Healthcare translation as it should be done

Australia has a long and in many ways outstanding track record in community translation services and training (and this from a suitably modest Australian-born translator).

This claim is supported by a recent (15 Nov. 2013) Maravia article by Libor Safar entitled Australia and the Quest for a New Healthcare Translation Standard, Part Two. Part One can be found here.

Other countries can learn from Australia's example.

QuarkXPress vs. InDesign

For some background on the downfall of QuarkXPress and the rise and rise of InDesign, take a look at this Moravia article by Libor Safar entitled How InDesign Won Against QuarkXPress is a Lesson for Us All.

Translators need to know about these tools and the role played by better localisation in InDesign's success.

Quote:

Among the complaints ... for why QuarkXPress failed is, of course, the language issue. InDesign shipped with multilingual feature sets built in, whereas QuarkXPress did not and charged far, far more for a limited language set.

Fear and loathing of the English passive

Fear and loathing of the English passive, by Geoffrey K Pullum, Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh (version of 17 January 2014), to appear in Language and Communication, is currently available for download at this address.

And, to add my two cents worth from the viewpoint of the technical journalist and translator, it is interesting to observe in the endless and often, as Pullam points out, incompetent attacks on the passive voice how often critics simply gloss over the need – especially frequent in TJ&T – to describe past, present or future events without identifying the agent.

A quote from Pullam's conclusion:

It is right and good, of course, to instruct students and novice writers in how they might improve their writing. But handing them simplistic prescriptions and prohibitions is not doing them any favors. ‘Avoid the passive’ is typical of such virtually useless advice.

The claims about why you should avoid passives – the allegations about why they are bad – are all bogus, and the interesting point (the discourse condition) is always missed. The advice is often supplied by advice-givers who don’t respect their own counsel – though they are unaware of that because they are commonly hopeless at distinguishing passives from actives.

Forbes on localisation

Under the heading How To Do World Domination Right: 5 Tips For Better Localization, Jessica Stillman, a contributor to the Forbes blog, presents sound advice on localisation based on the recent experiences of Irish startup app builder Soundwave.

Localisation for B2C (business-to-consumers) companies is in some ways simpler than for B2B (business-to-business) companies. Good advice for the former group is also more readily available and more readily applicable from case to case. Still nice to see this article on the Forbes blog.

Weekly action email

Australia-based, Ireland-born multilingual translator (ES, FR, DE è EN) Sarah Dillion now offers a Weekly Action Email for small businesses with BIG vision. I've just received my first issue, dated 21 January, entitled Why Style Matters. Whether you are actually a small business with a BIG vision or simply interested in what leading-edge translators are offering, I thoroughly recommend a subscription.

Here's the link to Sarah's Facebook page.

Exemplary punctuation

Under the heading The 5 Best Punctuation Marks in Literature, blogger Kathryn Schulz lists quotes featuring exemplary punctuation by five leading authors.

It would be nice to have some examples from technical journalism or translation. If anyone reading this has any, please feel free to contribute or comment.

Here's one modest example. The French expression plus ou moins has, perhaps surprisingly, a wider range of meaning than the corresponding more or less in English. Some of the equivalents listed in the Collins-Roberts French-English dictionary include: not very, just about, vaguely, and with varying degrees of. In some contexts, one option is to use more – or less –. The punctuation makes all the difference.

Fact or factoid

From the Guardian's MINDYOURLANGUAGE blog (style.guide@theguardian.com), posted by
David Marsh under the heading A factoid is not a small fact. Fact. Norman Mailer, widely credited with coining the word in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe, said that factoids were "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper".

Here are a couple of quotes:

Books about grammar and language are full of factoids, such as George Bernard Shaw spelling "fish" as "ghoti" and Winston Churchill writing "this is something up with which I will not put". I think the writers want these stories to be true, so repeat them, even when there is little or no evidence for them.

Part of the Mailer definition that is usually overlooked is that the media create factoids not so much as lies but "as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority"