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December 11, 2009
Ongoing Project
- Seeking Translators
These are for projects I myself translate for other agencies and require help with – either in the form of consultation with terminology, proofreading, or translations to increase my capacity. Because this is work for other agencies, unfortunately, my budget is not very high, but over time I plan to increase my price, especially once I find my own customers, so in turn I hope to offer more to the translators.
Project Details
I most often like to work in Transit (reasons given below), a translation memory tool. You can download this software for free through the Transit Star Termstar Instructions page. It is an easy program to use and I can help you set it up. Other times a proofread in Word may be possible, or simply consultation help with terminology. Below are further instructions how this cooperation might work.
If you would be interested in taking part in these projects, please send me an email and answer the below questions:
- your native language (your English does not need to be native but good enough for me to proofread it):
- your general price for translation per source word in Euro (you can adjust your price each time depending on the difficulty of the text):
- your general proofreading price per word:
- your hourly rate for proofreading or consultation:
- what time zone you are located on:
- your preferred subjects of translation:
If we come to an agreement I will put your email on a shortlist and approach you every time a project comes in, which I hope will be on a continual basis. You can adjust your price each time based on the text, or just ignore the email if you are busy.
Once on the shortlist I would encourage you to practice with Transit using this first project as an example. I can help you with the software if you have any problems.
Looking forward to working together!
Reasons why I choose to translate most of these projects in Transit:
it is free software for the translators (I, as a project manager, have the full paid version) and once they get used to it I find they most often like working in it;
the source and target text is always visible and move together, so it makes it easy for others to control the quality and meaning of a translation;
it separates the formatting from the text such that the translator only worries about the text. Therefore, the formatting of the original document cannot be changed or damaged, which can often easily happen when a file is passed back and forth between different translators;
no text can be erased. As you move along in the target text, the source text moves with you. If by chance you erase a sentence in the target text, you could not erase the corresponding sentence in the source text, and this would be evident to me when I control the translation afterwards. Otherwise I would have to always have two documents open at the same time and constantly double check that nothing was accidentally erased, which greatly slows me down while imposing a risk factor;
a dictionary can be set up of special terms, where those special terms are marked in red in the source document. This helps to unify terminology when several translators are working on the same project (sometimes, for capacity reasons, I may farm out entire files for translators to translate from scratch), and bring attention to the special words, in case anyone has any better suggestions;
as you will see from the instructions below, it is also a useful tool if I skip over certain sentences that I need help with.
Some Instructions for Past
Projects
The below instructions were for the first project and will be tweaked over time. Because my French was rather rusty at that time I had to skip over a lot of sentences, although I took my best crack at them and occasionally made some changes to them. When I skipped over them I did not mark them as Translated, in which case the translator who controlled/fixed them would get his/her full translation rate. I also used google translate to help me get an idea of the meaning, so essentially every sentence was already translated to some degree. The translators expressed that they liked this system.
Once the translator translated those segments I left as Untranslated (a feature of Transit), they would go back to the beginning and proofread the entire document, including what I had translated and felt confident enough to mark as Translated. They would charge an hourly rate for this, but because they were also proofreading their own translation, which should be included in their translation rate, we worked out some amicable compromise.
suggest to go through it first using ALT INS and focus on those parts I left as Untranslated, then go back to proofread both your work and mine. If you do not recognize it as your own translation then pay extra attention and compare it against the original. If you see the + character it means I am marking areas (to the left of it) which I felt uncertain about, so you can focus on those more.
for those parts I marked as Translated and without + , please still free to be skeptical and double check. You can state a price later which will make it worthwhile for you. The most important is to satisfy this customer. If we can do this well (I will also be consulting with the other translators, so feel free to forward back to me additional questions etc), there could be a steady stream of work for all of us. I have a feeling it will take a long time before I am able to translate everything by myself. Not to mention that perhaps by then I will have more work from other agencies and will be farming out a lot of it anyway. Quality is the most important!
certain titles and terms I spent some time researching on ProZ Kudoz and other websites of the internet. I spent a lot of time researching in isolated cases, but still we cannot be entirely confident of my selection. Although I understand this subject well.
other times I may have made some alterations to terminology or general proofreading within the google translation, yet still left it Untranslated, simply because I did not feel confident enough to mark it Translated.
I plan to proofread and carefully read over everything again after you, nevertheless please try to provide a complete translation as if no one will proofread after you. I plan to Compare Documents in Word and study your changes to help improve my understanding of French. You too can leave something Untranslated (do not press ALT INS to mark it as Translated but rather move down to the next segment with your cursor) if I hand it to other translators, so they could quickly find the Untranslated segments. If you want to leave a comment for me or for the next translator, you can put it in [square brackets] following the + character, which I or another translator can quickly ctrl f find to focus on the weak points.
when you press ALT INS it jumps to the next Untranslated segment, but also offers you a translation from the reference, which in this case is the soddy google machine translation. Usually you would make changes within the reference window, then press ALT ENTER to copy the changed/unchanged reference translation into the main window, then press ALT INS to mark that segment as Translated to move on to the next Untranslated segment. HOWEVER, in this case, there is a good chance that I had already made some changes to the reference and already copied it into the main window. If you see an English translation in the main window (which should be in every case), you should JUMP BACK (ALT 2) to the main window without accepting the reference translation, otherwise you will copy over and erase any changes I have done. If I did not make any changes, it does not matter because I had already copied the reference translation into the main window. In short, unless you do not see any translation in the main window (which should never be the case), do NOT press ALT ENTER (the command to show a reference translation when within a segment) but rather ALT 2. Alt 2 jumps you back to the main translation window without accepting any of the reference translation.
what concerns numbers, I tried to put myself at least to some use and was careful about writing them out correctly in English, based on the number I saw. So you can generally skim over these parts quickly. I will also double check these parts later.
feel free to ask me any questions. Again, quality is the most important here.
if you are not sure of some terms, feel free to mark them with + to help me and the other translators focus on the weak points. It is much more efficient this way than to force everyone to read everything all over again while referring to the original.
I have added some terms to my budding French to English translation based on my existing research today. Again, it is not set in stone. If you have any suggestions, I can upgrade the dictionary.
I've gone through and changed the formatting where necessary. If you erase any of my formatted text, you can format your own text either by using the mouse or CTRL SHIFT B for bold etc. The formatting must be adhered to (individual words etc.).
oh yes, and as explained in the detailed Transit PE instructions I believe I already sent you, set up your Transit environment so you see the BLUE SPECIAL CHARACTERS so that you do not erase any of those, and the FORMATTING so you know what is supposed to be bold/italic etc.
Correspondence with the customer and translators concerning these French to English translation projects by French to English Translations Translator.
