A New Field: Court Interpretation

This week, after much hesitation, Judy decided to take the first step towards becoming a certified court interpreter for Spanish in the state of Nevada. It's a difficult and long process with a 5% pass rate on the first try for those who take the written and oral exam in the same year. We have both always had a lot of respect for those interpreters who are able to work in high-pressure court environments with extremely high stakes. Judy wasn't sure if she had the necessary knowledge of the court system to start the process, and while she has found that she has a good foundation thanks to many years as a legal translator, there is a tremendous amount of things to learn. It's a humbling experience.

The court interpreter certification workshop was put on by the Supreme Court of Nevada, which does an excellent job at administering the program. Andrea Krlickova is very efficient at running this certification process (by herself for the entire state!) and has been delightful. The trainer was the well-known and respected Agustín de la Mora, one of the leading authorities on interpreter training. The two-day workshop was very informative and enlightening, and, as opposed to other states that face budget crises, we are glad to see that Nevada is still offering the certification and workshop.

On Judy's to-do list:

• Get a tape recorder and record a simultaneous and/or consecutive interpretation every day. You only get better by doing this frequently.
• Read the most important works on court interpretation, especially Holly Mikkelson's books.
• Gain a solid understanding of Nevada court terminology, including responsibilities of each court.
• Listen to YouTube videos and interpret them simultaneously.
• Ask colleagues for honest feedback.

It's thrilling and challenging to expand our interpretation services and move beyond escort community, and health care interpretation. Judy took the written exam today, and in March she will know whether she will be able to take the difficult oral exam in September.

Our hats are off to all your court interpreters! If you have any suggestions for those starting out in this particular field, Judy would love to hear them.

Adobe Reader Warning

Our IT guru just alerted us to the following issue, which we would like to share with our readers. If you are like us, you probably use Adobe Reader quite frequently. Unfortunately, some critical vulnerabilities have just been identified. Here is more information:

Critical vulnerabilities have been identified in Adobe Reader and Acrobat that could allow an attacker who successfully exploits these vulnerabilities to take control of the affected system. All it takes is to open a PDF document or stumble across a page which embeds one. This issue only affects users on Windows PCs (lucky Mac users).

The solution is to disable JavaScript support in Adobe Reader and Acrobat. You can disable it via the Preferences menu (Edit -> Preferences -> JavaScript and un-check Enable Acrobat JavaScript).

Have You Updated Your Rates?

We have written about the need to adjust your rates on January 1 very frequently. So, have you done it? January 1 is the best day to do this, unless you spend the entire day at the gym working on your other New Year's resolutions. The reason you need to adjust your rates is simple: inflation. With your very small rate increase, you are simply ensuring that you have the same purchasing power this year as you had in the previous year. If you don't increase your rates, you are effectively giving yourself a pay decrease. That doesn't sound like a good way to start the year, does it? To read more about inflation, visit the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and learn about the Consumer Price Index. And be grateful you don't live in Zimbabwe, where inflation has been 79,600,000,000%.

And yes, we know, you will say: the girls at Translation Times should lead the way, yet they haven't adjusted their rates. And you are right, but we have a good reason. Our wonderful IT guru is in the middle of a rather complex server migration this week, and we don't want to add another element to it. Once the migration is complete, we will update our rates as well. We'll be precisely one week late.

How Much Would You Pay?

We hope all our colleagues around the world had a fantastic start into 2010. We took advantage of a few relatively quiet days to make major progress on our book. We are still on target for a spring publication of "The Entrepreneurial Linguist: The Business-School Approach to Freelance Translation," which we are planning on self-publishing on Lulu. We are able to set our own price, and we are in the process of determining what the price should be. We'd like to make a modest profit off our work, but we also want the book to be accessible, price-wise, to everyone. As it stands at the moment, the book will be a nicely bound paperback of high quality with approximately 150 pages, illustrations, graphs, and a detailed glossary.

What do you, dear readers, think in terms of pricing? How much would you pay? We'd love to hear from you. Simply leave a comment. Thanks, in advance, for your input.

Link: Video From ATA Conference

While the ball was dropping last night in NYC, we received news from a fellow linguist, French->English audiovisual translator Alexander Totz, who tackled a time-consuming project: interviewing many translators and bloggers during the ATA conference in NYC at the end of October.

He's compiled a short video with brief interviews featuring Corinne McKay, Eve Bodeux, and one of us, Translation Times' Judy Jenner. These interviews were held at the Marriott Marquis on Times Square, just like last night's NYE festivities (but it was infinitely less crowded during the conference).

Watch the video on Alexander's blog here. Enjoy and thanks to Alexander for all the hard work -- it's quite a challenge to make appointments with folks during the busy conference. We admire his perseverance and dedication to compiling a bit of oral history of our profession.

Multilingual Food Glossary

One of our colleagues from the American Translators Association, Kristina Moeller, just shared a link to an interesting four-language online food dictionary (French, Spanish, German, English -- just up our alley). We quickly tested it with a few fancy food terms, and it appears to be quite accurate. As with every online resource, this is simply a glossary and not a painstakingly compiled dictionary, so take the results with a grain of salt. This is a good place to start if you do translations in the area of hospitality, travel, restaurants, etc., which we do quite a bit. Enjoy and let us know if you find the glossary to be solid! Visit the Gourmetpedia here.

Nifty Online Tool to Frame Digital Pictures

Our web guru, Tom Gruber, is always on the lookout for new useful software that we can use and share with our colleagues. This free online tool, still in beta testing, is delightfully simple and effective. Try Clip Your Photos Framer --nothing to download, install, or learn. Simply upload an image and make it look professional/interesting/edgy/artsy (your choice) by adding one of a dozen or so digital "frames." This will beautify your image and make it ideal for use in company presentations, marketing materials, PowerPoint presentations, etc. We tried one of our images, and in ten seconds produced the framed image to the left. We are partial to simple, useful, and free tools, and this one certainly fits the bill. Have you used it?

Report From the Front Lines of Interpretation

Fresh from a delicate interpretation assignment involving some private family and legal matters, Judy has been thinking about the interpreter training she has received and how it works in the real world. We wanted to share some of our thoughts about this particular situation, which shows that while we certainly have to uphold our ethical principles and our code of conduct, sometimes minor adjustments need to be made in order to achieve the best possible communication result.

1. Third person versus first person: It's widely known -- and taught -- that interpretation needs to be done in the first person, unless special circumstances dictate otherwise. In this difficult conversation between an adult and his elderly family member who suffers from dementia and has trouble following complex conversations, Judy decided to opt for the third-person summary style of interpreting. It felt awkward, at first, to move away from the classic interpreting mode in community settings, but it was a good decision: communication went relatively smoothly.
2. Taking sides: As interpreters, it's essential to be impartial and to not take sides, as compelling as they may be. Both sides had very good points, felt very strongly about certain issues, and everyone's heart was in the right place. It was difficult at times, but Judy managed to stick to her interpreter role. An interpreter is not an advocate.
3. Enforcing frequent pauses: Ideally, our clients and their parties would speak slowly and make frequent pauses to make the intepretation process easy, and they would speak one at a time. Unfortunately, when things get heated, both parties tend to talk at the same time. The traditional hand signals for pausing were not working for Judy in this conversation, so she had to use the "please stop so I may interpret" phrase. While hand signals are the preferred way to ask a party to slow down, sometimes you have to ask verbally. It worked in this case.
   
4. Taking notes: It was very helpful that one party had prepared written notes that he was reading off to his family member to help him ensure he wouldn't forget anything. He read them slowly, which enabled Judy to take good notes and use those as a basis for the interpretation for the other party, who was speaking freely. While good memory is essential for being a good interpreter, good note-taking skills are vital, too.

It's been another highly interesting interpretation project. As challenging as it was, it taught us to adjust to complex situations and to do what we've been hired to do: to serve as a conduit.

Translator Profile: Abigail Dahlberg, the "Trash Girl"

In our second translator profile (read the first one, about BJ Epstein and her process of getting a PhD in translation studies here), we are delighted to interview our wonderful colleague Abigail Dahlberg, a German->English translator specialized in waste management. Abigail hails from the UK and lives and works in Kansas City.

Translation Times: Is it OK if we call you the Trash Girl? We think that’s a fabulous, edgy term.

Abigail Dahlberg: Of course, you can! A client once suggested that I develop a superhero cartoon character called Trash Girl, but I have not quite found the time for that yet.

TT: How did you find your specialization?

AD: I think there was a certain element of happenstance involved. After I finished my degree in translation and interpreting, I realised that my next career step should be to move to Germany and find an in-house position. I ended up living in the Black Forest area and applied for every translation position I could find within a 50-mile radius. I was ultimately offered a job as an in-house translator and journalist for a trade journal specialising in recycling and waste management issues. As part of my job I attended countless trade fairs and conferences throughout Europe on subjects as varied as battery, electronics and packaging waste recycling, and also went on tours of different kinds of waste treatment facilities in several countries.

TT: What’s the most interesting thing about your specialization?

AD: For me, I think it is the wide range of texts and topics that I handle even within such a narrow speciality: One day I might be translating a report about the state of Germany's ferrous scrap market and the next be working on a press release or a contract for a waste management firm. It is also interesting to watch new terminology develop as concepts and technologies that exist in Germany are exported to other countries.

TT: What’s the most challenging assignment you have worked on lately?

AD: The most difficult text that I have translated in a while came across my desk a couple of weeks ago with a section containing lots of stocks and bonds terminology. Luckily my husband is fluent in German and works for a bond fund so he was able to lend me a hand. It is always good to have a group of people who you can contact with specialist terminological questions, even better if they live in your home!

TT: What would your advice to newcomers be who are trying to break into your field?

AD: My number one tip for newcomers trying to hone out a spot in any niche market, not just environmental translation, is to find a topic that you are interested in and then read everything you can get your hands on to build up your level of knowledge. Subscribe to trade journals in your source and target language and find courses online or in your area to develop your skills. Attend conferences and trade fairs to meet companies that might need your services and market yourself aggressively online (e.g. start a blog, join LinkedIn or Twitter) and locally through active involvement in your local translators association.

TT: Did your passion for this field develop organically or was this always something you were interested in?

AD: While I would not describe myself as passionate about waste, I have always been interested in environmental issues. As I have become more involved in this field, my dedication to reducing our impact has grown although I am far from being an activist. In our household we try and do all that we can to minimise the amount of waste that we set out in black bin bags at the kerb each week. Yet I am aware that our family's carbon footprint is massive simply by virtue of the number of transatlantic flights that we take each year.

TT: What direction do you think is the future for your general field?

AD: I think that the future for environmental translators is definitely bright as people become more aware of environmental issues and companies and governments take action to minimise their environmental impact. When it comes to growth areas, I think a great deal depends on your language pair. For translators working into US English, green technologies should be a fairly safe bet. Renewable energies are certainly an area to watch closely regardless of your language pair. Translators working with languages spoken in Africa and the Middle East might also want to consider specialising in water provision, sanitation and wastewater treatment.

TT: Who are your clients?

AD: I would estimate that 90 to 95 per cent of my business comes from direct clients located in Germany. My single largest customer is the publishing company where my career started. I also work for German waste management companies and government agencies. Moreover I still provide translation services to a select few companies outside my area of speciality, notably publishing firms, that I have worked with since shortly after starting my freelance business in 2005. Translation agencies only account for a very small share of my income at present.

Thanks for speaking with Translation Times, Abigail!

Royal Academy of Spain Publishes New Language Rules

The Royal Academy of Spain (RAE), which is the ultimate authority on the Spanish language, has recently finished one of its most ambitious projects to date: the publication of more than 4,000 pages of grammar rules, aiming to unify the Spanish language from Madrid to Tierra del Fuego. For the first time, the Spain-based institution has included details about the pecularities used spoken in all parts of Latin America. To achieve this, RAE worked with its dozens of sister organizations on the other side of the Atlantic for more than 11 years.

Academics analyzed and studied more than 3,000 works of literature to come up with their final work, hoping to unify the language and its rules for the 400 million people who speak Spanish around the globe. The full book is in three volumes and is quite, well, extensive, at roughly 4,000 pages (King Juan Carlos has been given a book -- this will keep him busy throughout 2011). Abbreviated versions will be available for everyday use. Read the full BBC article here.