“Can’t you do that with a bit more effort?”
“Sorry, I’m trying.”
“Yes you are, very!”
(Boom, boom!)

But humans make mistakes too. Consider, for instance, a site to which I was recently referred, in the “languagering”, offering ” Training in writting”, and telling us that “writing can be a tedious tasks”.  It would appear that for that writer, checking spelling and proofreading were just too tedious by far!

And here is another, although the author of this one can be perhaps forgiven, as the text was submitted for proofreading and correction.  I will not name the source, as it is a client who pays me. It illustrates the mistake that can be made by some Germans (and no doubt those with other native tongues) who plan to save money by doing the “translation” themselves, then paying a native of the target for the proofreading only.  The problem is, of course, that the difficulties created by this process mean that the “proofreading and correction” may demand more time and money than simply translating in the first place.  The source text was “Bei Werkstattmontage gebohrt”. For those who don’t know German, “bei” is related to the English “by”, and carries meanings like “in association with” or “at the same time as”, as well as “next to” and so on.  It is not used, however, to convey agency in the same way as in “I was knocked down by a car”. “Werkstattmontage” is a simple example of a German compound noun, and can uncontroversially be translated as “workshop assembly”. “Bohren” is to make a hole, as into “bore into a piece of leather”; in engineering contexts it is most often translatable as to “drill”, and a “Bohrung” is a drilled hole.  So our phrase is a comment on a hole, and tells us that it is “Drilled during workshop assembly“. Our German “translator”, however, had rendered it as (wait for it…): “Bored by workshop assembly“.  They probably were!

Disclaimer: having criticised the spelling and command of language of others it is a cosmic law (WIP – Wilding’s Inevitability Principle) that I have made at least one silly mistake in this article.  Don’t blame me!

On the other hand, I have known companies who have at least invested the necessary effort in the preparation of preferred vocabulary lists, and who are keen to provide translators with access to these lists and to ensure that they are used to bring more consistent results. I should stress that this is only a tiny part of “authoring for translation”, but it is certainly a positive step even if it is only a small one.

After some repeated difficulty with GIC, I pointed out to them that if they have a preferred vocabulary list, and if they want me to use it, perhaps they could give me, their translator, access to it. You can perhaps imagine my disappointment when, instead of the large Excel file that I expected, I was told where I can buy their dictionary. Hmmm.

Until now I simply had a system in which unknown posters have to have their first post approved by me. Once I have approved a post from you, you are then able to post without further checks. This works automatically, it’s simple and easy.  So far I’ve only had one human idiot whose posts I rejected.

It’s the non-human idiots that are the problem; every day I have to mark a large number of spam posts as such, and then delete them. It is to be believed that the vast majority of these – perhaps all – are machine-generated: spambots! I’ve therefore just added a “captcha” system. Most readers will be familiar with this kind of thing – you have to recognize an oddly written sequence of letters or numbers, perhaps a word. This is very hard to program a machine to do, so mostly only humans will get past.

I think I have set it so that it is only if you are an unknown user that this will appear. Like the freedom to add messages without me having to check them that known users, with a history of at least one approved comment, already have, it’s only the first time that you should have to face this small hurdle. If you have any problems with it – please let me know!

The company that offers its help in this process (a company not of “consultants”, one may note, but of “resultants”) will be useful to you, because they will shorten the time needed to get to the “go-live”. 

I reasearching this I also found the noun “hire” being used in the sense of an employee. New hires have to be onboarded, it would appear.

Spit, foam and stab is all that I can say.

I am more interested in the kind of Australianisms that a reasonably well-educated person would use when speaking more or less formally and perhaps not realize that an English (or for that matter Scots, American or what have you) English-speaker would find the expression odd, and perhaps detect that the speaker was Australian. As an example from elsewhere, I noticed in Ireland how the word “avail” was used in an extremely un-English way. For a start, the Irish say “avail” quite commonly, where in English English it is relatively rare, and rather more formal than Irish usage. What grated on my sensitivities when I first heard it, until I realized that it simply is the normal Irish way of speaking English, is that they do not use it reflexively. So where the English person might be judged to be pompous, but correct, to say “I availed myself of the opportunity to enter the dwelling”, an Irish grocer might put up a notice saying “Just collect coupons to avail of our half-price offer”. To see “to avail yourself of” in that context would be a surprise.

Inevitably I have now forgotten most of the subtle Australianisms that I have noticed until now, so this post is an opportunity to collect them over time. So far I have these:

• Trifecta – something like a hat-trick. Scarcely known in English English (well I, at least, had never heard it before) but not at all uncommon here.
• Identity – used in a context where English English might say “figure”: one hears, for instance of “underworld identity Bruce Smith” rather than ” underworld figure Bruce Smith”.
• Bash – whereas I would think of this as a somewhat colloquial word for a blow or series of blows, as when one bashes a nail into the woodwork, or even bashes somebody in the eye, in Australian English a bashing is used quite formally (again, I’m thinking of television news, for instance) to refer to somebody being mugged, beaten up or seriously assaulted. In the 19th century the word was sometimes used for a flogging – perhaps that is the origin of this usage?

And I know that I’ve noticed more, but what were they?

In the course of redesigning this website, Wolfram, of the same agency, kindly spent the time needed to edit my German summary – thank you!

A few years ago I had engaged a native German to translate that text for me. There were a few things there that sat uncomfortably with me, but hey, I thought, that’s why I paid for a native speaker! It’s almost impossible to write truly idiomatic text in a second tongue. But I left his (now deleted) name at the top, as I didn’t want anyone to think that I thought that I could translate into German. So it’s interesting that for all these years it’s been sitting there with some really rather poor expressions in it. Thanks again to Wolfram for sorting that out!

But why did I choose, and why do I still use, Trados, when there are several other systems out there with good reputations? One reason only: it is the industry standard. Only that. Otherwise the price, along with what is politely known as the “aggressive upgrade policy” (i.e. pay a lot more again or find yourself out on a limb with no support) would have put me off long ago.

And as for usability – forget it! Most of the features of the version I use now remain a mystery to me, as they would take days and days to understand and come to terms with. The manuals are obscure, the functions unclearly named; in fact after more than a year I still haven’t managed to persuade the new equivalents to functions – functions that I used to find helpful – to work.

But we must hand it to the producers, SDL. Cleverly they have turned their own failing into a money-spinner. Because their software is so counter-intuitive, they offer (expensive) training courses, at the end of which we can dig into our bank-balances and be “certified” as competent to use the damned thing! So 1/10 for usability, but 10/10 for chutzpah!

I really should follow my own prompting here and look into a more reasonable alternative.

Since about last November I have been receiving noticeably fewer job inquiries. So far (I choose that pair of words carefully) this has mainly meant that I’ve had to turn fewer jobs down. On the whole I have managed to do nearly as much work as I used to, although there have been a few slack stretches, and the trend is concerning. My trusted old clients, some direct but mostly agencies, are still coming back to me – but not as often. One freelancer is a tiny sample indeed, but it does look like the “global financial crisis” is biting.

It’s not easy to find out how others are doing – there are very few publically available statistics, and most people don’t want to tell the truth. After all, basic marketing is to maintain an image of being busy because we are successful because we are good, though not quite so busy that we can’t fit in the next job that comes along! We could not easily admit that work has eased off or even entirely collapsed.

It is, for that matter, not impossible that the work supply could strengthen for some of us. Business downturns can sometimes favour freelances, as in-house departments are downsized or even closed, but there is a suspicion that this happened in the translation field years ago, and that there is not much more that can effectively be outsourced.

But comments here can be anonymous, so if you are a freelance translator – especially in the field of European languages – why not add a comment to say how the GFC is affecting you?