Translation and leadership

Leadership guru John Maxwell has a simple philosophy: "Everything rises and falls on leadership".

Believing that people in life should lead, i.e. have influence, rather than unwittingly following others like sheep, this morning I pondered how this could relate to the translation industry...

... and to staff translator positions

Believe me, I'm having incredible fun running a translation business and working with my colleague, Hanna. Customers tell me they're happy, which is of course the goal.

But sometimes the mind wanders and I catch myself thinking on what terms would I ever go back to being a staff translator. Consistently, time and again, my one guiding criterion is management: how does senior management view translation? A cost item to be kept as low as possible? Or an opportunity to impress peers and clients with expertly written prose?

Generally, it is management that sets the tone as to whether translators (and their work) are respected in an organisation, as reflected in the following:

• The translator has a management-level contract (cadre in France, fondé de pouvoir in Switzerland)
• Pay is commensurate with qualifications and experience, on a similar scale to other skilled clerical positions
• The translation team leader participates in top-level meetings, especially regarding branding/marketing in languages other than the company's official tongue.

Any thoughts?

FT article supporting the need to use expert translators when companies have something to lose

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/06502358-771b-11e5-a95a-27d368e1ddf7.html#axzz3pB2n8UX5

To paraphrase, companies with a lot to lose should find a reputable translator, preferably a referral from a satisfied customer. Mr Skapinker also speaks of the need for translators to know about the industry for which they are translating.

Here we do finance, nothing more, nothing less...

Poor translation back in the spotlight

Yes folks, it's definitely worth getting yourself a good translator, especially when the topic is as high profile as FIFA is at the moment:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/10/johnson-lost-translation

For those interested, here is the link to the English translation of the Swiss Public Prosecutor's press release:

https://www.news.admin.ch/message/index.html?lang=en&msg-id=58891

"Johnson" has a point. One can be "disloyal" in English but only to a person or a body, like being disloyal to a government.

I'm no legal translator, but if "illegal" is too strong a word, then it is still possible to recast the sentence. Many people – including some translators – don't realise that it is okay to play with syntax, i.e. retaining the impact of the original text but expressing the ideas with a different part of speech in comparison with the original text. So, something like (assuming the German is the source text):

Furthermore, Joseph Blatter is accused of acting in bad faith by making a payment for CHF 2 billion to Michel Platini...

Summer reading

Here are my summer books this year, so it won't be much of a holiday...

At the moment I'm fascinated by the whole intersect between translation and good writing. As experienced practitioners know, there are two extremes to be avoided: one is sticking too closely to a source text and producing a plodding, turgid target piece that fails to pass on the intended message of the original; the other extreme is a free translation that says more (and often less) than the original text. In the middle of this, the translator must "find his or her voice" (to use Ros Schwartz's expression from the Financial Translation Summer School this year).

My gut feeling is that specialisation (again!) is the name of the game. As a seasoned financial writer, I know my way around my subject - and have drafted financial articles directly in English. I know what may be omitted, and what must be left in.

Anyone who has worked in the translation business for more than 10 minutes knows what it's like to be "out of one's depth" in a text. This is the feeling we have while learning the trade. Enter the more experienced team member to revise the junior translator's text.

Once we have earned our stripes, I believe that we should not stray too far outside our area(s) of expertise. And in the financial and business arena, there are plenty of sub-specialisations to be developed, from financial statements (using the right IFRS terminology, of course) and macroeconomics to fund reports and currency roundups.

Horses for courses...

Translating business films

Last Friday I was kindly invited by a Geneva bank to attend a seminar on translating business films. As the spoken word is more and more giving way to visual and oral communication, it seems timely for financial translators to have audiovisual-translation skills up their sleeves.

I was very much impressed by this seminar, given by applied translation expert Jean-Pierre Mailhac. His profile can be consulted at www.jpmlanguageservices.com

No thanks to you...

Right, I'm officially declaring war on "thanks to" being used, especially at the beginning of sentences, to denote a negative cause. A silly example would be

          Thanks to my cancer, I only have one year left to live.

Daft, eh.

The FT wrote today: "Thanks to the decline in CD sales..." when it meant "Owing to..." or "Following..." or "As a consequence of...".

For a fuller discussion, see this useful article:

http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2014/07/thanks-to.html

Professional courses attended

Some translators are in the habit of listing all the seminars they have attended since the year dot.

A recent example got me thinking, and made me realise that, over the years, I've attended a good few events - some of them rather informative.

Here is a selection:

SFT/ASTTI Financial Translation Summer Schools (Paris/Spiez): 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2015

German Annual Report Masterclass (Robin Bonthrone) - October 2013

Die Welt der Banken und Ihre Sprache - April 2015

"While" versus "whilst"

There is a definite tendency today to simply use (he says, voluntarily splitting an infinitive!) "while".

A decent summary of the issue is available here:

http://www.richardhollins.com/blog/grammar-tips-while-or-whilst/

However, I was composing a pretty ordinary sentence the other day, and "whilst" seemed a better fit to me:

He will also oversee Acme Corporation's differentiation strategy in terms of its products and services whilst optimising design and construction costs.

(I was having to deal with another one of those long lists in French: "he does a, b, c, d, e, f...". I don't usually allow more than three items in any such list without adding some kind of conjunction.)

Here is the same sentence with "while":    

He will also oversee Acme Corporation's differentiation strategy in terms of its products and services while optimising design and construction costs.

To me, the "while" sounds like he's doing everything at the same time; imagine him spinning plates.

It's almost like "whilst" has a sense of "as well as" in this example.

Of course, the EMT editor at the client may have simply edited out the "whilst" for the more internationally acceptable "while".

To be continued...

Die Welt der Banken und Ihre Sprache

In April, I attended this two-day seminar on the world of banking and the terminology that accompanies it. Organised by the BDÜ in Baden-Württemberg.

The highlight is that the speaker, Holker Schuster, is not a translator by trade (though I'm sure he could turn out some excellent work if he had to). Rather, he is a trained banker whose current area of expertise is trade finance. But he also has a passion for languages and has held high-level management positions within reputable translation companies.

This was the most comprehensive presentation on the business of banking that I've attended in any language.

It'll be happening again next April in Mainz. Herzlich empfohlen!

ASTTI Financial Translation Summer School

I'll be attending this event in July. It is held every two years in Spiez.

Always an excellent opportunity to see old friends and make new ones. (No, this is not an advert for a dating site but we translators don't get out much so these kinds of get-togethers are highly prized among us.)

There's a considerable amount of good stuff for into-English operatives. Look forward to attending the workshops.

Here's the link for those who are interested:

http://new.astti.ch/web/Sommeruniversitaet_281_3.php

Usually versus regularly (guest post by my colleague Hanna)

At one point or another, every translator has worked on an incredibly tight deadline. When it happens, it’s easy to race through the text on autopilot, translating one to one without stopping to check whether the English truly conveys the intended meaning or even makes sense.

I discovered a fitting example of this recently while working with a legacy translation that, I assume, had been produced in a race against the clock. The text, which discussed the customer’s code of ethics, contained the following sentence:

Le contenu de ce Code rappelle, précise et complète les dispositions législatives et réglementaires et les usages et meilleures pratiques déontologiques habituellement observés en France.

The legacy text had translated it as:

This Code states, specifies and supplements the laws and regulations and the best ethical practices usually observed in France.

Aside from the fact that précise is more adequately translated as “explains,” the real problem here is the adverb “usually.” Its use unfortunately implies a certain laxity in the application of ethical practices. A better translation would have been “regularly,” as in:

This Code states, explains and supplements the laws and regulations as well as best ethical practices regularly observed in France.

The slippery difference between “usually” and “regularly” is something that requires a native speaker’s intuition to grasp—another reason to translate only into your native language.

Informative article in The Economist on the translation industry

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21642187-technology-may-not-replace-human-translators-it-will-help-them-work-better-say-what

I'd agree with the premise that technology is our friend. Here we use SDL Studio 2014 on all our translation assignments.

GE > EN: Adverb or adjective (guest post by my colleague Hanna)

Dissecting complex German sentences can sometimes be tricky, and one recurring difficulty is distinguishing adverbs from adjectives. 

Take the following example:

“Der prinzipiell stufenlose Gradient wird in konkret quantifizierbare und diskrete Kategorien unterteilt.”

In this sentence, prinzipiell and konkret are adverbs, but their form is the same as an undeclined adjective. (Yes, I know, prinzipiell isn’t generally used as an adjective in German, but it looks like one.) 

Alas, German adverbs don’t come with that handy “-ly” suffix to distinguish them from adjectives. But a bit of grammatical analysis will help clear things up.  Notice that the adjective following the first bolded adverb (stufenlose) ends in –e. This is because it has been declined for the masculine definite article der.  If prinzipiell were an adjective, it would have that same ending.  This logic applies to konkret as well, which should carry an –e ending if it were an adjective qualifying die Kategorien (as are quantifizierbare and diskrete).

Punctuation is also a clue in this case. If the author is careful about punctuation (which I’ve not always found to be the case), then the adjectives should all be separated by commas. As there’s no comma between prinzipiell and stufenlose, nor between konkret and quantifizierbare, we are likely dealing with adverbs.

This seemingly trivial distinction between adjectives and adverbs has repercussions for translation.  Had these two words been adjectives, the sentence above would have been translated:

“The principal, continuous gradient is sub-divided into concrete, quantifiable and discreet categories.”

When they’re treated as adverbs, the sentence changes slightly:

“The generally continuous gradient is sub-divided into concretely quantifiable, discreet categories.”  

The nuances may seem very fine, but they’re important.  The ability to correctly identify and translate adverbs will turn a good translation into a more precise, polished one.

Translating from French in Switzerland: the case of the "taux plancher"

Many have observed the "shock and awe" shenanigans of the SNB in recent weeks, with the removal of the "taux plancher" against the euro.

How should we translate "taux plancher"?

"Floor rate!" exclaims everyone unanimously.

In German, it is "Mindestkurs".

Thing is, in Switzerland, German is the majority language (in writing, that is). So perhaps instead of saying "floor rate", we should be saying "minimum exchange rate" - which is incidentally the term I've been hearing most often on US financial news channels recently.

"Interest rate floor" seems to be a common term, but "floor (exchange) rate" is starting to look very much like translationese... To make matters worse, the term "cross-currency floor" exists but looks more like an options-based strategy than anything else: http://www.investment-and-finance.net/derivatives/c/cross-currency-floor.html

Another solution is to see the "floor" as a cap against appreciation in the Swiss franc: "the SNB removed its currency cap and let the franc float freely..."

Financial Translation Summer School in Spiez this year

This is always an excellent event. Smart combination of good seminars, nice food and a breath-taking location!

http://new.astti.ch/web/ASTTI_Financial_Translation_Summer_School_SAVE_THE_DATE_424_3-1.php