Jianjun's Blog

When I tell people I’m a translator, I often hear they say, ‘Ah cool, earning money without costing a cent huh?’ I guess most people think what a translator needs to start a career is just two languages and a computer. some even think we are still working with a pen and a piece of paper. But the fact is starting as a translator does require some expensive investments.

Besides a computer, today’s translators have to invest in a tool which is called a Translation Memory (TM). This is a piece of software that ‘remembers’ what you have translated and creates a translation ‘library’. The advantages of using such a tool are multi-faceted:

1. By remembering the terms you used, TM helps to keep consistency. It’s no strange thing that when a translator is working on a large project, sometimes she forgets the translation she used for a certain term. Without a translation memory, she could use more than one translations for the same term, causing inconsistencies. Now, when she’s not sure, a context or glossary search would make things clear.

2. If you can’t remember terms, it’s impossible for you to remember phrases or whole sentences. Translation Memory remembers that for you. For projects with a lot of repetitions such as an operation manual, TM automatically copies or suggests an old translation.

3. MS PowerPoint, Excel, Word, HTML files often contain rich format information – the position of a picture, the font used, its size and color, background sound and animation effects, etc. Needless to say, you want the translation to be exactly the same with the original in these aspects. However, without a Translation Memory, to achieve these is very challenging, time consuming and in some cases impossible.

4. Certain TM also facilitates remote collaboration among team members. WordFast provides a shared TM function. The project translation memory is stored remotely on a ftp server for the whole team to access.

The above advantages are not provided for free, however. Translation Memory prices range from 250€ to 795€ (about $390 – $1264) per license and yes they are mostly priced in Euro.

But the story is not over yet. How come you can translate MS-Office documents without first purchasing the package? The Office 2003 Simplified Chinese version costs several hundred bucks and many clients require PDF file delivery in cases of business card or brochure translation. Acrobat 8.0 costs another 449 USD. Maybe not all translators/businesses use genuine software, but when calculating translators’ work cost, you can’t count that as a factor.

No translators can dispense with a good dictionary. No matter paper-based or electronic, they cost money. And translation training costs money too.

To protect data loss from power outage or hard disk failure, many translators also purchase UPS system, memory sticks or even ftp space. (It’s no surprise that so many translators can’t deliver on time!) Promotional expenses include personal web site and membership fees.

To sum up, being a translator is FAR from cost-free. Depending where the translator is located and what additional services she provides, there are maybe additional costs – such as a fax machine, etc. I hope this article can help people understand how much it costs for a translator to get her business started and why there must be a fee for the translation service.

They said it and they will do it. Your blog might be dropped by Technorati for not upgrading to WordPress 2.5.

According to their official blog of April 7, 2008:

Blogs that have been compromised by this security vulnerability are typified by having links to spam destinations inserted onto the blog page. These link insertions may be invisible to casual observations; the links are often obscured by style attributes that render them invisible.

And as a result, Technorati will be:

discontinuing processing crawls of blogs that exhibit common symptoms of being compromised.

Although after running a check, I found no compromised security problems with my blog, I still decided to upgrade to WordPress 2.5 a couple of days ago as a precaution. If such unfortunate things ever happened, the damage would be more than being dropped by Technorati, but also by Google and Yahoo.

Most people feel upgrading WordPress a headache. Actually it is not! What you need to do is only to replace files under the ROOT, WP-admin and WP-includes folders and leave wp-configure.php intact. After replacing these files, visit the upgrade link and you are done.

WordPress 2.5 not only features a streamlined control panel, but also better functionalities such as one key update of plug-ins. Very cute. After upgrading, I also found no spam comments waiting for me to moderate.

Further resources:

Technorati Blog

With 2008 Beijing Translators’ Powwow (3pm – 6pm, April 19) just around the corner, I posted a reminder for possible live broadcast via BlogTV in the ProZ Chinese forum. While most colleagues responded the thread positively, there was one colleague expressed his concern over the live show.

He noted that not everyone might like to reveal his/her true identity on the web and said China is still not a ‘common peoples’ society’（公民社会或平民社会）and ‘individual rights have to be protected by oneself, and probably may not be fully protected.’（个人的权益需要自己注意保障，而且未必保护得过来。）

Although other colleagues were mostly joking about his comment, I see in China some people do think revealing their true identity may cause them discomfort or even ‘danger’. What are these people? I know lots of people in China fake girls in chats. The fun won’t be there if their manly faces were caught by a cam. I know there are guys who only use cloaked identity to write anti-government posts, comments, etc…

But I don’t think a professional should be afraid of showing his/her true identity. What do you fear and why?

As a matter of fact, IMHO, I believe showing my own identity is the only effective way to fight against those swindlers who claim they are somebody but not. By letting potential clients see who you are and what you think as a real person, you are more likely to build a business relationship. One of the purposes for me to come to this Powwow is exactly to see who’s who and what they are going to say…

Powwow Reminder - Broadcast your self LIVE