Ericsson France's award-winning blog

We're proud to be translating content for Ericsson France's award-winning corporate blog, which started life in June 2009 and has been extensively covered in the French trade press ever since. In December, the worldwide Ericsson marketing and communications community selected the blog for the annual Best Media Relations award. The bloggers at Ericsson France also presented at the recent Media Aces conference in France and wrote a guest piece including "10 golden rules for a social networker" at PR Conversations.

Is Jeromobot a hobgoblin?

Lifelong terminology evangelist Steve Dyson concedes that terminological consistency – one of the major selling points of translation environment tools – may be overrated after all. “For sizeable chunks of the translation industry, including translators of technical journalism and marketing materials, terminological consistency (TermCon) is culturally alien and stylistically unacceptable,” he says.

“TermCon receives little more than lip service from journalists writing in English and is often seen as a failing by journalists writing in other languages,” says Steve. In French journalism, for example, the quest for ‘elegant variation’ often takes precedence over the kind of ‘foolish consistency’ that translation memory tools tend to promote. “It’s another example of how technology can unleash powerful tools on people who simply don’t have the training, experience or cultural sensitivity to use them professionally.”

Steve will be running a workshop on translating technical journalism at the Tradulínguas conference in Lisbon in May. His 2007 paper on the same topic can be acccessed here.

2010: Year of the Purge

Jost Zetzsche, a leading proponent of translation environment tools (TeNTs), wrote an enlightening piece about his experience in Accurapid's Translation Journal last month.

As his personal translation memory grew and grew, Jost found its usefulness "seemed to decline rather than improve. Too much time had passed between the earlier projects and the current ones (...), language had changed and my skill levels had, too." Gradually, he found he was spending "a lot of time deleting or wading through useless suggestions from the TM." With the newer TeNTs offering subsegment as well as segment matching, the problems were getting even worse.

His conclusion? Gigantic vaults of bilingual data are fantastic as reference materials, "but I am just not sure about their value as translation memory data in the classic sense." My conclusion: this is the year to purge the dross building up in our own bilingual resources, such as wobbly source texts and translations the client didn't like (yes, this happens!). Our resources may be carefully vetted, but they're never vetted carefully enough!

And hats off to Jost Zetzsche for his realistic analysis in a world obsessed by the power of the crowd and the value of the terabyte.

You align it!

Terminotix, makers of the LogiTerm TM tool and (more to the point) the excellent alignment engine AlignFactory, launched this free web service a few months ago. It uses the same algorithms as AlignFactory, which will also be included with the 2010 update of LogiTerm.

There's probably no better alignment tool on the market. In the free version you can't edit the bitexts, but for rough-and-ready alignment it can't be beat.

And what happens to the files you just aligned on the Terminotix servers? Back in August when the service launched, the Canadian company's (excellent) customer service said "All files are deleted as soon as you close YouAlign. We will soon be indicating that procedure on the Web site so that our clients know what happens to the files." Sure enough, tucked away in the sign-up page, the privacy policy now says this in black and white, so there's every reason to trust them not to feed our confidential data into the mother of all translation memories... or sell it to Google!

That sinking feeling

French shipbuilder DCNS launched a spiffy new website last year, sourcing everything - from graphic design to translation - from the same full-service agency. It seems they have noticed some oddities in the English text (you know, that grey stuff in between the rich content). Better late than never. Rumour has it they're in the process of getting the copy fixed. But before they do, this photo caption for the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier, the jewel in the crown of the French fleet, needs to go on the record. I wonder how their Russian is?

A game-changing warship

A cutting-edge French warship sailed into St. Petersburg in November to show off its capabilities to potential buyers in the Russian Navy. Bruno Daffix, a spokesman for the French Defense Ministry's export and sales agency, described the ship as a "Swiss Army knife" of military ships - able to carry helicopters, land forces, hospitals or refugees, among other things, the Wall Street Journal reported. But critics of the potential deal in nations neighbouring Russia - such as Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic states - say it would dramatically increase the military threat from Russia, increasing tensions in some already difficult relations.

LOL: Naval defence can be fun too!

New-generation marketers for a new generation of procurement officers? This animated video was on show at DSEi to promote integrated topside design from Thales.

Israeli missile maker goes Bollywood

Engaging its customers with references to local culture, Rafael is making a break with some of the defence industry’s old-school paradigms, deemed overly serious by a new generation of marketing executives.

Punctuation makes a comeback

Lucy Kellaway's column in the FT suggests that speaking to people in a culturally appropriate way may have its merits after all...

Meanwhile the out-of-work French business school graduate who put himself on eBay got pretty well flamed for his presentation skills and trying to get a job with a CV full of grammatical errors.

Back in the blogosphere

This blog has existed off and on for seven years in blissful oblivion. The experiment continues! Here's one about Obama's oath of office and the trouble being a die-hard pedant can get you into. Maybe someone else would like to post some stuff here too. Let me know and I'll add you to the authors list.

Lottery buzz

This is where I stopped posting to the translation blog and started a teaser blog for the World Lottery Association, who loved it... and then fired me.

Acrobat document review just got easier

Anyone with the free Acrobat 7.0 Reader can add comments to pdf documents created with Acrobat 7.0 Professional. Replace text, correct typos, add notes, etc. and send it back! There's even a collaborative review function (a bit harder to set up) where several people can add comments to the same document... Agencies take note - it's time for a (paid) upgrade!

Will our world ever be safe?

Thales publishes a 32-page magazine twice a year for customers, industrial and commercial partners, the financial community, opinion formers, academics and the scientific community. "It's a magazine of real stature that communicates where technology and innovation is driving the business world," says Caspian, the London-based publishing company that produces it in English . And it's translated into French by us.

Scholarly searches

Also lurking behind the Google home page is Google Scholar, another chance to avoid the toxic wasteland by limiting searches to scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.

Read them the Patriot Act

Now available in pdf format online, the World Lottery Association's quarterly journal offers an inside view of the state lottery industry and how it is "rallying its forces around the world to rise to global challenges", i.e., protect state gaming monopolies from free market forces. As the US prepares its stand-off with offshore casinos at the WTO, the Patriot Act could provide a compelling argument for protection...

Let the library wars commence!

Google has struck a deal with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web, The New York Times reports. Now all we need is collective bargaining with copyright owners, something The Register doesn't think the privatised information scavengers of the web are in a position to do.

Avoiding the toxic wasteland

Barely a minute on the Wired website unearthed the little-known US government specific version of Google. Depending on your perspective, this could limit your search to just what the government wants you to read - or save time by avoiding what The Register (who are these guys?) calls a toxic wasteland of real-time noise.

United States to appeal WTO gambling report

The World Trade Organization has ruled against the United States in a cross-border gambling dispute brought by Antigua & Barbuda. The U.S. Trade Representative spokesman immediately issued a statement announcing the United States' intention to refer the "deeply flawed" decision to the WTO's Appellate Body.

The law of unintended consequences

Wired magazine on the world's biggest desalination plant, built to treat more than 35 billion gallons of cruddy, high-saline agricultural runoff per year. But the first step was to placate the Mexican farmers, whose crops were being poisoned by Colorado River water contaminated with runoff from Arizona farms. The fix: Keep the offending runoff out of the river, diverting it from the US side through a 53-mile canal into the Mexican desert. This took care of Mexico's complaints and ended up giving the country a free nature preserve - a wetland habitat now championed by environmental activists.

Technology doesn't make you less stupid...

...it just makes you stupid faster. In How Technology Failed in Iraq, the November issue of MIT's Technology Review recounts how even against a conventional enemy, the info wasn't getting to the people on the ground.