| My long-time colleague and friend Juliet Macan recently wrote me this letter. I found it remarkable enough to share with you because it describes the world of translation in a way that only few of us have actually seen. Here you go (and thank you, Juliet!): Your book "Translation Matters" really triggered some amazing memories. Quite literally as someone who experienced the industrial revolution of translation, I wanted to share my experience as a translator and translation technology enthusiast living in Italy since 1973 when this marvellous adventure all began for me. Here is my viewpoint of how things occurred, at least in Southern Europe: Although I never had any formal (academic) training in translation, I studied Sociology and Psychology at university. I found the great variety of texts I was asked to translate as a junior translator in an Italian agency an endless challenge and delight. Curiosity was the name of the game! Delving into the meaning of elaborate Italian texts which sang beautifully in the original but translated literally would have sounded plain silly to an English ear. Having to extract and mould the message to another culture without losing possible inferences. I loved it. My fascination with words harks back to my childhood, where I soon realised that some of the household words used by my Irish immigrant family were quite different from those used in my English school. This together with my Catholic Latin upbringing, passion for reading, and love of poetry and singing made me particularly sensitive to language and meaning. But it was less fun having to retype one or more pages on my manual Olivetti typewriter when a lot of changes were required. So I was thrilled, in the early eighties, when I first got my hands on an electronic word processor (Rank Xerox), so I could type up and save a certain amount of text and modify and reprint it as necessary. This was just a short jump to the PC. Unfortunately, my first computer, another Rank Xerox, did not go so well: after losing a translation of 30 pages, I sent it back but, undeterred, opted for my first IBM clone. Here I went for Microsoft Word for DOS, and my computer adventures began! Certainly, there were hitches in the beginning, but with a group of fellow translators, I learnt to master MS Word for DOS, to format the layout of a table in pre-WYSIWYG days. Lots of adventures in this new digital world. Also, instead of handwritten notes in my dictionaries, or pieces of paper with terminology suggestions, I was able to create "real" glossaries in my PC. But, just like all my reference materials, the original texts were still in paper form and the translations had to be delivered by post or in person. One nasty drawback that I experienced in my early computer (and mouse) days was "tennis elbow"--extremely painful--due to the incorrect position of my keyboard and mouse. Once I learnt the importance of ergonomics, problem resolved. Strangely enough, 15 years on when Dragon NaturallySpeaking was available, it was no use to me, as by that time I needed my daily exercise on the keyboard to keep arthritic fingers supple! Then the BBS arrived in the early nineties, which meant that equipped with a modem, I could deliver my translations in electronic format without leaving the house! Although I did have to install a second telephone line so that I could explain to the agency, or client, how to receive my file. This was rapidly followed by internet: finally, I could send and receive documents in electronic format. This new era changed lots of things, and required increasing technological competence, so I joined a cooperative of translators and interpreters so that I could contribute to, and benefit from, the pooling of knowledge and investment with professional colleagues. The arrival of MS Word for Windows introduced new changes for the better along with challenges--the RTF that lies below a DOC still causes trouble today for those who refuse to move on to DOCX. Other challenges were DTP formats such as Adobe PageMaker and FrameMaker and Interleaf, etc., as technical writers began to provide their documents in these programmes. Either you installed these programmes and learnt how to use them, or you were out of a job! But it was often difficult to focus on the translation in hand when you were struggling with unfamiliar programmes as well as layout problems, as clearly many of the tech writers were focussed on the "appearance" of their documents and unaware of the "text flow" nightmares they were creating. Somehow I feel this was excusable in the nineties, but I really think it is unforgivable today, especially in MS Word files where tables can be excruciating. Simultaneously, the arrival of terminology and translation memory software created a revolution. The potential benefits were very clear, but there were many new problems, not least choosing the "right" tool and configuring file filters, not to mention compatibility. IBM, Star, Trados and Atril all offered translation tools!! What a tumultuous time! I admit, I just jumped in the deep-end, tried a bit of everything, and gradually refined my choices over the years. Because of this passion and curiosity to find the best solution, at the end of the nineties I was appointed the translation technology manager in the cooperative, responsible for testing new systems and utilities, overseeing the fine-tuning, and training translators and reviewers in the use of these tools. This aspect had become even more urgent following the introduction of the new European Union laws in 1995 that obliged companies to provide all their documentation in the language of the European countries where they sold their products, thus no longer just English, French, and German, but Finnish, Danish, Dutch, etc. Another revolution that multiplied the demands for translation of technical documentation and required the training of new translators. Then, in 2000, I had to find a replacement for IBM Translation Manager when IBM decided to suspend support. Although we used Trados, and TagEditor, for quite a lot of work, I was one of the few who first used and appreciated Workspace as it offered the possibility of creating multilingual projects and combining the various parts of Trados into a single tool. I was getting exasperated by the total lack of support offered by Trados. Then there was the question of the freelance translators who did not have a licence, or those who swore they worked with it but who used Wordfast, which meant serious segmentation and compatibility issues when they delivered their files. Exactly at this time, SDL put its in-house translation software on the market. SDLX was a great solution. It made it possible to create multilingual projects and provide translators with a free translation environment, with everything set up and connected to aid them in their work. The translation layout was much simpler and more pleasant than IBM Translation Manager, Word+Workbench/TagEditor, and Transit, and quite similar to Déjà Vu. Support was also excellent: if they couldn't fix a problem immediately, they gave you sympathy and a workaround. They appreciated feedback! Furthermore, it was easier to convince translators to try using CAT and appreciate the advantages; all they had to do was open the packages and translate. In the meantime, not only did Microsoft update its basic Office tools to the XML format, another improvement, but it was also the advent of various so-called "QA tools," another source of great excitement and exploration. QA Distiller, Dog Error Spy, ApSIC XBench, etc. offered new possibilities for helping translators to avoid mistakes and improve the accuracy of their translations. Each of these had to be assessed, to establish how they could be used to best advantage, and instructions prepared for translators and reviewers. Then there was the new enlargement of the European Union in 2004 and the requirements for translations in the "new" European languages, from Hungarian to Czech, from Polish to Maltese (for the latter it took Microsoft from May to September to include the four special characters unique to this language). Even more translators to introduce to translation memory, and new fonts to be designed for FrameMaker! And then the breaking news on June 20, 2005: "SDL acquires Trados." I knew immediately what this meant, and that I would be obliged to look for another tool! A lot of new translation memory tools had appeared, such as MultiCorpora, OmegaT, Across and Heartsome. But none of these felt quite right. Then I tested memoQ, and my first impression was that they had clearly learnt a lot from all the tools that preceded them and appeared to instinctively know what was efficient and comfortable for a translator. In addition, they also appreciated feedback and were prompt in implementing PM functions. Subsequently, I was interested to note the similarities with the new SDL Trados Studio, although I think that Studio was based heavily on the experience gained with SDLX, with bits of Trados plugged in. They certainly had, and still do, keep a close watch on what memoQ does. This has led to benefits for all over the last decade, as both tools have introduced features that they considered useful in the other tool. The only oversight, which I consider appalling, on the part of SDL is their failure to recognise the incredible possibilities offered by LiveDocs. Now to get back to "Translation Matters": one of the first things that really touched me was your reference (in 2010) to the cloud (pages 38-40) and your doubts. Even though the cloud has been around for over a decade in certain tools and lies at the base of many of the newer tools that have appeared since 2010, I still feel uncertain about various aspects. First of all, although I personally have a fantastic fibre connection to the internet from home, I am acutely aware that not everyone is as lucky. Secondly, when you are "on-the-road," connections can be very unreliable/unpredictable, and so if your main tool, and all the material you are working on, is in the cloud, even in 2019, this is not a good thing. Indeed, I had a discussion about this with Michael Farrell in Forlì, as he was looking for the ideal translation environment tool with everything in the cloud. I tried to convince him that this was probably not a very good idea. And it is not even just a question of lock-in, as you mention later on, but the fact that even though you may be able to access, with permission, a cloud from a different tool to do a job, at the end of the translation, you are left with nothing. No trace for your own reference, no idea of how the translation has been used/modified. As a translator I find this more than a little alienating. Furthermore, it is not necessary. You can work in the cloud, but still have the possibility to work locally. I was delighted with your mention of Terence Lewis, an amazing guy whom we have had the fortune to hear speak twice at the ASLIB/ASLING conference in London. He really fascinates me with his determination to find a solution for whatever problem crops up. On the other hand, I am still in two minds about crowdsourcing. While I fully agree that it is a marvellous opportunity in certain circumstances, for instance Wikipedia, I was very disturbed when memoQ introduced several years ago the online professional workflow by which a translator starts a translation and then, to save time, almost simultaneously, a reviewer can enter and start to check and modify the translation. Maybe I am too old for this but I cannot escape the feeling that when one is doing a translation, often you need to get into a text before you can be sure of the correct translation, then you need to go back and review it yourself, before passing it on to someone else. But if somebody else is pressing hard on your heels and changing your translations before you have had time to reflect -- I am not sure what the result will be. I also notice today an unfortunate drop in the sense of responsibility on the part of translators for their work, probably linked to project and payment structures. This is dangerous and very inefficient. As regards your Trados history, I think we need to get some of the facts straight. The company Trados was founded as an LSP in 1984 and therefore could boast a history of 25 years in 2009, but the software Trados Workbench for DOS first appeared in 1992 followed by Trados for Windows in 1994. So at the most, we could say that in 2009 Trados Workbench was 17. This is something that SDL, which launched its own project-based translation tool SDLX in 2001, plays a lot on; indeed, Studio (a combination of the two) is only 10 years old this year! I very much appreciated your Relationships section, especially now when the pressure is on to automate everything from uploading content by customers, automatic counting and assignment, and automatic delivery and billing, although strangely prompt payment seems to be lagging behind! Clients rarely know much about the intricacies of languages, let alone translations or translation technology, and neither do their staff or content authors. To pretend that all this can be done by a magic tool, which just as soon as NMT has been perfected will do away with humans altogether, is absurd and yet.... I agree that qualified PMs are important to facilitate the whole process; they are NECESSARY to oil the wheels. Indeed, when I was still working in an LSP four years ago, I was delighted by the possibility offered by the memoQ project-communications function, a kind of Skype conversation for all those involved in a project that allows translators to discuss terminology or other aspects of the content with each other, and which can be monitored by the PM who can step in when necessary, or refer questions to the client. It was much appreciated by the translators and the PMs. But even at that time, the pressure was on to automate and eliminate human interaction. The message needs to be that communication, in one let alone multiple languages, requires the comprehension and mediation of highly qualified humans. Machines can follow patterns, but they do not understand. Unfortunately, often the problem lies with the source content. Despite the valiant efforts on the part of many authoring and content advisors over the years, source content optimisation is lagging sadly behind. A typical example of this can be found in the widespread use of Euro-English as a pivot between the various EU languages. This, combined with the pressure to use NMT and PE, displays complete incomprehension of the issues. Yet another argument in favour of the dream of Interactive Translation mentioned by Félix do Carmo (see edition 299 of the Tool Box Journal) to support expert, specialist linguists in the identification and solution of communication problems that cannot be dealt with by AI or someone just fluent in the target language. We were lucky enough to have Félix as a speaker at the Translating and the Computer conference in London in 2016 and I found his words very inspiring. You can find Juliet on LinkedIn right here. |
