MET workshops 2019

MET medley of talks in Nantes

 

An assortment of tips and tools from the Hive

Emma Goldsmith, Madrid, Spain

As translators or editors, we are aware that technical know-how is an important part of our skill set. We have identified and unidentified gaps in that knowledge. Furthermore, our toolkit needs constant updating as new apps are released. The Hive, MET’s archive of tools and resources, helps to solve these problems. Members go to this online hub to share tools they use in their daily work. As a result, we have a thriving collective knowledge base and increased individual expertise. In this presentation I will highlight some Hive resources , showing them on the Hive itself and explaining how to use them in practice. Tips and tools will range from quite simple (e.g. useful shortcuts) to more complex (e.g. AutoHotkey).

Emma Goldsmith is a freelance Spanish to English medical translator. She originally trained as a registered general nurse in London and later retrained – informally and formally – as a translator in Madrid. She currently serves as MET's Membership Chair and is the Hive Team coordinator.

 

Au revoir, Franglais: cutting out source-language interference

Helen Oclee-Brown, Staplehurst, UK

Bêtes noires – we all have them. Troublesome little words, expressions or constructions that are tricky to translate. Though stylish and elegant in French, in translation, these head-scratchers can clunk and bump in English, leaving our texts sounding decidedly “Inspector Clouseau”. In this short session, we’ll look at a selection of barbed French-to-English translation traps in context and work together to find neat solutions free from translationese. Some of the examples we’ll study will also apply to other languages, especially other Romance tongues, so non-francophones are welcome, too.

Helen Oclee-Brown is a commercial translator who works from French and Spanish into her native British English. A career-long linguist, she previously worked in-house for translation and marketing companies and now translates copy for companies across Europe. Helen is a qualified member of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) and current MET Promotion Chair.

 

Is full post-editing of machine translation output a pipe dream?

Michael Farrell, Mortara, Italy

Comparison shows that certain turns of phrase, expressions and choices of words occur with greater frequency in post-edited machine translation output than they do in human translation. This implies that post-edited texts, on average, lack the variety and inventiveness of human translation, and any attempt to eliminate what are effectively machine translation markers would require additional post-editing effort and nullify most, if not all, of the time and cost-saving advantages. Of course variety and inventiveness are not always desirable features. Nevertheless, there are various kinds of text where homogenization and uniformity would make the translation less interesting to read and less intellectually stimulating. In such cases, failure to eradicate these markers may eventually lead to lexical impoverishment of the target language.

This talk will illustrate the risks involved in using post-edited machine translation output indiscriminately and put the translator in a position to explain when its use might be detrimental.

Michael Farrell is primarily a freelance translator and transcreator. Over the years he has acquired experience in the cultural tourism field and in transcreating advertising copy and press releases, chiefly for the promotion of technology products. Besides this, he is an untenured lecturer in post-editing, machine translation and computer tools for translators at the International University of Languages and Media (IULM), Milan, Italy and the developer of the terminology search tool IntelliWebSearch. Michael is MET's current webmaster and a qualified member of the Italian Association of Translators and Interpreters (AITI).