The dignified translator's checklist of points so MOOT they are beyond MOOTNESS

Erich Brandenberger fecit

Before you start translating ...

Expect the unexpected

Scan the source-language document at least diagonally and underline terms that don't instantly ring a bell. Consider that in about 3% of all cases (a conservative estimate), there will be a glossary of terms on the last page - the ones that in retrospect had you stymied - with English equivalents. You will hate yourself for having done hours of terminology research when you see all the heavy-duty words presented to you on a silver platter as you turn to page 50 of 50. It's amazing how many translators don't know what's on page 9 until they have finished translating page 8.

Watch for the inevitable

In roughly 10% of all cases, there will be bibliographical references with titles of English documents the author referred to when writing the manuscript. Those titles are important pointers to terminology sources or might even provide essential terminology themselves.

Take the inescapable in stride

In at least 7.3% of all cases, there will be quotes from English source books or illustrations or screen templates with English captions somewhere in the text. The author of the job you're about to translate will expect you to use those terms. If you loosely commit them to memory before starting with the translation, you get 6 extra points for clairvoyance beyond the call of duty.

Do your research

Are you a bit rusty on the subject matter? Read up on it in the Encyclopedia Britannica or in those old college textbooks or in special-interest magazines. A good translator has stacks of publications in the attic or the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology on CD-ROM. There's always the Magazine Database on CompuServe [GO MAGDB]. It costs money, but for the price of 20 words, you can download a 10,000-character article on thingamajigs. Reading up before you translate gives you an exhilarating sense of confidence and that utterly enjoyable "déjà-vu" feeling which in severe cases makes you want to throw your dictionaries out the window. Resist it. You might hit an innocent pedestrian.

While you translate ...

Skip the ToC

If the document begins with a table of contents (ToC), skip it. Wait until you see and translate the text. Use your word processor's ToC function to assemble the ToC when everything is said and done and written. Too many jobs still get delivered with ToCs deviating from the actual in-document titles. It's a disgrace to the profession because ToCs are transcribed matter paid as translated matter.

Heed your terminology

Particularly in short jobs where you have to go on a manhunt for context, it can be very difficult for the two hemispheres of your brain to agree on a target language term for a given source language term. In other words, if you translate Schalter as switch, you could be wrong even though the dictionary says you're right. In the power distribution industry, for example, a Schalter is a circuit breaker and a switch is - well - something certain people chastise themselves with. If your work is going straight to the customer, you'll be caught with your pants down. If it's going to an editor, it might be wise to disclose that you're not totally familiar with the industry jargon and that you'd like feedback on your terminology selection. Asking for help is not a character flaw.

Stay consistent

If it's a technical text, you'll want to make sure that Krummteil B is always translated as widget B and not B widget and not gizmo. It helps to pencil the term you chose at the outset on the source-language manuscript so you can refer to it later in case you have to interrupt your work. This little trick will also assure that you can run a search & replace on the term if you change your mind about it somewhere along the line. If it's a big document, compile a glossary. It'll speed up your work on the next job for the same customer. (You can also type in the source-language term as you progress and do a search & replace on it later when you decide what to call it.)

Conversely, if you have already translated a job for customer X and didn't get feedback (no news is good news and a check in the mail is great news), make sure you don't translate Krummteil B as gizmo B if you called it B widget the last time around. Your customers generally believe that you have no other customers besides them and consequently cannot understand how you can possibly forget what Krummteil B means.

Put the pedal to the metal

If you type yourself, don't key in repetitive names, especially if they're long, like Bundesdeutsche Forschungsanstalt für Traubenzuckeranwendungen im Jugendsport. Type in BFTJ and then do a search & replace at the end of the job. Hey, it's money for nothing. Many word processing programs have so-called glossary functions that do the same thing.

Question your judgement

Most of the time, you will notice that strange feeling which emerges when you're not absolutely positively 100% sure about what the source text says. When this happens, translate the sentence such that it reflects your momentary pragmatic disposition, then type in three bullets (they look like this: •••) and let the queasy gut feeling subside. Keep on working. You can get back to the bullets later when you know more. When you're done translating the document, you generally will know more. Why bullets and not question marks? Because in many word processing programs, the question mark (?) used in a search & replace algorithm is equivalent to a wildcard character, and also because you can quickly spot triple bullets on a printed page if you happen to have missed them on the screen.

After you've finished translating ...

Check your spelling

Run a spell check on the document. If you don't have a spell checker, get one. Or figure out a phenomenal excuse. Bare in mind, though, that spell checkers won't catch "bear essentials" or "insurance police" or "socket calculator" - so don't rely on them blandly!

Hard hyphens (aka nonbreaking hyphens) belong in this category too. If you use state-of-the-art as an adjective, put in hard hyphens. That will prevent the typesetter (who doesn't understand English - I'm talking about apprentice typesetters in foreign countries) from putting stateoftheart in that beautiful glossy brochure you just translated.

Review your punctuation and capitalization conventions

Lots of jobs contain bullet lists. Did you always capitalize the first word of each bulleted item or only sometimes? Fix that. Did you put a period after some bulleted items but not after all of them? Fix that, too. If you have several bullet lists in the texts, make sure they've all been typed with the same conventions.

What about captions, callouts, and charts? Did you use initial caps for each chart column header and for each item in a picture caption and callout? There's nothing wrong with using all upper-case letters in column headers and callouts, even if the original manuscript doesn't use that style. If you adopt it, you can rarely go wrong.

Have you got your capitalization straight in the body text too? Or will the reader see Rear Gadget and rear gadget, not to mention Rear gadget and rear Gadget? If so, you should know that this is considered rather uncouth among dignified translators. Even if it's the typist's mistake and not yours, a lax attitude towards quality will be attributed to you - exclusively.

Look at paragraph titles and headlines

Look at your titles and headlines. Have you been systematic in upper-case and lower-case (U&LC) usage? If not, fix the titles. The outlining function offered by many word processing programs is an ideal way to do this. Then, recompile the ToC with the ToC feature.

Review those organization names and job titles

Now that the job is done and it's nearly time to write the invoice, ask yourself if any uncertainties remain. Maybe a Greek publication was quoted in the document and you translated it into English, wondering if, perhaps, an official English title already existed. Or maybe you referred to an international organization whose name was given in Russian but which might just have an official English name. What now? Easy. Make a footnote or add a comment in brackets. This will make you rich and famous. Well, probably.

Is the head of the Widget Department always the head, or is he sometimes the manager and sometimes the leader, and sometimes the supervisor? Is the Widget Department always just that, or sometimes the widget department and occasionally the Widget Area or, heaven forbid, the Widget Division?

Take another look at your bullets

There's more to bullet lists than meets the eye. Consider this one:

• Remove shaft
• Clean shaft with ethanol.
• Inspection of shaft
• Grease shaft ends and reinstall

What's wrong here? The list doesn't jive. The third item should read "Inspect shaft" since you used imperatives everywhere else in the list. If your original manuscript isn't consistent in this respect, that's no reason why your translation shouldn't be consistent. Notice also that only the second item has a period.

Jive-ness exists in many texts. Particularly in advertising copy, headlines are structured to jive - to tell their own story, so to speak. You can see that if you spare a moment to read all the headlines consecutively instead of just translating them one by one as they occur. Some word processing programs have an outlining function which is ideal for this purpose.

Find a victim to test your eloquence

Read the job out loud to your pet canary or calico cat - or to both, if they're on speaking terms. You'll notice alienating figures of speech, omissions - it's surprising how often the word "not" is missing (go ahead, think about that for a while) -, and unnecessary linguistic vegetation. By tightening up your verbosity rating, you might trim a couple of dozen words off your invoice, but you're boosting your chances of repeat business.

Never believe you can't make last-minute mistakes

We have arrived at the point of ultra-mootness. You've done a helluva fine job on that gizmo piece. While proofreading it, you decided to cosmeticize a few little passages that sounded too sticky to flow. An added word here or there, an occasional deletion ... chances are 6 to 10 that you made a spelling mitake, typed in the same same word twice, or left out an important. After all, you've grown weary of gizmos and what you want now is to watch that rerun of Star Wars or go to the beach.

Here's a little recipe to circumvent those last-minute embarrassments: put in three bullets (•••) wherever you change something in your "final" version. Then take a break. And before you do your final printout, instruct your word processing program to FIND •••. Read your own corrections one last time and just before printing replace ••• with nothing in the entire document. If you took the suggestions in the "Understanding" section to heart, this will also be your final text search for bullets which you used to mark terms that you weren't sure about.

And now the actual checklist, if you didn't feel like reading all that stuff up there:

• Diagonalize your source language text for terminology
• Underline words that might cause research problems
• Check the manuscript's bibliography for buzzwords
• Scan quotes, illustrations, and captions for hot terms
• Do your subject matter research or dump the job
• Don't translate the ToC
• Beware of "easy" terminology, particularly in short jobs
• Jot down key terms or write a glossary to assure consistency
• Use shortcuts while typing
• Trust your queasiness and mark "not-sure" items with triple bullets
• Know and use hard hypens
• Do a spell check but don't believe a zero-error rating
• Check your bullet lists for capitalization, punctuation, and jive-ness
• Check your capitalization in titles, captions, callouts, table headers
• Check key adjective/noun combinations for consistent spelling
• Check job titles, department and organization names
• Review the story that your titles tell
• Read the job out loud and add flow to sticky passages
• Review your own last-minute edits
• Get rid of all your triple bullets, do the ToC, print the job

Return to Etceter-a-Theque.