Let me preface this by saying that this is probably not a return to regular updates. Having said that, I've been thinking about the blog lately and this post has been assembling itself in my head at odd moments over the past week or so.
One of the biggest things to happen since my last post is that I went to IJET-23 in Hiroshima, which was also one of the things that I planned to do this year. I'm really happy I went, among other things it rekindled my love of Japan and seeing and talking to so many other translators inspired me to become a better translator, or at least try to.
I met a lot of interesting people there, I even remember some of their names. Some of them I recognised from blogs or mailing lists (one of them even recognised me and said she read my blog, I was so stunned that I was speechless) and some of them I had never heard of but was glad to have met all the same. I even met people who had less experience than me, I knew they had to be out there but I still didn't expect it.
One of the most interesting sessions was a workshop where we went through a translation of a short document; it was less than a page. What fascinated me was how free some of the translations were. I tend to be a fairly literal translator, partly by training (we were encouraged towards being as close to the text as possible to prepare for the NAATI exams), partly because of the work I do (fairly technical stuff mostly) and partly by nature. For me inserting a subject or dividing a sentence can be a big issue. A good example of this is the title of the text we looked at which was about Twitter and face-to-face communication. The title was 'PhoneとFace', which I would probably have translated as 'Phone and Face', literal as that may be. But the hands-down best translation was 'Tweet or Meet', which is absolutely brilliant and I wish I'd thought of it. It was clever, natural and perfectly suited the article. What more could you want?
I also attended a session on CAT tools, which was actually one of the reasons I wanted to go to this particular IJET. Despite my earlier protestations, I had decided that a CAT tool was probably a worthwhile investment and I thought it might be good to know a little about what I was buying. Honestly, they all seemed to have the same basic features, but in the end, I chose Deja Vu, mostly because one of the speakers recommended it. I also spoke to some other people who recommended it and I didn't really hear anything bad about it.
So far, I'm reasonably happy with it. It does everything it's supposed to and it's fairly easy to use. One point that really stood out for me was that when it presents you with a fuzzy match it highlights the differences that are in your source text, which is very helpful. Another feature I liked was that if the only difference between a text was a number, for example diagram titles that were the same but had different figure numbers, the program would automatically change the numbers. I'm not sure if this works with dates though. For all I know, these are standard in most programs but I still think they're cool.
I bought the USB dongle with the program. This means that I just plug in the USB stick rather than using a registration code and if I want to upgrade my computer it's simply a matter of moving the USB stick, rather than deregistering from one computer and reregistering on another.
I have had some teething troubles, lest you think it has all been sunshine and puppies, but I'm hesitant to say anything because I haven't read the manual or looked at the training, which they provide for free. If I had done so, I may have had fewer issues.
One of the reasons that I bought Deja Vu was because I had signed a contract with an agency and I was expecting a lot of repetition in the work they sent me (I won't name the agency because I'm about to complain about something that is not really their fault). Part of the confidentiality agreement they signed in relation to the contract I was hired for means they want me to work over a remote connection to their server and I can't use my CAT tool for the job I had in mind when I bought it. I'll let that sink in for a moment. Furthermore, I can't copy and paste from their system so I can't copy to a new document to import into Deja Vu. I also can't print out the document, which is very annoying. Now, I didn't want to translate into a document over the remote connection because a) the lag was terrible, only about a second but that's bad enough, and b) I'm a little self-conscious about my work, especially while it's still in progress and I don't like people to see it until I'm done. This meant that I translated into a document on my computer only to discover that I can't copy and paste to their system either and I had to type out the whole thing in their system, one of the things I'd been hoping to avoid. Now, I'm not blaming them (that's why I haven't named them). I understand why things are the way they are and if I'd had the time I probably could have found a better way of doing things, but it's annoying all the same.
Finally, I'm not sure when I'll post again. Regular updates are good in that they give me practice in trying to produce something readable in a deadline but if I'm forcing myself to write something then I suspect you (not you personally, I mean readers in general) would be forcing yourself to read it. So, at the minute, I haven't decided on what will happen, although I have had an idea for a future post.
tl;dr version, I went to IJET; it was good. I bought Deja Vu, a CAT tool; so far, so good. I can't use it for one of the projects I had in mind when I bought it; not good. There will probably be future posts, but I don't know when or how far apart; up to you (and this time I do mean you personally) whether this is good or not.
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