* They have embraced a new model of publishing, providing readers with various digital formats (iPhone, Kindle, Android, and eReader) to choose from.

* They started out at a low price point to get readers interested – and are they ever!

* Both of these approaches will garner a large readership quite quickly, which will help them eventually find a traditional publisher.

* They are using Creative Commons copyright protection.

* They are offering their work simultaneously in 14 languages (and growing).

* The translators they hire are professionals – for the most part -, often authors in their own right.

* The payment model for translators is that they will earn 50% of the profit for their language edition, thereby ensuring they are committed not only to the translation but to the marketing and the success of the publication.

Brilliant… in every way. Wouldn’t you agree?

I thus started to plan my new website look and content. It’s incredible how long this takes, how much work it is, and, frankly, I found that I can’t do it all on my own. I’m pretty tech savvy but when it comes to some things, I know I need help. Thankfully, I can rely on my partner, Jon, a true tecchie, to lend a hand. So… keep checking back as one day in the near future you’ll log on and be amazed at we’ve done.

In order to see what innovations were out there, I started to search other translator and writer’s sites and blogs. I wandered down a path that led from one to another, to another, reading, enjoying the content, getting tons of ideas, and then became so overwhelmed with all there was to do that I decided to procrastinate a little by writing this post.

Here are three of my favorites; I hope you’ll enjoy them, too:

Madam Mayo – A blog by C.M. Mayo, a writer and translator, that features her work and guest blogs

The Urban Muse – A blog by Susan Johnston, a freelance writer, with incredible blogging tips

Thoughts on Translation – A blog by Corinne McKay, a translator, offering great advice regarding the industry

“So interesting, inspiring, full of meaningful ideas, feelings and details, a true narrative of day-to-day reality as a freelance writer/translator… gifted, meticulous and prompts one to question oneself – I can only lament the fact that clients rarely realize and appreciate the time, effort and multi-faceted gifts you offer them and devote to their assignments… (can’t help thinking to myself: what a waste – some of the time -…!) [...] Still, I wanted to drop you a line, just let you know that you probably have many solitary readers/colleagues who’re comforted and cheered by your column but somehow don’t have the time or energy to thank you for it.”

When I started the blog it really was to reach out to colleagues and try to form some sort of an online community, but that hasn’t entirely resulted. I was hoping to see more comments, get more feedback, create more two-way dialogue. But still, notes like these, knowing that someone out there somewhere has benefitted in whatever way from what I have written, plus the simple satisfaction I derive from dashing off a few words, taking what is swimming around in my head and making it clear “on paper”, has been enough reward.

I do wonder, though, how an online community is built, nourished and sustained. Sites like Facebook have revolutionized the way we interact, but I wonder if that has more to do with the people who are interested in that type of site than the medium itself. But then that thought is contradicted by this one: the American Translator’s Association Language Technology Division has a website with an RSS Feed and a listserv, but both are rarely used – surprising to me because membership is comprised of techies, after all, who are used to online media.

I have been thinking about an article regarding writing/blogging/online communities for some time now, and Micheline’s message just set me off on a tangent that led me back to wanting to post here and get that article underway. Thank you for that, Micheline!

I am feeling slightly more than peeved, however, that one task that should have taken me a couple of hours at most took me almost an entire day yesterday and may take that long again today! I hardly ever come across them, mostly because I’m working with client documents that aren’t that complex, but if you try to do a fairly complex layout in Word – watch out! It is filled with bugs and sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be a workaround. I have the distinct advantage that I live with a software programmer and Jon can thankfully usually tell me within a short while whether the weirdness I’ve come across is because of something I’ve done, if there’s a better way to do it, or what I’m going to have to do to get around the problem. But it is so incredibly frustrating to spend a day working and not get ahead. Wish me better luck today!

I’ve been swamped with work these days and that in itself is a very good thing. My lovely DVX has been the best investment I’ve made in a long time and has saved me hours and hours of repetitive work. My database is growing and each time I start a new project there’s more for it to draw on and my task becomes easier. All those pesky phrases that you see over and over again are inserted and I can get to the new stuff. I should be a spokesperson for this tool!

But one problem I have had lately is the fact that many of my documents are coming in hard copy. They’re texts you can’t get the originals for  – legal documents from various countries that have been signed and stamped by notaries, dating sometimes back to the mid-90s. I have a PDF converter (ScanSoft’s PDF Converter Professional 3.0) and it actually does a marvellous job with the OCR. But when things are blotted out by notary’s stamps, or the original image was scanned in upside down, there is a lot of processing required. In a recent job, I had to take all of the multi-page TIFF images and rotate each page, saving the document each time, so that the pages were right side up. Then I had to print to a PDF. Then I had to open the PDF in Word so it would convert, and do a Save As. (Note that I used to convert to Word inside the PDF Coverter software, but it would do crazy formatting and I found that when you just open a PDF in Word, it converts it using that same tool, but the formatting is fine.) Finally, I had to go through the text and remove all the images of stamps and signatures, especially where they were superimposed over text, decipher the text underneath, type it in, and only then did I finally have a document I could import into DVX and begin translating.

Still, I’ve found that all that work is worth it because everything is then in my translation and terminology database. It is just a bit of annoyance, though, to have the time I’m saving with translation lost in conversion.

Today I thought I’d note a couple of items that might be of interest to people.

First, as Editor of the ATA Language Technology Division newsletter, I am accepting submissions until April 20th for our next issue to come out in May. I currently have some great articles about SDL Trados 2006, Lingo, and Pootle. As well, I’m waiting to receive a column of Trados Tips that will be ongoing, perhaps a review of WindowBlinds and DeltaView, and we’re working on coming up with a template of features for comparing different CAT tools. It’s shaping up to be quite a newsletter! If you’re a member of division and would like to submit, drop me a note.

Also, as Vice-Pesident, Ontario, of the Literary Translators Association of Canada, we’re gearing up for a really great seminar and AGM this summer at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. I’m taking the names of Association members who are interested in taking part in the panel “Translating Cultural Contexts”, so do e-mail me if that interests you.

It seems, somehow, that many of my volunteer activities are taking nearly as much time as my actual paying work. But it’s not a complaint really, I love being involved in the profession, doing different things. I just hope I can keep it all in balance.

While I was away, the blog was spammed by some gambling site. It’s unbelievable what lengths spammers will go to to get their message across. I recently heard that there are 5 billion e-mail messages sent a day, and about 90% of those are spam!

I did have my laptop and checked e-mail relatively regularly while I was gone. Mostly I did so to remind clients that I was away! I figured it was a pretty good start to the year, though, since I received work from some of my stable clients, all with reasonable deadlines past today’s date. Here’s hoping the balance between life and work will continue throughout the year.

Like many, I made some New Year’s resolutions. Unlike most, I make professional resolutions as well. I won’t share this years with you because I like to keep them close until I accomplish them. However, I can tell you that I did well as regards last year’s resolutions. For one, I resolved to publish more and I did! I have a few translations coming out in big US magazines and I wrote a few articles that came out in professional industry newsletters and journals. I also resolved to get a CAT tool and as you’ve read here, I did and am very pleased with it. Here’s hoping that our resolutions, yours and mine, be they personal or professional, are fulfilled this year…

Don’t you love those Monday mornings when you’ve been working 10-12 hour days on the weekend, it’s dark and rainy, and you’re up but still not functioning? Wishing it were Sunday, the kind of rainy Sunday when you could just curl up with a big mug of coffee and a good book? But instead it’s Monday, the “start” of the work week, and there are things piled up for you to do that day.

On the positive side of all the work I did this weekend, I’m certain that it would have taken me many hours more without my lovely new tool, DejaVu X or DVX. Pre-translation work took a little longer because I had to convert the PDF files into Word files and then clean them all up before I could import them into DVX. I then tried using their Lexicon feature, where you can create a lexicon (glossary) of the most commonly occurring words and phrases in the document or set of documents. However, the list it came up with for me was *thousands* of entries long. It took “a”, “a valor”, “a valor de”, for example. Sorting through that took me hours, literally, until I finally gave up and decided it wasn’t worth it. I’m sure I’m doing something wrong, need to configure the parameters in some way to get better results, but I’m just not sure. In any event, the entries that I did put in were then automatically inserted into my translated text and that did save me time. And, of course, then as I was translating I could propagate my translation through the rest of the document and I’m quite certain that eased my workload tremendously.

Well, it’s 9:09 a.m. and my dream of a lazy day isn’t going to be realized, so I better just get to it…

So, for example, if I had an entry that read “C/D; CD; Certificado de Deposito” in an Excel file, I will now have to make three separate entries in my terminology database because it is very unlikely that that string of Spanish words will be found in a document I need to translate; rather, only one of the three will be there. Likewise, my possible translations “C/D; certificate of deposit; deposit certificate” will have to be separated out.

But what do I do now, for example, if I have a term like “Comisión Nacional Bancaria y de Valores”. Easy enough, you say: “National Banking and Securities Commission”. Correct. However, this term may potentially come up in documents from several of my clients. One client likes to see it left in Spanish and the English beside it in square brackets after the first instance, then English only thereafter. Another likes to see it simply translated as of the first instance. What do I do with my terminology database??!!

I thought these tools were supposed to simplify my work?! This is giving me a huge headache, so I think maybe I’ll go have some lunch and ponder it again later!

I started using e-mail in about 1996 or 1997. I was living in Peru and only a few of my friends and family members had addresses, but what a joy it was to reach out across continents and be in touch so quickly. I didn’t have my own computer but went to a cultural center likely about once a week; even that turnaround time was miraculous compared to the postal system.

Now I’m on e-mail every day, all day long, have become so incredibly used to it and take it for granted. We all do, I think, because that is the way that communication works now. It’s instant, always on. And it’s required: if I have a job due out today then I have to know that my e-mail is working to get it to the recipient. So when I realized that my outgoing mail server wasn’t working properly, but taking over 24 hours to deliver messages, I nearly fainted!

Thankfully, I think I’ve solved the problem, my client received the job due today, and my blood pressure has gone back down. I’m glad I don’t live in the era of Inés Suárez, waiting a year for my mail, but I do need to remember to keep it all in perspective.