Poll: Type of legal documents you translate the most.

And now for this blog's first poll. Please share your views in the comments section.

The McWane Way

I find watching Internet video with any educational content highly rewarding. I would specifically direct your attention to PBS video. At this site, you will find free full-length videos on an array of topics. If your target language is English, you will be reminded of terms you already knew and perhaps pick up a few you did not know before. If your target language is Spanish and your source language is U.S. English, then you will gain insight to the U.S. legal system.

I just got done watching a Frontline video entitled: A Dangerous Business Revisited. I did not know that there were factories in the U.S. with such vile safety and management practices!

That aside, toward the end of the video, there is an interesting legal section where lawyers and government officials delve into the legal implications of what the McWane company did. Fortunately for workers and the environment, the company made a complete turnaround in its management and environmental policies.

Glossary of Mexican Acronyms

I am sure that many of you work with documents from Mexico. After all, it is a large country with a big population and many immigrants who cross the border into the United States. As many of these documents are legal, there are government organizations involved. These organizations tend to use acronyms or abbreviations.

Since the greatest battle is one when a translator grasps the meaning of the source text, even though he or she may not know the exact word in the target language, I have compiled a monolingual glossary of Mexican acronyms with over 400 entries. Some of these acronyms have links to their respective web sites.

Feel free to explore the glossary and let me know if there are any acronyms you feel should be added to the list.

Managing your online legal resources Part 1

Have you ever visited a forum on a translators' site where there is a post choc full of links? What do you do with them all? Where do you put them? The Internet Explorer Favorites folder is a quick and easy answer, but what if you collect thousands of links? What if you want to add e-mail and postal addresses, make your own comments on them and search all information in these records at will?

I have found that Primasoft dB Organizer Deluxe does a superior job of organizing my legal web resources. I can define the fields I think are appropriate and view the results in the built-in browser or click on the button next to the URL and launch the web site in Internet Explorer.

There is also an advanced search tool as well as a filter tool that will easily sort thousands of entries.

Off Topic - MemoQ spellcheck add in

Before saying anything, I know that there are those of you who swear by CAT tools and have your favorite one or ones. Others are averse to them and prefer to work with Microsoft Word. Whatever your translating conveyance, I wanted to share my acquisition of the MemoQ spellcheck add in.

After finishing a job, especially a long one, it is nice to have some electronic help in checking the target text against the source text. There is always a nuance (a glaring error you say? ¡Nunca!) that MemoQ picks up that I might have overseen or that might have taken me longer to pinpoint. By nuances I mean extra white spaces, missing target terms, missing or mismatched numbers. I found it easy to add this tool to my MemoQ workflow.

If you are already a MemoQ user, you might consider adding on this add on for a mere 100 Euros. It is a veritable safety net.

That's what false friends are for!!??!

I ordered this book for my reference bookshelf, and it came in the mail the other day. Though I wouldn't call it a must have, I find that it clarifies several hard to translate terms. If you use both Spanish and English on a daily bases, you probably already know that it is easy to confuse terms, and that since English and Spanish have many terms that are seemingly identical, it is easy to allow interference to meddle with your output.

How do you as a legal translator translate correspondiente, constancia, establecer and colaborar? If you are not sure about the right translation or would like a thorough, academic explanation, with real live examples, then you should pick up a copy of this book.