Polish Translator’s Blog

Doing the maths to get paid The Christian Holy Scripture says that the “ worker is worthy of his (or her) wages ”. I think you will agree with this obvious statement irrespective of your religion, if any. What's more, even most clients (fortunately) agree with it. But sometimes you have to walk the extra mile to arrive at the bottom line that you should get paid. In Poland, as opposed to other countries, many clients still pay by the standard page, which is often defined as 1800 characters, including spaces. Some count the source text, some the translated text. One of my clients pays by the standard page, but they recently discovered the savings that CAT tools can bring  them, and so they wanted to pay less for repetitions, fuzzy matches and internal fuzzy matches, still paying by the page. It is a good client and a regular payer, so I though to myself, why not. SDL Trados Studio provides excellent analysis reports, even with character counts, but unfortunately the...

THE PERILS OF CSV WARNING: Highly technical content. Hit the back button, if you're faint of heart. ;-) Some translators will cringe away from the technicalities of their job. But if you work with CAT tools, then by definition you are prepared to work with many different file formats. And there is no getting away from the technical side of this job. Here's my experience with a certain CSV. It was clearly exported from a content management system. Only some columns were intended for translation, and one of these columns contained very lengthy strings of text with HTML and CSS tags. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you want to view a CSV file and prepare it for translation in a CAT tool such as SDL Studio? Excel, of course. But then it turns out that the wizard for importing a CSV file is far from intuitive. You have to set the content type for each column one by one. For comparison, in LibreOffice Calc you can select all columns in the wizard and ch...

MY JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD No, I am not going to write about the end-of-this-earthly-life experience expected by followers of many religions. I mean the ‘computing cloud’. Ever since I got a computer with Internet access, I used electronic mail. Initially, because dial-up Internet access was costly in Poland (and probably elsewhere) I used an e-mail client with SMTP and POP protocols to check for new mail and then disconnect. So, effectively, all e-mail messages were stored locally in my personal computer. To preserve those important ones I had to make backup copies, and if there was a computer crash, some would be lost. Of course you could choose not to delete downloaded messages from the server, but then you'd eventually be over the server quota. This habit of having an e-mail client software installed (somehow it was never Outlook) was one to die hard, even when I learned about the IMAP protocol where messages stay on the server by default. I kept using Thunderbird mail, eve...