Wednesday Five.Tranfree is doing some soul searching among its subscriber database. Here are the questions Alex Eames is asking.

1. What are your main frustrations or problems as a freelance translator?

Ok, here's a frustation. This week I received a phone call from a client after many months without contact. Her first question was: 'Are Do you still translate?'. Of course, I replied. I AM a translator. This little story just tells you how many moonlighters there are among my crowd. People who take a translation job now and then just to make ends meet. Nobody calls the doctor's office for an appointment and asks 'Are you still a doctor?'

2. What aspects of running your translation business do you find the hardest?

Finding direct clients. I don't have the time nor the skills to chase after new business. So basically all translation work comes on a referral basis. Slowly but surely.


3. Is there a way that we could help you overcome these problems?

Yes. You could set up a Society for the Preservation of the Professional Image of Translators. We could host yearly meetings where everybody would get drunk, exchange business cards, dance to music played by horrific bands and try to get laid. Wait a minute, that's the description of the ATA meeting.

4. What kind of products or services would make the most positive difference in your life and business?

A clone of myself.

5. Is there any other way we could help you to achieve your goals?

I'm not sure, but a massage and a replacement for this evening's interpreting assignment would be nice. Oh, and I want DejaVu for only 315 euros.

Slang with a Twang. This dictionary will help you talk Southern.

hobo signs via plep

hungarian photographers via consumptive

Knock Yourselves Out. News trackers for all addiction levels. Some catches:

Language demands translate into huge bill
Food labelling law turns into war of languages
New book unwraps essence of Swiss
Chinese language getting popular in the world
Futurists predict Americans will become enhanced clones

Viva a Sociedade Alternativa. The NY Times translates Maluco Beleza wrongly in this bumf article about the growing admiration of Brazil among Argentines. I've come to the conclusion that listening to lots and lots of Raul Seixas is fundamental to understanding Brazilian culture. Maluco Beleza means stoned out of your mind and feeling the inner peace that can only be created by substance abuse.

Under Siege. Bad writing is everywhere.

Vale of Tears and Pamonha. The weekend has left me with a little more blubber on my tail and a puzzling question in my mind. What are the odds that you spend a weekend on a strange town, meet three different women on parties and cozy dinners and all three break out into tears midway through the festivities while recounting to you their immense chagrin? Is the Aedes aegypti mosquito a vector for female desolation? Or is Piracicaba the Rouen of São Paulo State, inhabited exclusively by pamonha makers and women in serious danger of becoming Emma? No melancholy for the mermaid though: I was riding on a scooter yesterday, feeling quite dizzy with happiness.

Weekend Reading. Items I will pretend to be reading this weekend.

Tolstoy's Family Reunion
Getting the Words Right- Subtitling in Japan
European Union's expansion sparks questions about language
Black Languages Need to be Promoted
EU puts la belle langue on the shelf

Translatored-out. I'm pretty exhausted after pushing a steady 4,000 to 5,000 words a day this week. It's getting to be so mechanical, all these RC and Help files I zoom past without even thinking about what the heck I am doing. That's the danger of becoming specialized. You can do stuff blindfolded, fast asleep and mentally recapping the best stories you read in I Thought My Father was God the previous night. Consider this: the appex of mental stimulation for me this week was translating about six strings with poker terminology. For a moment I actually was paying attention to what I was doing and searching the mental vault for the correct translations. Dang. I should take a little challenge for a change. Let me see. A book maybe, just for the fun of it?

Some ideas I will pack in my duffle bag, together with perfume, my nightie and this excellent quote by Brazilian rocker matriarch Rita Lee:

"Estou na TPM, a Tranqüilidade Pós Menopausa. É a carta de alforria da mulher, a felicidade sem derramamento de sangue."

And the best thing: it translates almost perfectly into English. Does anybody want to give it a try?

Can I have a cappucino and a nice translation agency to go please? TranslatorsCafé is a new translation portal announcing itself as the "place linguists and clients meet". Currently listing 1,294 agencies x 33 linguists. Wow. It's usually the other way around. By the way, have I already linked to the Glossarist in the blog? Didn't think so.

Translating the Kalevala. "I have done translations before, Shakespeare, Molière, and seem to be able to manage different metres. I have even translated opera texts, and usually say that opera translation is the worst there is. It makes the translator sweat blood. But now I have learned something else: namely that the Kalevala is worse." (Read more)

Oh del mio dolce ardor. The Aria Database is a diverse collection of information on over 1000 operatic arias. Designed for singers and non-singers alike, the Database includes translations and aria texts of most arias as well as a collection of MIDI files of operatic arias and ensembles. More opera arias and libretti here. Added bonus: the interactive database of Jewish song in Yiddish, Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish.

Word Origins. For etymology lovers, geeks and non-geeks alike.

BBC: Language chief calls for united front
Internet News: Microsoft getting cozy with Lionbridge
News 24: Peres blasts 'bad translation'
Philly Inquirer: Key to an Ancient Tongue: Sumerian Dictionary in the Making

Translating for the EC. Ever wondered what it is like?

Meanwhile in the corporate world, DaimlerChrysler partners with Systran for some gobbledeegook machine translation. Ok, granted. For their purposes it makes sense. On a related note: where do translators fit into machine translation?

Please Welcome. More linguablogs. Other Languages and Billy Clark's blog are two fascinating reads that are going straight into my left bar. My posting has slowed down to a crawl lately, but please bear with me. I was interpreting last week and now I am translating furiously as a deadline looms in the horizon. Not to mention that I have been quite busy going out with friends, eating vareniks and falling in love in the past two weeks. Valhei-me Iemanjá, he calls me Marika.

Encore. The Little Mermie has just requested an encore of The Seven Deadly Sins (Die sieben Todsünden, I must brush up my German) playing on my CD player this morning. And I am taking Fermin Muguruza's Dub Manifest to the office. The Basque CD has just made the long trip from Wales to Brazil together with a lovely card and lovely scribblings by fellow linguablogger Nic Dafis. Thanks Nic. I love it!

Technological Breakthrough: Mammographs by Satellite

Available Only for the Portuguese Women in Messines.



If this is true it's the best prank ever played on Portuguese women.

The translation into English of this astounding piece of news is provided courtesy of The Globo Ocular Peludo Translation Services and Snarkiness Unlimited. Pat has also translated the whole article and has more links for those interested in tracking down this meme.

Court Interpreting Code of Ethics. For an overview of the challenges involved in court interpreting, take a look at this Code of Ethics.

Three Degrees of Separation. Word association can link just about any two common words in the English language using an average of three steps, says a team of scientists in Arizona. The semantic links between English words make the thesaurus a 'small world', much as the network of human social interactions connect us all by six degrees of separation, find Adilson Motter and colleagues at Arizona State University in Tempe. The researchers expect languages other than English to have the same properties, even if their syntactic structure is very different. (Read more)

Linguists Back Tongyong as Symbol of Independence. "Criticism by opposition politicians of the Ministry of Education's decision to adopt Tongyong Pinyin as its official Romanization system is misplaced, linguists claim, saying that the experiences of other countries show that convenience and relevance to the rest of the world should not be the only criteria in deciding such a contentious issue. Other countries have frequently gone their own way in deciding on how their languages are used, supporters of Tongyong Pinyin say." (Read more)

My Mother's New Nose Fell Off During the Night, And the Culprit was Durian. Maybe you came looking for language and translation links, but I cordially invite you to read about nature at its foulest.

Well, if you insist, take a look at these:

The many languages of the Internet- with an overview on some online translation resources.
Cool down the rhetoric about English - The English as a Lingua Franca conundrum and a balanced opinion on the status of English in Japan
F U Cn Rd Ths, So Can Translator - text messaging language is on the rise.

Three Months Ago, My Mother's New Nose Fell Off During the Night. Not really. I've found that a great repository of regional accents is available the British Library. And there is a talk on regional US accents on NPR. Stan also offers you some sound samples with accents from the Northwest of England. And my trivia-hungry brain cells were satisfied to know that birds also have regional accents. Now, what I am really looking for is a sound sample with a speaker from Wisconsin, thank you very much.

Poems for all tastes
Venus and Adonis
Archy interviews a Pharaoh
Party Piece

My Featured Pro Collection

Henry Proz.com Founder

Would you like a jusu with your hambaga? It has been going on for centuries, but now the government says it has gone too far. The Japanese language is being invaded by too many foreign words.

By the way, how do you say 'mouse' in Kannada?

Or translate 22 math and science textbooks in only 5 months?

I know the answer for that one. Very fast.

And should anyone be surprised to find that English is harder to learn than several Latin origin languages?

But the crowning jewel is this one: Harry Potter Shanghaied.

Of Paramount Importance on my Mind Today. Can you tell whether a person is ugly or not by just listening to his/her voice? Or in other words. If Rade Serbedzija had monstruosly nasal vocalization instead of his deep voice and sexy Balkans accent would I still find him hot?

Other than that: is malice a false cognate or is Danilo the bearer of a translatorial revelation?

More Like This. Proof of incestous linking practices. More Like This and Language Museum, via Fabulousness, via Pat.

The History of the World According to Student Bloopers. Posted in the Proz forums.

The Enigmatic Mermaid never willfully infringes copyright. But she doesn't keep up much with patenting activities. This post has been defenestrated. If you want bloopers, consider this book.

Live from Merlandia. Just got an invitation from A. V. to become a correspondent at Transref. Time to repurpose my blog entries!

Scottish Poetry Library. "Do you recognise any of these quotations? If you can help us identify the poet or the poem, write everything you know in the box below. We will be eternally grateful."

"A swan and cygnets nothing more
Background of silver, reedy shore,
Dim shapes of rounded trees,
The high effulgence of a summer sky."