International Terminology Summer School 2015

If you are a terminologist, or would like to be, this might interest you:

International Terminology Summer School 2015

13-17 July 2015

Cologne University for Applied Sciences

The organizers have received by now almost 70 registrations from participants coming from more than 20 different countries and representing important organizations, companies and universities, but a few places are still available. 

You can register at: http://www.termnet.org/english/events/tss_2015/registration.php 

The International Terminology Summer School (TSS) is the leading and largest international summer school for terminology professionals with about 80 participants from some 40 countries and almost every continent. TSS offers a one-week, practice-oriented training course covering a comprehensive overview of the methods and principles of terminology management. The course is taught by some of the most renowned and prominent terminology experts in the world. Participation in TSS qualifies to obtain the ECQA Certificate for Terminology Managers. 

More information about program, venue and travel at: http://www.termnet.org/english/events/tss_2015/index.php

Top 100 Language Lovers 2015

Just as it has done every year since 2008, LexioPhiles has organized the "Top 100 Language Lovers 2015" competition, which is currently at the voting stage.

You can vote for your favorite blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and YouTube channels, in several different categories:

• Language Learning Blogs: blogs about the language learning process, both from the learners and teachers perspectives. 
• Language Professionals Blogs: blogs by people using languages in their profession, such as translators or interpreters. 
• Language Facebook Pages: Facebook Pages related to language topics, such as dictionaries, translation tools, language lovers communities and more. 
• Language Twitter Accounts: Twitterers who share content about languages. 
• Language YouTube Channels: Youtubers who vlog about languages.

By following the links above you can get directly to each category, where you can see your favorite language sites or accounts, or perhaps find new ones you didn't know.

This year, About Translation has been nominated in the Language Professionals Blogs category. If you like this blog, and want to vote for it, you can do so by clicking on this button:

...and if you decide to vote for this blog, thank you!

New version of my Xbench presentation now available for viewing and download

I've just uploaded the new version of my Xbench presentation, now updated with all the changes I made to it for the workshop I gave at the 5th CTA Conference, earlier this month. You can view a copy of the presentation as an online presentation by going to the Xbench page of this blog, or you can download a zipped copy of the presentation, from the same page.

Xbench currently offered at a 60% discount

Xbench, an excellent translation QA and terminology management tool, is currently on offer at a 60% discount (only Euro 39/year, instead of the regular 99/year). The special price offer will last until June 5.

You can find a through presentation of what Xbench is and how it can help you with terminology management and translation QA in the presentation you can see in another page of this same blog.

How to use Google to determine which candidate translation to use

Few tools are as ubiquitous in the translation world as Google: we use it all the time to search for the meaning of obscure terms. But Google searches can do much more than that: they can help us determine which of several candidate translations is the best, or the most used (the two things may not coincide) in our target language.

For example a legal translation I'm doing at the moment mentions "buyer's remorse". According to Wikipedia, "Buyer's remorse" is "the sense of regret after having made a purchase. It is frequently associated with the purchase of an expensive item" - something, I'm sure, most of us have experienced at some time or another.

The meaning is clear, but... how should we translate this into Italian?
A few candidate terms come to mind: "rimorso", "pentimento", and "ripensamento" "del compratore" or "dell'acquirente".

By performing an advanced search in Google, we can restrict our searches to only sites in Italian and/or sites from Italy.

The results I found are:

Candidate translation	# of hits
rimorso del compratore rimorso dell’acquirente pentimento del compratore pentimento dell’acquirente ripensamento del compratore ripensamento dell’acquirente	2170 1400 2 122 347 4270

Now things are clearer: "pentimento" (which was the translation that first came to my mind) is clearly out: too few hits in Italian pages. The two "rimorso" entries are plausible candidates, but, in my opinion, rimorso is not the most appropriate word here: it's almost a false friend in this context – still, they may be what’s used in Italy, so they remain as term candidates. Of the final pair of candidates, "ripensamento del compratore" is clearly used much less than "ripensamento dell'acquirente", so this latter now becomes my leading candidate.

There is still more to do, of course: verify that my candidate term is in fact used in contexts similar to the document I'm translating, and that, in this particular context, one of the other candidate terms is not better or more appropriate. So this time I search again for "rimorso del compratore", for "rimorso dell'acquirente", and for "ripensamento dell'acquirente", this time together with another word ("immobile", in this case) to help restrict the context.

The results are now:

Candidate translation	# of hits
rimorso del compratore rimorso dell’acquirente ripensamento dell’acquirente	9 9 476

The latter clearly seems a strong candidate translation.

Of course, frequency of use is not the only criterion to use when searching for a term, but it's a good start.