November seems a while off yet, but a new conference has just been publicly announced: The Translator as Strategic Partner. November 2008 will be the first time this conference has been held, and it is exciting to see a new professional conference appear on the translation circuit. The conference will be held in London, England on 22-23 November 2008 at The Camden Centre, which is conveniently located close to the new Eurostar terminus at St. Pancras. Here's the full conference programme. I'll be taking part in a round table discussion on translation, so I hope to see you there!

My passion for Continuing Professional Development is matched only by my enthusiasm for the Tour de France. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I can combine both. For the next three weeks, I will have German TV on quietly in the background as I work, honing my language skills whilst at the same time keeping up to date with the world's greatest bike race. Bliss!

Declaration of independence: There has been a lot of upheaval in the translation tools market over the past handful of years. Several producers of translation memory tools (or CAT tools, if you prefer to call them that. Personally, I think a cat has four legs and a tail, but each to his own!) have been bought out. The market has changed quite radically.

So I was interested to receive a "Declaration of Independence" press release from Kilgray, the company behind the MemoQ tent (sorry, that is TenT - which is not something you sleep in whilst hiking, but a Translation Environment). In their press release, the MemoQ guys promise to keep their translation memory toolset independent. Controversial stuff, even if it is just a bit of 4th July fun! Here's their statement:

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Kilgray Translation Technologies, a company dedicated to the development of translation productivity tools, re-iterated their commitment to being an independent provider of translation technology. July 4th 2008 is Independence Day for Kilgray. On that date they will sign a charter committing them to remain an independent technology provider.

“This Declaration is not just about throwing English-headquartered translation tools into the Boston Harbor. We see it as a positive charter of rights for Language Services Providers. This Declaration of Independence is a very serious commitment on our part to protect our customers' best interests. We believe it is important that any claims of independence by translation technology vendors must have real meaning. We also invite other technology companies who share our ideas on independence to join us in signing this Declaration,” - said Istvan Lengyel, chief operating officer of Kilgray.


This is Wimbledon week here in England. We're used to watching tennis matches, to moving our heads in order to follow the ball as it bounces back and forth across the net. I'll be interested to see if any other translation memory tools vendors choose to return this serve!

Cultural context is one of those terms that you hear a lot in the translation world. And here I must thank my friend Trevor for sending me the enclosed photo, which nicely illustrates the concept.

If I'd seen this Volvo driving down the motorway in Britain, it probably would not have made much of an impression. But in a diffrent cultural context, when spotted by a French driver as he trundled along the autoroute in France, the number plate gave a very clear message.

And no, I won't translate it. And no, I won't tell you what it means in French. But it is a lovely example of cultural context!

Good to see that the NWTN (the North West Translators' Network) is hosting an evening seminar on "Marketing for translators". The event takes place on Wednesday 25th June 2008, with the seminar commencing at 19:00. Venue is the Manchester YHA in Castlefields, and the speaker is Heidi Kerschl, an experienced translator with a background in marketing and an engaging presentation style. Highly recommended - I might even go along myself!

I learned a lovely new word today at an STC UK workshop. Sarah O'Keefe from Scriptorium has kindly flown over to run a workshop for STC UK, and as part of her "Paradigm Shifts are Never Pretty" presentation, Sarah introduced me to the phrase WYSIOO. This describes the XML paradigm. WYSIOO stands for What You See Is One Option, a lovely reflection on the fact that with XML documentation, content and formatting are two separate things. A lovely term - thank you, Sarah!

Usability is a big issue in the high-tech sector, so I was interested to read an article which reports that 95% of gadgets returned to the manufacturers are actually working fine - the users simply didn't read the manual. Doh!

What does the future hold for translators and interpreters?

What skills will translation and interpreting services need in the future?

Well you probably have your own opinions, but if you can take 5 minutes to complete the survey. You can learn what your peers think too, as everyone that completes the survey and supplies their email address will be sent a summary of the survey results.

The survey is part of research by Doug Lawrence of Amicus-Transtec for a presentation he is giving at the Institute of Translation and Interpreting session on "Starting Work as a Translator or Interpreter" on the 7th of June 2008.

Please click the following click to learn more about the seminar http://www.iti.org.uk/ice/pages/viewDetails.asp?id=479

XML is a wonderful thing, and you can set up some intelligent translation workflows if you put your mind to it. But one aspect of XML which constantly presents minor challenges is encoding - the hoys of UTF-8 versus UTF-16. And just what is Unicode? Here is a wonderful, short, pithy synopsis of Unicode and UTF coding issues. Well worth a read.

We had to do some reading up and research on UTF encoding in XML files when we translated some DITA files recently. The files were in UTF-8, which is fine. But some text editors didn't display accented characters properly. (If you're really interested, TextPad could not spot that the file was in UTF-8, and opened it incorrectly when left to "open automatically"; if we manually tell TextPad "Hey, open this file as UTF-8" then it behaves just fine. UltraEdit is smarter, and correctly opens the translated DITA files as UTF-8 all on its own, so the accents display correctly).

This called for deeper reading. The real issue is that UTF-8 uses 2 to 4 bytes to represent characters above ASCII 127 (that means accented characters to you and me!). But there's no simple way to show how many characters are in each string, so some text editors get try to interpret half a string as a full string, and they confused. This can be resolved to some extent by including a Byte order marker (or BOM), although this is a political hot potato in the geek world. Some people argue in favour, some claim it is the work of the devil himself.

Like most translation companies, we use translation memory tools to ensure consistency when we translate user manuals and help systems, and to enable us to translate a range of file formats. One the main TM tools (or CAT tools - Computer Aided Translation) is called Trados, and their TagEditor tool started off not handling Byte Order Marks in XML files, then changed to give a (well concealed) option to force a BOM into the translated file (target language file). For anyone translating XML files, or translating DITA files, this is significant. Quite when this significant change was introduced is a bit of a mystery, but our translation memory detectives reckon it was somewhere between Trados version 7.5.0.756 and version 7.5.0.759.

To the "TM detectives" who worked with me on this, a very big Thank you. This stuff would try the patience of a saint! Now, back to our translations.......

And as a postscript, I also enjoyed Christian Flury's Unicode Primer for Linguists on this subject. I particularly like his description of Endianism (or Endianness, if you prefer), comparing it with the difference between counting in English and counting in German: In English, we start with the biggest number first, so "99" is "ninety nine". German starts at the other end, so "99" is "nine and ninety" (or neunundneunzig, in German). So English takes the big Endian approach, and German takes the little Endian approach!

Language training and teaching in the UK is in a sorry state - or rather, the uptake of it is! The number of students studying a foreign language to GCSE or to A-level has plummeted in recent years in England.

Today, I was shocked to read on the website of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting that the University of Bradford's course in Translation and Interpreting is to be discontinued due to funding issues. This is not an airy-fairy course - this was a real-world course that trained would-be translators and interpreters in the skills that they need to become professional translators. I know some really good translators who did the Bradford University course. It seems I am not alone in being shocked... there is a petition to urge the Prime Minister to look closely at the provision of language training in the UK. If this concerns you, please do sign it!

The translation memory world continues to change rapidly.

Firstly, a new translation memory product called Swordfish has been released, which is one of the few TM programs (sorry, that should be "cross-platform translation environments") that will also run on an Apple Mac.

Secondly, I am delighted to report that the development behind MemoQ are as responsive as ever. A few weeks ago, I reported a minor glitch to them that caused autonumbering to disappear when translating a Word file. Today they mailed me to say they've launched an interim version update that fixes the problem. Thank you guys - that is what I call good customer service!

pssst! Fancy a free TM? Yup, the EU is giving away translation memories for free. Or, to be specific, the Directorate-General for Translation is making available to the public the contents of the translation memories that they have built up in a number of language combinations over the years. These TM's are available in 22 EU languages, and they contain aligned sentences (or translation units). The translation memories are supplied in the TMX interchange format.