Study translation no more?

What a month July was. Here in the baking heat of eastern Alentejo in Portugal we did our best to save trees that have been part of a nine-year soil reclamation project, but extreme temperatures and UV levels claimed victory too often, leaving us to contemplate what alternative approaches this coming autumn might give our flora a better chance at life.

And in a few short months, university courses begin again. What changes can we expect there after two years of turmoil in the professions for which they hope to prepare students? With all the loose talk of how the term "translator" is of declining importance in language service professions, one might legitimately wonder what lies ahead at the wordface for the next generations.

Theologian Martin Schloemann tell us that Martin Luther didn't really say that thing about planting an apple tree today even if the world is certain to end tomorrow, but I consider it sound advice nonetheless and psychologically healthier than Melville's take on not giving up,

"...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee"

though the two takes are not mutually exclusive in a degraded professional landscape littered with the corpses of so many old campaigners in the wars for and on words, with cyborg corporatist hyenas fighting over scraps on trashlation heaps.

Many actions are called for in the resistance to the abusive parasites who have become endemic to language service landscapes. Simply helping confused people step logically and carefully through the minefield of choices for project platforms to meet their needs in translation and localization can be heroically useful. The TMSreq project from Gemino may be described as such; my introduction to an early version of it in late June was promising, and I am encouraged by the possibility of that experienced team engaging to help business clients make more suitable IT decisions for language assets, but some work is needed still on the English-language interface for Entscheidungstr?ger before the instruments can be used to full effect without a consultant's constant guiding hand. I hope to report further progress on this in months ahead.

My Apple Tree Mindset

One of the interesting authors I've followed lately is Veronica Llorca-Smith, author of The Lemon Tree Mindset and other small motivational works. Hers is an interesting story of adapting to unexpected, difficult circumstances during the COVID pandemic, and she's one of a double handful of people whom I track as I explore Substack as a platform for continuing my decades-long public efforts for professional education. But as an amateur orchardist on our four hectare Portuguese quinta, with a history of more than three decades planting, grafting, air layering and otherwise propagating fruit trees, I'm a little bothered by her favorite metaphor of when life gives you lemons, plant the seeds to grow some lemon trees.

As a child I often heard the mythologized story of "Johnny Appleseed", the nurseryman who was instrumental in introducing apple trees to large areas of the early American frontier. We kids had an image of him walking merrily down dirt roads, strewing seeds about, which later grew to produce fruits sustaining a hungry population migrating west.

The reality of tree growth from seed is a little different for apple trees, lemons, plums and many others. And expectations are important, as are plans for adapting to actual outcomes. Neither lemon seeds, nor apples seeds, nor plum seeds, nor avocados (four of my favorite fruits) grow true to type. Stick a seed in the ground, and you really don't know what you'll get. It kinda works that way with human children too. Not a bad thing usually. But not necessarily a palatable result. I've had many an apple or plum from seed-grown trees that tasted like sawdust.

But even tasteless fruits have their uses, and one never knows when some miracle like a Freiherr von Berlepsch apple might be the surprise awaiting that first bite.

Still, if one wants a particular, known flavor, the way to get there isn't to plant a seed and pray Demeter grant her random favor, but rather to graft an established type onto healthy stock, air layer, or nurture cuttings of good provenance in some way likely to form roots.

I'm taking all three approaches, and transplanting some assets in toto, in my explorations of Substack as a venue for think pieces, written tutorials, teaching videos and recorded webinars, university course support content and CPD experiments. Here are some of the highlights from this past month:

PDF files are a source of frequent frustration in the many roles they can play in language service projects, so I summarized a few of my experiences with them with the hope that some might find a bit of relief in their encounters with them.

Costing can be a challenge in the transnational world of language services, where I've often been asked for help by colleagues and corporates when they encounter unfamiliar methods of price calculation. This article gives some guidance and presents tools that may make interpreting or offering project prices in the customary forms of other countries.

It's been almost two years since memoQ introduced its troubled new format for translation memories for those who consider 10 million TUs on a 90-core server training LLMs to be business as usual. For the rest of us, there may be some things to think about as bugs persist and memoQ make the still dodgy format its default for new translation memories while planning to eliminate the familiar, proven classic format sometime next year.

memoQ term bases also got some attention in July

I shared updates of several of the tips from my old Teachable e-learning course on terminology management in memoQ, with more to follow.

And there were

New tips in the practical LiveDocs series

adding to contributions from the prior month:

I'm working toward an online course and webinars on the many possibilities of this unique corpus creation and management toolkit to leverage reference information in better ways in our translation and localization work. And there are another nine article drafts on LiveDocs in the queue to be published, with more in the Limbo of notes on half a dozen pocket-sized memo pads I carry around. (My plan is to release two articles on the memoQuickies Substack each week, though it usually ends up being more due to a backlog of hundreds of productivity topics I wrote about but often didn't get around to publishing in my days of 24/7 active translation madness. The main problem is finding time to decide what's up next as I deal with garden watering emergencies and recurring veterinary issues for goats, dogs and myriad poultry. Retirement's a bitch.)

Also... leading up to the memoQ Regex Assistant course

in September I've been publishing quite a number of articles, videos and examples on both the memoQuickies Substack and, in cases of matters that relate well to other tools, the Translation Tribulations Substack, covering regular expressions topics. My take on all that is different from most; while I can teach regex syntax, I don't consider it useful to do that in most cases, and I'm actually quite appalled at the insistence of many experts that your average translator, reviewer or project coordinator undertake the masochistic endeavor of mastering the creation of regex for work.

First of all, it's really not necessary... to reinvent the fucking wheel for the Nth time. Solutions to common problems in translation and localization are well known and available in excellent reference works, such as Anthony Rudd's cookbook. And I and others have distributed many other, often more sophisticated preformulated solutions as resources for memoQ and other tools and will continue to do so.

Library tools such as the memoQ Regex Assistant enable one to curate collections of useful expressions that can be managed with plain language names, labels and descriptions and applied easily to a host of challenges, with no expertise whatsoever in the syntax of regular expressions.

Moreover, knowing the "language" of regex is less important than understanding why it can be useful and where it can be applied productively in your work. That understanding, the communication of requirements, and the management of a regex library and other regex-based resources for translation and quality assurance are the main objectives of the upcoming course.

As much as possible, I want to take a "flipped classroom" approach, with participants and other interested parties having plenty of opportunity to read relevant background information and try a lot of things out themselves before joining the group discussions. It's my hope that this will reduce the shock of seeing material for the first time, and that we can spend more time on questions that will help everyone become more productive in real project routines.

All paid or comped subscribers of either the memoQuickies or Translation Tribulations Substacks will be invited to the course without charge. The subscription levels of Substack are a convenient way for me to handle enrollments for courses the way I feel I want to do them and to provide a less formal and more flexible way to interested parties to partake. So join us if you like.

What else is ahead?

That quality assurance course is still in planning, even has its own (still empty) subsection on the memoQuickies Substack. As I planned it and began to collect material, I realized that so much of it depended on content from other topics such as the Regex Assistant library course that I decided to get more of that content out to make things easier for a QA course. Same deal for participation as described above.

So that was the month that was in #xl8; see you again at the beginning of September!