Timtranslates

For professional translations, visit timtranslates.com.

One of the most useful Internet tools for translators translating into English, and indeed any English writers, is the British National Corpus. The corpus is a collection of modern British English, containing over a million words. It consists of 90% written texts and 10% spoken texts.

Anyway, to give you a real example of how I used it, I was just revising a sentence in which I said “on the contrary”, and I was unsure what the best punctuation was to go after it: a colon, a comma or a full stop. I searched in the corpus, and as you will see if you click on the above link and do the same search, by far the most used punctuation mark after “on the contrary” is the comma.

For professional translations, visit timtranslates.com.

I left my mobile charger at my parents’ house at Christmas. No problem, I thought, as I’ll see them at Easter and until then I can just keep borrowing my flatmate’s charger. But yesterday he went off to Mallorca for a week, I forgot to charge it before he went, and I had no power left.

I got home to find a Skype message offering me a 60,000-word translation job. Of course, she had tried phoning me on my mobile before sending me the Skype message. I phoned her back, but since the Skype message had been sent several hours earlier, it was no surprise to hear that she’d assigned it to someone else. So, by not having my mobile with me, I quite possibly missed out on a contract worth several thousand euros. Now there’s a lesson to be learnt.
Nevermind. I probably wouldn’t have had time anyway. Right, better go and buy a mobile charger…

For professional translations, visit timtranslates.com.

I was first introduced to corpus analysis when taking the Spanish-English module at the UAB as part of my degree. It proved very useful, especially for medical texts, since up to 500 texts can be batch downloaded from Medline in txt format. I don’t want to go into more detail right now, but if you want to see how corpus analysis works, you can read an article of mine on the subject.

At the time we used WordSmith tools, and at the cheap price of ₤50 (approx €75) I quickly bought myself a copy. My copy was version 4.0, while at university we were using version 3.0. The new version had the advantage of not being limited to DOS names (8 characters only) and generally had a better layout and a few interesting new functions, in particular the WebGetter. Unfortunately it also became less stable, and certain functions stopped working, like searching for words in context and bilingual text allignment.

This summer, while attending Mediterranean Editors and Translators, I came across a poster for a similar tool called AntConc. Since this is open-source software, I downloaded it and quickly tried it out. Now I’ve been giving a lecturing job, I’m particularly interested in AntConc, since students are much more likely to use a tool if it’s free. I have not looked much into it, but it does seem to be more stable than WordSmith Tools 4.0. However, it is possibly not quite so user friendly, as it does not calculate everything (concordance, collocates, etc) in one go, but rather you have to run a search separately for each tool. So for the moment I’m sticking with WordSmith, but I’ll definitely show my students AntConc as well, and encourage them to download it at home.

I have to say that this is an area that has not been exploited to its full potential. A program like this can’t be particularly hard to make, and if only someone could come up with a really excellent corpus analysis program, I’m sure it would be really successful. Or has someone already come up with one, and I’ve just not found it yet? Please let me know if you know a better tool.

For professional translations, visit timtranslates.com.

Eric Aubijoux (Fr)
2007 death number: 2
Overall death number: 51 (or 53, according to other reports)
Stage: 14
Date: 20 January 2007
Category: Competitor (motorcycle)
Consequences: No stages cancelled
Miscellaneous: The Dakar organises will probably be fairly happy. Yes, happy! After all only two people died. This is about average, and in some recent editions, more have died. Also, fortunately this year only competitors have died. But can you imagine going into the final round of the Formula One season saying, “It’s been a good year. Only two have died.”? Let’s scrap the event and make these the last deaths.

Elmer Symons (RSA)
2007 death number: 1
Overall death number: 50 (according to various newspaper reports)
Stage: 4
Date: 9 January 2007
Category: Competitor (motorcycle)
Consequences: No stages cancelled
Miscellaneous: The BBC sums it up perfectly when it says, “He was the first competitor to die in this year’s race.” They, like me, are expecting more deaths to come. The race goes on…

Per a traduccions professionals: www.timtranslates.com.

Segons el web de telenotícies.cat d’avui, la temperatura mínima a la província de Barcelona és de 13 graus, i la màxima, de 18. Impressionant, pel gener. Però bé, no és així cada dia, i de vegades ha fet més fred a la nit, per tant, anem bastant abrigats quan sortim al carrer. Ara, al metro, mai no fa fred. I de vegades, fa tot el contrari. No sé quina temperatura fa a dins dels vagons, però és una temperatura ambiental, d’uns 20 a 25 graus, diria jo. És per això que quan entro al vagó, em trec l’abric i, ben sovint, també el jersei. Tot i anar tan sols amb samarreta, més d’un cop he tingut calor igualment.

Malgrat això, miro les altres persones al vagó, i veig que van tots amb abrics d’hivern, amb un jersei de llana per sota, i alguns, també amb bufandes. N’hi ha per a llogar-hi cadires, francament. No ho entenc pas. Amb la calefacció que hi ha, fa més calor que a casa. Els catalans també aneu abrigats a casa? De vegades, fa tant calor que em sento malalt en mirar-vos. És que, si jo anava tan abrigat en aquestes temperatures, voldria vomitar. Ho dic de debò, sense exagerar ni gens ni mica. I després començo a pensar en tota la suor que hi deu haver per sota de tota aquesta roba. En fi, jo, en tot cas, si anava vestit així, suaria la cansalada. Els catalans no sueu? És que no entenc com ho podeu soportar. No ho entenc. Expliqueu-m’ho, sisplau!

For professional translations, visit timtranslates.com.

As many of my readers know, I have just taken on a lecturing job, giving me the unenviable task of trying to help foreign learners of English translate into our language. I realised just how complicated our spelling system is yesterday, when I couldn’t figure out how to spell “conniving”.
The problem is that the vowel written as [ə] by the International Phonetic Alphabet, often called a neutral vowel, that most basic of sounds that exists in most languages, can be rendered by so many different vowels. In fact, any vowel can be pronounced that way if it is on an unstressed syllable. For example:

m[a]ternity
bant[e]r
penc[i]l
c[o]nniving
s[u]ccumb

So, “conniving” could be rendered “kaniving”, “keniving”, “kiniving”, “coniving” or “cuniving”, with a single or double n, and it would be pronounced exactly the same. This was my problem. I thought the vowel was an e, meaning the word would have to commence with a k, and so I just couldn’t find out how to spell it.

I think what I’ve outlined above explains one of the easiest ways of detecting a foreign speaker of English, particularly monolingual Spaniards — and bilingual Galicians — since the neutral vowel does not exist in these languages. To them, all vowels have to be pronounced [a], [e], [i], [o] or [u] (note that the phonetic symbols are identical to how the sounds are rendered in written Spanish and Galician). When they say, for example Casablanca, they will literally say [ka-sa-blan-ka], whereas an English-speaking person would actually have to make a fair bit of effort to pronounce it that way, and would find it much easier to say [ka-sə-blan-kə].

Of course, this could get me on to why I think English-speaking people are wrong when they think that Catalan is “too hard”. The above example shows why, for Anglophones, Catalan is actually easier to pronounce than Spanish, once you’ve learnt the rules. But that deserves a completely seperate entry, and this is getting too long, so I’ll end it here.

For professional translations, visit timtranslates.com.

Elmer Symons (RSA)
2007 death number: 1
Overall death number: 50 (according to various newspaper reports)
Stage: 4
Date: 9 January 2007
Category: Competitor (motorcycle)
Consequences: No stages cancelled
Micellaneous: The BBC sums it up perfectly when it says, “He was the first competitor to die in this year’s race.” They, like me, are expecting more deaths to come. The race goes on…

For professional translations, visit timtranslates.com.Today, the annual Dakar rally has begun. The event, which began in December 1978, will once again be roaring through the African desert. Bikes, cars and trucks will be competing to be the quickest to the Senagalese capital.

I only really found out what this rally was all about when I was living in Paris, where highlights are shown every evening by France Télévision. Though it is not the best spectator sport in the world, you cannot help but be impressed at the efforts of the competitors in such harsh conditions.

But slowly I became disaffected by the event. Why? In a word, Death.

I am a huge follower of formula 1. In this sport, deaths were regular in the early days. Eventually they realised it was not acceptable any more, and efforts were made to improve safety - well, to introduce safety, as it really didn’t exist at the time. In total, 43 drivers died between 1950 and 1986 - more than one a year. But conditions had improved, with each decade producing less deaths than the previous one. Indeed, no further fatal accident occured for another 8 years, until that tragic weekend at Imola when Roland Ratzenburger and Ayrton Senna both died. Once again, they realised that more could be done, and safety was further improved to the point that no other driver has died in a formula one car since.

The Dakar rally is quite another story. There have been 45 casualties in just 28 years. According to the Wikipedia, this is 45 competitors, whereas a BBC article says that one of the 2006 victims was the 25th victim. In any case, there are a lot of deaths. There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding the true figure, since so many people other than competitors have also died. And it’s getting worse rather than better. In 2005, there were five deaths recorded, including a five-year old girl. A year later, no lessons were learned, with two boys killed, in addition to the ‘mandatory’ competitor deaths.

I cannot find official figures for the deaths of non-competitors, but it is said that many deaths go un-noticed. How many people are really killed as these machines speed past?

So how many will die this year? We know there will be deaths, it’s almost certain, yet it is going ahead anyway. Would you run an event with the full knowledge that most probably at least one person would die? If you have children, how would you feel about a rally speeding past your front door knowing that last year a child had died?

The Dakar rally has to stop. I sincerely hope that nobody dies this year, but I know it will happen, and it may well be a little child again.

I vow never ever to attend a Dakar rally event, lest it be to protest against it. I wouldn’t want to support an event that kills children.

Stop the Dakar Rally now!