翻訳が依頼される場合、特にマニュアル関連文章では、お客さんが既に何かの商品を輸出の為に英文のマニュアルを作成しているから、依頼の場合「本当の原文＝日本語」ではなく英語からドイツ語への翻訳になる。
しかし、その「英語」は取り分け素晴らしい。幾つからの例をあげましょう。
• "Position of the transport"
• "Information behavior"
• "When the Information sound occurs, XXX performs the following behavior."
• "displays the screen for checking the message."
• "To prevent infection, disposable product is a single-use."
さて、翻訳者は「翻訳作業」を行っているとき、特に翻訳会社が「忠実」の訳文を要求している際、原文を持ってそのまま他の言語に移し替える。上記の例を「そのまま」ドイツ語に翻訳すると全く分からない戯言になってしまう。
しかし、「原文」をちゃんと意味の通る文章にするのは「翻訳」ではなく、copywriting, writing, creation になる。作業の内容が異なるし、本来それに支払われる値段も異なる筈だ！！！
過去+30年の翻訳している間、依頼主からそういう余計な作業は別当に払う・・・ 聞いた事ない夢の世界だ。
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
7/13/2016
12/10/2013
Translation - publishing
Now I am about to publish my third ebook, this one in English, listing a few personal views about why I think the Japanese acupuncture is better suited for the world population than the Chinese "authentic" style. Hopefully, it will go online in about 2 weeks.
It will surely make me a lot of enemies. If I should disappear suddenly in the middle of the night ... try asking the NSA and their hit squads, the newly formed Japanese copy of that wonderful agency, the Japanese NSC, or maybe the Chinese mafia, scared to death of people expressing opinions not meeting the standardized party line ...
After writing these four books, I definitely feel, that formulating one's own ideas is more interesting than converting somebody elses ideas into another language.
Although none of my books has really sold, the ebooks do not sell at all, I am planning to work on three more. My next target is the translation of a book by a Zen priest who I met shortly after my arrival in Japan. An encounter that changed my life.
2/22/2012
misunderstandings ...
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| Image via Wikipedia |
For example, the written language uses four different means to graphically express the spoken word: 1) Chinese characters, 2) TWO forms of Japanese alphabet = Hiragana and Katakana and the Latin alphabet. In particular the Japanese alphabets may sometimes cause confusion, because they render individual sounds where apart from the five vowels ALL other sounds are expressed in an alphabetic expression by TWO letters: a consonant and a vowel. Like
ka, sa, ta, na ...
The second of the mentioned alphabets is used MOSTLY for writing foreign words. Because of the additional vowels you hear as a foreigner, you may sometimes "mistake" what you really hear for something else.
For example, I remember when I first heard the word "windbreaker" = meaning a piece of clothing.
I was sort of stunned, because I could not for the life of me figure out, why people would like to "break windows".
THAT is how I recognized the spoken word with the additional vowels: "window breaker" ...
It took some explaining, but I finally got it.
1/31/2012
CAT tools - are they really helpful???
Last spring I bought one CAT tool (memoQ) and although I it tried many times already on different files, so far it has proven "helpful" in just ONE case. Everything else has been trouble!
Most probably this is because I am just too stupid, but I suspect some more "basic" reasons too.
For example:
I get a Word file for partial translation = meaning the file contains German, English and Japanese text, of which only the Japanese portions scattered throughout the document need to be translated.
1) I have to import the file.
2) Select all German/English text portions and copy them into the target segement.
3) Translate a few segments, want to take a break or continue working somewhere else.
4) Attempt BACKUP the "project".
=> Get error messages that tell me, I cannot do that. The reasons elude me.
* In fall of last year someone took remote control of my computer to resolve similar problems with an Excel file, and commented: "Oh, that is a "known issue" = bug. I will try to make the developers fix this."
5) Attempt to "export" the active document, which still contains a few hundred untranslated segments, fails too. Error message:
"At least one of the documents you are trying to export contains errors than prevent memoQ from exporting the document.
Do you wish to resolve these errors now?" Yes ->
6) Results, naturally, a very long list of items/segments, where the "error" is:
"Too few memoQ {tags} in target segment"
This is a matter of course too, since I have yet done anything with those segments!
The customer support tells me:
"It is not possible to simply ignore all the tag errors in memoQ, and export a monolingual document in it's original format, as the missing tags would make that impossible."
7) "Export bilingual" sort of "works" = it gives me a 2-column, intricately interlaced and completely garbled rtf file in which I would have to search and than manually copy each and every already translated segment to the orginal Word file. (Since memoQ cannot handle ODF files, I am also stuck with Word.)
Well, THAT does not make ANY sense. In that case I would be a lot better off using the original file from the beginning and forget about memoQ altogether.
Actually, that was the idea when I tried to "export" the document.
So, with the mentioned ONE SINGLE exception I ALWAYS get the some (or all) of the following problems
* Software cannot import original file
* Software cannot export imported file
* Software cannot "backup" the project
* In order to work on the designated text, I have to work on ALL OTHER text too.* The work put into a file only half finished apparently cannot be recovered be recovered in any sensible/practical way.
* I always MANUALLY have to tell memoQ, that it should ignore various things I would NEVER have to care about working with an ordinary (Word/text) file. There I would for example just a date/number and that's it. In memoQ I am confronted with the need to check "number format", verify numbers, insert tags etc. etc.
What in a word processor is for example TWO keystrokes (for example "10") may well need to required 10 or more "clicks" to get the same thing done!
That is FIVE TIMES MORE work!
This kind of software is supposed to "increase productivity" and make the process of translation easier and more efficient. THAT is not my experience. It makes the translation work more difficult, time-consuming and labor intensive and thus DEFINITELY REDUCES productivity.
Maybe you need very special documents to begin with?
For example during translation of a Japanese patent (in particular the claims) the order in which the individual portions of the sentence are arranged in Japanese differs significantly from for example English or German. So, the "alignment" of segments like "A-A", "B-B", "C-C" etc. does not work. It needs to be "A-C", "B-B", "A-C" or something like that.
I could not yet find out, if the (any) CAT tool would be able to handle that in any labor-easing form ...
But, as I already said, I am probably must too stupid.
Most probably this is because I am just too stupid, but I suspect some more "basic" reasons too.
For example:
I get a Word file for partial translation = meaning the file contains German, English and Japanese text, of which only the Japanese portions scattered throughout the document need to be translated.
1) I have to import the file.
2) Select all German/English text portions and copy them into the target segement.
3) Translate a few segments, want to take a break or continue working somewhere else.
4) Attempt BACKUP the "project".
=> Get error messages that tell me, I cannot do that. The reasons elude me.
* In fall of last year someone took remote control of my computer to resolve similar problems with an Excel file, and commented: "Oh, that is a "known issue" = bug. I will try to make the developers fix this."
5) Attempt to "export" the active document, which still contains a few hundred untranslated segments, fails too. Error message:
"At least one of the documents you are trying to export contains errors than prevent memoQ from exporting the document.
Do you wish to resolve these errors now?" Yes ->
6) Results, naturally, a very long list of items/segments, where the "error" is:
"Too few memoQ {tags} in target segment"
This is a matter of course too, since I have yet done anything with those segments!
The customer support tells me:
"It is not possible to simply ignore all the tag errors in memoQ, and export a monolingual document in it's original format, as the missing tags would make that impossible."
7) "Export bilingual" sort of "works" = it gives me a 2-column, intricately interlaced and completely garbled rtf file in which I would have to search and than manually copy each and every already translated segment to the orginal Word file. (Since memoQ cannot handle ODF files, I am also stuck with Word.)
Well, THAT does not make ANY sense. In that case I would be a lot better off using the original file from the beginning and forget about memoQ altogether.
Actually, that was the idea when I tried to "export" the document.
So, with the mentioned ONE SINGLE exception I ALWAYS get the some (or all) of the following problems
* Software cannot import original file
* Software cannot export imported file
* Software cannot "backup" the project
* In order to work on the designated text, I have to work on ALL OTHER text too.* The work put into a file only half finished apparently cannot be recovered be recovered in any sensible/practical way.
* I always MANUALLY have to tell memoQ, that it should ignore various things I would NEVER have to care about working with an ordinary (Word/text) file. There I would for example just a date/number and that's it. In memoQ I am confronted with the need to check "number format", verify numbers, insert tags etc. etc.
What in a word processor is for example TWO keystrokes (for example "10") may well need to required 10 or more "clicks" to get the same thing done!
That is FIVE TIMES MORE work!
This kind of software is supposed to "increase productivity" and make the process of translation easier and more efficient. THAT is not my experience. It makes the translation work more difficult, time-consuming and labor intensive and thus DEFINITELY REDUCES productivity.
Maybe you need very special documents to begin with?
For example during translation of a Japanese patent (in particular the claims) the order in which the individual portions of the sentence are arranged in Japanese differs significantly from for example English or German. So, the "alignment" of segments like "A-A", "B-B", "C-C" etc. does not work. It needs to be "A-C", "B-B", "A-C" or something like that.
I could not yet find out, if the (any) CAT tool would be able to handle that in any labor-easing form ...
But, as I already said, I am probably must too stupid.
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