Last week was my time to explore life outside translation. I get easily stuck in front of my computer, and before I even know it, a month has passed. When moving to California last year, one of the resolutions was to take regular breaks. Last week, we drove up north to Sonoma County.

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… in English translation (side by side) are available at this site of the Japanese Ministry of Justice. The site offers a Law Search, a Dictionary Search, and a Keyword in Context Search. I have heard no comments yet on the usefulness of the site, but I am intrigued by the button that lets you reverse the black on white writing to white on black – but only for the portal, not for the displayed documents. Whatever for?

Now here’s a story (which I found through a tweet by Elizabeth Marsi @EDMtranslations) translators can use to convince potential clients: According to Reuters, Finnair is showing strong growth in on-line ticket sales thanks to localizing their sales sites in 11 languages.

In April our web sales in Japan were the best after Finland … (with) sharp growth of 256 percent.

If that doesn’t convince the undecided client I don’t know what does.

I noticed that my home town in Germany is hosting an international conference on The Cultures of James Bond. “James Bond has become a popular icon and has developed nothing short of his own cultural mythology”, reads the introduction. It is fitting that it was the Apollo movie theatre in Saarbrücken’s Eisenbahnstraße where I saw my first James Bond movie, Dr. No, in 1963.

I also noticed that the Universität des Saarlandes, in their English-language website for the event, have elected the term Imprint to name their required legal compliance statement. This choice, which always sets my teeth on edge, is showing up more and more – but in translated websites only, it seems. I have yet to see a native English website that uses “Imprint.” There have been discussions about this, although not recently, and I remember in particular a thread in Transblawg.

Do I ever have questions when I translate a text? Of course I do, lots of times. As a translator, I have to be (or make myself) knowledgeable about the subject matter I’m working on. Linguistic questions come up. Sometimes the source text is not as clear as it should be and it requires high powers of deduction to understand the meaning. But translators have help: monolingual dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, books and magazine articles in the source and/or target language on the product or process in question. Internet searches for terminology in context – and much more. If all that fails, I can call a colleague, and if none of my colleagues is able to help, I can post a question in a forum or mailing list.

The ATA Chronicle, newsletter of the American Translators Association, has a column called The Translation Inquirer. I usually look at the English/German inquiries and I am often left speechless by what people (translators?) are asking about. Do they not have dictionaries? Have they no Internet connection? As an example, in a recent edition, the following inquiry appeared:

(G-E 5-09.5) In a manual about engine control, the mystery word Dongle appeared. Here is the context: Dialogsoftware (Diskette, Dialogkabel mit Dongle, Handbuch). What is it?

Is this inquirer kidding? Let’s just assume for a moment that this “translator” is so young that s/he has never seen a dongle in the wild, a simple check of the German Wikikpedia entry for Dongle would have given plenty of explanation plus photos of the thing. Clicking on English in the left box Andere Sprachen would have brought up the Dongle entry in the English Wikipedia, and the original question would have been answered. A search for dongle in google.de with the Seiten auf Deutsch option brings up a multitude of sources that show explanations and context, helping to confirm the Wikipedia information.

Mystery word? For me, the only mystery is how this ended up as an inquiry.