered words. Sometimes this can work well, especially if you use high-quality programs such as Acrobat, ABBYY Finereader or Nuance OmniPage, which come with powerful character-recognition software. But things don't always go to plan, and the results of OCR'ing a scanned image can also be very disappointing, requiring copious editing – or even a completely different approach to creating a translatable file.

This is the situation you may also find yourself in if you ever get sent a PDF file that has been protected (i.e. 'secured') in some way – by a password, for example, meaning you can only open it or add comments to it if you enter the password first (providing you are authorised to do so). If you don't have the password, you won't be given the full right to use and process the file. This also means you won't be able to copy its contents and paste them into a blank Word file for translation. And what then?

Asking the customer for the password may be the obvious answer here, but if they don't have it themselves and are unable (or unwilling) to get it, what else should you do? Well, there are various suggestions about this on the internet, some of which I've tried out, but have you ever thought of using a simple work-around with a printer? That may be a faster and simpler way of getting round the password-protection issue.

If you are able to print the file out (this may not be allowed, depending on what properties the PDF has been given – see the screen shot below on how to access these in Adobe Acrobat XI), then do so using the best resolution and clearest print you can. Scan the printout and create a brand-new, multi-page PDF from it yourself. Most types of scanner software will let you do this, including the three I've just mentioned.

When the scanner creates the new PDF file, get it to make the file searchable when you check or adjust the settings beforehand; it will then OCR it (don't forget to tell it which language it should recognise first, though). Once you've got the file, check it to see if the quality of the text is okay, and if it is, export the contents into a new Word file. Now you should find you have a Word document that is straightforward to translate. A little editing may be necessary, but not much (utilities like CodeZapper and TransTools Suite will help you tidy the file up if need be).

Thanks to my German colleague Ludger Giebel for mentioning this idea.

Carl

Related links

- My earlier post on converting PDFs into a translation-friendly format using Wordfast Anywhere

- My earlier post on Acrobat XI and Acrobat Reader

- Kilgray, the maker of memoQ, on converting PDFs using various tools, including their own CAT tool

- Eric le Carre on translating PDFs using various free tools

Did you know you can use a range of different fonts to display segments in memoQ's translation grid? You don't just have to stick to one, but can customise the appearance.

Many translators probably don't even consider using a different font to display text in their CAT tool, but it may well be worth your while to try a few other fonts out from time to time. You may even want to change which font you use in the course of a day as your eyes get tired.

I find that sans serif fonts are particularly easy to read on screen. These include popular fonts such as Calibri and Arial. MemoQ allows you to select a different font from a drop-down list and pick a different size as well. To do this in memoQ 2014, you need to call up the 'Options' menu from 'Tools' in the main menu ...

... and then select the item called 'Appearance' in 'Category'. The dialogue below will then be shown.

To pick a different font, go to the 'Editor fonts' section in the top half and pick a font from 'Font family and size' (click on the downward arrow in the font box to open a drop-down menu listing all the fonts available on your computer). Separate font families are listed for Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Apart from adjusting the font you'll see in the translation grid, this dialogue box also lets you switch the colour of the text – to do this, move down to 'Editor colors' and click on the box to the right of 'Text color'.

After making your new settings, activate them by clicking on 'Apply' or 'OK'. For some specific help on the options available here, just click on the 'Help' button on the far right.

To call up the 'Options' menu in memoQ 2015, go to the dark-blue 'MemoQ' tab at the top left of the screen, click on it and then move down to 'Options' near the bottom of the list, which will display various items. Pick the 'Options' item (the three cogs) to access the settings in the dialogue.

More details are available in the help documentation or on Kilgray's website.



Regards



Carl

Related links



Paul Filken's blog post on making similar adjustments via the 'View' menu in SDL Trados Studio 2014

The Bundesverband der Dolmetscher und Übersetzer, or BDÜ for short, is a relatively large professional association for translators and interpreters in Germany and currently has well over 7,000 members. Over the last few months, a number of these members, including the staff who run the body at a regional and national level, have been asking themselves and one another how the BDÜ can help refugees who are now coming to Germany or have already been registered by the authorities and are now living in temporary homes, awaiting a decision on their official status.

In the latest e-mail newsletter sent out to members, one of the points mentioned is what the BDÜ has actually started doing for these needy people now, many of whom are from Syria and other war-torn countries like Eritrea and are applying for long-term residence permits without being able to speak a word of German: it has set up a special page on its national website listing numerous links to language resources of potential use to refugees and their helpers in Germany. Some of these resources are also intended for government authorities to help them interact with refugees and obtain the information they require to deal with applications, for example. So in short, the BDÜ sees its main role as acting as a linguistic and cultural consultant for these three groups of people.

The list of links has been arranged in appropriate categories such as 'General information about life in Germany', 'Learning German', 'Teaching German as a second language' and 'Help for refugees'. The last category includes areas such as interpreters' training on asylum issues and news for refugees in their own languages, as you can see below:

Some of the material listed is available in other languages than German, fortunately. Klett Verlag has produced a refugee guide on living in Germany, which is in English, Arabic and French as well as German, which is a good start in my opinion.

Apart from publishing this list of useful information for the various groups concerned, the BDÜ is also calling on its members to contribute to the Refugee Phrasebook, which is an ongoing project in which a practical phrasebook to help users with basic phrases and terms in German is being compiled with translations in various languages. Words associated with seeing a doctor or being in hospital in Germany are listed here with equivalents in 28 languages, apparently. A juridical phrasebook has just been started on this website as well, which lawyers are contributing to on a voluntary basis.

I wonder what supportive action is being taken by translators' and interpreters' associations in other EU countries affected by the current wave of immigration. What is happening in Greece, Italy and Sweden, for example? What does the umbrella organisation known as FIT have in mind, if anything? If you know of any similar projects outside Germany, please let me know about them.

Regards,

Carl

Related topics

• Volunteering with the British Red Cross to work as an interpreter to help refugees


• An article from August on ways of helping in the German capital: '10 ways you can help refugees in Berlin'


• Volunteering to translate for a good cause, e.g. with Translators Without Borders

Images: logo © BDÜ, screen shot taken from the BDÜ's resources page, 'Hilfe für Flüchtlinge'.

Das 2-tägige Seminar "Mit Erfolg in die Selbständigkeit: Sprachmittler starten durch" vom Übersetzerverband ADÜ Nord hat sich leider verschoben. Die neuen Termine der beiden Veranstaltungen sind jetzt erst im Jahr 2016:

• Freitag, 7. Oktober 2016, 14 bis 18 Uhr, Hamburg


• Sonnabend, 8. Oktober 2016, 10 bis 18 Uhr, Hamburg.

Nähere Infos zur Anmeldung finden Sie in meinem letzten Beitrag sowie auf der Verbandswebsite.



Zum Glück gibt es aber zahlreiche andere Seminare als Alternative dazu, u.a. vom BDÜ e.V., wie etwa ein Workshop für Existenzgründer am Freitag, 20. November 2015 in Köln oder die Veranstaltung "Existenzgründung für Übersetzer und Dolmetscher" am selben Tag in Karlsruhe. Schauen Sie ruhig das Angebot in Ihrer Nähe und benachbarten Bundesländern an.



Viele Grüße



Carl

Gegen Ende November bietet mein Übersetzerverband ADÜ Nord ein zweitägiges Seminar an, das für neue und werdende Übersetzer und Dolmetscher sicherlich sehr interessant wird: "Mit Erfolg in die Selbständigkeit: Sprachmittler starten durch". Diese Fortbildung ist das zweite von insgesamt drei Seminaren extra für Berufseinsteiger, und zwar aus der Reihe "Selbstständig als Übersetzer und Dolmetscher arbeiten". (Das erste befasst sich am 24. Oktober mit Microsoft Word, das dritte am 28. November geht um CAT-Tools – weitere Infos hier).



Datum und Ort:



    Freitag, 20. November 2015, 14 bis 18 Uhr, Hamburg

    Sonnabend, 21. November 2015, 10 bis 18 Uhr, Hamburg



Lerninhalte (ich zitiere aus dem Infomaterial):



"Dieses Seminar vermittelt in komprimierter Form alles, was Sie für den Geschäftsalltag als Freiberufler wissen müssen: von rechtlichen Grundlagen und der Vertragsgestaltung über Steuern und Versicherungen bis hin zur Kalkulation und Akquise von Aufträgen. Außer geballtem Wissen gibt es jede Menge Tipps von »alten Hasen« und die Möglichkeit, sich auszutauschen und Kontakte zu knüpfen:

•     Unternehmensform und andere rechtliche Grundlagen


•     Steuern und Finanzamt


•     Versicherungsschutz


•     Kosten der Selbstständigkeit


•     Finanzierungsbedarf und Fördermöglichkeiten


•     Kalkulation und Preisbildung


•     Marketing und Kundengewinnung"

Vorkenntnisse sind nicht notwendig.



Referentin: Dr. Thea Döhler, Trainerin und Beraterin für Sprachmittler und deren Berufsverbände.



Teilnahmebeitrag für das zweitägige Seminar (einschließlich 1 Mittagessen sowie Pausenverpflegung und Seminarunterlagen):



    Mitglieder: 150 Euro

    Nichtmitglieder: 190 Euro



zuzüglich 19 % Mehrwertsteuer.



Frühbucherrabatt (€ 10,-) verlängert bis 27. Oktober 2015! Die Anmeldung läuft schon.



Für weitere Infos und die Möglichkeit, sich online anzumelden, siehe hier.



.......



Weitere Infos zum Thema Berufseinstieg vom Verband ADÜ Nord: http://www.adue-nord.de/leistungen/berufseinstieg/



Einsteigerstammtisch der Dolmetscher und Übersetzer in Hamburg am 29. Oktober 2015 ab 19:30 Uhr im Abaton-Bistro im Grindelhof, Grindelallee 14a, 20146 Hamburg.



Übrigens, der Bundesverband der Dolmetscher und Übersetzer e.V. (kurz: BDÜ) hat neuen Übersetzern und Dolmetschern ähnlich viel zu bieten. Zum Thema "Wie wird man Übersetzer oder Dolmetscher?", zum Beispiel, siehe die Informationen auf dieser Seite.



Für BDÜ-Seminare und Webinare, siehe hier. Unter anderem ist das Seminar "Was Sie schon immer über Existenzgründung wissen wollten" am 3. November in Saarbrücken für Einsteiger höchst relevant.



Viele Grüße



Carl



................



Nachtrag am 6. November: Soeben hat der BDÜ eine neu überarbeitete und erweiterte Ausgabe des Buches "Erfolgreich selbstständig als Dolmetscher und Übersetzer" herausgegeben. "[A]uch erfahrene Kollegen können mithilfe dieses Bandes aus dem BDÜ Fachverlag ihr eigenes Geschäftsmodell auf den Prüfstand stellen und Antworten zu Versicherungsfragen oder Kalkulationsmodellen finden", heißt es. Das Werk kostet ca. € 22 und ist hier erhältlich. ISBN: 9783938430606.

Bilder: Logos © ADÜ Nord e.V., BDÜ e.V.

Translators' platform Proz.com is going to be staging its 7th annual virtual conference shortly, in celebration of International Translation Day on Wednesday, 30 September 2015.



This conference is actually one of two training events for translators running over two whole days starting from 29 September.

• 100+ hours of scheduled and on-demand sessions and content


• 30+ hours of LIVE content including Q&A sessions, panel discussions, chat rooms and more


• Panel discussions on “Terminology management” and “Customer relationship management”


• Exhibit booths where you can chat live with exhibitors and software vendors (including prize giveaways)


• Earn 10 ATA CE credits for attending


• Save up to 50% on popular CAT tools including SDL Trados Studio, memoQ, Wordfast, Déjà Vu and more

Here are some of the topics that are going to be discussed according to Proz:

• How to find direct clients and run a business that you love


• Translation or Interpreting? & the Emerging Market for Hybrid Communication Models


• Getting in the game: a 'how to' for translation beginners


• The beauty of machine translation


• 10 essential tips that are most helpful for a professional translator


• Where to find clients and how to approach them and do the follow-up without sounding too pushy


• Glossary & terminology management


• Panel discussion on client relationship management


• Panel discussion on leveraging voice-recognition technology for greater efficiency.

View the full programme here, after which you can click here to register as an attendee. (It's free!)

N.B. If you attend at least one live event, this will give you free access to recordings after the event, which you can watch any time for a period of at least 90 days.



For events concerning CAT tools on 29 September, see the special programme here. This will include the following talks:

• Free Tools for Translators


• Technical translation: is it really about terminology?


• Setting up an MT system


• Managing client expectations


• Economics of pricing for the translation industry


• Panel discussion on meeting clients


• Panel discussion on machine translation


• Medical documents for academic publishing: creating English content with precision, accuracy and style


• How to participate in EU tendering procedures for translation services.

I'm sure you'll find something worthwhile as the topics are very varied. There are also quite a lot of pre-recorded webinars to accompany the two-day event that you can watch on demand, i.e. whenever it suits you.

Regards,

Carl

Related links



FIT (the International Federation of Translators) on International Translation Day



The British Library's day-long programme of events on translation in London on 2 October ("An opportunity for translators, students, publishers, booksellers, librarians, bloggers and reviewers to gather and debate")

"Continuing professional development", or CPD for short, has become something of a buzzword in business these days, even though it's something translators and interpreters have been doing for donkey's years. In a bid to get their members to commit themselves to ongoing training, some professional translators' associations like the American Translators Association (ATA) have made CPD obligatory and set members a goal of achieving so and so many points or credits for getting relevant training within a specific period. Other translators' associations like the British ITI and German BDÜ recommend CPD, but feel it's a personal choice and should therefore be voluntary.



Various educational organisations offering us videos, workshops and training courses on aspects of our work have been set up over the years, one of which is eCPD Webinars, which I've mentioned here before. This small but dedicated training company based in the UK offers an impressive range of online videos, live and recorded webinars, and courses designed especially for translators and interpreters. Some of these cost a fee, while others are free of charge.



eCPD Webinars is currently running a campaign to encourage linguists to show how committed they are to continuous professional development. You can do this by downloading a kind of virtual badge expressing your pledge to CPD.

You're free to put this on your website, in your e-mail signature, on your business cards and anywhere else where you might draw attention to your professional activity. To get the badge, which is free, you only need to read their CPD Manifesto; if you agree with all the points it lists, you're entitled to use the badge. (You can work on these points, of course, and then download the badge later once you meet all the criteria.)



To help you keep track of your CPD activities, eCPD Webinars is also offering a free log template, which you can download from here (a Dropbox site).



What CPD activities have you taken part in so far this year? Have they been worthwhile?



What do you get out of attending workshops and courses that you don't from participating in online webinars?



Have you thought of doing your CPD activities in a more systematic way? Or recording them in a special file as proof of what steps you've taken? What about developing some new skills that might prove useful in future? Or attending a conference where you can network with lots of other translators as well as attending workshops on topics of interest? CPD can boost your own motivation and open up new avenues of work for you one day, so it's worth investing in.



Regards,



Carl

 

Topic-related sites

• WantWordsTV by Marta Stelmaszak (videos)


• Sarah Dillon on CPD (blog)


• Jayne Fox on CPD and forthcoming conferences for translators (blog)


• Foreign Tongues on ways of obtaining more training (blog)


• Training for translators offered by Proz.com