the proceedings of cabinet beezer

Douglas CARNALL meets Olivier BRETON at the Salon d'Entrepreneurs in Nantes, 21 November 2012

Being an auto-entrepreneur means invitations to various business seminars and fairs regularly arrive by post and email. I’m somewhat allergic to “business” per se, but the conventional wisdom is that finding direct clients is the key to success as a translator. And it’s quite fun to don a suit and hustle round some exhibition booths indulging in the pleasant game of business card exchange.
I went to a couple of talks to keep my ear in. I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know the French talent for obscuring any topic behind a palisade of incomprehensible acronyms has not diminished. If I relocate to Sarthe (72) I can get my rent subsidised for a couple of years, and various loans at very favourable interest rates. If I employ someone who’s been unemployed for a long time, a troubled inner city youth, a disabled person, or can represent my activity as good for the environment, ditto. All this seems very sensible policy, but it’s not really my principal concern.
As I suspected, most of the businesses and organisations represented were either squarely parochial or long-established multinationals: in general the former have little need for language services and the latter are already doing business with a translation house of commensurate scale.
I talked to a few software providers about my own requirements for billing software that supports multiple currencies (answer: that’s gonna cost ya), received an offer from Loire-Atlantique’s premier business newsletter should I wish to do direct mail marketing, agreed to be interviewed by some business students about being “an entrepreneur,” and met a lovely booth rep who aspires to be a UN conference interpreter. All very pleasant and sociable, but I was beginning to be a little disheartened to not even have found one new client, when I ran into Olivier Breton (pictured). That bike of his looks wacky, but in fact it’s a very comfortable riding position (I tried it). And he needs some T&Cs translating into English. Hoorah!

I’m in rather a good mood with my technology today, after the recent hassles. The new laserwriter installed with only the minimum of configuration difficulty yesterday, and has been tested connected directly to the laptop and to the network. My recent travails with an update to Ubuntu 11.04 are over: I decided to revert to 10.10 for the time being, and normal service has been restored after several hours of mostly straightforward effort.

I’m now running LibreOffice 3.3.2 which is eight months newer than the default Ubuntu 10.10 install, and will hopefully prove more stable than its predecessor. Although I’m using Firefox 3.6.17 as I write this, I’m finding Chromium 11 very nice to use, especially in the limited screen real estate of the netbook: it’s definitely quicker than Firefox 3.x. I had a brief encounter with Firefox 4.0.1 and it did seem brisker, but I’ve also read comments that it’s a still a bit beta-ish round the edges, so I’m going to hold off the install for now.

And as you’re reading this, you’ll see that I’m finally getting round to hacking in WordPress: the import of the The Proceedings of Cabinet Beezer from blogger.com was a real treat: a three-step click-click-click of a most wondrous kind.

The next step is to bi-lingualise the site, and it looks like there are various templates and plugins out there that should help considerably, e.g. qTranslate, so look out!

I’m a happy Ubuntu user, but the reality is that there are still a lot of Word files flying around in the commercial environment. A combination of Open Office and OmegaT seems to handle them quite well, but on my latest job I experienced a number of formatting difficulties that had to be corrected manually, which was both time-consuming and introduced a new potential source for error.

Open Office crashed on me recently, just as I was tweaking a final .docx file before sending it off. Its automated recovery process then recovered the file to a previous version, causing errors to be reintroduced that had already been corrected in a proofing stage. This was vexing, and required another round of corrections.

One obvious way to avoid such problems in future would be to use the industry standard proprietary solutions. I priced this today: Microsoft Office plus SDL Trados Studio 2009 would be at least 650 euros, a considerable overhead given prevailing market rates for translation.

The decision for the time being is to upgrade to the latest and greatest LibreOffice, and persist with OmegaT, but it’s under review. Version control problems caused by software crashes are most unwelcome.

I regularly update a list of significant projects on my professional profile at Proz.com. I recently paid for full membership to the site in order to bid for a job going by within my fields of interest: and landed it! Which was pleasing. The short test translation of 50 French words translated straight-forwardly into 38 words in English. The site announced ten bids for the job when I went back to look a few hours later, but it was my bid that received a return offer towards the end of the afternoon last Tuesday.

The work required the translation from the French to English of several abstracts and full papers for a specialist healthcare conference to be held later this year. Of the full papers, the longer was fully within the scope of my professional interests in health care and information technology; the other had some straight-forward clinical material, combined with some technical detail in a subject that I have to confess I had contemplated only in the most superficial way in the past.

The search for background information online to assist in my comprehension of this arcana was necessarily brisk, as the first tranche of the delivery had a deadline less than forty eight hours away. That slight hump surmounted, the deadline was easily met.

The longer paper, due last, has had its moments, as my dear old Aunt Margaret used to say, but I now have the comfortable satisfaction of a fair copy of the final draft circulating in-house for minor corrections fully 24 hours before I had initially planned to send it off, and 36 hours inside the deadline.

All my work so far has come from personal contacts, but it’s not enough to live on. Sites such as proz.com and translatorscafe offer the prospect of getting work from around the world, but it’s not so easy: there are 15,478 translators offering my language pair on proz.com for example. I am buried in a heap of translators, many much more qualified than I, and with decades of experience. No fewer than 7313 claim competence in medical translation. As on all search engines, the question of ranking is key.
There are two obvious ways to increase this ranking: one is to cough up the cash (114 euros/year) to join the site; this would reduce my competitors to a mere 978 others. The other way is to answer so-called KudoZ questions: tricky questions of terminology asked online by other translators. I tune in to this every day using an RSS feed, but they are indeed tricky. When I do know the answer, I have mostly found that the question has already been answered by someone else. As this means that their answer is more likely to have been agreed by peers coming later to the question, it is they who get the points. Still, this morning I received an email informing me of my first four points. Hooray! But some of my colleagues have thousands… ulp!

So far, work’s been arriving through local networks rather than online. Recent efforts: 4 hours of coaching for an academic bound across the Atlantic to give a talk at a conference in Florida, editing a major paper in bio-inspired robotics for an international journal, and a fire notice. The latter was the trickiest, and payment for that will be only in kind, but it was also quite fun.

I have updated my CV and registered with proz.com and translatorscafe.com. I’ve sent off a few responses to job offers posted there, if they seem relevant to my interests, but so far I’ve had only one response, which merely indicated they were keeping my CV on file. There’s not so much work out there, and where the rate negotiations are opened by the potential client, rates of about $0.04-0.05 seem prevalent, so I guess I’m always losing the auctions. That’s fine though: I haven’t seen any jobs going there by that are so interesting I’d think about doing them for free: most often it’s dismal financial documents, or bizarrely obscure software manuals.

The next step is to translate all this material I have assembled in English into something coherent in French. Once that is done I’ll contact local agencies, and some contacts I have at the medical faculty. I have an idea for a seminar on using the internet for translation which should aid the development of relevant networks locally.