Sarah Alys Lindholm | The Detail Woman, LLC

Backing Up Your Records in TO3000 Version 10

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Sarah Alys Lindholm

Most of us translators realize that one of the worst things that could happen to our businesses is a hardware failure, theft, or other event that wipes out all our data. We’ve all been told, “Back everything up, because you never know.” We know we need backups for our business security and our own peace of mind. Some of us are even paranoid enough to have both a physical backup and a cloud backup (of any data not too sensitive for one).¹

I’m not a perfect person (ask my family), so when my computer’s hard drive died recently, I didn’t have everything backed up, but I had the essentials: my term bases, my translation memories, my personal photos, my financial records… However, when I got a new hard drive, reinstalled all my programs, and attempted to restore everything, I hit a couple of snags.

Quicken data? Fine. MemoQ resources/projects? Fine, if you know where to put everything. TO3000 Version 10? Tears of blood.

So here’s what I learned about backing up and restoring those records… Because it is a whole world of not-fun to be missing them at tax time.

Continue Reading →

Demon Parades and Career Beginnings

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Sarah Alys Lindholm

© Yoshihiro Togashi 1990-1994 "Yu Yu Hakusho" / comics originally serialized in the WEEKLY SHONEN JUMP published by Shueisha Inc. TV animation series "Yu Yu Hakusho" is produced by © Pierrot/Shueisha.

The contemporary: Kurama, the fox spirit from Yu Yu Hakusho. (see alt text for copyright)

The old: New Year’s Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji by Hiroshige

Though I didn’t manage to post about it before due to computer issues, I had two public speaking opportunities in January that were pretty fun.

First, I gave a workshop at Texas A&M University’s Stark Galleries. They’re hosting an ukiyo-e exhibit called “The Floating World” through next month, so part of their family-friendly event series is currently focused on Japanese arts and culture. The museum was kind enough to invite me down to TAMU to give a presentation on yokai–the legendary ghosts and goblins of Japan which played a big part in ukiyo-e traditions and still play a role in Japanese pop culture. (And, of course, to talk a little about anime.)

It’s a fun topic that I really like, though I worried about how it was going to go over–turns out it’s challenging to plan a family-friendly workshop about ghost stories when many of them are rated-R-worthy! Cue anxiety over how I could make it interesting enough for all ages at the same time.

But attendance was great: we had a full room, with an age distribution from about 10 to 75. We talked about how to survive an encounter with a kappa, how fox spirits possess humans, and who might show up in the deadly processional called the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons. The audience didn’t visibly react much during the lecture, which worried me, but it turns out they were just being quiet and polite. There were lots of thoughtful questions afterward, with people wanting to talk one-on-one and saying they really enjoyed learning about all the ghouls. Win!

Hyakki Yako (The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons), artist unknown

The other January “speaking engagement” was an informal video-chat interview with legal and academic translator Carolyn Yohn about how I got into my field. It went up on her blog this month (here’s the link) as her first video interview. Definitely not her first interview, though: Carolyn has an ongoing series of interviews on her blog with translators of all different fields about how they chose their specialties. Be sure to check it out!

I already knew that I far prefer delivering video/audio interviews to written ones, because written ones take more time as I get obsessive about getting just the right phrasing for everything. But I did learn something new doing this one through Google Hangout: good lighting for a girl in glasses is hard! Toward the end there are some truly epic shadows on my face. Next time, I’ll definitely ask the professionals for advice before I try to do my own lighting. ^_~ Lucky me that I work in an office with lighting professionals.

Talking to others about culture and translation inevitably means learning something new yourself, even after many years in the field. I highly recommend it, even if you don’t feel comfortable doing it on camera. Carolyn’s interview on camera was great for me: I may have a new fear of facial shadows, but I also met new people on Twitter who watched it and commented, and now I get to read cool new things they post.

The most fun thing, though, was probably finding this Night Parade a la Pokémon.

A night parade with a Pokémon spin, by Pixiv artist “nojo.” (Artist page http://www.pixiv.com/users/548497 – some images contain adult content or are NSFW.)

FAQ #1: How Many Languages Should I Study?

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Sarah Alys Lindholm

Here’s a truth of my life: I get a lot, lot, lot of emails from aspiring translators with questions.

That’s cool, in that aspiring translators should ask questions! That’s a lot of why I wrote So You Wanna Be a Translator etc., which many read before asking. But the thing is, I just can’t personally answer all of them in a timely manner. I can at least answer some of the frequently asked questions here on the blog, so I’ll start doing that instead.

So, here goes ultra-popular question to email me #1…

“Do you only have to stick to one language, or is it okay if I learn several at once? Will that be too much?”

I’m sorry to say that the short answer is, I don’t know. Even if I read all the research in the world about multi-language acquisition, I probably still wouldn’t know your answer. It’s true that some people successfully speak a half-dozen languages. Conversely, some people study a half-dozen languages and come away speaking none of them. I honestly can’t tell you what will happen to you.

Here’s what happened to me: I found it easy to study multiple languages in the same family (French & Spanish), and had no interference. On the other hand, I felt I had to choose between Japanese and the Romance languages. I chose Japanese.

Did I really have to choose? Heck, I was a teenager; who knows whether I understood any of my decisions. Maybe I was exactly right, and maybe I could have gone on in both and become equally fluent. I don’t think so, but I don’t have a time machine.

Again, some people work that way and some don’t. I imagine the easiest way to find out if you’re cut out for multilingual study is to go for it and see what happens. Take two different foreign language classes for a semester. Do you feel like you’re rocking both? If not, you can drop one.

My instinct is that choosing languages in the same family will help immensely if you really want to go the many languages route, but maybe your brain works in completely the opposite way from mine. I can certainly say, though, that when I’ve met professional-grade translators who work in three or more languages, they’ve never been three completely unrelated ones.

I’m sure that’s not satisfying since it’s not a “yes” or “no,” but I hope it helps a little!

2013 in Review, Part 1 – Filthy Lucre

Posted on January 18, 2014 by Sarah Alys Lindholm

Learning from the past is good for us! Which is surely part of why one of the popular topics each January is the “Year in Review” post, like those I recently read by fellow translators. Two favorites: Corinne McKay uses some questions to take stock—”what went right in 2013, what needs to go better in 2014, and where do you want to be a year from now?” and Carolyn Yohn looks back at the goals she set for 2013 and evaluates where she is now in relation to them.

These list-format posts are popular for some very good reasons, and it’s not just that we human beings love lists (though we do). It’s because:

We humans love lists!
Actively summarizing things helps us understand them. Just like a recap at the end of an essay helps the reader understand it, the very act of summarizing events in your own life helps you, the writer, to understand them better.
Learning from our past = good. Hopefully we’ll do more of the things that had good results and remember not to do some of the things that had bad results. And we can tell ourselves it’s for the readers, too: maybe they can avoid some of our mistakes or repeat some of our successes!
Knowing where we are in the present = crucial. It’s pretty hard to honestly confront where we are in life, which is why it can be painful to get on the scale at the doctor’s office or terrifying to see a financial planner. But if you don’t know where you are, you’re less likely to get where you want to go.

So, okay! I will follow my colleagues’ example and figure out where I am. What the heck did I do in 2013, anyway?!

Read on for Part 1, the money side of things, or stay tuned for Part 2, the professional development side. Continue Reading →

What Good Is Literature?

Posted on January 11, 2014 by Sarah Alys Lindholm

Today, one of my advanced and highly motivated students embarked with me on his first foray into Japanese literature: we started reading the short story 「神様」 (“Kamisama,” or “God”), by Hiromi Kawakami. It’s the second time I’ve taught this story, which features a walk to the river with a delightfully polite bear.

It was hard work for him, of course, and it introduced a lot of new grammar his formal textbooks hadn’t covered. This particular student prefers non-fiction to fiction in English, so I’d warned him ahead of time that he might find it frustrating, but over a three-week holiday break he got through the first page just fine. I thought things were going pretty well until he said, “I don’t see how this is helping me speak Japanese.”

I was flabbergasted for a moment. In my head I heard the question, What good is literature? But I’ve always been a voracious reader of fiction—it’s never occurred to me to question literature’s usefulness. For me, and for many of my friends, being able to read foreign literature is one of the goals of learning a language. But today, for the first time, I personally witnessed the proof of the theory that you don’t need to care about literature to be passionate about learning a language.

In which case, what good is literature, to the language learner whose interests lie elsewhere?

My answer to my student was that studying this story would help his listening comprehension by introducing him to speech that people use in conversation or on TV, and he’ll now notice them using it and know what it’s doing. And I 100% believe that’s true. I also believe that literature, along with comic books and television, tells you how people actually speak in a way that textbooks don’t. But now that I’m not on the spot anymore, I think there’s more to it than that.

Literature is also good for us so that we don’t fall into ruts. When you’re speaking a language you didn’t learn as a child, it’s dreadfully easy to find yourself recycling the same limited phrases or constructions over and over. Even I find myself sometimes latching on to phrases and developing speech tics I have to force myself to shake off. You see, it’s easy to only use a small portion of what you actually know. To become repetitive, because (1) learning takes repeated practice, and (2) traditional textbooks won’t expose you to anything outside the box.

Fiction is usually where we find the most creative use of language, where authors actively try to put words together in provocative ways. I submit that whatever your level of enjoyment, literature can’t help but expose you to new patterns and new expressions. And so I think that literature can help us go beyond functional into articulate.

What do you think? Have stories been useful to you?

**Yes, in addition to my full-time and freelance translating, I also tutor in the Japanese language. It’s pretty fun. Feel absolutely free to question my work/life balance skills, though.

New simulcast: Nobunagun (FUNimation version)

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Sarah Alys Lindholm

© Masato Hisa/ EARTH STAR ENT./"Nobunagun Committee" Licensed by FUNimation® Productions, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

A new year, a new anime season, a new simulcast. Just started my new show, Nobunagun.

If you’re thinking, “That sounds like it’s probably about Oda Nobunaga’s soul being turned into a semiautomatic machine gun”… yep, that’s pretty much right! But wait, there’s more: it’s also about Oda Nobunaga teaming up with Gandhi and Jack the Ripper to save planet Earth. No joke.

I’m finding it restful after some recent intense projects—it’s nice to kick back and do a little zaniness for a change.

Episode 1 is up now at http://www.funimation.com/shows/nobunagun/anime, with launches on third-party vendor sites to follow. (Note: FUNimation’s version is different from Crunchyroll’s version, so you’ll get a version by a different translator on that site. If you watch via third-party vendors like Hulu, iTunes, etc., those will carry the FUNimation version.)

Translator as Holiday Navigator

Posted on December 24, 2013 by Sarah Alys Lindholm

We translators spend most of our working time critically examining the question, “What did this person mean by these words?”

Maybe that’s why over the years I’ve noticed myself at company meetings or music rehearsals or parties saying, “Fred, I think what Jane is trying to say is…” In other words, interpreting not between languages, but for people speaking the same language: helping them get their meanings across to each other when they’re talking at cross-purposes. When, very very occasionally, someone asks me about this, I just say “I’m a translator.”

Now I’m home in Minnesota for the holidays, and I notice myself playing conversational navigator at the lunch table: “Mom, what Grandpa wants to know is…” “Grandma, Dad is asking…”

I can’t say authoritatively that all translators have this habit, but I suspect many of us do. It’s certainly in line with the good translator’s skill set. At work, we navigate the waters between one language and another with phrasing and inflection as our guides; with grammar and historical context as our star charts. Why shouldn’t this prepare us to contribute to dialogue in our larger lives as well? There are also seas between people of different generations, people of different religious attitudes, people from different places. There are even seas between us and those closest to us in character: seas between all the islands of our individual minds. Who better than a translator to help navigate these waters?

I wouldn’t be surprised to find that many of my colleagues are spending their holidays a bit like I am. “Billy, I think Sally is wondering if…”

Happy holidays from snowy Minnesota.

Life Dreams (Translator-Goggles Edition)

Posted on November 24, 2013 by Sarah Alys Lindholm

I expected my next post to be about ATA 54 from a freelancer’s perspective, but a recent Intralingo post spotlighting literary translator Peter McCambridge sent me in another direction.

Mr. McCambridge, a Canadian translator, mentions a specific moment with a specific book—Bestiaire by Eric Dupont—where “as soon as I put it down, all I wanted to do with my life was translate it.”

Reading that, I felt such a jolt of recognition. Yes, that’s what the world looks like through Translator Goggles! You may not even realize you’ve put on the goggles, but from that moment on, an almost visceral urge to translate certain works you’ve experienced is inevitable. You see a work of art through those goggles, and you realize you’re seeing what you need to be doing. It’s happened to me a few times over the last 15 or so years, but perhaps the very first life dream the goggles gave me was a dream I knew deep down could never come true.

…Until it sort of did.

Continue Reading →

ATA Conference Notes from a Buyer’s Perspective

Posted on November 16, 2013 by Sarah Alys Lindholm

I saw and learned so much last week at my first American Translators Association conference that it will definitely take some time to process it all! But I had the unusual experience of attending for the first time both as a translation vendor and as a translation buyer, and there were definitely some things I noticed from a buyer perspective that I found fascinating.

So, all you freelance translators out there: here are four things that make you leave a good or bad impression on a potential client.

Continue Reading →

The Sorrow of the Lost Examples

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Sarah Alys Lindholm

**Update 7/5/2021: Unfortunately, the Sanseido web service has now been discontinued, leading to even more lost examples. Its service has thus been removed from the Kenkyusha Online Dictionary experience as well. For those continuing to look for a J-J (国語) dictionary, I now recommend the デジタル大辞泉 found here at goo辞書: https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/jn/.

Today I bring you some possibly useful facts if you work in Japanese, and a passionate eulogy you don’t need any Japanese to understand.

I think many people will agree with me when I say that it’s not always the definitions which are the most useful part of a dictionary: more often, the real treasure trove is the usage examples.

True, that’s apparently not always what people look for: About five years ago some non-translator coworkers at my company were over the moon about a new online English<->Japanese dictionary they’d found. I was new at the time, and I was the first translator the company’d had in house. We were all still learning about each other, really. And eventually someone asked me what I thought about this “great” dictionary.

A teaching moment! I thought. Hoping my new friends would not be offended, I told the truth: I hated it.

When you looked up a word in either language, it simply gave you a list of words that might show up as its translation in the other language, with no context, no sorting into different base meanings, and no usage examples, as if there were no differences between any of the (often conflicting) choices, and it was really all a matter of what you fancied that day. Worse than useless! If you really want to see how to use a word—and if, as a translator, you really want to brainstorm ideas and then be able to actually evaluate them—you need the actual definitions, yes, but even more than that, you need to see them in action. You need usage examples. (And not just any examples! You need quality professional ones. My students are routinely forbidden from relying on any dictionary that relies on the Tanaka corpus, which was compiled by students.)

Which is all to say that right now, I am in mourning. One of the two high-quality online dictionary services I’ve used for years now has lost half of its usage examples, and I feel it keenly. The thinning of the Yahoo! Japan dictionary is a blow to the Japanese-English translator.

I have a paid subscription to the Kenkyusha Online Dictionary, which is actually a collection of Kenkyusha J-E and E-J dictionaries (plus a Sanseido Japanese-Japanese dictionary) that I can search all at once. Three times the usage examples! It’s easily worth the money for the quality illustrations and usable ideas it regularly gives me. But I am greedy, and sometimes three dictionaries’ worth of examples is just not enough! I must have more! At those times, I’ve always gone to the free Yahoo! Japan dictionary to get my fix. It boasted two J-E dictionaries, neither of which were on KOD, and two J-J dictionaries, one of which overlapped KOD and the other of which contrasted interestingly.

But at the end of July 2013, variety died. The two Sanseido dictionaries on Yahoo! Japan, 大辞林 and ニューセンチュリー和英辞典, are no longer there. Essentially, that means there is now only one J-E and one J-J. Happily the remaining J-J is the contrasting one, but as for the loss of that second J-E dictionary… Well, it’s been three months now, and I’m not over it. My sorrow is unending.

Sanseido currently has their own paid web service; their “Daily Concise” dictionaries can be accessed for free, but the rest of its dictionaries require paid access. I believe the ウィズダム和英辞典 there is considered the ニューセンチュリー和英辞典’s successor.

I have no desire to pay for two dictionary subscriptions at once, so I won’t be purchasing the Sanseido service. However, anyone in the market for a paid subscription may want to check out both KOD and the Sanseido service to see which they might prefer. Me, I’ll probably stick to my KOD + Yahoo! Japan formula and sigh a bit each time.

I’ll tell you one cool discovery, though: I find sanseido.net looks great on my iPhone and is a lot more functional than Yahoo! Japan’s mobile site. To test, I looked up 襟首 (the nape of the neck) on both sites on my phone, and Yahoo! Japan’s dictionary didn’t even get any hits, though it finds the word immediately when I look it up on my PC’s web browser. Next time I need a quick online lookup on my smart phone, I’ll be heading over to Sanseido’s free offerings rather than Yahoo! Japan’s service.

…And that’s a wrap. Thanks for listening to my tale of woe, and feel free to leave a note or drop me a line about any dictionaries you’re in love with! I keep a list of them in every language for the incidental “There’s German mixed in with this Japanese!” moments.