Yesterday’s post was about publishing fees on your website. I’ve had my say, now it’s your turn. Take our poll and let us know what you think! (Or — especially if you select “Other” — tell us in the comments).
By Marian Dougan
Fees: to publish or not to publish? (1)
After much humming and hawing, I’ve finally taken the plunge and published my fees on my website. I know that many translators and other small-business owners prefer not to do so. Some say that as they provide a service, not a product, their fees are not — should not be? — easily quantifiable. Others feel that, once published, their fees would be set in stone and hard to tailor to the difficulty and complexity of a given project.
My position is:
- my fees are quite easy to quantify. I charge on a per day, hour or page basis (per-word if required), with a sliding scale to reflect subject difficulty and surcharges for urgency and so on. If for some reason a project is difficult to quantify at the outset, I word my quote to reflect this.
- I already draw up a fee schedule each year which I send out to clients as and when they request it. It has a degree of flexibility built in, as the fees are listed as “starting from” a minimum level. So why not publish the schedule on my website?
It’s up to each business owner to decide whether or not to publish their fees, of course.
But here’s something I don’t understand. If you don’t want to publish your rates, why include a dedicated “Fees” or “Rates” page in your website? Pages that take up valuable space but fail to provide specific information are misleading and a waste of potential customers’ time, and web-users don’t like being misled or having their time wasted. Plus, these generic pages all say pretty much the same thing.
If you want to provide general information about your pricing strategy — our fees vary according to the length, difficulty and nature of the project; please contact us and we’ll send you a quote, etc — that’s fine. Clients are entitled to know how we arrive at our fees, and it doesn’t do any harm to give them an idea of the various layers of complexity involved in our work.
You just need to decide where to put that information and how to label it. A dedicated web-page labelled “Fees” but lacking specific information about rates isn’t the best place.
What’s your position? Let us know in the comments — or pop back tomorrow to take our poll.
By Marian Dougan
Smart quote-marks for smart translating
I wrote on 21 July about quote-marks — how to decide whether you should be using curly (smart) or straight quotes and, once you’ve decided, how to type them using keyboard shortcuts where necessary.
Translators, however, need to decide not just which quote marks to use but whether or not to “translate” them. For example, several languages use the guillemet style of quote mark, or angle quotes, «which look like this».
Since we don’t normally use guillemets in English, we shouldn’t simply carry them over from the source text (Italian, say) into the English translation. They should be translated into standard English quote marks, “like this” (or ‘like this’, if you prefer).
Here are three reasons why translators (some of them) fail to translate quote marks.
- They don’t know their source language well enough and think that the guillemets are being used for emphasis or to achieve some special effect, rather than being standard use. So an inexperienced translator will carry them over into English, where they hope to create the same effect (whatever that may be). This is bad.
- They don’t even notice that the quote marks in the source language are different from those used in English. In this case, the translator copies the guillemets over without thinking. This is bad.
- They don’t know their own language (English) well enough to realise that we don’t use guillemets. This, in my opinion, is the worst of the three.
Some people probably wouldn’t consider this misuse of guillemets to be an error. The translated text will still be comprehensible, although the reader might think it looks a bit odd, without necessarily realising why. But to my mind it is an error, for precisely that reason — it will bug and distract the reader. And the translator’s aim is to produce a text that reads smoothly in the target text, without sloppy mistranslations interrupting the reader’s concentration like a pesky mosquito buzzing around their head.
What do you think? Am I being too pernickety (yet again)? Have you got any pet punctuation peeves?
By the way: I originally thought that the word for angle quotes was “guillemots” because, taken singly, they look a bit like a child’s drawing of a bird and a guillemot is a type of seabird. Sadly, that’s wrong. According to Wikipedia the correct term, guillemet, derives from the name of Guillaume Le Bé, a French printer.
By Marian Dougan
Festival Times: Milngavie Book and Arts Festival
I haven’t had time to post anything recently as I’ve been working on Milngavie Book and Arts Festival, as Twitterer-in-Chief (follow the Festival on Twitter) and Deputy Webmaster (ie, I mess things up and the true Webmaster, Anne Nelson of Intuitive Internet (isn’t that a great name?) sorts them out).
If you live in Central Scotland or are planning to visit this coming week (the Festival opens on 6 September), check out the programme to see the great events we’ve got lined up.
And if you can’t manage this year, think about a visit to Milngavie for our 2012 edition. Milngavie itself is an attractive village and there’s lots to do in the vicinity. Nearby we’ve got Mugdock Country Park, with lovely walks and a ruined castle, or sister-suburb Bearsden, with its Roman remains: the bath-house, and a stretch of the Roman road running right through the peaceful cemetery. Cue film title: A Roman Road Runs Through It.
The Bennie Railplane, a form of rail transport which moved along an overhead rail by way of propellers, will be featured in the Festival’s Community Art Project.
Invented by George Bennie (1891–1957), a prototype of this novel railplane ran over a 130-yard line in Milngavie in the 1930′s but Bennie was never able to secure funding for further development and went bankrupt in 1937. The line was demolished for scrap in the 1950′s.
If you’re on Twitter, you can follow the Festival here
By the way, the Festival Committee includes not one but two translators: me and Alison Hughes. Lucky committee… or not?
By Marian Dougan
Portuguese pick-ups
We’re just back from holiday in Portugal, with a mid-year resolution to sign up for Portuguese lessons at Glasgow University’s Department of Adult and Continuing Education, which thankfully seems to have survived the threatened budget cuts. As my daughter put it, we felt like such tourists, not being able to speak the language.
However, not speaking Portuguese didn’t stop me from keeping my translator’s hat on and noting mistakes in English translations of signs, menus, museum pamphlets and so on. To be honest, I didn’t see many outright howlers, but one poor translation really bugged me — mainly because it was omnipresent on one of the country’s major pieces of infrastructure.
The Portuguese motorways operate a toll system where you can either pay as you go, or sign up to the Via Verde system. Under this scheme, an electronic identifier fitted in your car lets you drive straight through the Via Verde lane, with the toll fee being debited directly to your bank account.
The motorway signs in English identified the Via Verde lane as being for “adherents” and invited the rest of us to “pick up” our tickets at the ticket dispensers.
According to Merriam Webster, an “adherent” is:
a : a follower of a leader, party, or profession
b : a believer in or advocate especially of a particular idea or church,
neither of which applies to people who’ve signed up to an electronic toll-payment system. Given that the “Via Verde” lane is clearly marked with a great big green “V” on the road itself and on the overhead signage, couldn’t the motorway people just have used “Via Verde” or “Subscribers” on their signs?
I’ll spare you Merriam Webster’s entry for “pick up”*; it’s very long. Once again, none of the definitions applies to the case in point. You pick up theatre tickets you’ve ordered by phone or online, but you take your motorway ticket from a dispensing machine. Don’t you?
Maybe I’m just being pernickety here. But I can’t help thinking of the huge budgets involved in building and running a motorway and installing all those thousands of signs, and the infinitesimally small proportion of such budgets that even the most expensive translation service would cost. Or maybe the motorway company just asked somebody in the office to translate the signs, figuring that it’s dead easy to translate just a couple of words into English. When in fact translating single words and short phrases is one of the hardest things to do, because you’ve got no context to help.
Whatever translation service the motorways used, surely they could have spent a couple of euros more to get things rightS
*On second thoughts, here’s Merriam Webster on “to pick up” (look away now if you’re allergic to phrasal verbs):
Transitive verb
a : to take hold of and lift up
b : to gather together : collect <picked up all the pieces>
c : to clean up : tidy
2: to take (passengers or freight) into a vehicle
3 a : to acquire casually or by chance <picked up a valuable antique at an auction>
b : to acquire by study or experience : learn <picking up a great deal of knowledge in the process — Robert Schleicher>
c : to obtain especially by payment : buy <picked up some groceries>
d : to acquire (a player) especially from another team through a trade or by financial recompense
e : to accept for the purpose of paying <offered to pick up the tab>
f : to come down with : catch <picked up a cold>
g : gain, earn <picked up a few yards on the last play> <picked up her first victory>
4 a : to enter informally into conversation or companionship with (a previously unknown person) <had a brief affair with a girl he picked up in a bar>
b : to take into custody <the police picked up the fugitive>
5 a : to catch sight of : perceive <picked up the harbor lights>
b : to come to and follow <picked up the outlaw’s trail>
c : to bring within range of sight or hearing <pick up distant radio signals>
d : understand, catch <didn’t pick up the hint>
6 a : revive
b : increase
7: to resume after a break : continue <pick up the discussion tomorrow>
8: to assume responsibility for guarding (an opponent) in an athletic contestintransitive verb
1: to recover or increase speed, vigor, or activity : improve <after the strike, business picked up> <the wind began to pick up>
2: to put things in order <was always picking up after her>
3: to pack up one’s belongings <couldn’t just pick up and leave>
As I said, it’s a long list.
By Marian Dougan
Want to look trustworthy? Write it right.
Word geeks like translators and editors are always wittering on about poor translations or badly written web material being bad for business, because they make a company look sloppy or unreliable.
Well, I saw this belief in action during our recent trip to Lisbon. We needed to hire a car, and I asked my 16-year-old daughter, Olivia, to do some web research and find the best deal. In addition to the big names like Europcar and Avis she looked at the websites of some local firms recommended by our hotel (the lovely York House).
Olivia’s shortlist contained at least one local firm but she plumped for one of the big internationals, even though it was slightly dearer. When I asked her why, she explained that the local firms had mistakes in their English translations and didn’t provide enough information or contact details in their clunky-to-use websites. So she didn’t think we could trust them.
Teenage wisdom.
By Marian Dougan
Smart quote-marks for smart writing
Keyboard shortcuts are a great timesaver when you’re spending hours typing away on your computer. I’ve just learned a couple of new ones, for inserting smart (curly) quotes in text where autoformat functions, such as Word’s, don’t work, and for doing the opposite: inserting straight quotes when you’re working in AutoFormat mode.
I discovered these tips when I was working (in Joomla) on the copy for my revamped website. I noticed that some of the quote marks I’d been inserting were straight, not curly and that I’d ended up with a sloppy-looking mish-mash of both types.
So I contacted Zoë, my web-designer, who told me some keyboard shortcuts to turn straight quotes into smart in programmes or environments where AutoFormat isn’t available, and how to insert straight quotes when necessary. I’d to go through each page of the website (which has a lot of quotes — from Aeschylus to Groucho Marx!) and change them all by hand. But at least they’re sorted (although a couple no doubt slipped through the net).
These shortcuts are for Macs, by the way, but PCs should have something similar.
Inserting smart quotes
First, to set up Word to insert smart quotes automatically, go to the Insert menu > Autotext > AutoFormat As You Type and, in the section under Replace as you type, check the box next to “Straight quotes” with “smart quotes”.
If you’re working in an application where AutoFormat doesn’t work, you can use the following shortcuts:
For double right-facing quote marks (“): alt+left square bracket ([)
For double left-facing quote marks (”): shift+alt+left curly bracket ({)
For single right-facing quote mark (‘): alt+right square bracket (])
For single left-facing quote mark (’): shift+alt+right curly bracket (})
These shortcuts are also useful when you want to boss your programme around. For example, when you’re in AutoFormat mode, Word assumes that in a sentence like “The ‘80s were the decade of wide-shouldered power suits”, the single quote mark before 80s (as an abbreviation for 1980s) is opening a quote. So it makes the quote mark left-facing, when it should in fact be right-facing. But if you use the keyboard short-cut: shift+alt+left-facing curly bracket (}), you’ll get “the ’80s”.
Inserting straight quotes or prime marks
Sometimes you need to insert straight quotes rather than smart ones — when you’re using them as prime marks, say, to signify feet and inches or hours, minutes and seconds etc., like this: 5′ 6″ (5 feet and 6 inches (length), or 5 minutes and 6 seconds (time)). True prime marks are straight but slightly slanted, rather than vertical, but straight quotes do the job nicely.
To insert straight quotes when you’re working in curly-quote mode, type the single or double quote mark as required, then use the keyboard shortcut for “Undo”: command+z. That’ll turn the curly quote into a straight one and instead of 5’ 6”, you’ll get 5′ 6″. (In Word, I’d have expected it to remove the character I’d just typed, but no, it doesn’t. It does here in WordPress, though, as I’ve just discovered!).
As I mentioned above, these shortcuts are courtesy 
of the wonderful Zoë Shuttleworth of Rude Goose and are for use on a Mac. But other operating systems should have something similar — if you know of any, tell us about them in the comments. That goes for other keyboard shortcuts too — if you’ve got any you find particularly useful, we’d love to hear about them.
Photo courtesy of Quinn Dombrowski
By Marian Dougan
The language, or the message… Why not both?
I’ve just read an opinion piece on transcreation by Steve Puttock of Schawk, Inc. in the PopSop brand magazine.
The article begins:
The global marketplace is providing businesses with fantastic opportunities but also, inevitably, moving into new markets can cause headaches! One area for particular concern is around the creation of international advertising and marketing campaigns. For the sake of efficiency, it makes sense to create a master campaign that can then be adapted and deployed across local markets. […]
The key to getting this right is to think in terms of ‘transcreation’ rather than translation. This means looking far beyond changing the words of your campaign into different languages. Instead, you need to reinvent, or ‘transcreate’, the campaign’s key messages to take into account the nuances of the language and culture of each country/region you are in. This is essential if you want to ensure your message connects with your target audience—whilst still keeping the integrity of the master campaign.
To do this, the article suggests that companies should:
Use copywriters, not translators. Translators will get the language right word for word, but you need a multilingual copywriter to understand how to get the message across in the right way. [the emphasis is mine]
This last sentence raised my hackles a bit. Good translators would say their job is all about getting the message across in the right way. But maybe Mr. Puttock has never worked with good translators.
Transcreation does require special skills and not all translators will be good at it. But some are experts in the field and possess both copywriting and translation skills. Percy Balemans illustrated this beautifully at her transcreation workshop at the ITI Conference in May 2011. In Percy’s words:
I chose to become a translator because I enjoy being creative with language and juggling with words in order to convey the same message in a different language and against a different cultural background.”
And I wonder how many multilingual copywriters there are — surely the best solution is for client, copywriter and translator to work together?
I’d love to know what you think about this, translators, copywriters and readers.
Note: PopSop’s introduction to the opinion piece states that You are welcome to share your thoughts on this article but I couldn’t find anywhere to leave a comment, hence this post.
By Marian Dougan
Top 100 Language Lovers and Top 25 Language Professionals Blogs, 2011: we’re well chuffed!
“Words to good effect” is one of the winning blogs (we came 3rd!!!) in the Top 25 Language Professionals Blogs 2011 competition organised by LexioPhiles and Bab.La. We came 30th overall in the Top 100 Language Lovers category. We’re totally chuffed!
A big Thank You to everyone who voted for us!
By Marian Dougan
The king’s speech — and how to translate it
As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve had a speech-flavoured working week.
Translating a speech is a good opportunity for translators to provide added value for their clients. Not only should our translated text read fluently and naturally, it should also be easy for non-native-speaking clients to read aloud (and for their audience to listen to).
Your client might be delivering the speech in their own language, of course, with the translation provided in the delegates’ pack or for the interpreters. Try to find out. If they’re delivering the translated version (for the purposes of this post, I’ll talk about translations from Italian to English), try to find out how well they speak English.
When you’re working on the translation, remember to keep sentences short and simple in construction. If the sentences in the original version are long (as they often are in Italian), when you divide them you might need to change the order not just of the words but of the phrases too. If so, make sure you retain the intended emphasis.
Don’t be afraid to use a more rhetorical style of writing than you normally would (rhetoric, as defined by Merriam-Webster, refers to “writing or speaking as a means of communication or persuasion; skill in the effective use of speech”). You’re translating for impact, after all.
Lionel Logue, the speech therapist who helped King George VI overcome his stammer, used annotated drafts of the King’s speeches and drew lines between words to indicate when to insert pauses. Click on the image (inset on the left) in Ben Zimmer’s The King’s Tongue Twisters article from the New York Times to see an example.
As translators we might not be able to annotate our texts to that extent (although we could ask our clients if they’d find such guidance helpful). But we can and should use punctuation liberally for the same purpose.
And, like Lionel Logue, we should avoid words that might be problematic. For example, if I’m translating an Italian foreign-policy speech I might want to avoid a sentence like: “We will make a thorough-going effort throughout our three-year mandate to overthrow the forces of terror and through that effort thwart those forces in their attempt to throw the world into the trough of despair”. I know, you might want to avoid a sentence like that regardless of who’s pronouncing it. The point is that all those “th” and “ough” sounds would be problematic for most Italian-speakers.
Read the translated speech to yourself (in your head or aloud). Listen to its rhythms and adjust your translation if necessary.
And end the speech on a strong note.
By Marian Dougan