jobs and due caution

Because it's job-hunting season for translation MA students, I thought I would post a few more sites worth browsing through (see below); but I also wanted to sound a note of caution about recent scams targeting translators. Be very, very careful before responding to unsolicited offers of work and check the background of any potential client/agency carefully. A number of professional associations and websites have blacklists, so make use of these. Tip of the day: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Another couple of sites for translation job-hunters out there which seem to give useful results: the general portal www.indeed.co.uk (there is also a sister site www.indeed.com for US-based jobseekers) and http://www.gltjobs.com/, which specialises in localisation. Bear in mind that many clients advertising through general portals don't seem to know the difference between a translator and an interpreter. An agency site that caught my eye is http://www.london-translations.co.uk/joinus.html, (It's interesting to see how translation companies market themselves to freelancers using various forms of 'content' and, in this case, endorsements from previous translators, from some time ago now, suggesting that a widget is desirable that would 'feed' up-to-date endorsements to company websites...?). Experienced freelancers could also try here. Remember (a vague disclaimer is nobody's friend) that these are just suggestions, and mention on this blog doesn't constitute an endorsement of any kind. Caveat interpres.

interpreting in the financial spotlight

I see another easy news story about the terrible expense of public service translating and interpreting ('Cash-strapped force defends up to £68-an-hour translators'). A funny one for several reasons:
(a) they are talking as usual about interpreting rather than translation;
(b) reading down, one learns that the regular rate is less than half the headline rate, and that the headline rate is for anti-social hours (freelancers need sleep too, and the occasional day off);
(c) I have just seen an advertisement for some occasional interpreting work that paid £9 an hour, which rather dents the image of plutocratic linguists living off the fat of the land. (I also, fwiw, recently came across an ad for an interpreting gig that pays $200,000+ a year, but that one involved Dari and Pashto and being shot at, so I'm going to say that one doesn't count).

It's good at least to hear the other side of the story from the police and in the form of a spirited comment by Pamela Mayorcas of the ITI. Not everyone may agree, but we live in a multilingual society where basic legal, medical and administrative access entitlements mean that we will continue to need interpreters and translators, just as we continue to need lawyers, police, plumbing, wifi signals, ramps, tea, coffee, water, telephones, oxygen etc. It's easy and seductive to fantasise about everyone learning English, particularly in these straitened times when everyone is looking for budget headings to cut; but any day any one of us could be mugged in Rome or accidentally rear-end someone in Estonia, and then we would be very, very grateful indeed to find that the police speak our language.

English-language style guides and European Commission translation resources

I am in the process of putting together a list of translation links and resources for our website (keep an eye out later in the summer) and have rediscovered a few bits and pieces that I thought might be of interest to our general readership as well.

First of all, style guides. I got lots of detailed questions about assignment editing over the past couple of months, and some of them might be answered by a document such as this one, the English style guide of the Directorate-General for Translation at the European Commission. Note the extreme attention to detail! If you're not a pedant, then ask yourself are you sure you are a translator? The style guide also has some good basic details about the EU for anyone boning up for this summer's competition for translators (includes a call for English native speakers!).
The compulsive cross-checkers among you could compare the DGT styleguide with more journalistic style guides such as the Economist style guide or the BBC News style guide. It can also be entertaining to look at issues which are actively policed like dead metaphors and conventions for gender-neutral and gender-inclusive language.
The DGT site also has a page of general translation resources and a useful page of language-specific resources in all the official languages.

More links and resources anon. Anyone with suggestions of sites, glossaries, term banks, encyclopaedias etc. that they have found useful is welcome to post them in the comments!

'Delighted Beauty' project

I am just back from a thoroughly enjoyable conference on 'The Author-Translator in the European Literary Tradition' in Swansea (lovely beaches btw). More on that anon. Tonight's post is about a really pleasing project launched by a colleague at Swansea, collecting translations into any language of a couplet from Shakespeare's Othello. The couplet is 'If virtue no delighted beauty lack/Your son-in-law is far more fair than black' from Act 1, scene 3. There's a lot packed into this one little couplet, and one could see how it might pose all sorts of problems to a translator. Dr Tom Cheesman is looking for published/performed translations into any language. More about the project here and some intriguing suggestions of what one could do with the material here. This project seems like lots of fun and well worth supporting. If you have a copy of Othello on your shelves in any language other than English, why not support the project by looking up the couplet and sending it in? Translations directly to Dr Cheesman please.

crime fiction in translation

A nice article in the Wall Street Journal today on crime fiction and the explosion of interest in translated crime fiction since the frankly silly sales of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. And who knew that The Elegance of the Hedgehog had sold half a million copies in translation? More power to it. Any readers of this blog looking to get into literary translation - sounds as though you could do worse than read up on some crime novelists and think about a pitch to a publisher...

translation tools survey

Kevin Lossner over at Translation Tribulations has posted the results of this month's translation tools survey, for anyone curious to know what's popular and what tools other translators are using. The blog will probably be interesting for those of you working with German too.