Mice Like Us

Among my great passions are myths and children's stories. The transformative, symbolic qualities of the good ones carry forward ideas, moral and ethical concepts in ways few classrooms can, and even bad ones may communicate at a level many a gifted orator cannot.

In many ways, the translators I know are like mice. They see themselves as small compared to the great Bridges Lying Across their peripatetic professional paths, easy prey for the More Ravenous, to be consumed perhaps by HAMPsTr hordes or Transformed Perfectly into thepigturds polluting the waters of roadside ditches.

The Merchants of the Machine - and you know who they are - have a story line consumed gladly by those who, placing presumed balance sheet profits ahead of real producers and lacking a long-term commitment to service and the interests of those from whom they extract toil and cash, position themselves as transformers of communication and translation, surfing the Big Wave of Big Data to a Bigger Future. Humans are fallible, alas, but the miraculous Machine in its comprehensible simplicity shall save us from the messy human mystery and lead us to a calculable future, a Thousand Years of Grace and Prosperity for the Chosen in control of the channels of distribution and marketing magic. But real life isn't like that.


We need a different narrative. As Dr. Bronowski said, "We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act." In alternative narratives, the mouse is not always the easy prey to the CAT, nor to any other creature. It's a matter of attitude, and sometimes organization.

From the simple act of kindness in Aesop's tale to the complex world of Redwall, we mice can read examples of how those seen as small and insignificant can in fact be the key to survival and triumph. Lacking the bluster and flames of the Great Beasts of our "industry" we must instead rely on those most essential tools, our brains, to come out ahead in the asymmetric competition.

Technology is, in fact, on our side as translators when it is used in conjunction with BAT*. There are Open Source tools available for organizing the work of individual translators or teams which, in clever hands, can compete at most every level with the finest of commercial technology. OmegaT, Rainbow and GlobalSight are just a few of a long list of these. And for the less "clever" (or those who prefer a bigger slice of normal life) there are simple software service offerings like Kilgray's memoQ cloud, which puts my freelance team on equal footing with any agency or corporate department using the latest and greatest technologies for their language processes. All this for a fraction of what my monthly phone bill used to be in the days before flatrates and Skype.

So what will it be? Will you be willing meat for some weasel's pot?

Caught in a trap of your own denial, uninformed belief and fear, listening to naught but Common Nonsense?


Or, like the mice of Redwall, will you gather your strength and skills, apply them in concert with like-minded professionals in your own interest and the interest of the public you serve and partake of the great feast on a table set for all who will come?

* Brain-assisted translation

Stridonium's Third Way: freelance translation teams

On September 30th, Stridonium will host its second professional education workshop in Holten in the Netherlands, The Third Way, to discuss practical strategies for teams of freelance language service providers to overcome the barriers of distance and technology and keep pace with the latest demands for service in a rapidly evolving market. Participants can arrive the night before the workshop for a relaxed networking dinner, enjoying the venue's outstanding cuisine and a good night's rest (a limited number of rooms are available at no additional charge to early registrants as part of the workshop package) before the the 9:00 am start the next day with a discussion led by Chartered Linguist Christina Guy and Helen Gibbons on the benefits and practicalities of working in teams and the TagTeam concept.

"The three-course lunch ... was the best I
have experienced at a conference venue."

Demonstrations and hands-on practice with tools such as TeamViewer for coaching and work collaboration alone or in combination with other media will follow with Christina on-site and me at a remote location, and after lunch I will continue teaching how free online applications can be used for restricted sharing of reference resources for group work, including translation memories and terminologies. Novel possibilities for dynamic group translation and review - almost like translation management servers but without platform restrictions - will be presented for discussion and testing. The early afternoon session will also include a brief overview of interoperable file formats for different combinations of translation environment tools among team members.

After the afternoon tea break, colleague Riccardo Schiaffino will join us remotely from Colorado in the USA to present ideas for creative, collaborative thinking in distributed teams. Riccardo is a technical translator, language consultant and teacher with long experience in managing team processes for translation and developing cost-effective, intelligent solutions to challenges expected and spontaneous. I've followed him particularly over the years for his good advice on SDL Trados and tools such as ApSIC Xbench (a QA tool which I think he knows more about than anyone else in my circles... check out his Xbench training page!).

The workshop fee, including the hotel room Sunday night (but excluding the cost of dinner) is €250 (€225 for Stridonium members) ex VAT. The availability of rooms included in the workshop fee is limited, so book early. Further information and updates can be found on the Stridonium events page, which also includes a button link for registration and payment ("Register for the Holten Lectures 2").

Attendees should bring a WLAN-capable laptop to use for the practical exercises.

The workshop is designed for freelance translators, language resource managers and others interested in effective teamwork strategies and looking to optimize workflow and keep options open for flexible language teams.

CPD points have been applied for with Bureau BTV in the Netherlands. (Update: 6 CPD points have been awarded.)

TeamViewer as a collaboration tool

I recently had the pleasure of participating in the Nationaal Vertaalcongres 2013, the twentieth anniversary celebration conference for the Dutch training company Teamwork. The best part for me was that I could do so from home in another country.

I was the remote half of a presentation at the conference by my colleague (Chartered Linguist) Christina Guy, a Dutch to English legal translation specialist and founder of Stridonium, a private site for professional exchange and support for translators now also exploring new alternatives for large project cooperation with its TagTeams to better serve translation buyers tired of being mauled by agency lions who often use inferior grades of "vendors" as so much cheap meat and try to hide the stench of their roadkill translations by redefining quality as whatever they can get away with.

As part of the conference session on team collaboration, we demonstrated how we have used TeamViewer software in the past two years for troubleshooting, CAT tool instruction and work together on editing and copywriting projects.

In our interactive TeamViewer sessions, we are able to view remote screens on any monitor of the presenter's workstation, switch the presentation from one workstation to another, use audio to discuss the project, send text messages in a "chat" field and even allow the other person to exercise remote control of a presenting workstation. When the person viewing a remote screen wants to indicate some part of the screen requiring attention, a click at that spot causes a big blue "nag arrow" to appear (as it does in the screenshot of the pretranslation dialog for memoQ shown above). This has been very useful in tutorial sessions I have conducted for a number of people.

Christina's presentation showed how TeamViewer served as a critical tool for overcoming many challenges for working together interactively on projects over great distances in a way less likely to light fuses through misunderstanding a description or question. We showed brief examples of tutorial exchanges, review of a bilingual press release and work on a PowerPoint presentation - just a few of the many tasks for which TeamViewer has proved useful. Judging from the comments she received about her presentation afterwards, the idea was extremely well received.

I am, on the whole, quite skeptical of online presentation formats, particularly the much-loved "webinars". Certainly I have seen a number of excellent web-based presentations, and the opportunity to watch the masterful staging of such events behind the scenes with Kilgray's head of development, Gábor Ugray some months ago did a lot to address my objections and increase the likelihood that I might use conventional webinars as a communication vehicle myself some day, but on the whole, TeamViewer is a tool more to my taste. The logistics of using it are much simpler, and I feel it allows more focused, personal and effective presentations that fit the way I like to work and teach. Someone familiar with the Citrix presentation technologies and TeamViewer would probably object that I am not really comparing like with like here, and that objection would be correct. The real point is that I prefer more spontaneous, personal interaction with individuals or a small group, and TeamViewer is better suited to that.

TeamViewer played an important role in the development of many of the tutorials in my book of memoQ tips, and after the many good experiences using it to work with Christina and others it inspired me to develop some new approaches to software tutorials for corporate clients. I think that today's presentation at the Nationaal Vertaalcongres 2013 may inspire the translators in attendance to explore possibilities for using this tool to solve their own remote communication challenges. Why not try it yourself? It takes just a few minutes to download the software, and use for non-commercial purposes (like explaining some hellish Trados import filter to a bewildered colleague) is free. Go to the TeamViewer site to download it or see the many options available.