“

Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.

”

—Horace

Sally Stafford

Proofreader

Sally Stafford, our newest full-time proofreader in the Editing Department, is excited to join the family at McElroy Translation.

A Liberal Arts graduate with a B.A. in English and French, Sally has always possessed a love for languages. Sally started her junior high newsletter, contributed to a political “zine,” and worked on the high school yearbook as well as the journalism staff in her home state of Oklahoma. In 1996, Sally moved to Austin to attend the University of Texas, where she subsequently began interviewing and writing about local talent, eventually leading up to editing and managing local independent zines. Upon graduating from UT in 2000, Sally headed to NYU in hopes of becoming a fashion editor. After completing her graduate certification at New York University’s Summer Publishing Institute, she decided discussing the latest tweed was not for her and returned to Austin in 2002. Here, she entered the academic publishing industry, developing curriculum at textbook publishing companies such as Harcourt and Publisher’s Resource Group. After four years of K-12 pedagogy, Sally had had enough of her ABCs, and she made a transition into the biotech industry in North Austin. Working at a locally founded diagnostic device research and development company, Sally acquired a taste for optics and fluidics, testing lasers, building optical platforms and fluidics bays, and trying her hand at running nucleic acid- and protein-based assays. Once they discovered her writing background, the management at her company swept her into the Technical Writing Department, where Sally wrote and published product documentation, including Manufacturer’s Instructions, User Manuals, MSDS sheets, etc.

Longing for her publishing kinfolk, a return to Central Austin, and looking forward to exercising her foreign language background, Sally arrived at McElroy last fall. While working at McElroy, Sally has also completed real estate school. With the combination of her desktop publishing background and varied industry knowledge, Sally endeavors to refine industry translations through her skills at McElroy.

When she’s not running around like Rabbit in Alice and Wonderland, Sally enjoys walking with her dog and other outdoor activities, dancing, supporting local arts, and living the philosophy of Carpe Diem.

The Olympics: A marathon for interpreters

The Olympics is an incredibly exciting time for many people all over the world; here at McElroy, we are no exception. In the spirit of the games, we have included an article that brings together the Olympics and linguists who help make it all happen!

Beijing, China (Reuters): Bill Weber has taken part in 13 consecutive summer and winter Olympic Games—not as a competitor but as an interpreter helping the athletes to get their message across. Weber heads a team of 112 interpreters from 18 countries assigned to help tell tales of triumph and despair in 10 languages as varied as English, Arabic, Portuguese and Korean.

For more information click here

Results of Our Client Web Portal Survey

We are exploring the idea of setting up a secure portal on our website that would allow clients to find out what stage of the process a translation is in, retrieve previous translations by themselves, and more.

We recently sent out a survey to find out which features our clients would be most interested in. The survey listed 10 possible features and asked everyone to rate them on a scale of 1 to 4, where:

1 is Not Useful
2 is Somewhat Useful
3 is Useful
4 is Very Useful

Based on the combined “Useful” and “Very Useful” ratings, clients ranked the features in the following order:

Clients also had suggestions for additional portal features such as a searchable patent database, online invoice management, and searches by client reference number.

Security and confidentiality were at the top of the list of concerns clients had about a web portal, followed closely by clients’ concerns that access to a “live person” at McElroy might be restricted if the portal were available.

Our clients’ confidentiality is our primary concern, and security will be a required feature of any tool we implement. Your company information and documents will only be accessible to people you choose to authorize. Technical security details will be available upon request, and clients will be able to choose whether they want to use the portal or not. Clients will not have to purchase any equipment or software.

McElroy remains committed to “Setting the Standard in Customer Service,” and you will always be able to contact customer service or your project or account manager by phone or email. In fact, these new tools should allow us to provide faster and better customer service than ever.

Thank you to all of you who completed our survey! Your feedback will help to guide us as we develop these new features.

Japanese

McElroy is continuing this series of interviews that highlight some of the characteristics of languages used in doing business globally. This month, we look at Japanese.

What are some pitfalls specific to Japanese to avoid that a client should be aware of when translating into this language?

1. For marketing purposes, clients should be aware that:
   
   a.    Japanese are more oriented to sensibility than to logical explanations based on features and figures. You can see this clearly in Japanese commercials. For example, a well-known commercial for a newspaper subscription shows a big cow in front of a house and residents of the house come out to say, “I wish he were a human.” No connection between the cow and newspaper is given. This commercial was a huge success leading to higher sales of the newspaper.
   
   b.    In marketing IT in Japan, I have found American vendors often list a lot of features in their ads, while Japanese IT vendors (like NEC) tend to use Japanese celebrities and often have them playing with (or simply holding) computers without any explanation of features.
   
   c.    Japanese are not verbose. Silence (space) is often a virtue.
   For marketing, direct translation should never be used. Clients should use a translator with copy-writing experience or have translated text be edited by a copywriter.
   
   
2. For legal documents, however, everything should be translated word by word, but Japanese legal documents are probably 65 percent more succinct than English legal documents.
   
3. It’s a basic thing, but be sure to convert weights and measures (into the metric system).

What are characteristics of Japanese that are unique or different from English and/or other languages?

1. Subjects are often omitted. One has to guess with context.
2. Singular and plural do not exist.
3. Verbs always come at the end of a sentence, which requires higher skill for simultaneous interpreting. (The same applies to German, Korean, and some other languages.)
4. The present progressive form can be both past and present.

How do these characteristics make it important to use properly qualified, professional translators?

A good translation into Japanese should always sound as if a native Japanese in the industry wrote the text to start with. Therefore, in good Japanese translation (although with some exceptions like legal documents), the subjects are properly skipped, singular/plural are ignored, and even redundant adjectives should be cut into shorter descriptions. That is why I do not believe in the significance of back translation. A translation which sounds good in back translation often means the Japanese is not good.

Relate an example or two of times you found a website page or form difficult to use because it was poorly localized. How might a business lose money, prestige, or incur legal risk due to this bad translation?

Machine-translated websites are obviously useless.

I often get a kick out of a medical package insert translated into Japanese for a Chinese audience. A Chinese person must have translated it, but they often use Chinese characters instead of Japanese characters, and it’s soooo funny! I occasionally see similar things on the Web.

Translations on the Adobe and Microsoft sites used to be bad. Now they’ve improved a lot.

If possible, provide one example of a particular phrase or concept that only a properly qualified, professional translator would be able to correctly communicate.

This is more like the importance of using a proper copy-writing translator.

One example of a good translation job is “Intel Inside,” which became “Intel Haitteru” for the Japanese. The meaning remains “Intel inside” as in the original, but it has beautiful rhyme (“in-te-ru/hait-te-ru”), which made the translated phrase as popular as the original.

McElroy Translation Gives Back—Lucky Mutts

Click image to enlarge

Our jobs, like yours, are fraught with long hours, tension, and stress. Lucky for us, we are early and frequent adopters of dogs, cats, lambs, ferrets, bunnies … well, the list goes on and on.

The "group photo" seen here is but a fraction of the total critter ownership of McElroy employees. We couldn't fit everyone in and still be able to email this to you!

Pets provide more than companionship—they help ease stress, heal the sick, diagnose illnesses, and provide unconditional love. Richard Taglienti, editor at McElroy Translation, volunteers his free time to an Austin organization, Lucky Mutts (as well as adopting some very lucky mutts). In honor of his service, we have provided a cash donation to Lucky Mutts as well as translation of some of their brochures into Spanish.

Lucky Mutts is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit volunteer corporation dedicated to educating the public on responsible pet ownership to help prevent the needless killing of dogs at shelters. They are also a foster network that adopts out mutts to lucky people. Their motto: Good Used Dogs for Lucky People.

Local information can be found at http://www.petfinder.com/. There is much to be said for adopting rescue animals, but please be sure to get information regarding the physical needs, temperament, and the responsibilities inherent in nurturing a pet.

For more information about Lucky Mutts, and/or to make a donation, click here