Timtranslates

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Just in case you can’t remember, watch this.

This really was a boring cartoon that I absolutely hated. You just find yourself saying “Get on with it” a million times. And I can’t believe people actually like watching players who sometimes take 5 minutes to run from one side of the field to the other. Did anyone actually used to watch this? Did anyone actually enjoy it?

Fortunately in the UK we also had The Hurricanes, where the time between each shot was actually shorter than the Cricket World Cup (cultural reference for Spanish readers: el tiempo entre cada tiro era inferior al de un bloque de anuncios del Peliculón de Antena 3; cultural reference for Catalan readers: el temps entre cada xut era inferior al d’un discurs de Joaquím Nadal; cultural reference for French readers: le temps entre chaque tir était inférieur à celui d’une étape de la Tour de France).

In case anyone missed out on The Hurricanes, here’s a clip online dubbed into Portuguese. Fast forward to 1:30 and you’ll see that the match action was so much more exciting.

For professional translations, visit timtranslates.com.

The French presidential elections is yet another example of elections where candidates are campaigning for the votes of ex-pats. And there were long queues of voters in Barcelona. Some of these ex-pats have been abroad for decades. Is it right that these people should be able to swing the vote? I do not pay taxes in the UK, so I think it is completely correct that I am not able to vote there. It would make much more sense if I were allowed to vote in the elections for the national parliaments of Catalonia and Spain (as a foreigner, I can only vote in local and European elections).

For professional translations, visit timtranslates.com.

I just gave myself a massive jump because I had my headphones on while spellchecking in Déjà Vu and I had the volume on full when I got the bleep with the “Spell check is complete” message. My whole body jerked, like those horrible spasms you sometimes get at night when you’re dosing off. Anyway, the bizarre thing was that my body seemed to jerk a split second before I heard the sound. The only explanation I can think of is that it was a spinal chord reaction before my brain interpreted the sound, since I know that the spinal chord reacts quicker than the brain. Is that scientifically possible? Can the spinal chord react to sound?

For professional translations, visit timtranslates.com.

Or “Up to which translation lists should I sign?”, if you’re a pedant and ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which you will not put. All of them! Well, at least those in a language you understand. But how do you manage so many messages and find the time to delete them all? Well, I don’t bother. I have them all go into a Gmail account, which has so much space I won’t have to delete anything for years — possibly forever. You can see that I have thousands of messages in my inbox. And if you look at the list of messages below, you will see that most of them I don’t even open. I just quickly scan through all the messages with my eyes, and open those that I think will be of interest to me.

The other great thing about this system is that you create a huge database of information that you can consult at any time. For example, if a new translation agency contacts me, I can search all my messages to see if there are any comments about the company. Recently I was doing a job with QuarkXPress, and I was searching for some information about the programme. Anyway, I came across a message that I hadn’t read before saying that version 5 of the programme was going free with a computer magazine in the UK. I now have the programme, which I never would have required if I had deleted messages from lists.So, create a Gmail account for your lists, then start signing up. For a start, go to the translation category at Yahoo! groups. Then search in Google for other lists. If you work with — or understand — at least one Romance language, why not sign up to PANROT, a list I created this week. Just sign up for as many as you like. You don’t even have to sign off when you go on holiday, since they won’t get mixed in with your other e-mails.

I should thank one of my most respected translation colleagues, Xosé Castro, who unknowingly gave me the idea of setting up a separate account for my lists when I noticed that in the messages he sent to translation lists, he used a different e-mail address to his main business address.