Jianjun's Blog

Translator is probably one of the most vaguely defined professions around the world. While many people outside the industry consider a bilingual to be a translator, it seems to me there are no obligatory qualification requirements within the industry.

Some translator organizations do have special membership requirements. For example, to become an Active/Corresponding member of the American Translators Association, you have to pass their certification test or meet their minimum requirements, such as a translation degree or certain years of experience or you can provide invoices/POs as proof of your actively engaging in translation, etc.

Some translation agencies also require that their potential translators have a translation degree, or a language degree with substantial translation component, or a translation certificate issued by one of the recognized professional bodies and so on.

However, the problem is that a great majority of translators (I mean people who do translations for a living) do not have a certificate or a translation/language degree or a professional membership and those who do have them still may not be able to do all translations or guarantee a satisfying work. I myself got my NAETI certificate in 2003, but does that mean I can take all translation jobs? Of course not.

The reason is simple. Translation involves more than languages. It involves a person’s specialized training, life experience, work/education background, exposure to translation and the ability to represent the source language concept in the target language, among many other things. For web site or software localization, the translator has to be at home with coding or syntax. And all these may be listed as qualifications for a translator.

To be a qualified translator is a lifelong process. The more translation you do, the more you’ll feel you have so much to improve and there are so many things you still don’t know. Some people say a successful translator has to be over 45 years. Well, I won’t list that as a requirement, but it’s true that a maturer mind is more sensitive to meanings that are beyond the lines.

My parents for the first time showed me my birth certificate (1971). It’s interesting to see the following paragraph printed at the top of that document:

最新指示
The Latest Directive

要使全体干部和全体人民经常想到我国是一个社会主义的大国，但又是一个经济落后的穷国，这是一个很大的矛盾。要使我国富强起来，需要几十年艰苦奋斗的时间，其中包括执行厉行节约、反对浪费这样一个勤俭建国的方针。

All cadres and the whole people must be reminded frequently that our nation is at the same time a big socialist country and a poor country with a backward economy, which is a big contradiction. In order for our country to become prosperous and strong, we need to endure hardship and struggle for a few decades, which includes practicing the policy of constructing the nation adhering strictly to thriftiness and opposing wastefulness.

Ah, cultural revolution was still going on at the time.

Another interesting thing is the document was typeset in both Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters, indicating the work to simplify the writing system was still underway.

The last line of the Birth Certificate indicates the document was necessary when applying for the newborn baby’s Hukou（户口 – household registration record）and benefits.

Google Docs is Google’s online document processing and sharing application. With it, you can upload/create/share documents, spreadsheets or presentations. You have the choices to keep them private, share them conditionally or even publish them directly to your blog (Isn’t this cool?).

Protected with an encrypted access (https), your documents rest comfortably in their own folders. The tree structure on the left provides all kinds of filtering possibilities to facilitate easy search and organization. Change notifications via E-mail keep you up-to-date when a collaborator made a change to a shared document. ‘Changed-by-whom’ and ‘changed time/date’ information is also clearly visible from the document list. Unlike many web-based programs, Google Docs supports perfect context-sensitive right-click menus; you’ll feel ‘at home’ as if it’s an application installed on your PC.

I have been using Google Docs in my web localization work for over half an year. We set up a QA spreadsheet where web site staff put in user feedback or the latest changes for the localization team (translator and proofreader) to make necessary modifications or a comment.

Microsoft also has a similar online application – Office Live Workspace – as an extension to its Office software. However, its stability, speed and usability are far from comparable with Google Docs. I do enjoy its Office plug-in which enables direct save/opening documents to/from Workspace. Unfortunately, this is the only thing that is useful to me but at the same time ignorable.