Arline Lyons

Training courses in early 2012

2012-01-06T07:48:00.001-08:00

As well as the ITI Japanese Network workshops and AGM mentioned in the last post, here are some more training opportunities coming up early this year:

PharmaGuide, who have previously given their drug discovery course via eCPD's webinars, are running courses on Chemistry for Translators and Biotechnology for Translators on Saturday 21 January and Saturday 10 March in Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Corinne McKay will be running a four-week online course from Wednesday 25 January to kickstart you into the process described in her book How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator. (Just don't believe the bit about European CVs!)

And Ros Schwartz and Chris Durban are presenting their popular sessions in Amsterdam on Friday 10 February, Style Matters. Chris Durban will then go on to present two more sessions the next day in nearby Amersfoot, Mystery Shopper and Finding and Working with Direct Clients. (Thanks to Kevin Lossner for the information.)

ITI Japanese Network Workshops and 2011 AGM

2011-12-20T03:32:00.001-08:00

The 2011 ITI Japanese Network AGM and the first workshop day for 2012 will be held in York on Saturday 14 January 2012. The fee for attending the workshops is £25.00. (The AGM is as always free to attend, and is for members only.)

The workshops will be on patent translation (Japanese to English and English to Japanese) and training translators, plus our guest Nick Rosenthal, Chairman of Council of the ITI, will talk about becoming a full member of the ITI.

There will be an informal meeting at a pub on the Friday, a networking lunch is included in the price of the workshops, and there will also be a venue booked for dinner on Saturday afternoon.

Availability Christmas 2011/New Year 2012

2011-12-20T03:30:00.000-08:00

I will be unavailable from 22 December 2011, returning to work on 3 January 2012. I will have limited email access and will only be contactable by mobile for the first week of that time.

Availability week of 21 November 2011

2011-11-20T23:59:00.000-08:00

I will be unavailable from noon on Wednesday 24 November for the rest of the week, returning on Monday 28 November, as I will be attending a funeral.

I will endeavour to reply to emails as often as possible, but will be unavailable for work.

Availability reminder

2011-10-27T07:38:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder that I will be travelling in Japan and unavailable for work from tomorrow, Friday 28 October, until I return on Sunday 20 October. I will also not be contactable by phone, but will attempt to reply to emails as soon as possible.

Translation events in London in November

2011-10-13T03:43:00.001-07:00

If you're in or around London and have an interest in translation, there is plenty to interest you next month.

Saturday 12 November: Interpreting for the Media (Chartered Institute of Linguists)

Novotel London City South, 53-61 Southwark Bridge Road, London SE1 9HH

Hear from experienced interpreters about the challenges and potential pitfalls of 'live' interpreting for the media as well as requirements and codes of practice in the field.

Application Form to be sent to Julie Hobbs, Chartered Institute of Linguists, Saxon House, 48 Southwark St, London SE1 1UN. Tel: 020 7940 3144. E-mail: Julie.Hobbs@iol.org.uk
Price includes refreshments and buffet lunch. Members £30, non-members £40, students £20.

17-18 November: 33rd Translating and the Computer Conference

Including an overview of machine and automatic interpretation at the European Commission and WIPO, HTML5 and internationalisation markup at the W3C, and much more.

19 November: AGM of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting

Availability 2011

2011-08-23T02:50:00.000-07:00

Please be aware that I will be unavailable on the following dates in 2011:

From Wednesday 7 September (afternoon), returning Thursday 15 September
From Friday 28 October, returning Monday 21 November
From Thursday 22 December, returning Tuesday 3 January 2012

One step at at time

2011-08-22T07:32:00.001-07:00

Seen in the Asahi Shinbun this morning, the story of a Swiss travel agency employee walking from the nothernmost point of Japan to the southernmost to show it's still safe to travel there.

You can follow his journey on Walking through Japan (also in German and Japanese).

Just one slip

2011-07-18T04:43:00.000-07:00

Research carried out with business websites shows that even one spelling mistake can potentially halve your sales (go into the Comments section for a hysterically funny spellchecked poem) - and the inimitable David Crystal takes that as his cue to talk about the impression given by poor or non-native English and how it helps him to detect phishing emails.

People are very ready to make deductions about the background of a user based on language use, and the argument 'carelessness in spelling must mean carelessness generally (and thus an unsatisfactory product)' is applied regardless of the realities.

Harsh, but almost certainly true, and even more so for people whose business is language.

I've noticed this before with the 'Postcode Lottery' and attempts to con people into sending money by hacking an email account and asking for wire transfers after the account owner ran into fictitious problems on a fictitious holiday, which fell on far too sensitive ears when an email in broken English was sent to a translators' mailing list. (The other translators could accept the odd typo if the person in question really had been robbed at gunpoint, but not the use of American English.)

Please take care of the egg

2011-07-12T09:17:00.000-07:00

There is a wonderful saying in Japanese, 「卵です」 - literally, 'I am an egg'.

What it really means is that you are a something-in-the-making, or a budding something. I like the idea of an egg, though. It's full of potential, and has a future ahead of it if it can break out of its shell. It also implies a certain degree of fragility and a need for careful handling, which anyone who's ever been a beginner at something will have a degree of painful sympathy with.

My computer upgrade has had most of its kinks worked out and I now have a much more powerful machine, a new OS, two screens and a larger desk to help me work. The only thing that needs to be improved now is me, as I venture into a new subject area - patents - which is very different from my previous specialisms, games and correspondence. The terminology is of course different, but so many other things are as well, the degree of accuracy to the source text, the prescribed language in English, and the complexity of the writing in Japanese. I've completely changed how I work, including spending more time reading and revising on paper.

We'll see what hatches.

Selfish reasons to get to know your customer

2011-05-27T02:34:00.000-07:00

There are many good reasons to get to know your customers, including tailoring your service and making them more likely to give you feedback, but I added one to the list yesterday.

I had a perfectly achievable list of things to do, except that I wasn't aware that one of my contacts at a particular client was leaving at the end of the week and was going to hand over to his boss, on the fly, while a number of loose ends were still being tied up, which ended up taking quite some time and many emails while everyone involved was brought up to speed.

Thankfully no deadlines were missed, but it's always nice to know in advance when there will be demands on your time as a supplier to a new contact person.

Translation Unconference: Neuchâtel 24 June 2011

2011-05-24T07:53:00.001-07:00

The Swiss Translation Unconference is taking place in Neuchâtel on Friday 24 June 2011. It's hosted at the Federal Statistical Office and the keynote speaker will be Nicole Carnal, President of the Swiss Association of Translators, Terminologists and Interpreters (ASTTI).

It's free to participate (and participation is the name of the game at an unconference) and you can even set the agenda! Topics can be suggested on the unconference website.

De-LinkIn

2011-05-24T07:46:00.000-07:00

While I've used LinkedIn for some time - and even found some new clients through it - I have been quite frustrated with it over the last few months.

I belong to a number of special interest groups, mostly for game localisation, and they have gone from having conversations which are not directly relevant to me but interesting and on the theme of the group to being full of posts trying to sell iPhone and Android programming courses, people promoting themselves and barely literate people asking how to sell their big game idea. I used to read the digests, now after weeks of mostly skimming and deleting them I've unsubscribed from the digests of all but one group.

It's a shame, as I've never found anything as good as LinkedIn, but it's not living up to its promise of being a professional networking site - at least not for the groups I'm in.

Do what you love?

2011-05-23T09:18:00.000-07:00

Just like everything else in freelance translation, there's nothing for a long, dry spell and then everything comes down on you at once. I have a quiet period, then a massive new job and three possible contracts kick up at once. I have no ideas to write about, then several pop up in a day.

Thanks to Sarah Dillon for introducing me to "Brazen Careerist" Penelope Trunk via a link on her blog. After changing jobs several times, and never having a clear idea of what I wanted to do after being told Ireland didn't have any Sea Kings (I wanted to be an air-sea rescue pilot when I was in secondary school), I've often been given the advice "do what you love". Then you'll never feel like you're working, which is surely a bonus.

This struck me as problematic for several reasons. First of all, if you have to do something, no matter how much you love it, sometimes it feels like work. I'm not sure I want to ruin my love for something by turning it into work. What if I don't know what I love? Or if I love something completely unworkable as a career?

Penelope Trunk argues that "do what you love" is bad career advice. Why? Because you may not love the same thing forever, or even for the length of your working life. Because you may love more than one thing. And, you may not be suited to doing what you love, no matter how much you love it.

It reminded me very much of the talking down that happened during the specialisation topic on this year's ITI Professional Support Group. Specialising, like having a job, is a good idea. But you don't have to choose a specialisation and stay with it for life, through thick and thin. You can accept that they don't work out sometimes, or that you fall out of love with them, and if so you just move on. You're not getting a tattoo. It'll be all right.

On the other hand, it's also possible to be good at something you don't like or don't find rewarding. This is why I no longer work as a project manager although I'm reliably informed I'm good at it. Yes, I can herd cats. It doesn't mean I enjoy it. I enjoy the feeling of being able to make a difference, especially when I know it will stick, but it wasn't worth the rest of the job most of the time.

Now I'm going back to reading Penelope Trunk's blog, as it's more interesting than anything else I've found recently.

The grain of truth in the hype

2011-05-12T11:40:00.000-07:00

I take most sweeping declarations about the power of social networking with a healthy pinch of suspicion, but one thing I saw today did make me appreciate it. In a group for one of the professional organisations on a social networking site, a number of translators had posted about payment issues with a particular company. Knowing that others were experiencing problems - and that in some cases payment had been outstanding for some time - one after another announced that they were taking action through the small claims courts.

As freelancers working from home or small offices, I often feel that translators don't benefit from the aspects of a tighter-knit community that would allow them to follow issues like this, get the information they need, when they need it, from the right people and this means there's little in the way of collective response. But this certainly made a difference, both to the translators and, I would guess, the company involved. I still don't think the world will be revolutionised quite yet, but I'm starting to see how it can change things.

And cut!

2011-04-28T02:02:00.000-07:00

Phew. The huge video transcription project has died down into translating correspondence for licensing video clips, and should be over soon as the documentary gets ready to air. It's been quite draining - I find even reading the news about the aftermath of the Tohoku disaster totally draining - but I've really enjoyed it and it's been a nice introduction to the field.

Other than that, the ITI's Professional Support Group is steaming ahead. After ripping up all our CVs and preparing something that makes us look more like a one-person business and less like a job applicant, we moved on to talking about specialisms and then got stuck into quoting and invoicing.

Yes, yes, you think. I've quoted and invoiced. I know this... except I often find I don't know it as well I'd like to. I'm doing it right, but that's thanks to (well-informed) guesses so it's great to have an opportunity to go through it with a group of supportive professionals and check my ideas against theirs, which are backed by the weight of experience and expert knowledge. The feeling of "I know this is right" is quite different from "I hope/think this is right". (Not right in the moral sense, of course, but appropriate and satisfying local legislation.)

The specialisation exercise technically didn't answer my question, but it did convince me that I have to answer it for myself. There's some news in there too, but I'll wait until it's confirmed to tell!

Journal title references

2011-04-28T02:01:00.001-07:00

With a bow of gratitude to my fellow members of J-Net, the Links page has been updated with references for journal titles.

You just aimed for the wrong market

2011-04-18T09:38:00.000-07:00

Today's Chartered Institute of Linguists mailing list included a link to a blog post on an agency's site about how to succeed as a freelance translator. Shortly afterwards a link to the same blog post appeared on Twitter via a translator who often mentions relevant articles. It looked interesting, so I clicked on the link and went to read it.

Then it all went a bit pear-shaped.

If you're going to try to deceive linguists (and professional writers) you need to put a little work into it. I read the article and noticed that it slipped into talking about freelance writing instead of translation at the end. Odd. Barely an hour after tweeting the link, the same translator who had mentioned the article had read it carefully... and discovered it was almost identical to another article - on freelance writing.

A translator's bread and butter is pushing and prodding a text to find any inconsistencies and then finding out where they came from and what to do about them. When something suspicious comes up they have the research skills to unravel the threads and see where they lead.

The agency's blog post has now mysteriously disappeared.

Something similar happened on another translation mailing list earlier this year, where a moving plea for help was received from a member of the list who had been robbed while on holiday - except that the number of grammar and spelling errors in the email and - most damning of all - the use of US English made everyone realise at once that someone's email account had been hacked. Even if this person had been mugged and left stranded, they would never write something like that.

And the moral of the story? Other than good language skills being valuable for scammers and plagiarists, although this agency has taken the article off their site it has circulated amongst linguists on Twitter and will undoubtedly impact them. If someone has no respect for the work of others, they're not going to be your top choice as an agency to work with.

EDIT: The agency has apparently apologised and said it was down to a copywriter.

Dictionaries and useful links

2011-04-18T02:27:00.001-07:00

After being asked about it, I decided to put up a list of my most-used dictionaries and other useful links that I've come across through mailing lists, courses, conferences, Twitter or other sources - useful for me as well as I have them all in one place! I'll keep it updated, and you can find it by clicking on the "Links リンクス" link under "Pages" at the top of the page or else by clicking here: my list of dictionaries and other useful sites!

スケジュール状況

2011-04-10T15:25:00.000-07:00

予約済み：忙しいがデスクワークに従事、お引き合いに対し即返答可能。
即対応不可：出張中、もしくは席を外して不在だが、出来る限り早い時期にメールで返答を行なう。

All change!

2011-04-10T15:11:00.001-07:00

The ITI's Professional Support Group is giving me a lot to think about. The first exercise was on how a freelance translator's CV should be unlike the CV you would use to apply to a permanent in-house job, and although I like to think I can create a mean CV (this was actually a hotly disputed term throughout the whole exercise) I still learned a lot.

One thing that did come out of the whole discussion was one of those things that I had been thinking about for a while but not done anything about yet - changing my domain away from a .co.uk one as I am no longer in the UK. So, energised by the discussions, I went ahead and registered arlinelyons.com and have finally migrated everything to it this weekend.

The j-trans.co.uk pages all redirect automatically to their arlinelyons.com counterparts, and the email addresses will continue to be valid indefinitely.

Let's get professional

2011-03-21T13:48:00.000-07:00

I am one of the lucky 18 applicants chosen to take the Institute of Translation and Interpreting's yearly Professional Support Group, a 12-week course aimed at post-beginner but not-yet-established translators looking for guidance and mentoring as they establish their careers. The course started today with a gentle round of introductions to get people used to using the online forum where most of the work will take place, which bears a striking resemblance to the distance learning environment I used for my MA. Over the next three months the tutors will take the mentees through various aspects of owning and promoting their translation businesses, such as CVs, marketing, equipment and translation tools.

Although I have been fully freelance since late 2007, I have spent close to half of that time either working in-house without the usual demands of finding business, and spending part of my time studying for my MA. There seems to be no one path into translation, and so I'm sure that meeting others who have ended up in the same place from different directions will teach me a lot - and I hope I can contribute as well!

Review of The Prosperous Translator and some thoughts

2011-03-13T03:08:00.001-07:00

I reviewed The Prosperous Translator: Advice from Fire Ant and Worker Bee for the ITI Japanese Network's Bulletin and was interested to see that Sarah Dillion had also read and commented on it.

She gives a good outline of the book, and underlines the points that I think the authors want to make.

There were two other things that struck me, one when I read it and one when I read her review. Reading the questions in the first two sections made me realise how some people - translators and translation buyers - see translation as a semi-skilled job that requires some level of knowledge of two languages but not much else. I and most people I've come to know through university, the ITI or the CIoL, would assume a very high level of knowledge of both languages and a certain level of both writing skill in the target language and specialist subject knowledge. But that is not necessarily how everyone sees it.

The other thought that came to me when I was reading Sarah Dillon's review is how the engagement with clients that she and Fire Ant and Worker Bee advocate could become a virtuous circle. If you are working in isolation and without a close relationship with your clients, you can find it hard to understand your own value, including setting your own rates. Getting out and meeting your clients and forming the personal relationship that is supposed to move you into the higher band of rates will also teach you a lot about your own position and negate the unfortunate side-effects of the isolation that many freelance translators work in.

My own attempt to meet my clients is a little disrupted at the moment - my flight to Japan today has been cancelled. I'm due to fly tomorrow but may not be able to meet everyone I wanted to in Tokyo. I am spending two weeks away from Tokyo, which should be fine, but I need to get there first.

Translation Tribulations: Cheap translation, like coffee

2011-03-13T03:03:00.000-07:00

An excellent and very amusing article from Translation Tribulations: Cheap translation, like coffee.

Like some of the commenters, I'm no coffee connaisseur but I know when something is bad. (Then again I haven't studied coffee for 15 years...)

The delights of idiom

2011-02-20T01:24:00.000-08:00

Spam doesn't make me laugh very often, but today's one announcing that I'd "won the North England Postcode Lottery" certainly did. That phrase does not mean what you think it means.

Review: 'Damp Squid: the English language laid bare"

2011-02-11T05:45:00.000-08:00

One of my New Year intentions (it would be a bit strong to call it a resolution) is to get and read some more books, particularly books on English and computer games. I had a large Amazon order delivered to the UK in time to pick it up when I was there at New Year, but due to the amount of luggage I had from three months in Spain - plus Christmas presents - I had to leave the books there and will be picking them up at the end of this month when we're back in the UK.

However, the British Library's bookshop more than made up for it when I visited for the Evolving English exhibition in January. I bought three books and the first I picked up to read, after joking to a client that I was going to have to start a regime of reading books before starting new games, was Damp Squid: the English language laid bare by Jeremy Butterfield.

Its slim size, unusual title and bright, amusing cover definitely help it to catch the eye. But how is it to read? I've always been frustrated by my ability to consume mindless works of fiction with the speed of a wood-chipper (not sure what to use as an idiom for e-books) combined with an equal and opposite inability to get through non-fiction at any pace, even when it's something that I'm interested in and believe is worth reading. I thoroughly enjoyed David Crystal's Stories of English, but it still took me months to read it, on and off. So, it was a pleasant surprise to finish Damp Squid in two days.

It struck me as a little disjointed unless I thought of it as a book about electronic corpora, which is not how it immediately describes itself. There was nothing tying all the pieces together (as the evolution of English does for Stories of English) other than illustrating how corpora allow English to be analysed in new and productive ways and what that tells us about how language is changing. Once that link is established the book becomes an enjoyable whistle-stop tour of the evolution and results of language research methods, including vocabulary size, etymology, the formation of new words, changes in spelling, shifts and overlaps in meaning, collocations, idioms, grammar and how dictionaries are put together.

Translators even get a nod in the the chapter "Word Groupings":

A second group of people with a vital interest in collocation are translators. [The first group is learners of English.] They are interested because the translation of a word into another language generally changes according which words it's associated with in the original language. ... If you ask any translator worth their salt how to translate a word, their first question will be: 'What's the context?' (p. 101)

One thing I found very interesting was how Butterfield, like David Crystal, sees any prescriptive approach to grammar as futile. Both of them take a long (and broad) view of language through time and around the world that highlights its many varieties and how fickle the view of "correct" language is when seen historically. They highlight the tension between freezing a time and place-dependent view of language (such as in a dictionary or grammar book) and using research methods to determine what language is actually doing (rather than what anyone thinks it should be doing).

There won't be much to learn here for anyone with knowledge of linguistic research or language change, but it's a very good and extremely readable introduction to the subject and has left me with a huge desire to have a corpus at my disposal to play around with and see what I can find. And any book that teaches you the wonderful expressions "il pleut des vaches" (it's raining cows) and "estar más loco que una cabra" (to be crazier than a goat) can't be all bad. Japanese even gets a look in with 土砂降りの雨. Alternatively, it could make a good gift for clients so they understand why you keep asking about context and how no-one can win arguments about grammar in the absolute.

Isn't there a law against this?

2011-02-04T01:56:00.000-08:00

Received from another member of the ITI Japanese Network, a list of the most dodgy Japanese names. "Furumontei" as a girl's name was the most objectionable one I saw.

Yes, but no...

2011-02-03T06:31:00.000-08:00

I am very interested in collaborating with others - one of my objectives for this year is to find a partner translator to work with who can check my translations in return for me doing the same, so we both get a more polished result, as well as having two heads to think through linguistic and business problems instead of just one. If they're in the same field as me - that would be a dream come true.

However, I only work in one language pair - Japanese to English - and I don't outsource any other languages or act as an agency or broker. So sending this to me (twice) means that the "Report Spam" button gets some exercise:

I'm a freelance translator with experience of translating lakhs & lakhs of words till date in the mentioned language pair. I'm comfortable in working in all the domains including your domain. I'm ok working in any font & also available for font conversion & typesetting services. rates will vary for them according to type of work. Please check my CV for more information.

I'm ready to give free sample translations but please keep them below 100 words beyond which they will be chargeable.

My rates are 70 paise per source word for the mentioned domain which is adequate considering the expertise & the quality of work delivered.

Never mind a salutation or signoff, the standard of English and claim to work "in all the domains including your domain" is an instant no. I've been getting a few of these recently, which makes me wonder if I've been added to some spurious list of translation agencies.

Although the idea of "lakhs and lakhs" of words did make me laugh. Sounded a bit like Cilla Black.

Food for thought!

2011-02-01T04:47:00.001-08:00

A delightful typographical experiment with kanji for food!

London calling!

2011-01-06T07:38:00.001-08:00

If you're in London on Saturday 15 January and are interesting in translation in Japanese and English, the Japanese Network of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting are holding their annual general meeting at Birkbeck College in central London.

The AGM in the afternoon is for members only, but the presentation on Japanese food and recipe translation session in the morning (10:00 onwards, run by me!) are open to anyone with an interest. Attending the day costs £20.00.

Just starting? Start here.

2010-12-07T14:19:00.000-08:00

A great series of six articles on starting out as a freelance translator or interpreter by Jonathan Downie - some great food for thought in there and well written to boot.

Limited availability unti the end of 2010

2010-09-13T15:00:00.001-07:00

I will be working in-house until the end of 2010, which will limit my availability to a great extent. Please contact me well in advance if you would like me to work on your projects!

On holiday September 7 - 12 2010

2010-09-07T01:37:00.000-07:00

I will be on holiday from September 7 to 12 2010, but will respond to you as soon as possible.

Fonterrific!

2010-08-30T13:22:00.000-07:00

I was doing a test translation today where the employer of an illustrator was mentioned. Then later on I was updating my CV and wanted a Japanese handwritten-style font with kanji to use on it. This obviously entails a huge amount of work, so many only have Latin letters, numbers, punctuation, hiragana and katakana.

But I finally got lucky! The Maniackers site has a huge range of beautiful fonts, wonderfully presented, and I will definitely be getting their book and CD next time I have a chance.

And it turns out the book is published by the employers of the illustrator mentioned in the test translation. Very odd.

Please, sir, can I have an editable copy?

2010-08-26T01:16:00.000-07:00

I am normally flexible with client requests even when it involves a little extra work on my part. A little formatting on the translated document? No problem. Some additional feedback on what could make it more acceptable for its target audience? Absolutely included in the price. Working from a scan of an nth generation photocopy or fax of a mechanical engineering patent publication?

I have, to my regret, done this before. How bad can it be, I thought. It was bad. Working outside of my specialism (games and IT/general technical) is always a struggle, with more time and effort needed for terminology research and more angst about whether or not the text looks right for the target language readers. That alone is bad enough, but coupled with a poor quality, non-editable document that will not OCR well and will require extensive checking and having to create a final translated version with screenshot-and-pasted tables or images flowed in a multi-column layout?

That's document conversion and desktop publishing. And I normally only get paid for translation, per character.

So, although I like to go that extra mile for clients, it's not worth it for my sanity. Or when I have to turn down something else or stay up late trying to format a document in Word to look like an original which was probably created in FrameMaker or InDesign.

The way they minded their manners

2010-08-13T11:19:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to Matt Young for (re)tweeting this: a collection of old Tokyo subway posters urging customers to mind their manners. (Although the URL has "pinktentacle" in it, they are all safe for work!) I was particularly fascinated by the Superman posters, and the Japanese Madonna and child - I don't think I've ever seen one of those before. Lots of excellent puns as well.

I love the present-day 家でやろう ("Do it at home!") posters too! There's a great collection of them here, along with one 海でやろう ("Do it at the beach!") one that I've never seen before. They also rightfully reference the equally hysterical Smoking Manners posters, (more Smoking Manners posters here) which are really quite poetic, and my favourite one is probably "Inhaled. Burned. Thrown away. If it were anything but a cigarette, it would surely be crying."

Have a good weekend!

When it counts

2010-08-10T13:58:00.000-07:00

I seem to have spent a good deal of last week pushing back on clients.

Another subject that came up for discussion was numbers and punctuation. I don't normally double-check word counts, but this one seemed so far out that I quickly checked in Word and let the client know that I was getting over 2,000 characters more than they were. They answered that this was because they had a special macro that didn't count numbers or punctuation.

I was also pushing back on the deadline (which assumed I worked on the weekend) and wasn't amused by this, especially since I hadn't been told about it before. So, I pointed out that punctuation can alter the meaning of a sentence and some Japanese punctuation just doesn't exist in English or isn't appropriate. It does get factored into the meaning of the translation, and moved around and sometimes changed.

As for numbers... I'm happy to leave things as Showa 20 instead of 1945 if that's what they really want, but how many target audiences are going to know about era names and numbering? And then there's the ability to count in 10,000 which - literally and figuratively - does not translate into English numbering.

When I have one eye on the debates about pushing down rates, it's simply annoying to have to constantly be on the look out for little surprises like these as well. I don't want to spend more time negotiating rates and objecting to my client's practices than I do actually translating.

Because I'm worth it

2010-08-06T07:49:00.000-07:00

I recently created separate signatures for my general, games and collaborative "identities" for translation, listing my qualifications and professional memberships as well as my contact details.

Today I was asked to reduce a rate by a new client. I wrote a draft, wondering if my compromise between my initial (target) rate and her lower rate would be accepted. As I worked on the draft, I put my signature at the end in case I forgot later on.

And that reminded me that I have a reason to charge a decent rate - I've studied hard, worked and gained experience and been accepted by professional groups. So, it's useful to me too.

Say what you mean

2010-08-05T02:17:00.000-07:00

There are few experiences more frustrating to me than translating happily for days in my (overly) expensive translation software and finding that when I've finished... it refuses to export. Not only does SDL Trados Studio 2009 not make it clear when it is throwing the error if it's coming from somewhere else, the errors themselves don't even make it clear what is going wrong.

Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the size of the collection. Parameter name: index.

Searching on this error with SDL Trados got only two hits on Proz, neither of which gave a solution to the problem. Searching on the error alone, however, got me a lot more results, all of them from Excel itself. So, although SDL Trados presented me with the error, it didn't specify that it was coming from Excel.

The posts on the Excel error were many and varied but agreed on one thing - the error text has nothing to do with the problem. It seems to be related to the length or width of certain components on the worksheet, and nothing to do with an index.

In the end, I split the worksheets apart into two spreadsheets and went through the smaller one segment by segment, saving the target each time. Slow, but it got me my answer - the problem was being caused by text boxes with line breaks in them. Text boxes with no line break were fine, and so were some text boxes with line breaks where the English was not much longer than the Japanese. I tried applying the memory to the text boxes with line breaks, reverted them to Japanese when the save target failed, then applied the translation to the rest of the spreadsheet and ended up with minimal amounts of copying and pasting into the final Excel file. Phew.

So, that's another one for the SDL suggestion box (along with Autosave) - tell me where the errors are coming from so I can do something about them, and an error that tells me what is actually going wrong would be best.

Reminds me of filling in last year's online tax return, where the HMRC website insisted someone else had my return open but when I called the helpline they confirmed I was unable to submit my return because there were too many characters in one of the 'Comments' boxes. At least the person on the phone was sorry about it.

Finding the silver lining

2010-07-06T14:48:00.000-07:00

An unexpected plus to the move: finding things. I've already unearthed DVDs I forgot I had, realised I have some duplicate CDs... and found two games that I thought I'd lost!

I often pick up language-related games when I'm in Japan, and although these aren't the ones I use most (that honour goes to ２５０万人の漢検 and 美文字) I did miss them. Now I just need some free time to play them!

The week started out quiet, and I purchased Delicious Library 2 yesterday and was getting into cataloguing all our CDs, DVDs and games, but I'll be busy until the end of the week now with aviation and football as well as the usual school exchange correspondence. The books will have to wait, although they're what I'm most likely to buy duplicates of...

My constant companions!

2010-06-21T04:59:00.000-07:00

Now that we have all the items we had stored in the UK moved over to Switzerland, I finally have all my books back! And these are the ones taking up pride of place on my limited desktop space.

I'll no doubt fill that gap as I get the rest of the books up, but I'm glad to see these again.

Now with ACIL!

2010-06-09T10:40:00.000-07:00

Another thing I've been working on over the past few months is membership of another professional organisation, the Chartered Institute of Linguists - and today I had the letter in the postbox saying I've been accepted as an Associate member!

It was a bit frustrating that I couldn't apply for full membership, the only thing stopping me was the number of words I've translated over the past year. Since I'd spent a lot of the time editing, I couldn't reach the required number. I've actually never tried keeping track of how many characters or words I translate, but I'll have to start if I want to upgrade my membership!

Dictionaries and glossaries and specialist subjects, oh my

2010-05-25T01:11:00.000-07:00

I recently received a link to this page of links compiled by the venerable Jim Breen, full of general and subject-specific dictionaries and glossaries

Online Japanese Dictionaries and Glossaries

The next time I have some obscure terminology to look up, I'll know where to start!

[Edit: Ben Jones from J-Net has kindly pointed out that this list has not been well maintained and contains many dead links. He has advised Jim Breen, but the page hasn't been updated yet. Beware!]

Certified (in a good way)

2010-05-25T01:08:00.000-07:00

After taking some online training sessions just over a week ago, I passed the certification exams for SDL Trados Studio 2009 at levels 1 and 2 this weekend. Although I've been using Trados for a long time, I still learned a few new tricks from the sessions - and smiled when the software failed to work as expected and the trainer ended up taking screenshots for bug reports.

The exams were fairly straightforward multiple choice, although some of the questions didn't seem to be covered in the materials at all. The workbooks had some typos and some of the file types in the practise files weren't as described in the workbook, but overall it's a good training package. I'm not sure if I'll take training courses for the level 3 and Multiterm exams or just do them directly, but they'll both be good for my professional development record.

Dialects in translation - 5 June 2010 in Edinburgh

2010-05-16T08:01:00.000-07:00

The ITI Japanese Network are hosting their summer workshop in Edinburgh this year!

Dr Federico Federici from the University of Durham is the guest speaker, talking about dialects in translation. This will be followed by a workshop with Japanese to English and English to Japanese samples to work on. The workshop is on Saturday 5th June at the Overseas House in Princes Street.

It's in the box

2010-05-14T01:04:00.000-07:00

Wonderful as email and the ability to attach files to it is, sometimes things are too big or too sensitive to send them that way. I've just opened a Dropbox account that will make it easier to send and receive files, particularly media files for reference that would otherwise be too large to send as attachments or confidential material that a client doesn't want sent over email.

Provisional pass in MA Advanced Japanese Studies

2010-05-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

The Distance Learning Centre staff at the University of Sheffield have let me know that I have a provisional pass for my MA in Advanced Japanese Studies now that it has been seen by both markers.

The last word will come from the exam board, meeting on 27 May.

Taking on additional responsibility with the Japan Society

2010-04-28T12:00:00.000-07:00

I have been working with the Japan Society on their Japan-UK Live! schools exchange programme since September 2008, and have been invited to take on additional responsibilities to help them cover a member of staff on maternity leave.

In addition to translating a number of mailing lists, bulletin boards and web pages from Japanese to English for partner schools, I will be checking the work of other translators, helping to manage the talkboards and working with the Japan Society to develop the site.

Winner of the 2010 ITI Japanese Network translation competition!

2010-03-10T12:00:00.000-08:00

Thank you very much to the ITI's Japanese Network for organising the translation competition again this year - and I've won!

I entered in the novice category (less than 3 years experience) with a translation of the children's story ぽんぽん山 from ぼたえもん童話集 (Botaemon Douwashuu) by Katsuragi Botaemon, pen name of the mystic Deguchi Hidemaru.

Associate Membership application for ITI approved!

2010-02-15T12:00:00.000-08:00

My application for Associate membership of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting has been accepted!

Many thanks to Mary Gillender and Heidi Potter of the Japan Society for providing references.

Returning to freelance translation after working in-house

2009-09-28T12:00:00.000-07:00

Now that I've completed my second contract at Nintendo of Europe, I'm back to being a freelancer and finishing off my MA in Advanced Japanese Studies with the University of Sheffield.

It was a lot of fun working on Another Code:R, You, Me and the Cubes and Endless Ocean 2!

Welcome to J-Trans: Japanese to English translation

2007-10-31T12:00:00.000-07:00

J-Trans was set up in October 2007 to offer Japanese to English translation specialising in patents and technical material.

My name is Arline Lyons and I started studying Japanese in 1996 and acquired basic competency by 1998 when I spent a year on the JET Programme as an Assistant English Teacher in Gifu Prefecture. I passed Level 3 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) on my return and continued my studies part-time. In 2002 I returned to Japan for a year of full-time study at a Japanese language school in Aichi Prefecture, followed by a pass at Level 1 of the JLPT in 2003 and a J2 in the JETRO Business Japanese Test in 2005.

I have worked as a localisation project manager for several years, working on for my MA in Advanced Japanese Studies part-time with the University of Sheffield. I started off translating patents and technical articles with Technical Language Services (TLS) under the guidance of Michael Varga before going to work at Nintendo of Europe in March 2008.