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When a translation has no mistakes, but is still poor

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This video by the Spanish Ministry of Affairs is an example of a translation that has no mistakes per se, but is still not a good translation.

In the following table, the first column lists some of the expressions that don’t sound natural in English; the second column shows some proposed solutions.

Unnatural phrases used in the videoAlternatives that sound more natural
"more than four and a half million foreigners habitually reside in Spain""more than four and a half million foreign nationals have made Spain their home"
"75 million inbound tourists will visit our country""75 million tourists will visit our country"
"1 in every 10 inhabitants of Spain is a foreigner""Foreign nationals make up 10% of the population"
"from all five continents""from across the world" (English speakers don't use the five-continents model!)
"Did you know that there are more than 100,000 different surnames from all imaginable origins in Spain""More than 100,000 different surnames reflect the diverse backgrounds of the people living in Spain" ("origins in Spain" in the published translation is misleading)
"this melting pot not only derives from people from other countries, but also from different regions of Spain""This melting pot is a result of migration from abroad, but also migration among the different regions of Spain"
"No xenophobic political party has ever held a parliamentary representation""No xenophobic political party has ever won a parliamentary seat" or "has ever been represented in parliament"
"Spain is a multilingual, non-denominational and open state""Spain is a secular country with a multilingual, tolerant society"
"We actively foster the integration of different peoples""We help people from a range of different countries and cultures to integrate in Spanish society"
"Our diversity is a source of social and cultural wealth, as well as an important economic asset""Spain's social and cultural diversity is a major* economic asset"

*I believe the word “important” is a translation error here, though some colleagues may disagree. The Spanish word importante often means big/large/major, rather than important. I believe that is the author’s intended meaning here.

As mentioned above, the expressions in the left-hand column are not wrong. It’s just that the turns of phrase are not commonly used in English, whereas the original version in Spanish used common, everyday phrases. The result is a text that sounds strange to an English speaker’s ear and doesn’t achieve the same result as the Spanish text.

Make sure you use a good translator if you want a text that sounds natural in the target language!

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Dialogue boxes slow to open in Word

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A problem I’ve been experiencing for quite a while on my computer is that dialogue boxes have been very slow to open in MS Word and Excel. I assumed it was a result of the UBitMenu, a handy add-on that restores the old-style drop-down menus we used to use before Microsoft introduced the awful ribbon. I accepted it as a trade-off, since the delays were more than offset by the time I gained by finding option quicker thanks the drop-down menus (and being able to open up the drop-down menus thanks to a script I wrote).

But then things started getting really slow, and I’d also experienced some sluggishness in my browser. I trawled through the forums and found many people with the same problem, but nobody was proposing a solution that worked.

Then I read a post by someone who hypothesised that it was down to hard drives that were dying. The writer of the post (which I can no longer find) had the issue on two computers, both of which then experienced hard-drive failure. He then started working on a laptop that was more than 10 years-old, and therefore should have been much slower, and found that he no longer experienced the problem.

The hard drive that came with my computer has been playing up recently, with one of the partitions not working very well. Fortunately, I only use it as a backup drive, as I migrated my operating system and documents to a solid state drive several years ago (I recommend all my colleagues do the same, as will make your system much quicker), but it seems that even having the hard drive connected was slowing down my system, especially (for some reason) when opening and closing dialogue boxes in Word and Excel.

If you are experiencing the same issues, try disconnecting any old drives that no longer perform properly. Of course, if it’s the drive that your operating system is running on, then you can’t just disconnect it, but it’s a good excuse to buy a solid state drive, which will definitely speed up your system, even if it doesn’t fix this particular problem.

If, like in my case, the hard drive playing up is one that you can safely disconnect, but it is an internal drive, you don’t need to get out the screwdrivers. You can simply go to the device manager, select “Disk drives”, then right-click on the device that’s playing up and select “Disable device” (whatever you do, don’t do this on the device that runs your operating system!). After restarting your computer, check whether the problem has gone away.

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A guide to pronouncing the place names in reports about the terrorist attacks in Catalonia

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Journalists have been struggling with the pronunciation of Catalan place names in the aftermath of last week’s tragic events in Catalonia. Strangely, sometimes the names of places in Catalonia and the rest of Spain are pronounced as if they were French, with a nasal vowel creeping in to place names that begin with “Sant”, for instance. This phenomenon is known as a hyperforeignism.

Journalists should not be expected to pronounce place names exactly as they are pronounced in the original language, but the purpose of these tips is to offer the best compromise pronunciation, i.e. a pronunciation that uses sounds that we use in English. In other words, it would sound pretentious to pronounce the r of the French city Rennes out of the back of the throat, like the French do, but it makes sense to avoid pronouncing the final s, since it is easy for an English-speaking person to do so and it does not sound unnatural.

I’ve refrained from using phonetic symbols to make this guide accessible. A linguist will spot inconsistencies in my “transcriptions”, but they’re intended to be read by English speakers as if they were English words. The syllables written in all caps are the stressed syllables. The letters uh indicate a schwa sound, like the initial a in the English word about.

Barcelona: This one’s easy. I think we can consider this one to be Anglicised, like Paris (in which we pronounce the s, even though it is silent in French). So just pronounce it the usual English way. But whatever you do, please don’t pronounce the letter c as a th! It sounds pretentious, and although it is part of the Spanish pronunciation, in Catalan, the c in Barcelona is pronounced as an s, just like in English. Recommended pronunciation: [bar-suh-LO-nah].

Cambrils: Another easy one for English speakers. Read it as written, including the final s. The stress in on the final syllable: Recommended pronunciation: [kuhm-BREELS].

Sant Sadurní (d’Anoia): I’ve put the final part in brackets because, although it is part of the official name, it is usually left out, in the same way that Newcastle-upon-Tyne becomes Newcastle. The pronunciation is quite straightforward. Note that in Catalan and Spanish (unlike in French), accented vowels indicate the stress, so Sadurní is stressed on the final syllable. The only other thing to note is that the final t of Sant is silent in most Catalan dialects. Recommended pronunciation: [SAN suh-dur-NEE (duh-NOY-a)].

Sant Just: Like in the above, you can drop the t, so Sant is pronounced [San] (don’t make it sound like the French word Saint!). The j of Just is pronounced like the s in vision, or the j in words borrowed from French, like jus. Recommended pronunciation: [SAN JOOST].

Alcanar: The main mistake I’ve heard with this one is a stress on the first syllable; it should be on the final syllable. The final r is silent in standard Catalan, but is pronounced in the accent of the people living in that part of southern Catalonia. Recommended pronunciations: [uhl-kuh-NAR] or [uhl-kuh-NA].

Subirats: The important thing here is to place the stress on the final syllable. All the letters are pronounced. Recommended pronunciation: [soo-be-RATS].

Ripoll: No, it doesn’t sound like the English word ripple! The double l produces a sound that doesn’t exist in English and is hard to pronounce. But we can get close enough by pronouncing it like a letter y. The stress is on the final syllable. Recommended pronunciation: [ri-POY].

Vilafranca (del Penedès): There are several places called Vilafranca in the Catalan sprachraum, but since this one is the biggest, Vilafranca del Penedès is often shortened to Vilafranca. The pronunciation of the short form is straightforward; English speakers will even relax the unstressed vowels in the same way that a Catalan would. If reading the long form, the word Penedès is stressed on the final syllable, as indicated by the accented vowel. Recommended pronunciation: [vi-la-FRAN-ka (duhl puh-nuh-DES)].

Pau Pérez: Not a place name, but the name of one of the victims. The first name should be familiar to basketball fans, thanks to Pau Gasol. I’ve written it as “pow” in the recommended pronunciation. Note that this should rhyme with cow, not with bow. In the surname Pérez, the first syllable is stressed, as indicated by the accented vowel. It is a Spanish name, so most Spaniards (including Catalans) would pronounce the z as a th sound, but in other parts of the Spanish-speaking world people would pronounce it as a hard s sound, so this would also be acceptable. Recommended pronunciations: [POW PEH-reth] or [POW PEH-ress].

Have I missed any out? Leave a comment below, or tweet me, and I’ll add any other places you’d like to know how to pronounce.

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Preventing Windows updates from using up your bandwidth

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Is your Internet connection running mysteriously slow? Perhaps you’ve noticed that it’s only slow when one computer is connected to the network?

That’s what happened to me today. While testing my wireless router in different parts of the building to see if the signal improved, I eventually realised that the connection was only slow when the router was connected to my desktop computer. Because the desktop computer is connected to the router using an Ethernet cable, it wasn’t connected while I was moving the wireless router around the building, which is when the speed improved.

As soon as I reconnected my desktop computer, I noticed that the speed went down again.

I then investigated what was using up all the bandwidth on that computer, concerned that I had some malware running in the background.

To do this, you can press ctrl+alt+del and open the Task Manager, select the Performance tab, then click on “Open Resource Monitor” at the bottom of the window.

Open resource monitor

Once in the resource monitor, open the “Network” tab, and you’ll see a list of the processes that are sending and receiving data. If the bandwidth is being consumed by Windows Updates downloads, you’ll notice that the amount of data being downloaded by “svchost.exe” is far higher than what other processes are downloading, as in the screenshot below.

ResourceMonitor

You can double-check whether Windows is doing updates by opening up the start menu and typing “Update”, then clicking on “Windows Update Settings”, which will open up the window shown below. This will also show you how much of the update has been downloaded. If you’ve already downloaded 98%, you might just want to let it finish, as the procedure described below will mean that you have to restart the download when you want to download the update.

WindowsUpdates

If you’re connected to your router wirelessly, then you could tell windows that your connection is metered. However, this may affect the behaviour of other software and prevent you from getting important software updates (which are generally much smaller, so they won’t take up bandwidth for hours on end). Also, Windows says that it delivers certain essential updates even on a metered connection, much to the chagrin (as evidenced by comments on numerous forums) of many users of metered connections, especially in developing countries where Internet usage per megabyte can be very expensive.

If you’re connected using an Ethernet cable, you can’t mark the connection as metered.

Many websites will tell you commands to stop the update service. The problem, though, is that since the “Anniversary” update of Windows 10, the service restarts itself, so we need to use an additional command to stop the service from automatically restarting.

First, open a command prompt as Administrator. To do this, open the start menu, type “cmd”, then press shift+ctrl+enter.

Once command prompt opens, type the following command to prevent the update service from restarting automatically once we stop it: sc configwuauserv start=disabled

Next, type in the following command to stop the Update service: net stop wuauserv

Finally, type in the following command to stop the Delivery Optimisation Service: net stop dosvc

Your command prompt should now look like the following screenshot.

StopWindowsUpdates

You can now close the window if you wish.

In the resource monitor, you should now begin to see the network activity of “svchost.exe” decrease. The number does not disappear immediately, as Windows calculates the download rate over the past minute, but wait 60 seconds and you should see the amount of data being downloaded by svchost.exe fall to less than 100B/sec.

When you do want to do the download (such as overnight), use the following commands to restart the services:

  • sc config wuauserv start=auto
  • net start wuauserv
  • net start dosvc
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How to remove an initial cap from glossary entries

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Many online glossaries start every term with a capital letter, such as in this example:

  • Comptes d’accumulation
  • Accumulation accounts

Since these terms would only be capped at the start of a sentence, translators ought to import them without the initial caps.

Use the following formula in Excel to remove leading caps. The formula below assumes the first term is in cell E1, but to change it to wherever your first term is, then paste it down all the rows containing terms.

=IF(EXACT(UPPER(MID(E1,2,1)),MID(E1,2,1))=TRUE,E1,LOWER(LEFT(E1,1))&RIGHT(E1,LEN(E1)-1))

Please note that if you don’t use Excel in English, you will need to translate the formula words. Also, if you have your system set to use decimal commas, replace the commas in the formula with semi-colons.

The reason the formula is so long is because it initially checks to see whether the second character is capped. If the second character is also capped, it assumes the term is an acronym, and therefore does not change the first character to lower case.

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VAT in cross-border transactions

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One query that new VAT-registered translators in the EU often have when issuing an invoice to another EU country is what to put on the invoice to indicate that the VAT is due in the country of supply (i.e. the client’s country). In some countries, it used to be necessary to refer to a law, but more recently, under an EU directive, it is sufficient to add the words “reverse charge”, or the equivalent phrase in another EU language.

Since it is important to inform the client that the reverse-charge mechanism applies, I recommend including the equivalent label in the client’s language. The following list shows the official label in all the official languages of the EU.

    Bulgarian: Oõратно начисдявае
    Catalan: Inversió del subjecte passiu
    Croatian: Prijenos porezne obveze
    Czech: daň odvede zákazník
    Danish: Omvendt betalingsspligt
    Dutch: BTW verlegd
    English: Reverse charge
    Estonian: Pöödmakssustamine
    Finnish: Käännetty verovelvollisuus
    French: Autoliquidation
    German: Steuerschuldnerschaft des Leistungsempfängers
    Greek: αντιστροφής επιβάρυνση
    Hungarian: Forditott adózás
    Irish: aistriú táille
    Italian: Inversione contabile
    Latvian: nodokļa apgrieztā maksāšana
    Lithuanian: atvirkštinis apmokestinimas
    Maltese: Inverżjoni tal-ħlas
    Polish: ogne odwrotne obciążenie
    Portuguese: Autoliquidação
    Romanian: taxare inversă
    Slovakian: prenesenie daňovej povinnosti
    Slovenian: obrnjena davčna obveznost
    Spanish: Inversión del sujeto pasivo
    Swedish: Omvänd betalningsskyldighet
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Getting paid in foreign currencies, part 2: Borderless accounts from TransferWise

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Transferwise is now offering the option to create a borderless account. This allows you to have bank accounts in euros, pounds and US dollars, as shown in the infographic below (click to zoom in). More currencies are likely to be added in due course.

TransferWise borderless accounts
Infographic provided by iCompareFX.com

In a sense, this is similar to what you can already do with many more currencies with CurrencyFair (see my previous post), which already lets you store money in different currencies. The difference, though, is that you actually receive your own, personal bank account number in your clients’ countries, so unlike with CurrencyFair, you won’t have to worry about your client entering the correct reference number.

At the time of writing, the new borderless account is available to anyone living in the European Economic Area, except those living in Cyprus (i.e. Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom). It is also available to residents of Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Switzerland, India, the Philippines, the British Virgin Islands, and some, but not all, states of the United States of America.

Since this is an actual bank account with a bank account number, as I understand it you can even use your account to make payments. Imagine you live in the UK, but you have a client in France, and you attend an annual conference in Germany. In the past, you’d get charged for converting your euros to pounds, and then charged again for converting them back to euros. Now, you can just keep your money in your borderless account in euros and pay the fee for your conference in Germany in euros. Of course, if you do need to move the money to the UK, you can still do an exchange on TransferWise for a much smaller fee than you’d pay with a bank.

Reports suggests that TransferWise will also introduce a payment card in the near future, making it even easier to spend the money you earn in foreign currencies.

To sign up for TransferWise, please use this link, which will give you a free transfer for up to £500 or equivalent, and will earn my £50 for every three sign-ups.

More info on borderless accounts is available here, but please use my referral link if you decide to sign up!

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Translator productivity – video 3: Verbatim Google searches

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Google used to allow the plus symbol to be used for verbatim searches, forcing Google to search for exactly what we type in, rather than trying to guess what we might mean. When Google introduced Google+, they removed this usage of the plus sign, and informed users that they should use quotation marks instead. Only problem is, as shown in the video, this new method is not reliable.

In the video, I demonstrate how using the plus symbol and the quotation marks don’t work, and show you how to make sure you perform a verbatim search.

Link mentioned in the video for performing verbatim searches: Translator productivity – video 2: https://www.google.com/webhp?tbs=li:1

File to add Google verbatim searches to Intelliwebsearch: IWS Google verbatim.

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Translator productivity – video 2: Problems with Microsoft Word comments

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This video explains how to deal with two problems translators and editors encounter when working with comments in the latest versions of Microsoft Word. It explains how to prevent comments from running off the side of the screen, and how to print without markup by default.

The macro referred to in the video is as follows.

Sub LegacyPrint()
'
' LegacyPrint Macro

'This section prints without comments
'Add apostrophes to the start of the lines below if you prefer to print with comments when they are visible.
With ActiveDocument
.ShowRevisions = False
Dialogs(wdDialogFilePrint).Show
.ShowRevisions = True
End With
'End of section

'This section allows you to print using the legacy print window without removing the comments
'Remove the apostrophes on each line below and add them above if you prefer to print with comments
'With ActiveWindow
'.DisplayHorizontalScrollBar = True
'.DisplayVerticalScrollBar = True
'End With
'Dialogs(wdDialogFilePrint).Show
'End of section

End Sub

Please leave a comment to say whether you managed to get this to work, as it helps me know whether my posts are user-friendly.

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Give your clients a local number

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In Southern Africa, it is common to hear and read the expression “Local is lekker” in advertisements encouraging people to buy local food. The word “lekker”, borrowed from Afrikaans, is used to say that something is good.

For purchasers of business services, local is very definitely lekker. People prefer to buy their services from someone who is local.

All freelance translators know that the world is their oyster, that they can work for clients anywhere in the world. That’s the theory, anyhow. In practice, however, most translators I’ve spoken to seem to get most of their business from local clients.

There are many reasons for this. Obviously one major factor is that you meet more people in the place where you live, and word of mouth spreads more among the people who know you. However, I noticed that although nearly all my clients were based in Catalonia, not all of them were acquired through word of mouth. Many of my Catalan clients had found my website. So why was I not getting many clients from, say, France through my website?

Foreign phone numbers

I concluded that it was because people in Catalonia could immediately see that I was local, probably due to a combination of having my website in Catalan and having a Barcelona phone number. I already had a French website, but could I get more French clients by obtaining a French phone number?

Foreign SIM cards

I began acquiring phone numbers for various key markets in an attempt to expand my client base. For countries I visited regularly, I picked up SIM cards with good pay-as-you-go (PAYG) rates and as flexible conditions as possible in terms of keeping the SIM card active. In addition to my main smartphone, which is dual SIM, I have a cheap quad-SIM phone (not a smartphone) that sits next to my desk for my other foreign SIM cards. Unfortunately the quad SIM card is no longer sold, but you come always put extra SIM cards in an old dumb phone that is no longer used.

Here are the phone companies I recommend for a few markets (please leave a comment if you can recommend a better service for any of the countries or a service in another country):

  • UK: TalkMobile‘s PAYG phones remain active for 180 days since the last chargeable call, SMS or data usage. Data rates when in the UK are reasonable.
  • Spain: I have a Simyo card that I pay for by direct debit. The card remains active for 10 months since the last outgoing call, SMS, data usage or top-up. You need an address to have a new card delivered to. The card plus delivery costs €7. For data, it is best to activate one of their packages when travelling to Spain. Simyo also has a good roaming package that you can use if visiting an EU country for which you don’t have a local SIM card. If you sign up with SIMYO, when registering, please enter my phone number as the person who invited you, and both you and I will receive €5 credit.
  • France: In France, all SIM cards require payment of a minimum monthly fee to keep them active. However, the minimum fee charged by Réglo Mobile (run by the supermarket E. Leclerc) is just €1.50. This means I must pay at least €1.50 a month even if I don’t use the SIM card at all, so I use this SIM card if I ever have to make a call while in a country where I don’t have a local SIM card, such as when I was recently in India, since anything I spend that is less than €1.50 is already paid for. If visiting France, I take out one of their data packages.
  • Switzerland: Like in France, the best option in Switzerland is also run by a supermarket: Aldi. You can pick up a card from one of their supermarkets. Cards remain active for one year since the last incoming or outgoing call (top-ups, SMS and data don’t keep the card active). Unfortunately the minimum top-up is 30 Swiss francs. When visiting Switzerland, it is best to buy a package for data.

Virtual numbers

It is not always easy or desirable to pick up a SIM card for all our target markets. For instance, I wanted a Quebec phone number, but wasn’t travelling there any time soon. That’s where virtual numbers come in. Ever wondered how companies such as airlines have local phone numbers in so many countries? It’s not because they have a call centre in every country, but because your local call gets forwarded to another country.

The best virtual number service I’ve found is FlyNumber, which provides numbers for almost 60 countries, in some cases allowing you to choose a number in a specific city or region. The call forwarding service costs $2.95 per number per month. You must also pay a small charge per minute for each incoming call. Thanks to the powerful PBX panel you can configure call forwarding to your phone and add pre-recorded messages if you are unable to take a call, with voicemail forwarded to your e-mail address. You can change the forwarding for all your virtual numbers in just a few seconds, so if, for instance, I’m going to be attending a conference in Switzerland, I’ll change my call forwarding to my Swiss mobile number. Similarly, when I was on holiday in India, as soon as I’d bought a local SIM card I changed the call forwarding to my Indian number.

Of course, eventually the client will find out where you are based, probably when they receive your invoice, if not before. But once you’ve reassured them that you can provide just as good a service as a local translator, and that payment will be just as easy, it won’t matter.

Although most of my clients are still in Catalonia, I have acquired several new clients in other countries since getting local phone numbers there. I can’t know for certain that the local phone numbers secured those clients, but I reckon they probably did.

If you decide to use any of these options, please leave a comment below, and please share it on social media!

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