The Detail Woman logomarkSarah Alys Lindholm

Professional translator, educator, and owner of The Detail Woman, LLC. I love opportunities to both teach and learn from others, whether at large conventions or in smaller informal settings. My not-so-secret passions are research, terminology management, and penguins. LinkedIn | Twitter

FAQ #3 Followup–Another Perspective on Translator Education

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Image of the letters FAQ with a magnifying glass over the F. Public domain image from clker.com

In my previous post, FAQ #3: Did Your Bryn Mawr Education Prepare You For Your Career?, I discussed how a liberal arts education prepared me for a career as a translator. My colleague Frode Aleksandersen, an English/Danish/Swedish/Japanese to Norwegian translator who specializes in technical translation, checked in with me afterwards to offer a contrasting perspective. Since … Read more

FAQ #3: Did Your Bryn Mawr Education Prepare You For Your Career?

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Image of the letters FAQ with a magnifying glass over the F. Public domain image from clker.com

Another FAQ!

Much as I love my alma mater, the question “Did your Bryn Mawr education prepare you for your career?” is, I think, actually a bigger one: “Did your liberal arts education prepare you for your career?” Because Bryn Mawr is a liberal arts school, and I think the practical usefulness of the liberal arts is what people are really getting at here.

The short answer: yep, it did.

The long answer: Here’s what a liberal arts education is, and why it’s useful to a translator’s career even though it’s by definition not career-specific.

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Pictures and Sound: Audiovisual Terminology

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Tomorrow November 8th, I’ll be presenting my first-ever American Translators Association conference session. If you’ve ever wondered what translating audiovisual content is all about, come join me for session T-10: “Pictures and Sound: Translating Television and Other Audiovisual Media” from 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. So that attendees don’t have to give themselves hand cramps … Read more

A Personal Appeal to My Fellow Americans

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It’s voting season right now in the United States–a fact you’ve probably been unable to escape if you live here. Next week we’ll have local, state, and federal midterm elections, and we’ll even have elections in the American Translators Association.

This blog isn’t about politics. I don’t actually want to talk about the people running in any of those elections right now, so don’t worry. But since some things are so universally important that they deserve a personal appeal, I want to get personal for a second here, and I want to do so publicly. Here’s the thing: every day now we hear the words “vote,” “voting,” “voters.” These are big words for me personally, because in 2006, I had the vote taken away from me.

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memoQ & OmegaT Shortcut Unification

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**Note 10/2/2023: There is a bug in OmegaT 6.0.0 that causes a loss of functionality if you edit the gotoNextUntranslatedMenuItem shortcut. The ability to go to the next untranslated segment will be lost until you reinstall, even if you revert to the default. Therefore, I recommend against modifying gotoNextUntranslatedMenuItem in 6.0.0.

Like a lot of translators, I use more than one CAT tool (TEnT tool) in my work, deciding which one to use based on the type of project I’m translating. In my case, it’s memoQ and OmegaT.

I don’t know about other translation tool combinations, but the one thing that drives me CRAZY switching between these two is that the important shortcuts are completely different. But after some digging around and experimentation, I have achieved shortcut paradise.

All I wanted was for the “go to next untranslated segment” and the “add term to glossary/term base” shortcuts to match so that I wouldn’t keep using the wrong one in the wrong program, but memoQ only allows certain shortcut customizations, so I couldn’t get its shortcuts to match OmegaT’s. Happily, if you’re willing to venture into the bowels of your file system, you can get your OmegaT shortcuts to match memoQ’s. Here’s how.

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Guest Post: What Exactly Is Literary Translation? by Lisa Carter

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At the ATA‘s 54th Annual Conference in San Antonio last fall, I had a chance to chat with Lisa Carter of Intralingo, one of my favorite blogs on literary translation. One thing led to another, and we got to thinking about how everyone probably defines “literary translation” differently. Lisa tackles the question of “What is literary translation?” in her online course First Steps in Literary Translation, and I tackle it whenever people wander into my office asking “What do you do in here, anyway?”

So hey–why not each have a go at it and let our readers share their thoughts, too? And lo, a guest post exchange was born. Please welcome acclaimed Spanish>English translator Lisa Carter as she gives us her take!

[Note from the future: Although Lisa’s blog is no longer online for you to check out my take, if you are interested, I dug up the 2014 Word document from the depths of my computer. You can download it by clicking this link.]

 

What exactly is literary translation?

By Lisa Carter

 

Have you ever asked yourself this question? I have. And I’ve asked it of others, too. Quite often. The answer to this one simple question is never as straightforward as it would seem it should be. You see, the answer changes, depending on who you talk to and when you talk to them.

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Word Usage Quiz for Writers #2

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It’s baaaaack… Following up on my first quiz on commonly confused words, here is a second set of ten word-pair errors I see during proofreading. As always, the theory is that even if you already know the difference between the words in each pair, practice making deliberate choices may help prevent mistakes in the future. … Read more

Word Usage Quiz for Writers

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When you choose the right word for the right situation, your writing looks polished and professional, but sometimes it’s almost like English is out to get you with all its little pitfalls. It’s easy to read advice about commonly confused words, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get them right later. Yesterday I started wondering whether … Read more