Bilingual filetype in Trados Studio. It is created from the source file and then converted back to the original file format at the end of the translation process.
Archives: Glossary Terms
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#litranslators
The hashtag #litranslators on LinkedIn is used by (predominantly freelance) translators to talk about their work, workflows, specialities, and profession.
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Accessibility
Accessibility means ensuring that there are no barriers for preventing interaction with websites or documents. Ensuring an accessible website is now mandatory under law for the public sector. In making a page or document accessible, I frequently have to:
- Add image descriptions to graphic elements used in non-decorative manners.
- Ensure the logical hierarchy of the document (e.g. heading levels)
- Ensure that abbreviations are explained
- Ensure that for screenreaders that words that are pronounced as per other languages (e.g. English jargon in a German text) are marked accordingly.
This helps ensure that our reports, soft law publications etc. are accessible to all intended readers regardless of whether or not they have a visual impairment.
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ASTTI
ASTTI is the Swiss professional association for translators, terminologist and interpreters. I knew of the association before I attended its Financial Translation Summer Conference in Spiez in July 2024, but that event was my first experience of its events.
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Big 5 EU languages
The big five languages in the EU are English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, considered in terms of numbers of speakers within the EU.
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blocker appointment
A blocker appointment is an Outlook appointment that shows you as “do not disturb” to allow you to block a period of time to work without interruption.
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Computer Assisted Translation tools
A computer-assisted translation tool, is effectively a way to store your existing translations in segments (frequently one sentence per segment) to then recall them for subsequent reuse. There are a number of CAT tools out there. I have used Trados in various editions since 2004.
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Continuing Professional Development (CPD)
Working as a translator isn’t only about translating. Training and seminars making up continuing professional development are also important parts of the job.
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CPD
Continuous professional development. Even with seniority and being established, CPD remains an important part of working life. I relate this to a certain extent to my mantra to “Always be curious” (ABC).
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DACHL
The country grouping for Germany (D), Austria (A), Switzerland (CH) and Liechtenstein (L).
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Dietl/Lorenz
“Dietl/Lorenz” is the popular title for the “Wörterbuch für Recht Wirtschaft und Politik” – compiled by Clara-Erika Dietl and Egon Lorenz, available in German<>English (in two volumes). I bought the 5th edition of the DE>EN volume early in my career, and the latest editions appeared in 2016 (7th edition EN>DE) and 2020 (6th edition DE>EN).
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Ernst
Richard Ernst’s “Wörterbuch der industriellen Technik“, known simply as “der Ernst” has been a standard reference volume for technical translators since it was first published in 1948 (EN>DE) and 1951 (DE>EN). There are now also German to French, Spanish and Portuguese versions.
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eTranslation
eTranslation is a neural machine translation service provided by the European Commission. It was launched on 15 November 2017 and superseded MT@EC. It now not only covers all EU languages, but also Arabic, Chinese, Icelandic, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Turkish and Ukrainian.
In addition there are also multiple different domain-based models (e.g. formal language and finance).
For further information, please visit: https://commission.europa.eu/resources-partners/etranslation_en
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Eurodictautom
Eurodictautom was the European Union’s terminology database until 2007, being an early example of online terminology.
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Expert in the Lead (XITL)
The MITL and HITL approaches to human/machine translation advocate “Machine in the Loop” (MITL) and “Human in the Loop” (HITL) – both relegate humans to the loop. The Expert in the Lead (EITL/XITL) approach is human expert-led, rather than only having the (potentially non-expert) human in the loop.
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get it right at the start
A phrase attributed to RWS’ Daniel Brockmann – as a key takeaway of ETUG 2023. Also as #GIRATS
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Human in the Loop (HITL)
Human in the loop is an approach advocated by the translation industry, whereby machine translation is used and the role of human translators is secondary – e.g. doing some kind of post-editing. It has become particularly prevalent with the rise of LLMs.
My issues with HITL is that it reduces the role of a human (with no mention of their actual or implied expertise) to being peripheral/subordinate to the machine in the lead.
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ISO 3166-1 alpha-2
Standard for two letter country codes – such as AT, BE, CH, DE, LI, LU for countries with German as (an) official language in Europe.
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Job crafting
Job crafting is the approach to “hack” your job e.g. to better align it to your needs, goals, skills and strengths. It can help to improve performance and usually involves the employee shaping the job to their needs, rather than fitting to a manager-designed job description. It can sometimes be done very subtly, without being anchored into a job description. Typically job crafting takes on one of three forms: task crafting, relational crafting and cognitive crafting.
Task crafting involves taking the initiative to change tasks you perform, or timing to give you greater control. It can be particularly good for marginalising the tasks you don’t like doing, or which have negligible impact.
Relational crafting involves changing interactions at work – e.g. colleagues and superiors, as well as finding a way to get access to more senior levels of management. In some very hierarchical settings, a “face time” and “elbow technique” approach is often used by competing peers.
Cognitive crafting involves modifying your perception about your job to find greater meaning to the work you do. For example, it can be re-evaluating how work influences and motivates you (e.g. to escape a burnout/boreout cycle (à la Dienst nach Vorschrift (doing the bare minimum))
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LangTech
a portmanteau for language technology, meaning assistive use of technology in relation to language processing tasks.
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language data collection exercise
A language data collection exercise (LDCE) is a call for bilingual language data to allow the initial population of a translation memory (TM) or termbase (TB). It also can serve other purposes, e.g. creation of a style guide or identifying common mistranslations.
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Language Services Handbook
A living document that I had to address all issues relating to language services. Abbreviated as LaSH.
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Languages other than English
Languages other than English is used to describe any source-target language combination that does not involve English. It is abbreviated to LOTE.
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Large Language Models (LLMs)
A large language model (LLM) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that uses deep learning techniques and massively large data sets to understand, summarize, generate and predict new content.