1. Ignore the context, or better - invent it.
2. Don’t consult your dictionaries (if any) unless absolutely necessary.
3. If you don’t know how to translate, don’t do your research, don’t ask your fellow translators and don’t ever bother your client.
4. Be an I-eat-cats-dogs-frogs translator - accept any job coming your way even if it falls far beyond your specialisms.
5. Specialisms - who said you need to specialize?
6. Throw away quality and make use of machine translation tools whenever possible.
7. Avoid spellcheckers - with so many varieties of English or other languages you translate into, they are useless. Anyway, spellcheckers are just a form of self-imposed censorship.
8. Think of deadlines as a distraction.
9. Promote yourself at the expense of others. A good fellow translator is a …
10. And remember - You’re as good as you can get.

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Please find attached my CV for your attention.
(traditional and formal, can be used for your CV and wedding invites)

Please find my CV attached for your attention.
(Modern formal, better than the traditional version)
[when you sign your email "yours sincerely/faithfully and best regards"]

I’ve attached…I’m enclosing… the latest figures for you.
(Modern business, for friendly associates/colleagues)
[when you sign your email "best regards/regards/nothing"]

Here’s that excel file that you wanted.
(Modern-casual, for team mates)
[when you sign your email "regards/thanks/nothing"]

Это лишь небольшая часть очень интересной дискуссии на форуме Wordreference.com. Остальное читаем здесь.

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We all know that customers love discounts, while translators have no other choice but either bow to pressure or stand their ground. Of course, no hard and fast rules apply here. This part is always open to negotiation and depends on who you’re negotiating with - your regular or potential client. Let’s start with the trickier part - the potential customer cold contacts you. Here’s what I normally do. I quote a price that is somewhat higher than my standard rate. First, this in a way mitigates the risk that any “out-of-the-blue” client poses. Second, I can always consider a “discount” if the customer insists on one (provided they meet my eligibility requirements, which often boils down to a good record on the Blue Board). But if the “know your customer” search yields no results, this means both no discount and (at least partial) upfront payment.
Alternatively, you can promise to offer a discounted rate on any further projects that might follow from the customer but not on the one they have contacted you with. As you know, they just love to promise “large volumes” of work – but I know better than to buy that.

With existing customers, this is a tad more complicated (depends on how you look at it, I believe). At least you are willing to keep the status quo, while the customer might be wanting to probe your willingness to be more “flexible”.  My advice is just say no. The rationale behind this is if they regularly go to you with their projects, this can only mean you are perceived as a valuable asset. And unlike equipment that depreciates with time, experience gained over time only increases your value.

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Words of 2009

Unfriend | To sever a virtual friendship on a social networking site.

The New Oxford American Dictionary

* * *

Admonish | To express disapproval, as Rep. Joe Wilson did when he shouted “You lie!” at President Obama in September.

Merriam-Webster – based on online user enquiries

* * *

Distracted Driving | Multitasking while in charge of a vehicle; a term now entering legal lexicons worldwide.

Webster’s New World College Dictionary

* * *

Birther | Those who refuse to believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who therefore claim he is ineligible to be president.
Aporkalypse | Flippant nickname for the H1N1 “swine flu” apocalypse.
Government Motors | The latest nickname for General Motors, after the company’s federal bailout.
Meep | A nonsense word sometimes used disruptively by young people; originally attributed to Beaker from “The Muppet Show.”
Crash Blossom | A potentially misleading headline, like “Shark Attacks Puzzle Experts.”

Some of the words chosen by Mark Leibovich & Grant Barrett for The Week in Review

* * *

Bossnapping | Preventing senior managers from leaving an office, as a protest against layoffs (the tactic made headlines in France).
Hashtag | The # (hash) symbol used as a tag on Twitter.
Geoengineering | Large-scale manipulation of the climate to mitigate the effects of global warming (also called eco-hacking).
Jeggings | Jeans + leggings.
Snollygoster | An unprincipled person (often applied to politicians).

Some of the words chosen by Susie Dent et al. at the Oxford English Corpus

* * *

Abwrackprämie | Germany’s “cash for clunkers” program – literally “wrecking premium.”

The Society for German Language

* * *

Minarettverbot | Switzerland’s controversial minaret ban.

Journalists in German-speaking Switzerland and Liechtenstein

* * *

Pan | “Yearning” or “hope” – a desire to move past the devastation of Typhoon Morakot, and a struggling economy.

Taiwanese citizens

* * *

Seiken Kotai | Regime change – the result of the Democratic Party of Japan’s victory in the August general election.

Japanese publisher Jiyu Kokuminsha

* * *

Shin | “New” – chosen to reflect a “year of new ideas.”

The Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation

* * *

Twitteren | To Twitter, or tweet.

The Dutch language association Onze Taal

* * *

Ontvrienden | The Dutch for “unfriend.”
Hypotheekleed | The Dutch for “mortgage misery.”
Zeilmeisje | Literally, “sailing girl” – a reference to the would-be round the world solo sailor Laura Dekkers.
Mexicaanse Griep | Swine flu.

The Dutch Van Dale dictionary group and De Pers newspaper

* * *

Tweet | To send a message via Twitter.

SFGate

* * *

Vampire Squid | Matt Taibbi’s memorable description of Goldman Sachs, in Rolling Stone.
Hacktivism | Hacker activism.
Slacktivism | Slacker activism.
Sexting | Explicit text messaging.
Unfriend | To end a friendship on a social networking site.
Zombie Bank | A financial institution kept alive only via government funding.
Staycation | A stay-at-home holiday.

Forbes India
Words of the 2000s

Global Warming | The climate crisis.
9/11 | The terrorist attacks.
Obama-| The name of the president when used as a root word or stem, such as in “Obamamania.”
Bailout| A rescue, of banks, etc., during the financial crisis.
Evacuee/refugee | As applied to Hurricane Katrina survivors.

The top five words selected by The Global Language Monitor

* * *

Bling | Ostentatious displays of fortune and flash.
Chav | A derogatory social label usually applied to the white underclass.
Slumdog | The children of Mumbai’s slums; after the movie “Slumdog Millionaire.”
WAG | Wives and Girlfriends (of star British soccer players).

Some terms selected by the BBC

* * *

Cougar | Older women on the prowl for younger men.
Glamping | Glamorous camping.
Helicopter Mom | A mother constantly hovering over her children.
Meh | An expression of apathy.

Some of the terms selected by Adam Jacot de Boinod for The Guardian

* * *

9/11 | The attacks of September 11.
iPod | Apple’s ubiquitous MP3 player.
Friend | In the social networking sense.
Blog | A weblog.
Carbon | Presumably, because of carbon trading, footprints, usage, &c.

The National Post, Canada

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It happens all too often in the world of translation that people expect the translator to act as author, editor, copy editor, and proofreader all in one–on a deadline of just a day or two. Nothing irritates me more than a client with that assumption–particular translation agencies, whose job I firmly believe is to provide the added value of QA and copy flow to justify their markups.

Click here to read the complete story.

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We all love rap, but let’s face it, some of you are too white and/or too uncool to really understand the lyrics to some of your favorite hip-hop songs. Luckily, we’ve put together a new column to help you out.

Here is our first installment, translating the Youngbloodz song, “85 South”, featuring Big Boi from Outkast.

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The Across Personal Edition is the standalone application developed by Across and offers full translation functionality, particularly for freelance translators.
The application assists you in re-using contents, controlling processes, and ensuring a high quality level. Thus, it speeds up the delivery of high-quality foreign-language contents to your customers and significantly reduces your own translation workload.

Features of the Across Personal Edition include:

* crossTank - the translation memory; the key to better translations for less money
* crossTerm - the terminology system; as a central platform for all corporate language resources
* crossDesk - the multi-format editor; for efficient translation processes independent of document format and its peculiarities
* crossSearch - the research tool that provides seamless connection to terminology resources on the Internet
* crossCheck - the quality management module that assures the quality of your translations

Anaphraseus is an OpenOffice.org macro set available as an OpenOffice.org extension or a standalone document.
It is a CAT (Computer Aided Translation) tool for creating, managing and using bilingual Translation Memories in any languages.
Originally, Anaphraseus was developed to work with the Wordfast Translation Memory format, but it can also export/import files in the Unicode UTF-16LE Translation Memory Exchange (TMX) format.

Its main features:
* Text Segmentation
* Terminology Recognition
* Inexact (Fuzzy) search in Translation Memory
* Unicode UTF-16LE TMX Export/Import
* Plain text and Unicode UTF-16LE TM, Glossary
* User Glossary
* OpenOffice.org Extension
* Ready for localisation in any language

Autshumato Integrated Translation Environment (ITE) is a free computer aided translation application. It provides a single translation environment that contains translation memory, machine translation and a glossary to facilitate the translation process.

Although Autshumato ITE is specifically developed for the eleven official South African languages, it is in essence language independent, and can be adapted for translating between any language pair. Various existing open source components are utilised in Autshumato. These include the OpenOffice.org office suite, OmegaT® Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tool and the Moses Machine Translation System. Autshumato ITE is implemented in the Java programming language, supports open file standards and is licensed under the GPL.

EsperantiloTM - Translation Memory program for translators

EspernatiloTM is a program for translators, which facilitates the translation of papers by using translation memory. The program supports many formats as HTML, OpenOffice, XML, MS Word (partly) and can use exchange formats TMX and XLIFF. EsperantiloTM runs on Windows and Linux, is easily installable and offers an easy and rich user interface. It is a free program according to GPL a license.
Features of the program

EsperantiloTM is split off of program Esperantilo. The program Esperantilo is programmed for Esperantists first. It contains dictionaries, machine translation from Esperanto language and grammar checker. EsperantiloTM contains only one this part of program Esperantilo, which is interesting for translators of any language pair. EsperantiloTM is smaller and easier for use.

* Easy installation
* Powerful fast translation memory, which can manage huge amount of sentences
* Supports formats: OpenOffice, HTML, a pure text and MS Word (only on Windows with installed MS Word a program)
* collaborate with another translation programs is possible with TMX and XLIFF format
* Editor for translation memory

MT2007 offers the following:

* Translation Memory
* Machine Translation (Google online translator)
* 21 dictionaries, including several specialized ones
* Access to Multitran online dictionary from MT2007 interface (www.multitran.ru)
* Ability to create user segments
* Ability to work with tags

As for now, each project can have only one source file. A project cannot work with several source files. The following formats of source files are supported: MS Word 2007 docx, docm, MS Word 2003 xml files, TMX files. Source files undergo direct parsing.

OmegaT is a free translation memory application written in Java. It is a tool intended for professional translators. It does not translate for you! (Software that does this is called “machine translation”, and you will have to look elsewhere for it.) OmegaT has the following features:

* Fuzzy matching

* Match propagation

* Simultaneous processing of multiple-file projects

* Simultaneous use of multiple translation memories

* External glossaries

* Document file formats include: XHTML and HTML; Microsoft Office 2007 XML; OpenOffice.org/StarOffice; XLIFF (Okapi); MediaWiki (Wikipedia); Plain text

* Unicode (UTF-8) support: can be used with non-Latin alphabets

* Support for right-to-left languages

* Compatible with other translation memory applications (TMX)

OmegaT+, a computer aided/assisted translation (CAT)/machine aided human translation(MAHT) tool, has many of the good features that users expect in a translation tool (translation memory, full and partial matches, glossary function, search engine, support for various document types, translation projects) presented in a straight forward manner that is simple and easy to use.

Status: OmegaT+ 1.0 is in development

Development version 1.0.M2.3 is available. This is the second in a series of milestones that will culminate in a much improved translation tool. This version has been tested over a long period of time on real translation jobs. Some features are still missing, but it has proven to be reliable and more features are in development.

Development version M3 is in planning. Minimal improvements to expect are: spell checking and fast opening of projects.

OmegaT+ 1.0 (stable) will include many new and improved features. The current development version already has a new user interface, sentence segmentation, and other expected functionality. A large effort is being put into revamping the underlying software architecture due to poor design from the legacy code. This will ensure that the application is more reliable, robust, and ready for future enhancements. Specific features and enhancements will be announced as the project proceeds.

Transolution is a Computer Aided Translation (CAT) suite supporting the XLIFF standard. It provides the open source community with features and concepts that have been used by commercial offerings for years to improve translation efficiency and quality. The suite is modular to make it flexible and provides a XLIFF Editor, translation memory engine and filters to convert different formats to and from XLIFF. The use of XLIFF means that almost any content can be localized as long as there is a filter for it (XML, SGML, PO, RTF,StarOffice/OpenOffice).
XLIFF Editor

A versatile translation editor for XLIFF files. It aims to provide translators with professional quality editor for both documentation and software. Features tag protection and interactive Translation Memory.
Highlights

* Versatile, can be used for both software and documentation
* Sentence segmentation
* Tag protection
* Interactive Translation Memory
* File format based on XLIFF standard
* Platform independent
* Open source (GPL License)

The XLIFF editor is especially useful when the content to be translated contains tags and placeholders. It aids the translator so tags are protected and only allow translatable content to be changed.

WordFisher’s main features

* Translation Project management - WordFisher presents a simplified TM-like environment for the translator. Automatically creates a simple folder and file structure for managing the project. Indexes documents, and utilizes the indexes to synchronize source and target files, as well as to navigate in the project. Several search and replace functions have been added to enhance the translator’s productivity. It can create a bilingual table containing the matching sentence pairs from the source and target files. The translator can collect these tables for future reference and use them as his translation memory. These tables can later be read into any full-featured TM program.
* Glossary management - You can add new entries to glossaries without leaving the document you are working on. With the help of WordFisher’s Quick Alignment and Glossary Builder modules, you can easily build glossaries by aligning a document and its translation and selecting the corresponding terms.
* Enhanced Find function - You can search in user-defined groups of files, using logical operators with two search strings.
* Enhanced Replace function - You can replace strings in one or more files. Replacement operations and options may be logged and they can be re-used again to pre-translate other files. This is a built-in function in the translation project management module.
* Alignment - You can align a document and its translation on screen.You can synchronize the files at any time while working on them. The module offers Synchronized scrolling as well. In addition, WordFisher has its own Aligner module to create a translation memory corpus from old translations.
* Consistency Check - This unique feature enables translators and agencies to check in a group of aligned files whether the required translations were used in a project consistently or not.
* Trados support - WordFisher can convert its translation corpus into Trados readable format.

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