Carelessness hides in tired eyes...

The new client has a pretty thorough proofreading team, as they caught two one-sentence paragraphs in the original text that I'd omitted from my translation. In the great big picture view, these errors ought not weigh too heavily against me, but as such errors are preventable, and only serve to keep clients from thinking of me as a "leaps-buildings-in-one-bound-carrying-barbells" kind of translator, I need to do a little soul-searching in this regard.

Obviously, once I get some breathing space, I need to take some time and review my despeckling procedure (from the acronym DSPCKL, which stands for my six review steps: Disambiguate, Spellcheck, Pronounce, Cleanup, Key, and Layout).

It would appear I've gotten way too used to working with editable files, where I find it's difficult to leave stuff untranslated. The proofreaders—who apparently are not Russian-speakers—apparently use the same technique that we used back at Plenum when we press-checked camera-ready plates of translated technical articles against the originals without much of a command, if any, of the source language. Specifically, one compares the number of paragraphs in the original against the number of paragraphs in the translation. If the former number is greater than the latter, something is probably missing! Doh!

* * *Between dealing with omitted sentences and other time sinks, I've just sent off The Routine Stuff™ for the day. The Pagosa Springs (Mushroom) Foray starts in a few hours. I'm looking forward to it.

Cheers...

What is this, quality week?

I just got a note from an agency I did a small job for last week. It reads:

The client we did this sample translation for came back saying that they rated the quality as poor. Can you look at it and advise your input?

I was a little nervous as I waited for the file to open. However, the nervousness evapoated quickly upon reviewing the edits. Here was my reply:

For the most part, the changes appear to represent a different choice of words, e.g.:

"prepared to propose" becomes "ready to offer"
"which makes it possible" becomes "thereby making it possible"
"were considered" becomes "have been taken into account"
"information on sales" becomes "information about sales"
"presented information" becomes "information presented"

I won't bore you with a complete recitation. In my opinion, however, this comment applies to better than 9 of 10 edits in the returned file.

Are there what I would consider to be proper edits? Yes. My sentence that was edited to read "confirmation can be provided" was perhaps too literally translated. And while "alcohol market" is, in my opinion, perfectly serviceable, "alcoholic beverages industry" is probably better.

Do any of the edits detract from the text? In my opinion, yes. For example, starting a sentence with "And producers" instead of simply "Producers" adds nothing to justify violating the "don't start sentences with 'and'" rule. There are also some turns of the phrase that I would not use (for example, I don't think "history relating to previous orders" is as tightly stated as "history of previous orders") but I don't want to fall into the same trap regarding choice of words.

There's more!

In a follow-up email, the client asks me whether or not I consider my translation to be of high quality. Here's my response:

In my opinion, the translation is of high quality. There are no omissions, misspellings, or mistranslations that I saw corrected among the edits, and I think anyone reading the English will clearly understand the meaning of the original text.

That said, does that mean I think that my text (or any text, translated or otherwise) could not be "polished" with judicious editing? No.

Apropos of my previous email, I might add that, if this sample was meant to be a marketing piece, it is generally considered poor form for a company to announce that it is "pushing the use" of anything. This seems to be something the editor added that is not in the original, as the Russian source text states "компания делает ставку на" which pretty much means the company is "betting on" something (which is acceptable in marketing copy).

Ye gods.

Cheers...

Android comes of age...

You know Android is getting big when emacs has become available for it!

I wonder if it supports Ctrl-Alt-Meta-cokebottle?

Cheers...