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Transloscope March-April

The horoscope for translators - 15 March - 15 April 2010


Aries
Stop getting angry because you cannot ctrl-z back in those excel cells and no, it is not absolutely sure that you checked already for double spaces in that 4,000-words doc: it just takes a sec, don't send it yet.


Taurus
Before you set on fire your internet provider's central building, go out and subscribe to the local gym and work out to realease the stress: in a prison cell the wi-fi is going to be even more unstable.


Gemini
Don't refuse that dentistry manual job: the fact that you specialize in gardening tools does not mean at all that you'll do bad: no-one will notice unless you loaf on the couch until it's two days from the deadline as usual.


Cancer
I know: it's not the right time, today it's so cloudy, you had a fight with your girlfriend, you don't know the true meaning of life. At least crawl out of the bed, get yourself some coffee and send that €3k invoice, ass.


Leo
In 2010, no-one is going to acknowledge the striking superiority of your work in accuracy, quickness and eloquence: now this may sound unfair to you, but perhaps you should rethink that €0.09 min rate, mate.


Virgo
You could fit those extra 2,500 words for Mon, work on Sun at the legal doc, and Sat night you can finish checking the agency's Nuclear_physics_TM. What you need, though, is to fit a dinner out, music and sex.


Libra
There's quiet no-one like you at fixing problems with CAT, organizing work and not snapping at coleagues, but this month keep in mind that they'd love you or hate you all the same if you were the floor's janitor.


Scorpio
If this month you find your job so boring, don't plunge into alcohol and sexual promiscuity to make it more lively, just try to think rationally to what a new job could be, that is excluding drug-dealing and blackmailing.


Sagittarius
You made clear that you don't need this job, it's this job that needs you. Your PM does not know it yet, though, so no jaw-dropping and eye-rolling at criticisms. And laser away that "Pro Translator" chest tattoo.


Capricorn
Last time you tried to take a break, you ended up organizing a heart-surgery translation 4-days intensive course on the beach in front of the resort: don't you realize you really are a navy-seal doing the wrong job?


Aquarius
Dude, I don't really know what to say, it's just the weird way you make it all work, just don't fiddle with suicidal thoughts for the human condition and dying whales and keep on going, whales will make it somehow.

Pisces
Probably this year you ought to specialize in some field. Probably you ought to become an in-house. Probably you should raise your rates. Probably you'll get some 20k words to do. What?! Oh, no, no, it's all up to you.

News - "Click Revolutionary kidnapped"

This is the last e-mail received by a translator from his hiding location in the Argentinian Ande.

Shortly after sending the message, the SDLX militias arrived and at present the hold him captive. The prisoner is thought to be a member of the Church of the Second Proofreading, the European offspring of the Hijos de la Inconsistency, a radical sect of translators who reject the use of CAT tools. There have not been further communications from the kidnappers and tonight authorities have scheduled an emergency meeting in Buenos Aires at the residence of Percent Iate, the New Guinea Consul's appointed expert and a free-range translator himself. Iate is the only acknowledged representative of Guinea Free-Range Translator Tribes, as they and their representative are defined in the UNCFTA 20 May 2001/Matters concerning the international recognition of the Free-Range Translators community, L. Grassman vs. New Guinean government pronouncement, p. 23-45. 

Here is the moving and frantic letter of a defender of translators, and yet a potential terrorist and member of a severely extremist sect. After enduring several weeks of fighting and hiding, apparently he was reached by the militias while he was writing this very mail. He is heavily altered as he writes, and seems to refer to past events, and more specifically to his conversion, a central topic in he Church of the Second Proofreading. Experts suspect that the victim might have been forced to use CAT and shocked with a 30k words batch. We do not know how did he send the email, from what device, nor it has been made public to whom it was sent.

"[missing text] Microsoft standard, always respected elsewhere, forces translators to use an unbearably long periphrasis: "to right-click" becomes "fare clic con il pulsante destro". 99.9% of italians who use a PC uses shorter expressions among which "fare clic destro". Please allow for this madness to end: readers will surely appreciate it as it is obnoxiously redundant. "To click" is academically "Fare clic", but EVERYONE say "Cliccare". But that is very radical for Italians and I still do not dare to push it forward. The subject is not futile at all as Italians have to do MAD things when there are character limits per cell or row; likewise, a persistent formality involving the use of impersonal syntax, infinitives and bureaucratic, cold approach to readers of manuals are all factors that slow down Italian translators, draining energy and time which should be for proof or research or a snack. Too much time is dedicated to fitting coiling subjects and verbs, making something complex of what once was straight-forward handbook english. If you become aware of such issues and test alternatives, you can have the chance not only to maximize your staff's production, but also to make them enjoy their work better, as we often get so frustrated by the awareness that such time-sucking syntax-juggling-for-the-sake-of-formality is utterly useless, as the reader would rather want a straight-forward, linear, clean Italian that explains things clearly and pragmatically [missing text] Last but absolutely not least, the pitch of an Italian manual turns out to be aloft, vanely robotic in the repetitions of blurb while unclear in the relevant spots. Definetely heavier, especially for IT manuals: IT guys worldwide know the English for their job and just scroll through manuals picking up what they need. I mean, no beginner will ever read an Oracle server manual. If he needs one, instead, he probably knows already how to use it and will just peek at the manual looking for a filepath or a command every now and then. SO there is a particularly generous time- and money-squandering attitude to still hold on to certain obsolete language structures, the virtuosity of which are no longer appreciated and barely perceived by the average reader of a  handbook for specialists and/or professionals, who wouldn't care less whether you address them Sir or buddy, as they just want brief, clear information. Manuals are things that people mostly do not use nor read. English manuals are friendly in comparison, sound like your neighbour is telling you how to install a program or to clean your chainsaw. American handbook English is blessed with carelessness for grammar, syntax; randomly, they's become you's, plurals turn singular and it's no scandal to anyone. Look at how they make us work: for each English 10 words, we have to use 20 to get the concept across. To some extent, it is unavoidable and a liguistic fact. But some of it is so obsolete that hit causes us to have troubles when we work on a text.

Why can't we write "cliccare", io clicco, doppio clicco, clicco col destro! Why on earth even for a young creation like the PC there already is a sclerotized standard which forces me -through its duly and unconcerned hangmen: the PMs, the proofreaders, at best in a hurry and just unaware- to write "fare clic", "fare clic con il pulsante destro". Just look at it, think you read: RIGHT-CLICK.

and translate: FARE CLIC CON IL PULSANTE DESTRO.

Does it feel right to you?

I am limiting my examples to the few which are easily understandable even by a reader with no cognition of Italian language. Not every country experiences the same socio-linguistic issues or does so at varying extents, but I am sure many translators share similar issues and face parallel obstacles with their own language.

V - The Feeding Habits of the modern Free-Range Guinea Translator

Let us have a closer look into the life of Free Range Translators now: as you probably know, translators follow what is called a deadline circadian rhythm. That is due to the fact that the life of Free-Rage Translators is conditioned on deadlines:  depending on the nature of the work and on the deadline, the Free Range may as well sleep for a scarce four hours a night, or wake up very early in the morning, often without knowing anymore exactly which one is which. Due to this fact, Free Range translators have little familiarity with the human convention of solar calendar time measurement: whilst they accept and understand the use of months and years, they are troubled by week-days: as deadlines are seldom synchronized to the work-week, transaltors tend to mistake weekdays, generally go shopping when shops are closed, and will forever have troubles with post offices until these do not provide night-time opening times.

To endure such changing day-night cycle, translators ingest massive amounts of coffee, mostly liquid but in raw beans as well, which the creature crunches while browsing for jobs or checking the email: often Free Range translators are tracked by hunters by the traces they leave, like empty coffee cups for instance.

In 1967, archaeologist Hernanda Prieto-Cid discovered a burying site of an ancient Free Range translator. Inside the small conical structure, there were six mugs containing well-preserved traces of several liquids, among which tea, milk, orange juice and chocolate. It is thought that such items were placed besides the body of the translator in order to help him in translate in the afterlife.  The tomb now belongs of the Translation Ethology Museum of Figueras, Spain.

When hungry, the Free Range begins a ritual activity that has not yet been fully explained by researchers: the specimen ceases to work, stands up, walks to the fridge and stands in front of it, opens it, closes it, looks at the clock. Then it moves to the shelf - where crackers, dehydrated soups and cookies are hoarded. It stares at it blankly, opens it, sighs, looks at the clock, and closes it. Then it goes back to the PC and begins to work again. This pattern will be repeated even four or five times before the Free Range actually decides to feed on something, and when it happens, it shows its wild nature by throwing a pan on high flames while devouring crackers or coffee beans.

The meal will last between up to 4 minutes, regardless of the quantity or the entity of the food.

However furious its meals are, the Free Range never fails to leave some left-over: it is a trick that this species has learned during evolution to survive to the cold season or to procrastinated payments. Free Ranges are accustomed to feed on the left-overs of the day before, and go as far as feeding on other translators' left-overs, although this is generally performed by male Free Ranges onto a female's meal left-over. Besides coffee, translators' diet consists of processed cheese and tuna, but it is an omnivore and is delighted by pizza, which it cannot cook, though.

As a rather intelligent species, the Free Range does possess some degree of culinary expertise: a few recipes are known to researchers (thanks to philologist Ted Roost's uncompared work): all recipes characterized by optimizing time and often mock actual human recipes:

3 am spicy fuzzy morsel

1 can of tuna (oil or brine regardless)

tabasco

2 slices of bread

processed cheese

Put the tuna and the cheese in a hot pan until the cheese melts, mashing everything up.

Add tabasco, then spread the whole thing on the bread.

Add salad or toast the bread for special occasions or if you have guests.

14 pm undead pasta from hell

left-over pasta (at least 500 gr)

grated bread

frankfurts

grated parmesan

olives

take the left-over pasta and shove it in a baking pan previously buttered.

Chop frankfurts, or really, chop whatever can be chopped, throw the olives in.

Now spread a layer of pasta, then grated bread, then pasta, and on top, parmesan cheese.

If the pasta is already a little dry, add tomato sauce or cooking cream.

Put the thing in the oven - which should be already at max temperature- and go back to work.

Cooking time: 20-30 min

Deadline Completion Eggs

Eggs

Powdered mint

Processed cheese

Parma/smoked ham/bacon

milk

butter

Pour a thin layer of milk in a sauce-pan, then a little butter and two eggs, minding not to break the yolk. Cover immediately with the lid and cook for 4-5 minutes at low fire, until the white becomes thick. Then add the meat.

When the whole thing looks almost ready, add the cheese (and, if it really came out well, wrap the meat with the mixture of white and melted cheese). Sprinkle plenty of powdered mint.

It's at least 40,000 calories so Free Ranges love it and prepare it only on special times, such as after they handed in some work.


In next post: The Proz Age

IV - Present-Day Free-Range Translators

Some specimens of Guinea Free Range have adapted to urban habitat and presently live in suburban areas of Western cities, where they have mated with local translators, causing several cross-breeds to appear: such recent phenomenon raised the interest of several scholars, among which John Trados, who began studying them in 2005. Urban Free Ranges are omnivore and possess higher resistance to industrial handbooks and go as far as feeding on legal and medical texts.

Trados went as far as adopting one stray cub, who was named F4, in the attempt to train it to a normal translator's circadian rhythm: after six months, F4 would spontaneously wake up at 7 am and work until lunch. Then John would take him for a short walk around the block and then put it back to work until 7 pm. After three months, though, the cub began to show symptoms of depression, so John thought of feeding F4 a few words-of-the-day from Urbandictionary in order to provide him with the creative vitamins these creatures can't do without. The idea was successful, and apart for sporadic times when John would catch F4 not working but composing puns on a secret word document, his behaviour was perfectly compliant to the work standards which would be required from a  domestic translator.

All seemed to go for the best and the cub recovered quickly after being fed small doses of creative contents, until something unexpected happen: F4 was assigned a large work from a client who would send new batches at 7 pm, as there was a 6+ timezone gap between them. After months of training the Free Range to work in the morning, the cub found itself having to work at night, as it is instinctive for its race.

F4 worked for a months translating dutifully 3000 words a day and revising another 2000 in addition every other day, when one night it suddenly snapped at the PM. The fit of aggressiveness was justified: the evil PM had shown no appreciation of the work done so far, although the quality of it was good enough to make of f4 the coordinator and proofreader for Italian. The PM proved to be unconcerned of the long period of previously unmentioned overnights and overall dedication, and what's more, kept on sending hysterical, bossy and blunt emails at poor F4, who generally read them right before to go to sleep and thus developing insomnia, bruxism and personality disorder.

After composing 5 different hilarious mails to the client, where he ironically complained about the PM, none of which he actually sent, F4 suffered a terrible breakdown: quality of work decreased, and John found out that he had been outsourcing proofreading to a 15-years-old student next door for the last two weeks. F4 never reverted to morning time work and now refuses to  check emails at the end of the day and keeps on raising his euro/word rate in fear of other timezone-affected assignments might have him exploited again.

John did some research on the PM, to find out that she was a lonely Argentinian Anal Shepherd, who had been adopted by a Canadian lady, an agency owner, as a guard-PM: it had been trained to attack whoever tried to contact directly the owner, to deny any raise under any circumstance, and to actually expect that it is justified to send a 2500 words excel file of subtitles at 01.00 am and expect it to be ready by 09.00 am in the morning for 0.03/word. The sapphic and deranged dedication of the Anal Shepherd to their master is a well-known characteristic of its species and makes them very timely and fatigue-enduring translator shepherds. Unfortunately, F4 showed to be not sufficiently domestic to undergo the rough treatment to which flocks of out-sourced translators have been educated to.

John has had F4 mating with an Irish Adaptation Hound, and is currently studying the off-springs. His goal is to create a balanced cross-breed, capable of facing many years of technical translation without loosing creative skills.

In next post: The Feeding Habits of the modern Free-Range Guinea Translator

III - The Free-Range Translator in Folklore

Through time, folklore turned the Free Range Translator into a mythological being: according to the sources accurately presented by Johanna Endresson (Friversättarsaga: The Free Range Translator in Nordic Folklore), the Free Range never sleeps, can edit while sleeping, can be tamed by feeding it fridge-cold meatballs, can smell double spaces, can open Transit pfx files with Logoport interface and load on it an IBM TM. In Brittany, the écrivain rouge, owing its name to the thick reddish fur, is invoked by translators with children who refuse to go to bed.

In the Middle Ages, PMs hunted down Free Range translators as they were accused to spread the Catalyst heresy, whilst of course these harmless creatures had nothing to do with it. Behind these religious accusations there were underlying political reasons: Free Range translators often ran away from their Project Masters, as they were called in those times, and could hardly bear the volumes of work which used to be assigned in those times (just picture revising a 2000 words Benedectine scroll over the week-end).  

Even though according to popular tradition Free Ranges were thought to possess benign magical powers, Project Masters lived in fear of them: it was believed that you can have a PM fired if you express such wish as you pluck a hair from the Free Range's back; alternatively, by storing beneath the keyboard a tooth of this wondrous creature, you can prevent payment delays. Finally, the Free Range is portrayed in a XIV century Triptych of Curriculum's Vitae, while it quietly sits at Saint Thesaurus's feet, whose worship was believed could cure excel settings. Persecutions ceased only in the late XIV century, after Saint Thesaurus founded the Order of the Tabula Puteulana (Protestants created a twin order, the Blue Board, under Henry VIII). Saint Thesaurus was himself a Free Range translator, who performed such miracles as to induce religious authorities to make him saint, scared as they were of a peasant translator revolution should they refuse to acknowledge the man's piety.

Nevertheless, today many PMs have not yet wholly dismissed certain superstitions: according to a survey involving 230 PMs, carried out in 1999, 34% of Western PMs believe the a hired Free Range translator only needs to sleep 4 hours a night, and 54% that, as it barely needs any nourishment but lager and pizza, it can survive any assignment as long as it is paid 0,02 euro/word. Additionally, the stereotype according to which if you write politely to a Free Range it will turn against you and curse your project, causes PMs to write as bluntly as they can. This stereotype is so rooted among PMs that, under Nazi Germany, Reich's scientists tried unsuccessfully to create a cross-breed of Free Range translators and dobermanns in order to obtain a übertranslator characterized by extreme aggressiveness and genetic hatred for PMs. 

Another fairly spread belief is that you do not actually need to reply to a Free Range if his or her application has not been accepted: again, the fear of the Free Range’s cursing powers is such, as to not dare to refuse explicitly a job, but to rather let time pass by. Free Ranges in fact spend a good part of the day grooming each other in front of a screen, refreshing every few minutes their emails, as they wait for a reply to their application. Generally, a young Free Range tends to accept side-assignments during the wake for reply, thus ending up with overloads as they all get accepted: this, in turn, causes the average quality to decrease and the Free Range to become more and more hostile to PMs. On the other hand, adult Free Range know better, and refuse side-assignments during the wake for reply, thus ending up with no work, as the reply never comes, which causes the Free Range to become more and more hostile to PMs. 

As far as reality is concerned, the few specimens left of the Guinea Free Range Translator show amazing pecularities indeed: unconcerned by the hardships of a non-necessarily industrial localization diet, these animals can endure prelonged fasting and several overnights in a row of joblist browsing to find their selected preys. In fact, Guinea Free Ranges can survive only if the environment provides them with sufficient Rata Persatisfactionis, a rare species of ant which is present only on the twisted branches of the Crea Tee Vine, a type of ivy that used to grow over the islands of the region but which became progressively rarer as it was taken over by the more aggressive American species. 

In next post: Present-day Free Range Translators

II - Specific Allergic Reactions of the Free Range Guinea Translators to Certain Kinds of Assignments

Free-Range translators have shown allergic reactions to industrial-related texts and over-redundant texts going as far as developing a rare form of narcolepsy causing specimens to suddenly pass out in front of irrational tasks: for instance, working on promotional texts for hotels to update for a major hotel chain, where you have to update dates and seasonal offers in order to make them suitable for marketing over Christmas 2009, yet being such work assigned to you on 27th December 2009: the Free-Range immediately faints, only to wake up hours later. Another case that can generate an allergic reaction can be translating UI terms with PM guidelines as such:

Use double language format - English and (Italian in brackets) for all UI of the software, except those with capitals and attached, while translate Win UI, but for the directories related to the software. Please keep every segment under 35 characters for questions and 60 for answers. The client's TM is your first reference, but for terms relating to the 2004 version of the software, for which please check our website. Best,

Richard

www.mortifyingperwordrate.com.

PS: in the fourth TM on the server, all 100% results from P. Johnson are wrong, please check everytime by right clicking on the concordance text.

PPS: be informal but not formal like Microsoft manuals ;)

In this case, since the first two lines, the Free Range immediately begins to tremble and bleed from the nose. Researchers suspect that such reaction is caused by the specimen wondering 1- being this software for Oracle programmers who chew UI English since before they had teeth, why am I told to translate "double-click" into "fare clic due volte" (-do the click twice-) instead of "clicca due volte" (-double-click), as recommended by the MNPOI (Ministry for Nonsensical Preservation of Obsolete Italian)? 2- Once it is translated in this lengthy and irrationally obstinate Italian, Oracle programmers will skip to the English page within 3 minutes of reading the Italian instructions. In fact, the Free Range is aware of how, if you are an Oracle programmer, you do not anymore read words: you just see binary code dribbling before your eyes and, in that text, you will only detect written strings like directories, verbs and commands, but no longer your superior mind will indulge in stuff like reading a whole sentence in any language.

After becoming aware of such facts, the Free Range just keeps on staring blankly beyond the screen, produces to single tears from his right eye and faints. These being indeed unique allergic reactions, the Free Range was quickly drawn on the brink of extinction by more omnivore species of translators, and today we take pride in studying what could be soon a memory of the past.

As exemplified by these few anecdotal observations, there are few similarities to be listed if we take a Guinea Free Range specimen and compare it to any other translator family, but perhaps for Jefferson's translator (commonly know as Trados Squirrel), which is thought to have separated from the Guinea Free Range approximately ten-thousand years ago, shortly before the advent of the Proz Age.

At that time, it is thought that Free Range translators abounded not just in the South-East Pacific, but all over the globe: fossil evidence has proved that individuals with characteristics similar to the modern Free Range's lived in Eastern Africa, North America (where it became extinct as recently as the XIX century due to the settlers' savage corporate hunts) and Europe.

In next post: the Free Range Translator in Folklore

I - The Free-Range Guinea Translator: Breeds and Behaviour

I am reading this interesting essay by PhD John Trados, Evolution of Translators: Breeds and Behaviour (University of Las Casillas, 2008) about the behaviour of translators as a species. It's mainly about a rare species of translators, the Free-Range Translators: unlike other translators, what I understood so far from the book is that the Free-Range translator is wild, untamed, creative. As a species, it has a hard time adapting to dull translations, of which it cannot feed: modern society has thus pushed it on the verge of extinction.

The first part of the book draws heavily on the founding essay of Translator Ethology, titled A Study on Species or The Behavioural Social Features of the Male and Female Free-Range Guinea Translator (Charles Windar, Sootwrist&Co, London 1887). To give you an idea of the topic, I am going to paste an extract from the first chapter. In future posts, we will have the chance to discuss issues and studies on the present-day life of Free Range translators.

(from chapter 1) Is the Guinea Free Range Translator a mammal?

Although there are alleged witnesses who arguably claimed having seen a Guinea translator laying eggs, there is no doubt that all translators are mammals.

Such myth stems out of the peculiar characteristics of free-range translators in comparison to their more commonly seen species of domestic translators, which, through generations of controlled breeding, have become certainly more homogenic.

The Bored BA and the Virginia Pygmy translator, for instance, are practically the same species: as we all know, they are both PC-alienated species, live alone in small, white flats, feed regularly on fruit and chocolate mousse, have never purchased, let alone consumed, more than three 33cc beer-bottles within the same night and mate once a year after the last deadline of May.

Bored BAs do not wear glasses and are less tame than Virginia Pygmy translators, who are are generally distinguishable for being mainly female diligent geeks during University (Language Faculty average male-female ratio: 1:4), lacking any creativity whatsoever, and taking pleasure is unholy and repulsive activities such as spell-checking a document, not save it, and go again through it manually in order to see if they can beat the spellcheck; other recreational activities include handing in on Friday a batch due Monday and assaulting question-posters on Proz when the reason for notawarding the Pygmy's suggested translation 4 points is weak. Pygmys attack in spinsters of three-to-five females.

Virginia Pygmy translators feel threatened by any assignment related to literature, as their digestive system has evolved to digest unfathomably large batches of printer-maintenance handbooks, html catalogues of gadgets for microfibronizers, industrial oil-pump bolt-lubrication do's and dont's and the like. If presented with a pun in an informal dialogue from a fiction series, the specimen perceives the distant call of the wild, begins to perspire, the iris shrinks, heartbeat raises, lips tighten and the typical red crest on his head stiffens: the Pygmy starts an anxious browse for quotes, references, forum posts. After approximately 30 minutes, body function begin to revert to standard values. Mathematician Fabrizio d'Addani-Roncofiore has demonstrated, in the model bearing his name, how the translated version of the pun by a Virginia Pygmy translator invariably corresponds to the least witty option of adaptation available among all options among all modern Indo-European languages.

Virginia Pygmy are potentially attractive females but only suceed in winning the attentions of a male translator, as their high, hysteric pitch of laughter and their capability of finding a dull party extremely entertaining and memorable are, to the male translator, signals the first, of potential frigidity and the second, of not having a life. In fact, animal instict is once again correct, although incapable of perceiving the deeply sexually frustrated and thus perverted mind of the eye-glassed diligent Virginia Pygmy Translator sophomores, of which, however, three out of five are die without having ever mated (hence the term spinster for a pack of female Virginia Pygmys).

The male Virginia Pygmy is a female Virginia Pygmy provided with a differing genital apparatus, which allows mating with the females of his species. Males are characterized by obsessive hygiene and short, neat fur, live in sads of two-to-three, exchanging new emoticons and performing sporadic solitary sexual activities deprived of any passion whatsoever. They represent the least-studied species in the history of science, as scientists who attempted to study them all lost interest within the first three hours of on-field research. Virginia Pygmy male translators represent the perfect host for the pornularis intrabatchensis, of which they are immune carriers, and which represents the first cause of death in translators, who, attacked by this parasite, are neurally compelled to masturbate every 1300-2000 words.

Specimens who are infected by pornularis intrabatchensis, if no therapy is undertaken in the first six months, all inevitably die within 3 years from contracting the infection, and can be healed only by the physical presence of an adult PM within a 10 feet radius from the infected specimen.

In next post: Specific Allergic Reactions of Free Range Guinea Translators to Certain Kinds of Assignments