Entry with Post Format « Video »

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The Native Guy

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From time to time, a quote of ours is declined because the customer decides to handle the translation “in-house”.

Aside from the fact that a translator is a professional in his or her own right who could only really be replaced by another translator, this choice primarily reveals poor management of human resources within the company.

As a result, translations are allocated to a foreign employee who is assumed – by his or her exotic nature – to be gifted with excellent writing skills and flawless spelling in his or her native language.

Yet, we all know that the mere fact of being born in a particular country and having studied at university level does not necessarily mean a person knows how to write well. French, German, Spanish, but also English and Italian, are languages often persecuted by company executives. So why trust someone without a literary background to do a translation? That’s right, I do mean literary background. You can be fairly sure that a person will write well in his or her native language if he or she has studied literature (the question remains whether that person will be able to understand and convey the source language message without cumbersome phrasing). But I will swear my life on the fact that if the person has, for example, a language degree, he or she will be incapable of correctly translating even a short press release.

Even this very post – written by my fair hand in French – has been proofread by my colleague Laura, a French translator. Nor have I attempted to translate it into English myself (merci Jazz!), even though I am a translator… and bilingual to boot.

Let’s say though that there is “a native guy” in your company who is perfectly bilingual and can give Balzac, Shakespeare or Goethe a run for their money, translation is highly unlikely to be included in his job description. You are therefore forcing a person who is supposed to be focusing on other objectives to devote time and energy to a task for which he will not be evaluated and which prevents him from doing his real job. It takes a lot of time to do a good translation, and even more so when it’s not your line of work. That poor marketing director, webmaster, engineer, salesperson or secretary is bound to rush this complicated task in order to be shot of it as quickly as possible. The translation won’t be checked by anyone anyway (because if there were someone capable of evaluating translation quality within the company, the job would be entrusted to a translator, not the first available native speaker). The end result will be sloppy, not only because you need years of study and experience to produce a good translation, but as it’s presumed that any old person knows how to translate, the translation will be considered and treated like a minor task.

So here is how communication, at the very heart of the company’s concerns and budget, finds itself taking last place in the development plan as soon as the target audience happens to be across the border.

Still think you’re right to handle translation in-house?

VSB: Verbalising Sorrows in Business

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I have something to confess… I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the idea of shutting down my business.

Managing a company alone, alternating between the roles of translator, project manager, salesperson and accountant, with no one to turn to for advice, or any organisation offering help, is often a tough ride. Add to this the fact that large multinationals in translation are renegotiating contracts with their translators every six months, reducing rates on the pretext that we’re going through an economic crisis, and you will agree that the whole thing leaves a lot to be desired.

I told myself I was gifted in my field of translation and interpreting project management, but that it wasn’t enough to become a « true » entrepreneur who knows the “tricks” of the marketing trade and can build useful relationships at business owner clubs, for example. Also, lowering my profit margin instead of paying translators less to ensure good final quality whilst remaining competitive… it’s not really what I would have been taught at business school either.

So I attended a CGPME [General Confederation of Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises] meeting last week, hoping to get some advice. What a surprise it was to discover that this feeling of loneliness and despondency was common among all business owners, even those with 20 years’ experience and a hundred or so employees! All complained of having to deal with increasingly late payments and banks that no longer offered overdraft facilities. They have all had to invest their personal assets to buffer cash flow; all have recruitment and business development problems, and none felt they had any representation at government level.

Like most SME entrepreneurs, I invested my own money into my company and had to resort to personal loans to advance funds and deal with late payments from customers with a turnover at least one hundred times higher than my own, sometimes forgoing my own salary because banks and government agencies find it risky (and mostly pointless) to help a small business. That said, since founding Fairtrad two years ago, I have issued purchase orders for more than 110,000 euros and given work to over 200 people. Frankly, as a one-woman VSB I think that, proportionally, I contribute more to the country’s economic effort than companies who seek public funds to build a new factory and then relocate a few years later, leaving the State with the task of cleaning up the site and finding work for those left unemployed.

I find that large companies – apart from employment blackmail – don’t really have much to offer. Having a huge turnover and many employees does not guarantee quality or reactivity, nor does it guarantee better value for money given that VSBs/SMEs enjoy lower operational costs and focus their efforts so as not to waste their human and material resources.

We need to start thinking differently and valuing networks of small, reactive operators with roots in society, who offer products that meet real demands and have a capacity for immediate adaptation and flexibility, instead of leaving it all to large multinationals whose sole aim is to attain economies of scale. If I compare my offer with that of large, quoted translation agencies, not only am I in the same price range, but I can also guarantee better quality and pay my colleagues more because my operating costs are lower – the number of contributors varies depending on the size of the project. I can guarantee a truly customised service as I am in fact the only contact person and, like any VSB, I am obliged to meet my customers’ expectations. I do not have access to the exclusive agreements reserved for large accounts and any future orders depend directly on customer satisfaction for every project.

Last week was indeed one of introspection for I also had to write up a presentation of Fairtrad for Etika Mondo, an association of which I am a member, as well as 1 % for the Planet. I had to reassert the values that prompted me to set up a fair translation agency and my commitment to working ethically; it is a great venture, I do have to say. I realised that I’m not as alone as I thought and that others do share not only my problems but also my ideals. The world is changing, and it’s up to us to decide whether for better or for worse.

So, for now, I’ll hold on strong.

 

A small gallery

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  • Nulla consequat massa quis enim.
  • Donec pede justo, fringilla vel, aliquet nec, vulputate eget, arcu.
  • In enim justo, rhoncus ut, imperdiet a, venenatis vitae, justo.
  • Nullam dictum felis eu pede mollis pretium. Integer tincidunt. Cras dapibus. Vivamus elementum semper nisi.

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Fairtrad 2013

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Fairtrad now has a network of over 500 professional linguists.

The most sought-after languages include French, English, Italian, Spanish, German, Korean and Chinese.

Over the last two years, we have had the pleasure of working for: 1ère Position, Areva, Axalot, Axance, BT Paysages, CBM Automotive, DRS Avocats, eBay, FerrariGroup, Filhet-Allard Maritime, FloraQueen, Huawei, Lawington, le coq sportif, the French Ministry of Ecology, Nespresso, Objectif Prod, Obalys, Paris Attitude, Polyspot, Renzo Piano, Royal Caribbean, SCAU Architectes, SMABTP, Solaire Direct, Sophie Kamoun Communications, Systra, Terre Majeure, Traveltainement, Usabilis, Vizona, Watermill, and more…

We have provided translations in the following fields: architecture, civil engineering, automobile spare parts, nuclear waste processing, e-commerce, legal (standard and certified translations), fashion, marketing, luxury, change management, IT, construction, insurance, solar panels, press kits, clinical trials, user tests, dermatology, cosmetics, retail, technical manuals, subtitling and tourism, among others.

A big thank you to all our colleagues for their work and to all our customers for their business. Here’s to another year together!

 

Localisation and the return of fascism

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People are expressing themselves from bad to worse. It is a sorry sight indeed. With the advent of the Internet and content produced by users, language is evolving at an ever increasing rate. Common mistakes eventually become systematic and accepted as the norm once the next generation forgets the correct form. For example, I bet that within five years it will be acceptable to write “their are several ways [to do something]”. Confusion between the use of « there, their and they’re » is a common grammatical mistake that many people make or read without picking up on the error.  This rapid corruption of language is one of the reasons why crowdsourcing of translation is to be avoided as much possible. Likewise, I urge you to have your virtual content translated by a professional translator – an absurd idea perhaps – but you never know. It might work.

Among those languages progressively losing their cultural identity, Italian has pride of place. Italy has only been a united country since 1861 and this unity was not confirmed on a linguistic level until after World War II, through the advent of television among other things. It was a time of literacy campaigns and national pride. Now gone when you see that young Italians no longer know their own language and even institutions in the country hardly seem to care about preserving it. I could give you many examples to illustrate how corruption – rampant on various levels in Italy – even influences the very language (I am Italian). However, I will confine my discussion to localisation.

The most common source language on the Internet is English, but the aspects I will present to you here are also common to websites translated from the French.

Calques (or loanwords). Italians think that English is a much “cooler” language. That is why they prefer to use “supporto” instead of “assistenza” to translate the English word support, or “registrarsi” instead of “iscriversi” for register, and so on. These words are not used at all in Italian in the natural language, but are now commonplace on the Web. This does not mean they are correct.

Pronouns. Italian uses very few pronouns. Firstly, it is a language that is written as it is pronounced: “I love” is “io amo” and “you love” is “tu ami”. So we just say “amo, ami” because we don’t need the pronoun to understand who the subject is. In fact, we only use possessive pronouns when there is cause for ambiguity. So we would say “dammi la mano” (and not “dammi la tua mano”) for “give me your hand”. It is obvious that we are referring to the hand of the person we are speaking to (unless that person is carrying a dissected corpse…). That is why it is easy to recognise a poor Italian translation by the impressive number of pronouns contained within it.

Formal “you”. Where formal “you” is used in English and the French prefer “vous” to address Internet users, very bad Italian translators have invaded the Internet with horrible constructions based on the pronoun “voi”. See the Italian website for Chanel, for example:

Yet, not only is it the informal “tu”, or the infinitive form of the verb that should be used in this context, if you do really want to speak formally to someone, you have to use “Lei” in Italian – the third person singular. That said, “Lei” is only used in very formal situations and therefore never on the Internet.  Also, “Lei” must always be reciprocated which means you demand that your customers speak as formally to you in return.

Used until the 19th Century in parallel to “Lei” and “tu”, “voi” was reserved for those people of very high rank. In southern Italy, it is still very common to speak formally using “voi”, but this is more a mark of dialect. These days, “voi” is a plural pronoun that addresses several people at once, as explained by Luca Seriani from the national linguistic institute Accademia della Crusca. In 1938, Mussolini banned the use of “Lei” and ordered the return of “voi” in formal speech. Ettore Scola quotes this law in his 1977 film “Una giornata particolare« . Italianists will note that Marcello Mastroianni uses “Lei” whereas Sophia Loren uses “voi”. They argue in fact, as Sophia Loren is afraid of reprisals for refusing to apply this fascist grammar. Mastroianni resolves the dispute by moving straight to the use of “tu”.

That is why each time I browse a badly-translated website where I read “voi”, I turn to check whether there isn’t someone doing a Roman salute in the room. Is this the effect desired by those who mandate these translations?  Far from it, I’m sure…