This week I received my very first machine translation project (10,000 words) – and I had to decline because of the envisaged deadline.

Specifically, I decided a couple of weeks ago that it is not entirely normal to work every single weekend, and that clients, especially agencies, should not automatically assume that you’re available just because you’re a freelancer i.e. a sucker. I noticed something strange: I am less stressed and more concentrated on my 9-5 projects now. I also have extra time for home life, coffees, reading, etc.

The interesting thing is that I could have pretty much named my price. So I offered what I felt an appropriate rate for weekend/rush work and am waiting to hear back (i.e. whether there is some other sucker out there willing to take the job at the lower rate).

I wonder if I did the right thing. I would have loved to accept it in order to gain experience with post-editing and also to test the MT waters. It was for a well-known computer game, and games are my favorite thing to translate. But, one has to have (new-found) principles. Indian Summer walks without so much as a telephone, here I come.

Customers are located in Germany for the most part (timezone CET), while I usually work from Virginia (timezone EST). Can you see where this is going? When I get up on a beautiful East Coast morning they’re already more than half-way through their work day. Consequently, I need to check emails at night in case anything requires early morning attention.

I’ve been travelling in Germany for a couple of weeks now, taking my mobile office with me, and it’s the strangest and most wonderful thing to take long lunch breaks and finish my work day (for this client, that is) around 5. I can’t remember the last time I had several relaxing evenings off in a row. Wonderful!

I delivered the project in several batches, received reasonable feedback, and had no reason to believe that anything was wrong. Payment terms were 30 days, I agreed; so far so good.

30 days passed. No contact, no payment. Needless to say that I was unable to get in touch with them and, surprise surprise, really only had an email address. And here was me wondering about their pretty good rate (India is not exactly known for paying high rates).

It was only then that I started doing some research, and I have now come to the conclusion that I’ve been led on by a fraudster. Who, me? Sensible me? But I’m always careful! I never forward chain mail! I never open unsolicited email, never mind unknown attachments! I fell for the oldest trick in the book, and I’m out of pocket by a few thousand euros because of it.

The company name is Tarin Translation, and my contact was Kelvin Marks. So, if you receive an email offering you a nice big project… just treat it as spam and delete.

Here are a few lessons I learned:

• Make sure you have a telephone number (that works)
• Make sure you have actual company details, including a full address (and not just a PO Box)
• Make sure you ask for a PO and don’t get started without one
• If the rate sounds too good to be true… it probably is! Ask for 20% down payment
• Trust your instincts. If it feels off, it probably is!

On a related note, I discovered this website: http://www.paymentpractices.net/, that allows translators to talk about, er, payment practices of translation agencies. You get a 7-day free trial, and it’s about $20 thereafter. You know what to do!

I always felt that it was impossible to successfully and elegantly combine the two, but I didn’t know how - especially when it came to my website or how I use Twitter. My translation clients are vastly different from my web design clients. I didn’t/don’t cater to this but instead used/use one blog, one website, one Twitter feed.

Well, no longer! This morning I decided that it was/is time for a change and that I will completely overhaul my website to give my (potential) customers the customized content that they need. I might also scrap Joomla as it’s just too slow and doesn’t give me enough flexibility. Change is good! Also, I met a graphic designer this past weekend, so it’s all coming together… Stay tuned!

Convert to PDF

These tools convert your Word doc (or whatever) into a pretty, professional-looking, non-editable PDF. It’s like printing, only you print to PDF instead of to a printer. Various options by different vendors are available, e.g.

• http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

Merge PDF’s

Have several PDF documents and need to merge them all into one? This is a headache without shelling out for Adobe’s PDF suite, but there’s help! PDF reDirect allows you to do just that – merge PDF’s. Nothing else – no removing of pages, no inserting an external image. But it does merge PDF’s (and you can add encryption if you want):

• http://www.exp-systems.com/

Annotate PDF’s

How many times did you need to add a comment to a PDF doc but couldn’t? With PDF-XChange Viewer you can! For free.

• http://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-viewer

So, do you need to pay for Adobe? If you’re big into DTP, journalism or graphic design, then maybe you do. But if you’re just a small business owner in need of a couple of features, then these free tools provide all you need. Enjoy!

PS The above tools have been tried and tested by me, and the views expressed here are my own personal opinion. I am not endorsing any particular company, I am merely sharing my experience with some everyday tools I find useful.

Enter Google. A recent NYT article states that Google is using a so-called statistical approach and a few hundred billion words to create a model of a language (Source). This sounds very plausible to me. Now, there are some obvious design flaws with this. If the system checks thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, who is to say that the human translation was flawless to begin with? But if I read this MT translation of The Little Prince, it is almost – eerily – better than its human equivalent! To be fair, the other MT translations in that same article did not impress me at all – but The Little Prince did.

So, in conclusion, I believe that decent-quality MT translation is not that far off, maybe in the next 10-15 years. But don’t quit your day job just yet – a sophisticated or literary text will always need to be proof-red and fact-checked by a human. Only change is constant – we just need to adapt and change the way we, as translators, work. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

At the risk of shooting myself in the foot here, I do think that a common European language is highly desirable, necessary and ultimately inevitable.

So I took a course. Nothing. No light bulb.

I assumed that maybe I had only touched the basics and that maybe I just didn’t “get” it. But then today I stumbled across this blog (granted, the post is a few months old) and it all became clear: http://translationmusings.com/2009/06/26/trados-just-keeps-drivin-em-away/. It wasn’t me!

To be fair, I have only ever used SDLX and Trados. I tried Wordfast once, couldn’t figure it out, cast it aside. I haven’t given any other CAT tool the benefit of the doubt as I always assumed Trados was the market leader and that it is arguably the preferred tool of most agencies.

So why do I prefer SDLX?

1) The original text is on the left, the translation is on the right. I can easily scroll up and down to refer to other sections, and I can easily read every one of them if and when I want to. I find Trados very challenging to read once you close a segment – all these tags get in the way, and the original and the translation are essentially on the same line. Granted, the formatting in SDLX can be a bit messy, too, especially if the original was not perfectly formatted beforehand. And proof-reading a text is a whole different ball game. But still.

2) Multiterm vs. Termbase. Multiterm in a separate window and matching terms not even showing up when I have the relevant segment open? What’s all that about? I want suggestions right while I’m translating! Thank you SDLX! Even if creating a Termbase is not as user friendly as I would like.

3) I want my Translation Memory to show me suggestions in the same window – not in some separate popup window that I always have to have in focus. No time for that – I might have dictionaries or other browser windows open that I need to refer to.

So what exactly is all the fuss about? Or is there even a fuss about Trados? I get the part about project management, and I have happily used Synergy to manage some of my projects. I find it quite alright. But once you finalize a project, there is no going back to it – and that is definitely not in my interest as I may indeed need to re-open it (not saying that I ever closed a project and then, panic-stricken, realized that I had to make last minute changes. Just sayin’).

Conclusion? I will keep using SDLX unless someone tells me otherwise. It’s simple, effective, and it works!