Business is booming, and I’ve been so busy with my business that I haven’t had much time to write on my blog. I had loads to say about the end to the Formula 1 season, but that can wait. I’d like to try to write more posts about my day-to-day business: translation.

Have you noticed how often we use the word business in English? You probably have if you translate out of English. It is such a versatile word that there are countless possible translations into other languages, depending on the context. I’d never really thought about it before, until I stumbled upon this little gem from our friends in Quebec (they really do provide so many resources to those of us working between French and English). Although the article examines translations between English and French, it should provide plenty of ideas for those translating from English into other Romance languages.

The article starts by categorising the different usages of the word business in English. At the end of the article, there is an alphabetical list, which is pretty easy to import into a terminology database.

This is just one of many articles on accountancy terminology provided by the Ordre des comptables agréés du Québec. The rest can be found here.

Absolutely scandalous! In France, they call ice cream glaces. Why can’t they just call it ice cream? And why do the Italians have to call it gelati? And as for Spain, well, if you go to Madrid you’ll have to ask for a bocadillo de queso, if you want what everyone else calls a cheese sandwich.

OK, now I know what you’re all thinking. I’m sounding like one of those little Englanders who thinks that everywhere in the world should be like England. This is not what I really think, but is simply an illustration of the attitude shown in TeleMadrid’s latest anti-Catalan report. Once you’ve opened the above link, have a look in particular at the second part of the report (from 1:25).

Here are a few quotes from the report:

“If we want to eat in a restaurant, here is El Recó del Bon Menjar, which means The Good Food Place, and a sandwich is called an entrepà.”
“Those who are from Cádiz or Huelva do have problems. Writing bocadillo is not the same as writing entrepà. Entrepà de formatge [cheese sandwich]: we call that a bocadillo de queso, don’t we?”
“This, for example, is a baker’s [in Spanish, panadería], yet the sign says forn de pa.”
“At the end of our holidays we understood that here we can buy fresh fruit…”. The sign says “fruita”, whereas in Spanish it would be “fruta”, so obviously there’s no way a Spanish-speaking person can work out what it means.

From the BBC Sport website:

The vast majority of Grands Prix are funded by governments, who see the events as a way of promoting their country’s worldwide.

Shame on you!

Despite all the training, I still have to say “barthroom” [sic] to get Dragon to write bathroom correctly. When I say “bathroom”, I get all sorts of interpretations. To give you an idea, I’m now going to create a list by saying “bathroom – press enter” several times:

battery
bass room
bathroom
bathroom
battering
battering
bat’s room

This is very annoying.

I need to find all the place names that are in a text I’m working on. Rather than read through the whole document again, I’ve have found a search for Microsoft Work that will find all words starting with a capital letter that are not at the start of a sentence. Wildcards must be activated. The search string is:

[!.?!] [A-Z]

Because the text was in Catalan (though this also applies to French), I then did a separate search for those preceded by l’ or d’:

[ld]’[A-Z]

Obviously I may miss a place name that appears as the first word of a sentence, but most place names appear more than once in the document, so I shouldn’t miss any.

I’d be interested to know whether any of my colleagues set autoresponders on weekends. Most weekends I have access to my e-mail, and I’ll normally just reply to any work-related messages. This weekend, however, I was away in Andorra on a skiing trip, and I made a conscious decision to completely switch off from work, with the exception of doing some marking of my students’ work on the coach trip.

On the Sunday, I was really tempted to put a euro in the Internet machines in the hotel, but I resisted, saying to myself “you’ll be home later”.

When I finally got home on Sunday night, I found two e-mails from a client I had been negotiating quite a large contract with (about 1800€). The first had been sent on Friday night, just after I had left, asking me for my phone number and stating that he had to wait for confirmation from someone else within his organisation. The second e-mail had been sent on Saturday afternoon, and confirmed the job.

I was quite tired, so I decided to wait until Monday morning before replying with my phone number. So on Monday morning I sent the e-mail. Several hours later (about 15 minutes before I wrote this), he called to say that he panicked because I hadn’t got back to him and that he has contacted another translator, who has accepted the job.

As you can imagine, I’m not in the best of moods at the moment. But the best thing I can do is to think about how I can prevent this happening again. I don’t think I should have been carrying a blackberry around with me on the ski slopes, just in case a client contacted me (at the time of my Saturday e-mail I was in the middle of a skiing lesson), so I’m thinking that next time I go away for a weekend I should maybe set an auto-responder, like I always do when I go away for longer periods of time.

I’d be interested to hear whether other translators do the same, or whether they’ve had similar experiences.