Preparation is everything...
Aug. 3rd, 2002 11:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgp...and, of course, it's not something you get paid for.
My work for the day would invoice out at peanuts, because I decided to process client U's 8500-entry "glossary" into something actually usable. I need something usable, because the work approach proposed by my editor has some serious shortcomings.
For example: Why do editors assume I have nothing better to do than use Word's search feature to plow through their multi-megabyte files?
My mania for a useful glossary does not take into account the editor's insistence that I must use the company's "glossary" while doing the translation, which, in the face of his expecting me to manually translate about 7,000 words is BEYOND ridiculous.
* * * I remember the same issue came up when I was spearheading a drive to get NASA/JSC to sit down with both the company I worked for (i.e., me) and with the Russian side and come up with a definitive "lexicon" of program-critical terms.
You might think this was one of the first things that was attended to back when the program first started in 1993, but it wasn't. There was a predecessor to the Lexicon, as it came to be called, but it was incomplete, inconsistent, and arranged to suit the tastes of engineers and not translators.
The idea here was two-fold: identify and codify unique terms (i.e., terms that brook no dalliance with variety), and identify and codify terms that may have multiple critical meanings in different contexts. In the absence of such a guiding document, nobody could ever be sure what the heck an English translation was referring to, unless they were experts in a particular subject.
What finally put the project over the top was support from the Astronaut Office, which quickly came to the conclusion that, say, having a one-to-one correspondence between 'консервант' and 'pretreat' (a substance used to treat collected human waste) would make life much easier than having to read documents that referred to 'preservative', 'additive', 'conserving agent', and (occasionally) 'pretreat solution' where all the terms denoted the same thing.
One of my core goals, besides actually collecting and verifying terminology, was to keep the size of the Lexicon at or below 3,000 terms (once some folks at NASA got into the swing of things, they wanted to add every possible term to the document, which would have been a project unto itself, on a par with the compilation of a full-blown dictionary). The reason for the limitation was this: if you were going to hold a translator's feet to the fire and require these terms to be used - and that was the intent - the Lexicon had to be of a scope that could be grasped within a reasonable amount of time, say three to six months of daily use.
Let me draw an analogy.
If you've ever used a "style book" (e.g., the AP or UPI books, which prescribe how certain things are written for their respective shops), you'll notice the thing is reasonably compact: not more than 200 pages or so. If you read it a couple of times, you have a pretty good idea of how to deal with about 90% of the problems you're likely to cover while writing a story. If you forget something specific, you'll at least remember that it's covered in the book, and can look it up in jig time.
However, once you get to the level (and size) of something like the Chicago Manual of Style, you now start to lose a lot of users who instead will go with their best judgment - or simply guess - about how to deal with some style issue, rather than slog through a 546-page book (that's the count for the 12th edition, BTW, which resides on my reference shelf).
It's the same with glossaries. Most translators can deal with a list of a few hundred words pretty quickly. Larger glossaries require more time for familiarization and "imprinting." You could probably go above my 3,000-word limit if all your work is oriented that way, but even so, it would take some time to master, with the bulk of that time devoted to realizing what terms are in the glossary, and which aren't.
Unfortunately, my client assumes I have some kind of paranormal power that tells me which of the several thousand words in my assignment are in his glossary, so I can look them up and make sure I'm using the "right" term.
* * * Reading client U's "glossary" is not an option. If I were to spend a mere 10 seconds per entry, it would take me nearly 24 solid hours to read through my client's "glossary," and neither my recall nor my absorption are that good. (Neither is the glossary's layout, but that's another issue.)
So... the alternative has been to extract the Russian and English from the Word file and then run the result through some Perl and a text editor in preparation for importation into Déjà Vu. I am about 95% done. I will complete the edit in a few minutes (after this steam-releasing break), and then import the file into DV.
The real work starts tomorrow... or - seeing how much rain we've had today (almost 5/8 of an inch over by Fred H.'s) - maybe I'll take an hour or two and see if any mycological fruiting bodies have come up for air.
Cheers...
My work for the day would invoice out at peanuts, because I decided to process client U's 8500-entry "glossary" into something actually usable. I need something usable, because the work approach proposed by my editor has some serious shortcomings.
For example: Why do editors assume I have nothing better to do than use Word's search feature to plow through their multi-megabyte files?
My mania for a useful glossary does not take into account the editor's insistence that I must use the company's "glossary" while doing the translation, which, in the face of his expecting me to manually translate about 7,000 words is BEYOND ridiculous.
You might think this was one of the first things that was attended to back when the program first started in 1993, but it wasn't. There was a predecessor to the Lexicon, as it came to be called, but it was incomplete, inconsistent, and arranged to suit the tastes of engineers and not translators.
The idea here was two-fold: identify and codify unique terms (i.e., terms that brook no dalliance with variety), and identify and codify terms that may have multiple critical meanings in different contexts. In the absence of such a guiding document, nobody could ever be sure what the heck an English translation was referring to, unless they were experts in a particular subject.
What finally put the project over the top was support from the Astronaut Office, which quickly came to the conclusion that, say, having a one-to-one correspondence between 'консервант' and 'pretreat' (a substance used to treat collected human waste) would make life much easier than having to read documents that referred to 'preservative', 'additive', 'conserving agent', and (occasionally) 'pretreat solution' where all the terms denoted the same thing.
One of my core goals, besides actually collecting and verifying terminology, was to keep the size of the Lexicon at or below 3,000 terms (once some folks at NASA got into the swing of things, they wanted to add every possible term to the document, which would have been a project unto itself, on a par with the compilation of a full-blown dictionary). The reason for the limitation was this: if you were going to hold a translator's feet to the fire and require these terms to be used - and that was the intent - the Lexicon had to be of a scope that could be grasped within a reasonable amount of time, say three to six months of daily use.
Let me draw an analogy.
If you've ever used a "style book" (e.g., the AP or UPI books, which prescribe how certain things are written for their respective shops), you'll notice the thing is reasonably compact: not more than 200 pages or so. If you read it a couple of times, you have a pretty good idea of how to deal with about 90% of the problems you're likely to cover while writing a story. If you forget something specific, you'll at least remember that it's covered in the book, and can look it up in jig time.
However, once you get to the level (and size) of something like the Chicago Manual of Style, you now start to lose a lot of users who instead will go with their best judgment - or simply guess - about how to deal with some style issue, rather than slog through a 546-page book (that's the count for the 12th edition, BTW, which resides on my reference shelf).
It's the same with glossaries. Most translators can deal with a list of a few hundred words pretty quickly. Larger glossaries require more time for familiarization and "imprinting." You could probably go above my 3,000-word limit if all your work is oriented that way, but even so, it would take some time to master, with the bulk of that time devoted to realizing what terms are in the glossary, and which aren't.
Unfortunately, my client assumes I have some kind of paranormal power that tells me which of the several thousand words in my assignment are in his glossary, so I can look them up and make sure I'm using the "right" term.
So... the alternative has been to extract the Russian and English from the Word file and then run the result through some Perl and a text editor in preparation for importation into Déjà Vu. I am about 95% done. I will complete the edit in a few minutes (after this steam-releasing break), and then import the file into DV.
The real work starts tomorrow... or - seeing how much rain we've had today (almost 5/8 of an inch over by Fred H.'s) - maybe I'll take an hour or two and see if any mycological fruiting bodies have come up for air.
Cheers...
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no subject
Date: 2002-08-04 01:22 am (UTC)He told me that "standardization of terms is not a priority".
Glad that convo was in english or I would have had to translate it to believe it!
no subject
Date: 2002-08-04 10:38 am (UTC)There's a lot I could say and rant about. But educating a client who needs translation is one of my major challenges in life and often makes me feel like bashing my head against a brick wall. For all I tend to hate academics for their nit-picking at the outset, I tend to love them in the end because they actually (in general) actually treat translators with respect (if the translator respects their text in return). They discuss. They help. At times they even write and say 'thanks'.
One thing people don't realise, too, is that a translator is often a client's best proofreader - we see inconcistencies or mistakes that even several 'editors' can miss. A lot depends on the client's attitude, however. I remember phoning an industrial client about a book manuscript, politely pointing out errors in the text (city X does *not* have a 14-hole golf course, it has two 18-hole ones, and the bobsled run you mention is NOT in Davos, it is in St. Moritz). His answer: "I believe you are paid to translate. The text content is our business."
This is one example among many. Translators (more melodrama here) are expected to do miracles. Most of us enjoy trying to do them. But there's a limit: unless people understand *what* we are trying to do and use a little respect, you're wasting your battery. And they will get a text that doesn't satisfy anyone.