Quality in translation: Does it matter? The Times newspaper recently had an article on how poor quality translation of the subtitles is impacting on audiences. After all, if you are relying on the subtitles to follow the meaning, you need them to flow properly, don't you? There have been many instance of excellent subtitling (I found the English subtitles to the French film
Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain to be excellent, for example). And this has an implication when it comes to translating technical manuals, too. You want them to read right, so that your customers can easily absorb the meaning. Just like film producers want their audiences to be able to relax and enjoy the film, without having to work out what the subtitles are trying to say. Click here to read the article.

And if you are interested in learning more about the art of good subtitling for movies, take a look here.

Ein Produkt ist nur so gut wie sein Handbuch - or, in plain English, "A product is only as good as its documentation". Back in 1998, I contributed to an article on good software documentation for Swiss computer magazine PC Tipp - click here for a link, then scoot down to page 4 to find the article. It took me back in time to find a copy of the article on the internet today!

The Microsoft Glossaries have now been renamed as the Microsoft Translation Glossaries, which makes clearer what they are. And I am delighted to say that people or companies with an MSDN subscription can now download the latest versions from the Microsoft Developer Network web site. Here's how to find them:

1. Sign in to MSDN using your username and password.
2. Click on MSDN Professional Downloads and Product Keys.
3. In the left pane, click on Tools, SDKs and DDKs.
4. Scoot down the list in the left pane until you see Microsoft Translation Glossaries.

I would like to thank the various individuals at Microsoft who have been very helpful about this. I won't embarrass them by naming them, but they know who they are. It is very easy to think of a large company like Microsoft as some sort of anonymous monster, but actually there are real people working there, and they are often very helpful and eager to be responsive. Guys, thank you.

And what is this stuff? The Microsoft Translation Glossaries, also known as the MSDN Glossaries, are the translation memory of Microsoft software products released in 77 languages. These glossaries contain the user interface materials in English plus the target language. For localization companies, this information is crucial. We need to know what the Windows Vista user interface says, for example, in Italian when a user clicks on "Add Network Printer".

Lorem ipsum: When customers need to see design layouts before copy is written, DTP bods use dummy text, often a Latin text beginning Lorem ipsum. We didn't get to study Latin at my school, so I was fascinated to learn that the words come from a treatise in Latin on the theory of ethics, written by Cicero. The text begins "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet", and printers and typesetters have been using it as "random text" since the sixteenth century. Now, thanks to the joys of our high-tech world, there is a Lorem Ipsum website, where you can generate as much dummy text as you need in seconds. You even get to specify the number of words, paragraphs, bytes, or bullet point lists. Highly recommended.

Blogs for translators is a topic close to my heart. Two translator friends of mine are currently doing interesting things with blogs. Firstly Margaret Marks, an English solicitor living in Germany, has been running the delightfully-named Transblawg (which always bring Deputy Dawg to mind for me!), which is always an interesting read. (As an aside, Margaret and I first "met" on the old and much-missed FLEFO translators' discussion forum on CompuServe back in the late 80's, before this new-fangled Internet stuff really took off.) And more recently, ace German translator Heidi Kerschl has set up a blog called Heidi Lives & Learns. I anticipate that it will not be long before more technical translators start harnessing the power of the blog. And not just translators: I notice that two STC groups are including "how to create a blog" sessions in their events aimed at technical authors. The STC UK chapter has an event in Birmingham on March 10th on the subject of "Blogs and Wikis", and then the STC Transalpine chapter is running a two-day conference in Zurich, Switzerland, on April 19th and 20th 2007 that also includes a couple of sessions on creating blogs.