¡El que pestañea no pierde!

...De hecho gana a mi modo de ver las cosas con respecto a los archivos PDF (¿Dónde estaríamos nosotros los traductores jurídicos sin este archiconocido formato informático?). Me explico: Adobe Acrobat Reader está en todas partes, y desde luego tiene su brillo, pero encuentro que ocupa mucha memoria RAM y que esta eternamente actualizándose. Por eso es que yo he optado por desinstalarlo e instalar Foxit Reader. Foxit Reader tiene todas las funcionalidades de Adobe Reader más pestañas. Así no tienes todos tus PDFs abiertos en un solo lugar.

The semicolon; a great invention

What I am about to write is a generalization. From years of observation, I can say that simply put, Spanish uses long sentences and English uses short sentences. Of course, I could give you concrete examples to prove the contrary. Jorge Luis Borges writes in short sentences, and Charles Dickens writes in long sentences.

Now that I have given you the long and the short of it, I want to introduce my friend the semicolon to you. It is not a period, yet it is not a comma. It is a marker placed in the middle of the road that says we are taking a different course, but we are not stopping. A slight change of plans, but nevertheless loosely tied to what we were doing before.

Getting back to long Spanish sentences and short English ones, in a marketing text, I have programmed my brain to chop up the translated English sentences at the right junctures; otherwise I would have a word salad on my hands.

Legal Spanish is a different story; it has long, indivisible sentences which, if chopped up by periods, will change the meaning and flow of the text. Many times, the original Spanish document has semicolons that coincide with where a semicolon would be placed in English.

Cómo realizar una búsqueda con dedos flojos

Es tarde, y tengo bastante que hacer. Sin embargo, quisiera aprovechar este ratito y compartir un descubrimiento con Uds. No es que yo tenga los dedos flojos. Muy al contrario, los tengo veloces y precisos cuando estoy escribiendo, mejor dicho traduciendo. Sin embargo, cuando uno busca un término o frase en, digamos, las respuestas de KudoZ una vez que hayan hecho la búsqueda inicial en el cuadrado del buscador, no es necesario escribir la palabra o frase completa. Si quieren buscar crédito hipotecario, por ejemplo, basta con ingresar Control + F seguido por crédito h o quizás crédito hip.

Lo que me gusta de buscar así, ademas de descansar los dedos un poco, es que suele aparecer otros términos además del término preciso que estoy buscando. Si quiero ver una mayor cantidad de otros términos, uso menos letras en la búsqueda (por ejemplo crédito h o créd).

Y ahora mis dedos van a volver a su tarea de traducir.

Do you align?

Alignment has always been one of those rainy day activities that I always plan on doing but seldom find the time to. Alignment, for those who are not familiar with it, is the process of taking two texts, one in the source language and the other in the target language, and making a bilingual document out of them. Aligned texts can be useful to translators provided they are high-quality texts and each source segment properly matches its corresponding target segment.

If you use a CAT tool, you probably already own an alignment tool of some sort. I have used the MemoQ and SDLX aligners with some success. What I am not keen on is having to manually match segments as this is time consuming and boring. Logiterm will align texts for you automatically and give you "bitexts" in seconds - all within the Microsoft Word environment. It also comes with a nice little search tool that will quickly and efficiently lead you to the terms and/or phrases you are seeking. Another option is NoBabel. Here, you upload your source and target files and let the site do the aligning for you. The great advantage to this option is that it will convert the aligned text to a downloadable .tmw or .tmx file that you can seamlessly add to your CAT tool. In other words, it is as if you had translated the file yourself in your own translation environment. Each translation unit costs USD 0.02, and new subscribers receive USD 100 free credit.

Legal translators are capable of building voluminous files of aligned text. There are many official documents, in Europe and elsewhere, that are of comparable quality in both languages. Before plunging into the alignment process, it is important to examine both files. Which one was translated into the other language? Is it a good translation? If you find yourself correcting the translation provided, then there isn't much point in using it as a future reference. Are the two documents similar in length and content or are they two distinct versions? If they are not close matches, then they won't be good candidates for alignment. You might extract a few good TM entries, but not much else.