What are /r/TranslationStudies' favorite Products & Services?

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I have my own domain, but it is not my given name. It's my company's trade name. Note: my company is composed only of myself and my wife. I'm not an agency, but in my opinion, businesses often prefer to work with other businesses than with freelancers.

Now, for the part before the @ sign: I set up my email system with something called a "catch-all" address. Essentially, gets sent to . I use this both as a spam sourcing strategy (I couldn't find a better source, but this Lifehacker article describes it) and, more importantly, to see where my referrals are coming from. In my ProZ account, I use . In my ATA profile, I use . On my web page, I use . On my business cards, I use . And so on. They all wind up at the exact same inbox. That way, when I get an email from a potential new client, I know right away how they found me.

For outgoing email, I set things up so that it all gets sent from my . For the sake of anonymity, let's suppose my name was Robert. My outgoing mail gets sent from . I think this would be fine even if my domain were my name: or something.

I’m not a JP>EN translator, but that absolutely is an unreasonable request, expecting what sounds like a very difficult translation in return for no remuneration. You’d be well advised to simply disregard it. I don’t even think it would be worth your time trying to engage and educate that “client”, since you already stated that they recognise their request is unreasonable.

You mentioned getting a sense of “how things are supposed to work in this field”, so here are a few quick pointers that come to mind at the moment:

1) Don’t ever work for free.

2) Know your worth (see e.g. ProZ for ballpark rates). Don’t let yourself be pressured into accepting low rates just because you’re just starting out.

3) Know and work within your limitations.

4) Read How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator.

5) Avoid sites like Fiverr and Upwork.

I would look into doing some little things for LibriVox. You'll get a sense of how to produce audio of a professional quality yourself. I should say that quality control is your responsibility there, in terms of producing and submitting good audio. I learned a lot from their resources!

NOTE: I don't do dubbing or voiceover work myself, so I can't say how the skills may or may not transfer in terms of specific software, workflow, etc. But if you're totally new to voiceover-type work, it's not a bad place to start. Their essential service is audiobooks, but they can help you get up and running in terms of recording and producing audio; I would be surprised if most of those skills didn't transfer for voiceover, narration, dubbing, etc.

Plus, it's free! haha

If you want to increase your online presence, you can start by creating a ProZ profile, as the other commenters have already mentioned.

You can also register to your local translator union. Mine has a directory for all its members, and it can be used by companies who are looking for a more serious candidate for a translation.

You can also advertize yourself on LinkedIn. Make sure your profile is designed for customers, aka think about what customers would type on a search engine when they are looking for skills you have (ex: translation German-English birth certificate). There are courses online, and even on LinkedIn, for SEO and keywords on your profile.

Finally, you can make your own website, and online presence is dictated by SEO too. It takes a bit of knowledge in this field, but you can create one more easily on specialized websites (Wix, Wordpress.com) or download a website design programm like wordpress.org, which allows you to be the owner of your own content, but you have to pay for the domain name.

The feature you're looking for is called Alignment. Trados can do that. It does require some manual work though - you need to check and fix any incorrectly matched segments. More info here: https://www.sdltrados.com/solutions/translation-alignment/

Strong AI is not a necessary prerequisite for human-level machine translation. Current AI can handle image recognition, Go-playing, etc at better than human levels (for the image recognition claim there are some caveats, but the point is that it's pretty good, despite us not being close to strong AI). At the rate that machine learning has been progressing, will most likely have human-level machine translation in the next 5-10 years at the very latest.

Back during the Cold War, the US government invested loads of money into rule-based automatic machine translators, but they never worked, the funding dried up, and caused what is called "AI winter." Google translate has never, ever used anything like that. Up until 2 years ago, the state-of-the-art in machine translation was called "statistical phrase-based machine translation," such as systems like this: http://www.statmt.org/moses/

The state-of-the-art is now largely dominated by "neural machine translation," which is based on deep neural networks. Humans do not hand-code anything; it learns what things "mean," (it creates a real-valued vector encoding a sentence in high-dimensional space) and then translates based off of that. This approach has real potential to create human-level automatic translations.

I had the same dilemma having to buy a computer in Italy. The Italian keyboard is just horrible, really! 😂. Unbelievably, it's not even good to type in Italian! You can't type any capital letter with an accent, like ÀÈÌÓÂÊÃÕ... which is a big design flaw, since many letters in Italian and other Romance languages have lots of these accents. Italians write CAFFè or CAFFE' because they can't type "CAFFÈ". You can't start a sentence with "È" (is), which is so fundamental in Italian! It's funny, even in official documents, I've seen them writing "CITTà" (city) because they don't know how to write CITTÀ. I've seen a small movement of Italians asking for a keyboard reform.

Anyway, that was very annoying and restrictive in making a decision to buy a laptop in Italy. Then I decided to just accept it, it’s much easier to buy cheap stickers from Aliexpress. I need to type in Portuguese, and I’m used to the Brazilian keyboard, which is just the best international keyboard for me, you can easily type in Italian, Spanish, French, German, English.... without any workarounds.

I practiced my typing in this website with the Brazilian layout, so now I can type at any computer without having to look at the keyboard. Much better to stick to one layout for productivity.

https://www.typing.com/

First of all, congrats on the promotion and the learning spirit. I wish more managers had your attitude.

I had a similar situation where I went from in-house linguist to loc manager, and I wonder if my experiences might be of use to you. Like you, I definitely did not describe myself as "into programming." I'm still not into that sort of thing. But learning as much of it as I could had a direct benefit to a lot of my daily tasks, and I would recommend at least giving the more learner-friendly tutorial sites a try.

I finished a lot of modules on codecademy.com and genuinely enjoyed them because they were not particularly difficult and also allowed me automate a lot of things and also gain a deeper understanding of how things work. I went through Learn Python the Hard Way and gained a lot from that, especially since subsequent projects included quite a lot of assets in Python. I went so far as to plow through the first half of Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (the latter half too arcane for me) and found that quite useful as well, although in hindsight it was a bit overkill.

Even after my department was given an actual programmer to code up solutions for us, I at least was able to understand how a good amount of it worked. Coding aside, a localization manager is the person that the linguists and testers go to when things break, and man do they break a lot. That said, I would also recommend training of some sort in SDL and Kilgray's products if you use them. In my experience as manager, both broke often or were fussy at best.

A few years later, I haven't really read much about code, but I still try to ask developers as many questions as I can about the technical aspects of their products and find it really helpful to follow up on Stack Overflow or just Wikipedia.

Good luck with your new position!

Are you looking for an alternative to InDesign, perhaps?
Because it sounds like it. Inkscape is more like Illustrator, so graphics.

But you are talking about publishing stuff, so you are talking about Microsoft Publisher (if you can have access to it) , Adobe InDesign, and there are free alternatives such as Scribus, although I only know that one from reputation, I've no experience with it.

Personally I had Excel files with images inserted and columns containing the manually transcribed text, so I'm afraid I don't have much experience in the "right way to do it", but I sure would love to hear about it ! :)

IMO, you shouldn't buy Trados YET. Until you have a few clients and now you're going to need it, you shouldn't buy it, and even then there are options. Start with the 30 day trial, obviously. It's fully featured, so you don't lose anything from the main version. Now you know how and how often you're going to use the software. Look at the files: can you work with the Starter Edition? MemoQ is also mostly compatible with Trados files, so you can work jobs that require both memoQ and Trados (although you'll probably be missing features). I've worked for over a year with Trados files and only just now had to use the Trados free trial because memoQ didn't have a preview with a file for which I needed it. So if you end up needing both, maybe start by getting memoQ.

Hey,

It's a free/libre computer-aided translation software project developed in java.

The contact people are here.

It supports open document formats which allow TM and TB transfer/sharing between other software.

You can:

• donate
• contribute code
• translate documentation (if not, already)
• provide training for translators
• set up a server so that your translators can share TBs and TMs while doing the translation work.
• you can even start your own CAT-tool project based on OmegaT codebase.

Also, here's a quote from the website:

> OmegaT's developers, who are all volunteers, may be more willing to implement an RFE if the development work is funded by the requester. Sponsorship of development has already resulted in the addition of certain features. If you are willing to finance the work of implementing your desired feature, please contact the development team privately for a quotation. It may also be possible for developments commissioned from external developers to be implemented within OmegaT.

Thanks. I might give it a try.

I actually use a program called notepad++ for most of my translations. I has a split screen function so I can look at the Japanese on one side and type out the English on the other. My productivity must have double since I found it. It's actually designed for programmers, but I've found a lot of the features work really well with translation (numbered lines and bookmarks, for example).

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/

There's a lot of good open-source subtitle software out there, and then you can just upload the SRT files to your youtube video.

Alternatively, something like Otter.ai can also generate the SRT files and then you can have them translated with the timecoding already done for you (though it may require some finetuning)

I would make a list of authors and then look if I can find their work translated.

I think SM Sterling has a lot of books that haven't been translated to French. I'm not going to look it up for Italian because I don't speak it but he doesn't have a wiki page in Italian which is a good sign.

One strategy could be to look at authors who recently published their first novel. For instance, make a list like this

I don't translate legal stuff, but I suppose you could ask a gendarmerie or a commissariat de police if they have spare books on the matter?

I also found a book on the topic (Jean-Claude Salomon, Lexique des termes de police) but I'm not sure if it fits your situation. Surprisingly, there's also a Defense Wiki of judiciary terms as well.

This textbook will give you a nice overview of several theories and their practical applications, and you'll be able to choose for yourself.

100% valid question. I'm grappling with figuring out the best way to test translators, whether it be through showing industry certifications or through a quick screening call. I would love to hear about your experiences and thoughts. Would you be able to hop on a quick call with me (link)?

I don't think the problem would be with the actual computer but the availability of software or websites for you translation needs. I'm not expert at translations myself, I usually use a combination of Google Translate, Bing Translate Lrousse for French Dictionary and knowledge from my courses. I have the 2008 MBP and recently got the latest Macbook Air. Now on the Macs, they have autocorrect just like most smartphones do. Perhaps this will help you with grammar. There is also the ability to speak and it will try to type what you speak just like on smart phones also.

*edit: On the Macbook, Pages is their version of Microsoft Word.

According to what I'm finding, that's not even right: "le groin" is a pig's snout, and the onomatopoeia (which I assume is what they mean since there's an exclamation point after it) should be spelled "grouin"

Maybe https://thenounproject.com/ could be a place to look? At the very least, you could probably pick out and pay for individual icons that you want, instead of buying a whole set which might not contain your exact picks.

I'm doing Estonian-English-German translations. I don't know what you consider to be enough to "survive", but I make about 125% of my country's median salary working 20 hours per week. As others have suggested, you need to specialize.
As for a master's in Translation Studies, I have it and found it to be completely unhelpful.
You just need to find the right markets. I have found many long-standing clients from Upwork.com and ProZ.com, but it really depends on you and you alone.
But if you have such great language skills, you could probably also pivot into something else. Most of my uni class went into IT (technical account managers, compiling manuals, etc) and they make well above the median salary.

I use MS Word's "Review" functions. (Tracking changes, adding notes.) It automatically records/shows who made what changes. But another alternative would be GitBook --for more than 2 contributors and/or bigger projects. https://www.gitbook.com

I like to use Daum PotPlayer. There's nothing wrong with VLC, but I think Potplayer looks sleeker overall. Changing the playback speed (by increments of 0.1x at a time) is as easy as a right-click or pressing "x" to speed up, "c" to slow down, or "z" to reset the speed back to 1.0x.

You can also use the website www.otranscribe.com.

When I bought my computer, I chose my CAT tool first and then picked a computer based on the specific system requirements for the "optimum performance" of that CAT tool.

For example: https://www.sdltrados.com/products/trados-studio/system-requirements.html

It took all the guess work out of choosing my computer! I cut costs by getting a refurbished desktop computer.

like this?

https://www.sdltrados.com/blog/studio-subtitling-complete-solution-to-audiovisual-translation.html

I use memoQ as well and I couldn't agree more. Also it's much cheaper and more stable than Trados.

An alternative to Google's Toolkint is definitely OmegaT. It's open source and completely free. You have to set everything up yourself but it's definitely doable and surely better than nothing. A good starter I guess.

If you're looking for cloud-based programs, I'd recommend Wordbee.

CAT tools aside, I can't live without Antidote (https://www.antidote.info/). It's a powerful spellchecker/grammar resource for English/French (although I only use it for French) that works a million times better than the basic Office one. It's paid though, about 100€ per license, but it can be integrated in MemoQ.

I don't really use a physical medium, everything is digital. I use two monitors, and Windows virtual desktops as well so I can organise environments for translating and communication. Regarding my internal notes, I use Notable, which is a Markdown local note-taking application.

Hi! I have this laptop but with 20 gb (RAM) instead of 8 https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Port%C3%A1til-Pavilion-Ryzen-Windows-Horizon/dp/B08NXWPZRD It's really fast, and works perfectly well with Trados, OmegaT, MemoQ, Jubler, Subtitle Workshop, etc. I would read the specifications of the softwares that you want to use before buying a laptop, Trados requires a minimum of 8 gb ram to work decently, but the ideal would be more than 16 gb of ram, according to their website. Ryzen 5 or 7 are better than Ryzen 3, same with Intel (i5,i7 are better than i3). You need to have some ssd memory so that the computer would work and turn on fast, don't buy any computer that counts only with a hard disc, it'll be slow!! For example: you can buy one that has 240ssd AND 1tb (hard disc). Or buy a laptop like mine and an external hard disc to save all your projects.

When I worked as a PM, I dealt with such translation teams – it's a viable model. Can't remember how they advertised themselves – as a mini-agency, or as two separate freelancers who each mentioned their team arrangement? Not sure.

> Both of us are currently in college

Wait till you finish. No reputable client will hire you without a degree.

Your other questions are addressed in past threads – most of the information about how to get started applies just as well to this partnership as to individual freelancers. The Entrepreneurial Linguist might have more ideas about actually founding a little mini-agency and marketing to direct clients.

Not sure if this is close enough, but the protagonist of My Heart So White is a conference interpreter. IIRC, the narrator talks a little about conference interpreting as a profession and describes his job as a conference interpreter. It's not the bulk of the story, though.

Spanish title: Corazón tan blanco.

I found this book to be helpful when first starting out. Read it from cover to cover. In fact it seems Japanese Amazon has many books on 特許翻訳, so probably good to do some reading if you can't do some interning.

The World Intellectual Property Organization also has some online courses about intellectual property and patents, such as this. It looks like you get a certificate upon completion too. I would be impressed if I came across a freelancer with such a certificate (more so if you complete the Patents course after the primer course).

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I assume you refer to the different reprints of the novel, but in that case, it should not be a problem. As long as your friend knows which version he has and as long as he sticks to it, he can use the latest version of Notre-Dame de Paris (I think it is this one, in Folio (2019), but I also saw this version, in Flammarion (2017)). But, since the novel is in the public domain, it is also rather easy to just download a pdf version of it.

If your friend has a contract, he is already working with a publishing house, so he knows which version he will translate. If he wants to translate as a sample to show it to a publishing house in the hopes of having a contract, I guess he only needs to stick to the same version.

"J'ai un ami ~~de~~ traducteur" "beaucoup de versions variées ~~que~~ qui sont ~~différents~~ différentes"

IDK much about the Japanese market, but from my experience with US/European agencies and my pair, that MA in Japanese is gonna be plenty. I don't think an additional masters is not gonna help you for a freelance job, unless it's some weird hoop Japan-based agencies make people jump through. Freelance is not like a salaried job where an additional degree is gonna get you an automatic raise – an agency just wants people they trust can get the job done and the rate is based on the supply of such people.

The following link should be in the sidebar because it contains everything you need to know. Another degree would be an enormous waste of time and effort IMHO.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CDAB134/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

I found Anymemo to be very useful. There is an Android app for it. It's essentially flash cards, but it doesn't just show you all of them one after the other, it shows you those you have a harder time remembering more often than those you do well at.

As for context: Don't just add the source word and the target word, but include the context either in the question or as part of the answer and you're all set. It worked very well for me - I just did my words every morning on my commute on public transport. :)

I did all three in one day. I have to say I enjoyed it overall. But then I like being in a situation where distractions are forcibly removed from me... not everyone responds in the same way to that kind of thing. I know a lot of translators don't like those exams because they're so different from a real-world translation scenario. You might want to think about whether this form of assessment suits you or not. There are alternatives.

I think I took about 6 months to prepare. I did practice exams in the library once or twice every week with no phone, no internet etc. You should invest in the past papers with annotations from the CIOL. They're expensive but I think you need them. Look closely at the annotations and you get a feel for the examiners' particular preferences. You also get really good detailed advice from experienced translators. Doing one of the past papers and then going through the notes line-by-line is a very good learning exercise. Also, for my pair, this book was very useful. The same publisher does other books for different pairs, which I would guess are of comparable helpfulness. Also, assuming you're doing into-English, read up on prose style, especially from people who prioritise clarity and simplicity - Orwell's Politics and the English Language, Strunk & White etc.

Check out our audio recorder app:

• Hi-Res Audio Recorder

There are no ads.

While it does have paid features (MP3 is paid, and the 12-voice real-time voice changer feature is paid, some aspects of call recorder like auto are paid).

The audio recorder (WAV and OGG) are completely free. The field recorder features (Effects - Volume/3-band Eq/Pitch Changer), which work in real time while you monitor recording - are all free.

If you plug in earphones before you click Record, you will be able to monitor recording in real-time, and adjust field recorder settings to get the desired volume boost etc.

In addition, the app does Hi-Res Audio (32-bit/192kHz) - so if you have a Lollipop+ device, it will allow that. And if you have a device with Hi-Res Audio certified hardware, then you will get the benefits of that. Hi-Res Audio can be saved as standard WAV files, and our app also allows you to record for longer than 4GB - using multi-WAV files (WAV files have a 4GB file size limit - so this allows you to create multiple files which you can join together later in your audio editor if you want very long Hi-Res recordings).

App has been tested recording continuously for long periods of time:

• Reliability: tested 100 hour continuous (2.4GB MP3/OGG)

• Battery: test 34+ hours continuous on single battery charge (Note 4)

Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche is a collection of writings about translation (including those of many famous translators) throughout a good bit of Western history, along with biographical notes on all of the writers/translators involved. It might not be the most ideologically cohesive text, but it provides an amazing look at how attitudes towards translation have evolved and been shaped over time, straight from the horses mouths as it were.