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Morosidad de la Universidad de Sevilla

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En agosto de 2010 envié una factura de 237,12€ más IVA para un trabajo de corrección que hice para la Universidad de Sevilla, y concretamente el Departamento de Nutrición y Bromatología. A día de hoy, 31 de mayo de 2012, sigo sin cobrar la factura. Al principio se ponían excusas. Me pedían documentación y datos que no pide ningún otro cliente, y que no tienen ni la necesidad ni el derecho a saber, como mi número de pasaporte.

Incluso me pidieron una dirección en mi país de origen. Les dije que yo no tenía ninguna dirección en el Reino Unido puesto que soy residente en Cataluña, y hace 10 años que no vivía en el Reino Unido. Además, como soy comunitario no me tendrían que pedir más datos de lo que piden a un cliente español. Basta con mi dirección y mi NIF. Pero no había manera, así que cedí y di mi número de pasaporte y la dirección de mis padres, para poner algo.

Seguía sin cobrar. Después me explicaron que no se me pagó en su momento porque el trabajo se hizo mal (aunque unos días después de la entrega me habían dicho que estaba bien) y tuvieron que pagar a otro corrector. Pero curiosamente el artículo está publicado en la revista Food Chemistry y había pocos cambios. Los únicos cambios que encontré eran de datos que solo puede saber el autor. ¡Incluso encontré un error tipográfico que estaba en la versión original que se me envió pero que yo había corregido en mi versión! A la persona que me dijo que el artículo estaba mal expliqué lo que había encontrado en Food Chemistry, pero no me contestó. Incluso dije que cobraría el gasto del segundo corrector si me pudiera demostrar lo que yo había hecho mal, y no me han enviado nada. Tampoco se disculparon de su falsa acusación.

En noviembre de 2011 (más de un año después de la factura) me pidieron volver a enviar documentación que ya había enviado el año anterior.

El 17 de enero envié un mensaje para decir que todavía no había cobrado. Nadie me contestó.

Volví a escribir el 26 de marzo. No me contestó hasta el 16 de abril (21 días más tarde), en cuya fecha me dijeron que la factura ya estaba grabada. Añadía que lo cobraré seguro, pero no sabía cuando (o sea, ¿podría cobrarla en el 2025?).

Hoy es 31 de mayo de 2012, y sigo sin cobrar. Me parece vergonzoso. Me gustaría saber lo que pasaría a un alumno que tardara casi dos años a pagar la matrícula. ¿La Universidad de Sevilla lo consideraría aceptable? ¿El alumno podría argumentar “no sé cuando lo pagaré pero lo pagaré seguro”? ¿El personal responsable de pagarme la factura aceptaría que la Universidad tardara casi dos años a pagar su propio sueldo?

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Working with your author to find the mot juste: journal vs magazine

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Spanish and other Iberian languages do not make a distinction between a journal and a magazine. They use the same word for both, a revista. For translators this can cause us a headache if information about a particular publication is sparse. An abstract I was translating today mentioned two underground Catalan revistas from the 1940s, so it was hard to check whether they were journals or magazines.

One solution is to do what I did twice in the previous paragraph: translate revista with its hypernym, the more generic word publication. But if we want to be more precise – you probably don’t want to repeat the word publication too often in the same text – then you can ask the author, who will probably know about the publication and will be able to tell you which is the more appropriate word.

But the author might not understand the difference between the two terms, or might think that magazine refers only to glossy, tabloid-like magazines like Hello!, when in fact some magazines, like Time, are more serious. To solve this problem, this slide presentation in Spanish is a good resource to send your author, who should be able to identify which word is more appropriate based on the explanations on the slides.

This nuance between a journal and a magazine is another example of the dangers of machine translation. Google Translate might pick the right word if your sentence contains the name of a well-known magazine like ¡Hola! (the Spanish version of Hello!), but for a 1940s publication it will most likely just be guessing.

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Anglo Premier col·labora amb el I Open de Tennis de Taula de Sant Quirze / Anglo Premier is sponsoring the inaugural Sant Quirze Table Tennis Open

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Cartell del I Open de Sant Quirze del Vallès

[English article below]

Anglo Premier Translations és patrocinador oficial de I Open de Tennis de Taula de Sant Quirze del Vallès, que tindrà lloc el 16 de juny de 2012. D’aquesta manera recolzem un esdeveniment que contribueix a fomentar la salut al nostre entorn local a través de l’esport.

L’Open consisteix en un torneig per a federats, un altre per a no federats, i un tercer per a escolars, de manera que sigui quin sigui el teu nivell, hi pots participar. Podeu fer la inscripció a través del web del club organitzador, el club de tennis de taula de Sant Quirze del Vallès. T’hi atreveixes?

Anglo Premier Translations is an official sponsor of the inaugural Sant Quirze del Vallès Table Tennis Open, which will take place on 16 June 2012. In doing so, we will be supporting an event that promotes good health through sport in our local community.

There is a tournament for league players, non league players and schoolchildren, so players of any level can take part. Players can register on the website of Sant Quirze del Vallès Table Tennis Club. Are you game?

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Invalid Swedish VAT numbers – how to correct them

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I have recently arranged a job with a client based in Sweden. I asked the client for the company’s VAT number, and he sent me a number with the format SE123456-7890. I tested the number (without the hyphen, since you should always remove hyphens and spaces when entering a VAT number) on the VIES website and was told the number was invalid. The VIES website lists the formats of VAT numbers for each EU member state, and says that Swedish numbers contain 12 digits. Mine, as you can see, only had 10.

Fortunately the Wikipedia’s list of formats gives additional information. It says that all Swedish numbers end in 01, and gives a link to a Swedish website. Although I don’t speak Swedish, I do understand enough words to see that it’s saying that you add 01 to convert a national number to an international VAT number. I tried adding 01 to the number, and sure enough the VIES website gave me the name of my client’s company, thus confirming that I had the correct number.

So, if a Swedish-based client sends you a 10-digit, rather than a 12-digit, VAT number, just add 01 to the end of it.

Anglo Premier Translations provides translation and editing services. For more information, click here to visit our main website.

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How to say “Camp Nou” (and “Salou”)

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Anglo Premier Translations provides translation and editing services from Catalan, Spanish and French to English. For more information, click here to visit our main website.

When a foreign word is used in the media, journalists are normally advised to pronounce it as closely as possible to the original pronunciation, but using English phonemes. So when Real Madrid is said in the English-speaking media, the word Real (which means royal) is pronounced as two syllables and not like the English word real.

But journalists never seem to have got the hang of the name of FC Barcelona’s stadium. Apart from the fact that the words Camp and Nou are often switched round in the English-speaking media, the word Nou is invariably pronounced noo.

Some journalists realise this is not the correct pronunciation and try to pronounce it the proper way, but end up pronouncing it like the English word now. English speakers often produce the same vowel sound when pronouncing other Catalan words, like the name of the popular beach resort Salou. You even hear the same sound for Catalan words ending in eu, like Bernabeu in the name of Real Madrid’s stadium, probably due to influence from German, in which the eu is pronounced this way.

However, this ow vowel sound would be written au in Catalan, and appears in words like palau (palace).

The correct pronunciation of ou contains English phonemes, but it is the combination of phonemes that feels unnatural to English speakers. To pronounce the word nou properly, first pronounce the short o sound that appears in words like hot or cod. Now pronounce the sound written as oo in English, as in boo and coo. Now pronounce one straight after the other quickly, and you’ve got it!

Since this combination of sounds feels unnatural to English speakers, we could use a compromise pronunciation. But I would suggest the best compromise would be to pronounce the word nou as no, rather than as noo or now.

Finally, in the word Camp, the letter p is silent in the variety of Catalan spoken in Barcelona, although it is pronounced in some other varieties of Catalan.

If you’re still confused, why not listen to a couple of natives pronounce it.

And if you’re still confused, just pretend it says “Cam No”, as that’s a pretty close approximation.

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Anglo Premier now translates LaTeX documents

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In addition to the dozens of formats Anglo Premier already works with, we are now able to translate LaTeX files. We use a special filter that protects the code used in the LaTeX document, which means we can guarantee that we won’t spoil any of the code so that you will be able to compile the final document in the target language. Contact us if you need a LaTeX document translating.

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Translating Latex files in MemoQ

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LaTeX is a format that uses tags to enable authors to not have to worry about typesetting their text. Unfortunately, at the time of writing there do not seem to be any CAT tools that accept this format. However, MemoQ lets you label tags using regular expressions. We have created a filter for importing LaTeX files into MemoQ. If you normally use a different CAT tool, you could import your file into MemoQ (you can use the demo version for up to 45 days) then export it into a format you can use in other CAT tools (for example, the XLIFF format).

To use the filter, download it here. Next, go to the Resource console in MemoQ and click on “Filter configurations”. Click “Import new” and add the file you just downloaded.

Now all you need to do is go to “Add document as” in a MemoQ project, click on the “Open” button in the Document import settings window and select “Latex all” from the list.

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Termcat databases with 73,016 entries

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Download 73,016 terminology entries from Termcat’s database for the price of £12 or €14.50.

You can download a free sample of the first 1,000 entries (which covers the entire database on Video games and part of the Telecommunications database) here. Apart from the CSV format for importing into a CAT tool, the sample file also includes a version in Excel format so that if you don’t know how to import a CSV file into Excel you can visualise the data more easily.

On its website, Termcat provides 27 terminology databases in an open, xml format. Although it is an open-source format, the xml format used is not easy to import into a terminology database. Previous posts describe how to use Excel to convert the format, but even using that method is very complicated and takes many hours to do. It also requires Excel 2007, since Excel 2003 and earlier versions does not have enough rows (it is limited to just over 60,000) to enable the method to be used.

The databases contain 73,016 entries. All of the entries contain Catalan, and the vast majority also contain Spanish, English, and to a slightly lesser extent French. Termcat’s XML databases also have some entries in other languages. You can see the domains covered and which languages are covered for each domain here.

Since it is so difficult to import the XML files into computer-assisted translation tools, we at Anglo Premier are offering our converted version – which took us many hours to produce – for the price of just £10 or €12.

Our version contains all the entries available in Catalan, Spanish, English and French. Since the file is aimed at translators rather than terminologists, the data includes only the terms in each language (including all synonyms), as well as the domain (or subject), and the database from which it was extracted. The domain and database names are always in Catalan. They are usually the same, but some databases have various domains, for example, the “Videojocs” database has some records labelled as “Dispositius de joc” and others labelled as “Interacció i comunitat”. I would therefore recommend importing the database name into your CAT tool’s domain/subject field rather than the “domain”.

If you would be interested in having the entries that Termcat has produced in other languages (such as German and Italian) please contact us. If there is sufficient demand we will make a version with the other languages.

Buying the database

To purchase the product, please write to us using the contact form on our main site with your name in the subject line. In the body, please include your name, e-mail address, full address and, if applicable, your VAT number. Please also state your preferred payment method. We accept wire transfer to a British or Spanish account or Paypal or Skrill (formerly Moneybookers). We will reply with the necessary details to make the payment and a reference number for you to use. Once payment has been received you will receive a link to download the full file within 48 hours.

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