Do over!

If you were a kid in the U.S. or have one, you know all about do over. When something goes wrong in a game on the playground, kids can say "do over", and it is as if the wrong move never happened. I found something similar in a Venezuelan divorce decree. There was incorrect information given in the initial divorce suit, and the counterclaimant is asking to change the case's status to the way it was at the second conciliation hearing.

Archivarius

If you use a full-featured CAT Tool to translate your documents, you probably already know that you can search for all instances of a term or phrase such as patria potestad via the concordance function. That way, you do not always have to rely on your memory to know how you have consistently translated a term.

This is not that easy if you have to wade through dozens of Word and PDF documents. If you use Translation Office 3000, and you assign each job a fitting description, with the aid of your memory, you could probably locate most documents and perform a search within each of those documents. But how long would that take? How motivated would you be to do all of that?

There are several desktop search engines such as Copernic Desktop Search and Google Desktop. They include sound, video and image files in addition to text. I have found them to be a bit bloated at times, especially because as a translator, I am mainly interested in searching through text. Then there is dtSearch, which is good if you create your own specialized indexes. I know that several translators use dtSearch. I for one have been testing Archivarius and like it so far. It does not take up an inordinate amount of RAM, and you can define your indexes. Many times I have come across documents that I wasn't looking for, but that are nonetheless useful!

Tables to text

Do you ever get the impression that the person who formatted the source document has some magical way of fitting all those tiny words onto one page? I often have to use a bigger font in the target text so that clients can read the page without a microscope! In fact, I never go below size 8 (which I find to be small all the same).

All too often I am instructed to "keep the original formatting". Instead of constantly fiddling with tabs and the space bar, what I like to do is enter information such as names and dates into a table and then use Word's "Table to Text" feature to convert the table into perfectly spaced text.

Another possibility, if the converted text doesn't come out right, is to format the table so that it has no borders and thus the table is invisible, but all the text is fixed smartly in place.

Equatorial Guinea

When you think of Spanish colonies, you think of the New World. However, Spain colonized the Philippines, Guam, Western Sahara, Ceuta, Melilla and Equatorial Guinea.

Equatorial Guinea is a slice of land wedged between Cameroon to the north and Gabon to the south. The capital, Malabo is on an island several hundred miles to the north of the mainland part of Equatorial Guinea.

I have translated 2 documents from Equatorial Guinea during my career as a legal translator. One was an oil-related document and the other was a birth certificate. I don't think that all of the inhabitants speak Spanish fluently, but those who do speak what sounds like Castillian Spanish to my ear. They in fact pronounce the "z" like Spaniards, which I found to be surprising given that the norm is for this feature to disappear when the Spanish language is spoken far from the Iberian Peninsula.