A Day in the Life of a Translator

I woke up to the shrill chatter of the alarm clock with a warm, fuzzy feeling, and pulled back the curtains as sunlight streamed through. It was a glorious day and I felt as Bertie Wooster must have felt -- "God's in His Heaven and all's right with the world."

I pleasantly reminisced the events of the previous day. We had bagged a fairly large order the day before in a field that I love to work, and with very little "active marketing" effort too. The manager of one of the biggest shipping companies in Japan had called two days ago and after I responded to his questions about my company and my career as a translator and engineer, he requested that I translate as a trial a page from a VLCC (Very Large Cruder Carrier) Manual from Japanese to English. The attached file containing the trial arrived almost immediately, and I set aside the technical report on bridge foundations I was working on, and switched over to the VLCC document. I quickly scanned the page; it looked quite simple. I finished the trial in about twenty minutes, but spent another 15 minutes carefully reading through my translation. Should I use "large draft" or "deep draft"? I fired up DtSearch and searched through the voluminous collection of marine documents on my hard disk, found "deep draft" more appropriate, used it, formatted the document and dispatched it by e-mail. An hour later the manager called to inform me that he had sent me the trial. He looked a bit surprised when I told him that I had already sent in the translation. An hour later he called, asked me to visit his office the next day and to finalize the details of a 600-page translation that I had to finish in two months. I learned during this visit that he had searched the Web for translators working between Japanese and English in the marine field, found from our website that we had worked on projects similar to the one they were working on, found our website and had called me. My efforts at drastically renovating our website to offer relevant information a few months ago had paid off. "Passive Marketing" does work!

This was the day I would start the 600-page job, and churn out roughly 15 to 20 pages a day to finish the job in two months. I looked forward to learning more about oil tankers, especially new developments by doing this translation. It was already six o'clock as I walked up the stairs to the office to switch on all the four computers before brushing and washing up. The startup of all the PCs takes some time as they launch Ad-Aware and Anti-Virus Personal Edition automatically. These applications clean up unwanted ad programs that connect and send information and viruses respectively. After washing up and having a cup of tea, I went back to the office to read my mail messages and Newsgroups messages. There were about 200+ messages in various folders (including Honyaku, JAT, Personal, Work messages and messages from other mailing lists). I quickly glanced through all the messages, marked those that needed a response, sent off about five such messages and checked out a couple of freeware applications. By the time I finished, it was already 7:30 a.m. I made some notes in Paste-It , a to-do memo on the desktop, to check and deliver an E-J environment-related job by noon, to call a couple of clients from whom I had not heard for more than two months, and to send a get-well card to a client, who was indisposed since a week.

At 7:45 a.m., I opened up the first of the files that I would translate and checked its formatting; it was in shambles. The writer had used lots of double-byte spaces where a tab would have sufficed, hard returns at odd places and no styles. I quickly removed all formatting, copied our standard styles to the document's template and applied them. The document was about 30 pages long and I finished applying the styles and sprucing up its appearance in about thirty minutes. Although the client had not asked for a formatted, translated document, I decided to give him a nicely formatted and translated document. There were a few tables, but no charts or figures. I also readied up Trados, keying in the attributes for the client, kind of job, file name and so on. Trados would maintain the formatting as I translate the document into English. At 8:15 a.m., I left the office for breakfast, feeling satisfied that I could start off with the actual translation work from 9.00 a.m.

At 9.00, one of our native Japanese translators came up with a problem. This translator is probably the best E-J translator in the field of computers that I have come across. He is meticulous, hardly ever makes mistakes, and more importantly, after completing his job goes through his translation with a fine tooth and comb. He then looks only at the translated Japanese text, and edits it making it more readable. When he sends in his job, I need to read only those parts of the source English text that are ambiguous and check how he has translated them. Good though he is in translation, he throws up his hands when it comes to PCs and their operations. Well, his problem was he couldn't open a PowerPoint slide and translate it because some of the fonts used in the presentation did not exist on his PC. I quickly launched TreePad, where I usually save all snippets of useful information that I read on mailing lists, keyed in "Powerpoint" and the information came up in a flash. I gave him the solution - that he should go to Format - Replace Fonts, see two list fields ("Replace" and "By"), click on the down arrow in the first field, and replace all the fonts that were preceded by a question mark (? instead of TT) by fonts that were available on his computer. It worked, thanks to TreePad, which had come to my rescue again. I had already lost 15 minutes and had not yet started my work. I had to finish at least 15 pages by the end of the day, which is fairly hard work for me but doable because of my familiarity with the field.

I started off at 9:15 a.m. and was going through the translation at a scorching pace (the document was related to adjusting trim and stability of the ship; I had practically done these tests in my earlier life as an engineer) for about an hour when another client called up. My heart sank. I was full up with work for the day, this client always insists that I personally do the work he sends. I couldn't refuse work from him because he is one of our preferred clients. Fortunately, he had called because his company wanted to send a condolence message in English to an overseas client on the demise of the client's wife and he needed my assistance. I heaved a sigh of relief and was happy to type out three specimens of a condolence message and FAX them to him.

By 11.00 am, I had translated about six pages when another one of our translators handed over his E-J translation to me, to check and deliver to the client. I suspended my own work since this environment job had to be delivered by noon. Now this translator has a good command of English and an engineering background, turns out good work, but is not as meticulous as our other E-J translator, and his work still needed to be checked carefully. I caught some of his errors; for instance, in some parts of a formal technical report, he had translated "inconsequential" as "重要でない"　and at other locations as "意味がない."I pointed out these small mistakes, he corrected them and the translation was delivered to the client by noon.

There were no more interruptions until 2.00 p.m. I decided to take a break from my work and to complete the tasks in the to-do memo. I wrote the get-well card and called up two of the clients. I struck pay dirt with one of them. He had a software manual to be translated from English to Japanese. He sent the file over to us, I consulted with my E-J software translator, and we discussed problems that we would face with the translation. We sorted out most of the problems, such as what should/should not be translated, worked out an estimate and sent it to the client. Another 30 minutes gone.

I started off with my work at 2:30 p.m. determined not to be disturbed. I had at least another 9-10 pages to go. For about 30 minutes I worked continuously until I came upon an oddity in the source text. The writer was discussing various kinds of head 揚程 in relation to pumps and listed them along with the English term in parentheses: 1) 実揚程 (Actual head) 2)速度水頭 (Velocity head), 3) 圧力水頭 (Pressure head), 4)管路損失水頭 (Loss head in pipeline), 5) 全揚程 (Total head). I had never come across a "loss head" and obviously, the writer was referring to "head loss." I fired up DtSearch and looked up "loss head" to confirm if any such phrase existede were no hits; Google also did not turn up anything relevant. I looked up "head loss" and found a description of various kinds of "losses in pipelines" including head losses, frictional losses and minor losses, in the Fundamental Handbook of Fluid Mechanics, a handbook in PDF format on my hard disk. Shouldn't item 4) be included in the kinds of losses rather than the kinds of head? Should I call up the client and tell him that his source text needs to be corrected? Was the source text written by the Manager himself? This was rather tricky and I did not want to offend a new client. After contemplating for a while, I decided to send a politely-worded e-mail message to the client to check item 4). I typed out the message in Japanese, had it checked by one of our Japanese translators and sent it to the client immediately. Another 30 minutes gone.

At 3:30, I had a cup of coffee, gritted my teeth and set down to finish the day's quota of pages. By 4:30 p.m., I had finished another four pages, when I came across a phrase that stumped me: ポンプの締め切り運転. Neither the Trados context search of the marine database nor DtSearch yielded any information. I launched Sakura, a text editor that I use for direct searches of glossaries, and searched through the folder where I had assiduously collected glossaries in the marine field. I found references to "cut-off" and "shut-off" but the context did not match. I searched for other occurrences of the same term in the document and began to understand hd been used. It appeared that the pump was used to discharge oil cargo to shore tanks. When one of the tank became full, the valve in the discharging line had to be closed and another opened up to discharge the oil into another tank, without stopping the pump. Thus for a short time, the pump was operated without any cargo oil flowing through it. Obviously the writer meant "no-load operation" when he wrote 締め切り運転. I marked it for confirmation with the client and added the term to my glossary of marine

By 5:30 p.m., I had finished a total of 13 pages but still intended to finish 2-3 more pages before calling it a day. The dreaded phone call came at about 5:35 p.m. This was from the research lab of a construction company, a valued client. The scientists working at this lab call us directly and we maintain close contact with them. One of the scientists wanted the abstract of the paper he was writing to be translated immediately. The deadline for submission of the abstract together with the request for publishing the paper was three days away and the translation had to be in the mail the next day. My spirits sank. Although abstracts are generally never more than a quarter of a page in length, they are extremely difficult to translate without the entire report. An abstract condenses a 3,000-word research report to about 100 words or so. I have found translation of abstracts of technical papers to be extremely exhausting both physically and mentally. There was no choice; it had to be done. I informed the scientist to stand by the phone so that I could talk to him if necessary while translating the abstract. I called him thrice and by the time I finished 45 minutes later, I was a wreck. The client thanked me profusely, and I requested him for the nth time to write out his paper and then send it to me along with the abstract when he wanted the abstract translated.

At about 6:30 p.m., I started again on the last two pages, finished them in about 20 minutes. I called it a day at 7.00 p.m. after reorganizing the Trados database, backing up the day's work to another computer and dashing off a few e-mail messages. I looked back on the day's work in my mind as I cast a last look at the office before locking up -- it had been hard, and a bit tiring, but generally enjoyable.

DtSearch

A commercial application available from http://www.dtsearch.com, it is a very useful tool for translators. It can index various kinds of files including .txt, .doc, .html, .pdf that are stored on your hard disk and instantaneously produce relevant hits. Japanese documents can also be searched provided they are in Unicode format.

Tips:

1) Store documents/glossaries/word lists in separate client/field folders. This enables you to select folders you'd like DtSearch to search.

2) Convert all your documents to Unicode format so that you can make searches in Japanese too.

3) Insert an asterisk before and after a Japanese term for wild card searches..

information

A few tips on putting up a no-nonsense website.

a) Keep your website simple, avoid animations and graphics. Clients in urgent need of services wouldn't want to wait for your pages to load.

b) Faithfully list up all the projects/jobs you have completed. This gives your prospective client a good idea of what your capabilities are.

c) Make sure you have a Japanese version of the website. Most of my clients in Japan tell me that they prefer to look at my Japanese page rather than the English page.

d) Give complete contact details including e-mail, fax, telephone numbers. Some prospective clients may prefer to send e-mail first before calling.

e) Be sure to mention the fields you specialize in.

Passive Marketing

I refer to advertising in telephone directories, professional magazines, putting up your website, and displaying its URL in your signature in all the e-mail messages you send as "passive marketing," and calling up prospective clients over the phone or knocking on their doors unannounced to sell your services as "active marketing."

Ad-Aware

A free multi spyware removal utility (http://www.lavasoftusa.com) that scans your memory, registry and hard drives for known spyware and scumware components and lets you remove them safely. If you are frequently try out various freeware and uninstall them if you don't like them, I recommend Ad-Aware. You'll be surprised at what's going behind your back when you log on to the Internet! You can set it to startup when Windows starts and delete all applications that connect to the Internet and send information from your PC.

Anti-Virus Personal Edition

(http://www.free-av.com/)

Offers protection against computer viruses, and is free for individual and private use on a single PC-workstation. I also run F-Prot (http://www.f-secure.com/). The choice of which AV software is good is debatable. I personally feel that if you use your common sense, practice Safe-Hex and don't open attached files without confirming what's in them from the sender, you could use any of the free AV software available as additional protection.

Newsgroups

I subscribe to six newsgroups (alt.comp.anti-virus, alt.comp.freeware, misc.transport.marine, sci.engr.civil and sci.engr.marine.hydrodynamics) downloading the headers, marking only those messages of interest to me and then downloading those messages using an offline newsreader called Free Agent (http://www.forteinc.com). I keep myself informed about new viruses and new AV software through the anti-virus newsgroup. I read the freeware newsgroup because I'm a freeware junkie! I love trying out various kinds of applications that would help me in my translation work, and I have found excellent tools for my work through this newsgroup (Treepad, Ad-Aware). I monitor misc.transport.marine and sci.engr.marine.hydrodynamics to keep abreast of news in the marine field. I have also found excellent reference websites and documents by reading the sci.engr.civil newsgroup, and have found one client by posting an answer in one of the marine groups.

Paste-It

Available at http://www.stormpages.com/bojanjurca/PasteIt.htm

A sticky note that you can move around on your desktop and enter various snippets of information whenever you feel like. You can change its size, copy from/to it and create as many sticky notes as you like. Freeware.

Trados

A commercial translation memory tool (http://www.trados.com). For the Japanese to English translation jobs that we do (marine, civil engg, environment fields that do not contain repetitive sentences as in instruction manuals), we did not find it very effective. We use it however, to store all our translation jobs in databases with Japanese and English segments. This helps us perform context searches. We use Trados 5.5 and Multiterm (from the same company) extensively for E to J software-related jobs, where Trados is more effective. Also check out Wordfast, and especially PlusTools (free at the time of this writing, http://www.champollion.net), still in its beta version and a bit buggy as far as Japanese is concerned, but with some nifty features (extracting text from PDF, translating Excel and PowerPoint files on the fly).

TreePad

Available at http://www.treepad.com. An easy-to-use information manager that helps you structure your personal notes and information in an orderly fashion. It has a tree and nodes into which you can drop in various snippets of information. It is easy to use, free and retrieves information very quickly. One of my finds from the alt.comp.freeware newsgroup.

Sakura

A freeware text editor that I use mainly because of its convenient search features and for opening/conversion of text files to Unicode format. Available at http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA016528/ .

Copyright (c) 2002 by Gururaj Rao

Uploaded April 1, 2002

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Gururaj Rao is a technical translator and an ex-engineer. He graduated with a B. Tech in Naval Architecture (boat and ship design) from IIT Kharagpur, India, and with a Master's degree in Engineering from the University of Tokyo. He has worked as a design engineer for 6 years and as a full-time technical translator for 12 years. He manages his own company Transtech Inc. (http://members.jcom.home.ne.jp/transtech/ ). He can be reached at guru@despammed.com.