Unknown said:

If your problem is you are using wysiwyg and not displaying any tags at all so you can't see whether or not you placed the correct colours in the target then I'd recommend you work with the tags showing.

Off-topic: Personally I would even vote for not allowing to turn off the tags at all... since this is causing SO MANY problems with translations being done by ignorant translators who freely remove tags, put them at completely wrong places, ignore differences between various types of tags, etc.

Hmmm, if police can take your driver's license, I vote for reporting such translators to some "police" which would be then deactivating their Studio licenses ;-) :-\

Off-topic: Personally I would even vote for not allowing to turn off the tags at all... since this is causing SO MANY problems with translations being done by ignorant translators who freely remove tags, put them at completely wrong places, ignore differences between various types of tags, etc.

I was saying the same since the very beginning of Studio. Unfortunately many of our colleagues do not have the slightest clue about fonts and about the fact, that in case of missing fonts these are simply substituted by something more or less similar, what causes extra problems.

Nonetheless, when showing tags also many people unfortunately do not think about what they do and place or remove spaces in a way, that the target documents contains multiple spaces or spaces before punctuation marks with no spaces between words at the same time.

IMHO unless we start educating translators of 21st century to understand, that this is a highly technical profession, where computer knowledge is not just some small added value, but plain necessity.

Unknown said:

Off-topic: Personally I would even vote for not allowing to turn off the tags at all... since this is causing SO MANY problems with translations being done by ignorant translators who freely remove tags, put them at completely wrong places, ignore differences between various types of tags, etc.

You certainly have a way with words Evzen! Before I entered this industry I thought I was reasonably savvy as a user of technology... then I discovered SDLX and Trados 2006 and was amazed by how much I didn't know, and still don't.  Learning the ins and outs of these tools is no joke and most translators are linguists not computer experts.  So I wouldn't be so hard on any translator who struggled with the concepts and the importance of handling tags... often they are more of a nuisance!!

However I tend to agree with you to some extent, particularly over the defaults because I think the whole wysiwyg approach as default is wrong.  I like it for proof reading after the translation is complete, or even as an easy toggle as you work, but I think the default should be plain text showing all tags and in my opinion Tag ID mode as opposed to showing the contents of the tags which more often than not are meaningless anyway.

I think the default should be plain text showing all tags and in my opinion Tag ID mode as opposed to showing the contents of the tags which more often than not are meaningless anyway.

Well, not so meaningless - or most of tags I see are very meaningful. And I show always full tag text, no formatting.

As for linguists and not computer experts - well, this was once, several years ago. When I started back in 1990 this might have applied. But nowadays a translator may not only be a linguist, this is simply not enough. I far to often have to read "we are only (just) linguists" as an excuse for not being able to properly unzip a file, to place it in a folder in your computer, where you will find the file anytime and with no problem, to manage your files & folders and all the stuff we just MUST know, because computer is our main tool!

You`re an engineer like myself. Now imagine you take your car to the garage and tell them, that it has shown you an error message and the steering does not work properly. But the guy there, instead of dealing properly with this error message, would ask YOU to help him in resolving the problem. Or the plumber you asked to mount your new vales at your home would come with his brand new Makita drilling machine and ask you to explain him how it works.
Now linguists expect their customers not to bother them with all the tool stuf, they only want to translate? But our tool is the computer and it is not customers business to explain it to us. So why so many people think, they do not need to learn how to use computer?

Sorry, but I have next to zero understanding for such attitude.

Hi Jerzy,

I'm pretty sure I deal with a wider variety of translators than many, and I can tell you that you are still very much in a minority.  Most are not as technical as you and many, for perfectly valid reasons, will never become this way either.  Should I judge a translator on the basis of their ability to handle the technicalities of their tools or their ability to provide a good translation?  I think the latter.  I would also never use the phrase "only linguists" because I think any monkey can learn how to use the tools, but a language is much more.

I think we have a lot to answer for in the way we deliver the tools and the defaults we use.  The pressure to make things appear easy is so high that we often make serious mistakes in removing the complexity on the surface so that when things do go wrong it's even harder to understand why.  I agree with you completely that it's important to understand as much as you can about the tools you use, but translators come from all walks of life.  Many use the tools because they have to rather than because they want to... in fact I'd say a surprisingly high number feel this way.  This doesn't mean they shouldn't be in the profession... it means we need to do a better job of educating them and helping them along the way.

Your car and plumber analogy is flawed if the client expects the translator to use the tools.  The end delivery is a quality translation and this is something I would not expect the translator to ask the client to help with.  Asking for help with the tools in this scenario is perfectly acceptable.

But enough with analogies... the translator would definitely benefit from learning the ins and outs of their tools, and I think most try to.  But to expect them all to reach the level of sophistication you have is quite another.

Regards

Paul

Dear Paul

Should I judge a translator on the basis of their ability to handle the technicalities of their tools or their ability to provide a good translation?

On both methinks. As in the quite old series which used to appear on TV years ago "Hose and carriage are like love and marriage - you can't have one without the other". Nowadays it is next to impossible to deliver a high quality translation without using tools. And you cannot deliver high quality translation by just typing the text in that window in a certain tool. This won't work - the process is far too complicated to allow to reduce quality only to the linguistic part of the job. A linguistically perfect translation provided using a typewriter is useless, and such one provided in Word limits its usability to a very high extent. Of course not all parts of translation industry must use tools, but many - and in my personal opinion the majority of modern translators simply has to use tools, as otherwise translating the variety of formats wouldn't even be thinkable.

IMHO the problem starts with the education. Linguists are not told what it will mean to be a translator. From what I see this is the main reason for cross-comers like myself to be successful translators even without linguistic background. This is not only my personal observation, but many people do share this feeling - non-linguists entering the profession adapt to use tools in natural way and do not bother with being "only linguists". They just step into this job and take tools for granted. And the same must apply to linguists of 21st century.

The future will not bring the year 1990 back, when translation was 90% linguistic. In the future even more tools will emerge and customers will be as disoriented as we may now be with all the tools growing faster than mushrooms after a summer rain. When I started there were some tools, all offline. Now we have some major offline tools, and then a variety of cloud-based tools. And as this wouldn't be enough, many customers develop their own tools, which are perceived by their IT guys to be just perfect for the desired purpose, but are pain in somewhere to work with. Within the last 8 years from the first release of Studio back in 2009 the translation world has changed in much more ways, than in the years 1990-2009. And I am certain the changes were even more quick and dramatic within the last 2 or 3 years. Now we can simply say, that's a pity and translators are poor linguists and cannot cope with this development - but then they're lost. So either they clench their teeth and learn or get lost. There will be no market for "high quality translations" without tools in only few years. Not only because working without tools will not be possible, but also because of the definition the quality. In the end of the day it is the customer who decides what is high quality. I see it that way: quality is the ability to fulfill the customer needs. If they ask you for a translation of a very urgent letter and request a delivery within an hour, so "best quality" in this terms is to deliver understandable text before one hour instead of delivering a text which might be linguistically much better, but will be ready by tomorrow morning.

To come back to my analogies - this is nothing else as when the customer gives you his files for translation and expects you to deliver same files with not damaged formatting, but in a different language. He does not care about how do you do that - he wants his files back. And this is the job of the translator to understand how to process the files. If not on his/her own, then together with someone - but in the end a usage of a tool will be necessary.

Best regards, Jerzy

Unknown said:

Should I judge a translator on the basis of their ability to handle the technicalities of their tools or their ability to provide a good translation?  I think the latter.

Nope, never. A lingustically good translation is completely useless if the delivery is damaged technically (screwed tagging, crippled package, target files not exportable due to some screwup of the internal file stored in the SDLXLIFF, etc.). Translator is expected to deliver BOTH linguistic AND technical quality in the delivery. And so is expected to KNOW how to use the tool, simply because (s)he claims to have the knowledge of the tool.

Unknown said:

 I would also never use the phrase "only linguists" because I think any monkey can learn how to use the tools, but a language is much more.

Ohoho... I can show you quite a lot of such "monkeys" which, even after several years of using the tool, still don't get some elementary stuff. Monkeys can only repeat series of steps they were shown. But will NEVER actually THINK about what they do and WHY... therefore actually don't learn to "use the tool" (if you can feel the difference).

Unknown said:

The pressure to make things appear easy is so high

THAT is the problem - people push to "just" do this or that, without thinking about it. We seem to be very close to a moment when someone would seriously want to "just build a house" with a push of a button :(... And short-sighted managers (most probably because they are also as dumb as those wanting such things) promise these people that they will be able to do it...

Unknown said:

but translators come from all walks of life.  Many use the tools because they have to rather than because they want to...

So what?! Again, it's the same as driving the car... do they come to the authorities and say "I JUST want/need to drive, I do not want to learn how"?!

Unknown said:

This doesn't mean they shouldn't be in the profession...

Yes, it does mean exactly that. A carpenter not willing to learn to use a hammer or a saw should not be in the profession. Period.