ATA Conference Boston - Review of Sessions I

German-English translator Annette Cyrkel took this photo at one of the networking breakfasts at the recent ATA conference in Boston and graciously let me use it. Here are my summaries of three sessions on technical translations/terminology. I'll review two more sessions on the business/marketing end of our profession next week.

• "A Dilemma for Language Service Providers and Translators: Subject Matter Expertise and Internet Style"
• "Technical Writing for Into-English Translators"
• "Search-fu! Finding Terminology on the Internet"

"A Dilemma for Language Service Providers and Translators: Subject Matter Expertise and Internet Style" by Manisha Mittal

Ms. Mittal works for Language Scientific, a translation agency specializing in technical and scientific documents. She explained how her agency analyzes incoming projects and matches translators, subject matter experts and editors with a specific project. Unlike more generalized language services providers, Language Scientific requests fairly detailed information from its end clients. This includes target audience, specific speciality within a subject, type of text, in-house style guides and glossaries. It then assembles a team of translators, editors and proofreaders, at least some of whom are also subject-matter experts in the given sub-speciality. The agency is looking for additional freelancers.

"Technical Writing for Into-English Translators" by Karen M. Tkaczyk

Ms. Tkaczyk defined technical writing as text that conveys informaton accurately, explains technical ideas and is focused on the user. For a technical writer a romantic poem simply becomes "John loves Jane." She then provided a number of specific tips for editing your translation into better technical writing, such as:

• write concisely; if necessary, divide long sentences into multiple shorter ones
• reorder thoughts to make them logically coherent or to present events in the correct order
• turn nouns into strong, active verbs

Translators should pick a specific style guide to follow whenever a client doesn't specify a particular style guide, Ms. Tkaczyk suggested. The presentation concluded with a list of common stylistic errors, such as spacing between units of measure. An extensive list of resources was provided in a handout.

"Search-fu! Finding Terminology on the Internet" by Alex Lane

Mr. Lane focused on the ways in which Google searches can be customized to return the specific results a translator might need. One of the most useful, I think, is the fact that a search query can contain words in more than one language. Google will interpret the languages concerned and return bilingual texts that fit the query. Other ways to find terms include exploiting a site's URL structure to find the same document in a different language (e.g., if a search returns www.example.com/English/document1.html, replace "English" with "German" to see document1 in German) and restricting searches to specific sites or sites with a specific country code. Mr. Lane recommended keeping track of the searches performed, in case terminology choices are questioned later.

H.W. Fowler and Global English

As I am writing this, I am looking out over the remnants of yesterday's snowstorm in New York, which even closed the public schools. The park near me handed out free loaner sleds and hot chocolate to children taking advantage of this unexpected free time. I wish they did that when I was a kid!

Anyway, about language:

Henry Watson Fowler was born today in 1858. Best known as the author of Fowler's Modern English Usage, his first publication was actually a translation -- The Works of Lucian of Samosata translated from Greek into English. (The translation is available at the Project Gutenberg website). His next publication, together with his brother Francis, was The King's English in 1906 (available at Google Books, but he is most famous for Modern English Usage, published in 1926 and dedicated to Francis, who died before the work was completed.

Many of Fowler's rules for good writing established in The King's English echo modern-day advice for writers of global English, such as:
· Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.
· Prefer the concrete word (or rather expression) to the abstract.
· Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.
· Prefer the short word to the long.

I am struck by how often the writers of user manuals and similar documents do not follow these rules. They not only use highly specialized, abstract words, but also join sentences into paragraph-long complex structures. Many of these manuals are:
a. read by non-native English speakers (both immigrants to the U.S. and customers purchasing these products outside the U.S.), and/or
b. translated into languages whose own grammatical structures may complicate such sentences even further.

Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that many adults find it difficult to give clear and concise directions. While admittedly most people will not write user manuals, being able to provide clear instructions seems a useful life skill. Consider the friend who is trying to tell you how to get to her party, or the roommate trying to explain how to operate his video camera. How many detours did you take on the way to the party? Did you ever get that video camera to work?

Try this assignment from an innovative high school English teacher: "Your house guest is an for an alien from Mars. You are writing instructions for him on how to fix a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The alien has never seen such a sandwich, or its ingredients, and knows nothing of common culinary techniques. Be specific, but concise." Have a few people write these instructions, then follow each others instructions literally. The results can be quite hilarious!

Until next week,
Barbara