Although translating and interpreting are often used interchangeably they are two entirely different professions, with the latter often being misunderstood or overlooked. While translators work with the written word, interpreters work with speech, thus requiring different skills and different types of training.
I always thought that simultaneous interpreting was just listening and speaking at the same time, impressive in itself no doubt, but through my experience as an administrative trainee in DG Interpretationat the European Commission, I have learnt that it is actually so much more than that. Interpreters have to listen, understand, analyse, summarise, capture nuances, translate and express someone else’s words…Simultaneously! Interpreting is nothing less than an intense verbal marathon.
Working as an interpreter for the European institutions is certainly not your average 9 to 5 job. To say the job is varied is an understatement, there is no such thing as a typical week. I have rubbed shoulders with colleagues who work in large conferences one day and then interpret at private lunches with President Barroso the next, before travelling to Budapest for a 3 day conference! It goes without saying that interpreters use their languages every day but they also have plenty of opportunities to learn new ones and are encouraged to do so. Many of you are probably still away or have just come back from your year abroad; as an interpreter you would be able to live overseas again and travel with your work.
However, this exciting and challenging profession is under threat for two main reasons; a) it is perceived as a difficult career path to follow, so many people disregard it as an option and b) international organisations, such as the EU institutions, are currently facing a severe shortage of interpreters in several languages, with English chief among them.
In order to become a conference interpreter within the EU institutions, you firstly need to have a Masters degree in Conference Interpreting before you can apply for their freelance accreditation tests or open competitions. In this current economic climate and with the impending rise of tuition fees in the UK, this option may seem arduous and expensive, but help is at hand. Many universities running Conference Interpreting courses have study bursaries available for students, but you will need to contact the universities directly to find out more. In addition, DG Interpretation at the European Commission also offers some bursaries to interpreting students each year. Additionally, you don’t necessarily have to study interpreting in the UK of course. There are many universities across Europe that offer top quality courses at a much lower cost, for example the ESIT in Paris offers the European Masters in Conference Interpreting for just 600€ a year.
Financial considerations aside, DG Interpretation also provides training support to its partner universities through study visits, teaching assistance and training materials, which helps students better prepare themselves for the assessments they need to take in order to become an interpreter for the EU institutions. Read more. Source: http://www.proz.com
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
The world of interpreting: the ins and outs
The future for translators looks bright...
Seven predictions and a survey presented at the 19th FIT Conference, San Francisco, August 2011
Translators in the 21st century find themselves in a difficult position.On the one hand there is a steadily growing demand for translation as a result of increasing global trade and communication generally. On the other hand it becomes harder and harder for the professional translator to meet this demand. Delivery times grow shorter and prices go down.
Technology is often thought of as an answer to this kind of pressure. But along with the technology come many new challenges. It is simply impossible for a translator who is trained in the language arts to keep up with the technology. And if she tries, frustration grows when she finds out that translation tools do not really work together very well. (See report Individual translators and data exchange standards.)
Then there are the economics. As the owner of a small business, translators must weigh the return-on-investment on time and money very carefully. Tools do not come for free and every new tool takes time to be mastered. What if these same tools – or machine translation – one day take over the job of human translators, as many of our colleagues fear. You might prefer to live on another planet, or at least work in another profession.
For the 19th FIT Conference held in San Francisco, 1-4 August 2011, TAUS ran a survey among the translators attending the conference. This article references a summary of the survey, and then makes seven predictions as a follow up to the keynote I gave to close the FIT event. The conclusion: the future for translators looks bright, but they will have to reinvent the profession first.
Which of the following technologies and/or innovations will translators apply in the coming two years? Sixty percent of the respondents say ‘no’ to machine translation, while 19% are already using it, and 21% expect they will use MT within the next two years. The main concerns about MT are the poor quality of MT output (76%) and the poor quality of source documents (54%). Those who look at MT on the bright side see cost reduction as the greatest benefit (39%) and the possibility of real-time delivery of translation as a secondary benefit (35%).
A majority of the respondents are interested in sharing translation memories and terminology: 35% already do so and 39% expect to be sharing language data within two years. However, another much larger poll by ProZ.com of 1,000 translators indicates that 49% would not consider sharing their translation memories. Translators are concerned about ownership of TMs and their relevance to the job at hand. But they do see the benefits of terminology searches of massive TM resources and the productivity gains these bring.
Click here for a summary of the full survey.
Hundreds of millions people press the translate button every day which makes them realize how difficult it is to get a good, accurate translation. As professionals we must realize that our community is far too small (just 250,000 or so professional translators in a world of 6,000 languages?) to serve the needs of seven billion citizens.
We are only scratching the surface. As professional translators – and as a global translation industry – our mission is to help the world communicate better. (That sounds better than being a lawyer or a banker, right?) For we now have the means to deliver on that mission. We simply need to find a way to do it properly. Here is how TAUS sees the future in seven predictions.
1. MT is here to stay
Let’s face it: machine translation will never be perfect. Every speaker of a language has the right to introduce new words, give existing words new meanings and change the spelling and grammar of his language. The point is: that’s what people do every day – witness Twitter or online chat, popular songs or political revolutions.
Computers just cannot keep up with these evolving nuances and associations in hundreds of domains and linguaspheres created by speakers of just one language. Yet, MT for all its mechanical faults is here to stay. Why? For the simple reason that we humans just cannot deliver enough translations in real-time.
Two other factors will also influence the rapid growth of MT. First, MT is getting better and better as we keep feeding the engines with human translated sentences to improve their domain knowledge and we keep tweaking the rules to improve the word order and forms. Second, a new generation of users are growing up, they are more forgiving, and open to self-service. Users may even step in and offer better terminology and forms of expression as a way to help others and themselves.
MT is here to stay and will be called “translation”. It will be embedded on every website, mobile and car app. Translation will become a utility, just like electricity, water and Internet: a basic resource and a basic human right.
2. High-quality translation will gain recognition
As machine translation becomes so universally available, it is clear that there isn’t just one single translation of a text that fits all. To differentiate their product offerings and appeal to specific customer groups, buyers will recognize the need for high-quality translation - call it personalization, transcreation or hyper-localization. This means that, machines will not replace human translators.
On the contrary, non-perfect MT output will stimulate the need for high-quality translation in a broad range of communication situations. The challenge we face as an industry is to agree on the criteria and the measurements for the level of quality that is needed for each situation. Sometimes MT is simply not an option. Sometimes MT is the only option.
3. Post-editing will come and go
Information travels fast and loses its value quickly. This is especially true for news, entertainment, online shopping and customer support content, but increasingly also for business-to-business and government information.
There is a fundamental shift from static “cast in stone” content to dynamic “on the fly” content. Instead of one or two releases per year, companies are shipping product updates on a weekly if not daily basis. And consumers, citizens and patients are increasingly sharing their reviews, tips and tricks in user blogs and social media in almost real time. Any chunk of information may be relevant and interesting to someone somewhere.
The key attraction of MT in this new information age is that it can deliver real-time translation to meet these changes. Potential cost reduction is only a secondary benefit. And the widespread fear that all human translators will soon be downgraded to mere post-editors of MT output is ungrounded.
Why? Well, in the next few years post-editing will grow quickly, but then we will see it diminish. But if there is no time for translation, then there is time for post-editing either. Real-time is real-time, right? In any case, MT technology will get better, using machine intelligence to learn from its mistakes and not make them again.
Translators who choose to work with computers will customize and personalize MT engines to specific tasks, customers and domains, rather than do stupid, repetitive error fixing. They will be promoted to ‘language quality advisors’ if you like.
4. Translators win when supply chains get shorter
More so than most other industries, the translation industry consists of a complex cascade of suppliers. There may be three or four levels between the translator and the end-user: translation agency, global multi-language vendor, corporate translation department and often an external quality reviewer or subject matter expert.
All these functions add a cost to translation but are they adding any real value in proportion to that cost? Tasks are often replicated and functions overlap. Disintermediation (i.e., ‘cutting out the middleman’) hasn’t really bitten into the translation industry yet as it has in the travel and banking industries, for example. But change is on the way, under pressure from the overarching need to translate more words into more languages.
Corporate and government buyers will analyze their supply chains to reduce their costs, and functions such as project management, quality assurance, vendor selection and translation memory management, will probably be streamlined, simplified or shared. Yet there will be no question about the critical role of the translator at the end of the chain.
Even though MT will be used to translate content streams requiring real-time translation, there will always be a need for a professional translator to tell good from bad language in the communication process.
5. The list of languages keeps growing
As global business is shifting from an export mentality to a world of open trading on a flat playing field, the nature of publishing and communications is also changing fundamentally.
In the old 20th century model the global manufacturer and publisher used to push information out to the world. They would select their markets, pick their most important language communities and translate their own instructions for use, brochures and web pages.
They would probably start with four to six languages and gradually add more languages if the markets prove to be worthwhile. In the new 21st century model, companies are realizing that their customers are not sitting there waiting for the information to be pushed out by manufacturers and publishers.
They are browsing the Internet and pulling down information wherever they find it. And if they can’t find it, they write their own reviews and comments that yet others may then translate to help their local peers. In the old world, content was owned by publishers; in the new world content is shared and earned.
In this radically changing environment, the range of languages for content is constantly growing. Successful global companies need to facilitate communications in a hundred-or more languages instead of the old standard set of seven or at the most twenty.
Translators in many more countries will benefit from this “democratization” of globalization.
6. Sharing data becomes the norm
Our concept of a ‘translation memory’ is about to change. Translation memories and translation memory tools have long been cultivated as our proprietary productivity weapon, perhaps offering a competitive edge in an environment where one fifth of professional translators (according to a recent ProZ.om poll) still don’t even use translation memories.
Yet, we have now reached the limits of potential productivity gains, and, let’s face it, translation memory technology itself – in its current and mostly used form – is no longer state-of-the-art. Most translation memory tools are stuck in a technology time warp and cannot leverage the power of corpus linguistics (see article The Future is Corpus Linguistics). A new generation of translation productivity tools will emerge that allow us to leverage any length of strings of text from very large corpora of translations.
These new tools will in many respects be using features and components that emerged from statistical MT technology, except for the fact that they leave the professional translator in full control of the processes. They will unleash the translational power hidden inside very large corpora of text. They will allow us to do semantic searches and clustering, synonym identification, automatic cleaning and correction of language data, sentiment analyses and predictive translations.
In anticipation of this next generation translation technology, many translators and companies have already started consolidating their translation memory data into large, searchable repositories. Some (more than you think) are even harvesting these language data from the Internet, meaning that they have computers crawling translated web sites, aligning the sentences from these web sites, and reconstructing translation memory files.
Call them pirates if you like. But as we have seen in other industries, they are the drivers of innovation. We at TAUS truly believe that it is this kind of innovation that is needed to unleash the power of the translation industry and enable it to prosper.
The TAUS Data Association was established in 2008 as a legal, not-for-profit member-driven organization aimed at hosting and sharing translation memories for all stakeholders in the global translation industry. The publicly accessible and searchable database already contains four billion words of high-quality translation data in 350-plus language pairs.
7. Translation becomes a business of choices
The future of translation either looks bright or gloomy: it depends on whether you want to change, reinvent yourself and adapt. Admittedly, this is not an easy choice. Nor is there a lot of time to consider all the options, but at least translators now have the luxury of choosing. In the past, you became a translator and you were in it for life. Unless of course you became a literary translator, in which case none of the above applies.
Today, you can choose to be a ‘boutique’ translator, specializing in a domain and providing hyper-localization or transcreation services. In this case, you will drift away from the original concept of a translator once you start specializing in your domain. You may be asked to create local content instead of translating text written for a different culture.
You may be asked to do brand checking for new product names. Your job title may change to ‘language consultant’ or ‘communications adviser’. If what you like is linguistics and computers, you may choose to become a specialist in training domain- and customer-specific MT engines, or in translation optimization, or in new functions such as language data cleaning, data selection on the basis of semantic search, search engine optimization, or sentiment and cultural analysis using customer feedback data.
The availability of language data in so many languages will open a much larger range of choices for specialization and innovation. And yes, you can also opt for post-editing machine translation output. Not so much fun if it is not your first choice, but in many ways this option is similar to the first wave of automation our profession experienced in the 1980s with the arrival of translation memory tools.
The good news now, is that the MT engines will soon learn from the corrections made by post-editors, so you will not have to make the same corrections again and again. And translators (or whatever their new title might be) will become much less solitary and grow closer to their colleagues and end customers.
Collaborative networks will bring language workers together. And buyers of translation and language-related services will eliminate one or two handovers in the supply chain and be able to connect directly with you.
Translation may, in many ways, become a commodity and a utility but that does not spell the end of the profession. On the contrary, it will stimulate the need for differentiation, specialization and value added services. It is up to the world’s translators to rise to the challenge, and open up to these changes, and reinvent their future. Source: http://www.translationautomation.com
Translators in the 21st century find themselves in a difficult position.On the one hand there is a steadily growing demand for translation as a result of increasing global trade and communication generally. On the other hand it becomes harder and harder for the professional translator to meet this demand. Delivery times grow shorter and prices go down.
Technology is often thought of as an answer to this kind of pressure. But along with the technology come many new challenges. It is simply impossible for a translator who is trained in the language arts to keep up with the technology. And if she tries, frustration grows when she finds out that translation tools do not really work together very well. (See report Individual translators and data exchange standards.)
Then there are the economics. As the owner of a small business, translators must weigh the return-on-investment on time and money very carefully. Tools do not come for free and every new tool takes time to be mastered. What if these same tools – or machine translation – one day take over the job of human translators, as many of our colleagues fear. You might prefer to live on another planet, or at least work in another profession.
For the 19th FIT Conference held in San Francisco, 1-4 August 2011, TAUS ran a survey among the translators attending the conference. This article references a summary of the survey, and then makes seven predictions as a follow up to the keynote I gave to close the FIT event. The conclusion: the future for translators looks bright, but they will have to reinvent the profession first.
Crisis. What crisis?
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, sixty-four (37%) of the survey respondents reported that translation rates continue to be under pressure. There seems to be a slight decline in translation volume, while the palette of languages seems to be broadening slightly. Thirty-seven respondents (21%) see business continuing as usual, while respectively 12% and 10% of them see opportunities for automation and innovation in the currently unstable market.Which of the following technologies and/or innovations will translators apply in the coming two years? Sixty percent of the respondents say ‘no’ to machine translation, while 19% are already using it, and 21% expect they will use MT within the next two years. The main concerns about MT are the poor quality of MT output (76%) and the poor quality of source documents (54%). Those who look at MT on the bright side see cost reduction as the greatest benefit (39%) and the possibility of real-time delivery of translation as a secondary benefit (35%).
A majority of the respondents are interested in sharing translation memories and terminology: 35% already do so and 39% expect to be sharing language data within two years. However, another much larger poll by ProZ.com of 1,000 translators indicates that 49% would not consider sharing their translation memories. Translators are concerned about ownership of TMs and their relevance to the job at hand. But they do see the benefits of terminology searches of massive TM resources and the productivity gains these bring.
Click here for a summary of the full survey.
The future looks bright, but …
… change is the name of the game. And reinventing the profession is extremely hard if your days are spent just getting the jobs done and trying to make a modest living. Yet, for the first time in the history of the planet, translation is a really strategic activity. Thanks to Google Translate, Yahoo! Babelfish and Microsoft Bing, every soul on our planet now knows what translation means.Hundreds of millions people press the translate button every day which makes them realize how difficult it is to get a good, accurate translation. As professionals we must realize that our community is far too small (just 250,000 or so professional translators in a world of 6,000 languages?) to serve the needs of seven billion citizens.
We are only scratching the surface. As professional translators – and as a global translation industry – our mission is to help the world communicate better. (That sounds better than being a lawyer or a banker, right?) For we now have the means to deliver on that mission. We simply need to find a way to do it properly. Here is how TAUS sees the future in seven predictions.
1. MT is here to stay
Let’s face it: machine translation will never be perfect. Every speaker of a language has the right to introduce new words, give existing words new meanings and change the spelling and grammar of his language. The point is: that’s what people do every day – witness Twitter or online chat, popular songs or political revolutions.
Computers just cannot keep up with these evolving nuances and associations in hundreds of domains and linguaspheres created by speakers of just one language. Yet, MT for all its mechanical faults is here to stay. Why? For the simple reason that we humans just cannot deliver enough translations in real-time.
Two other factors will also influence the rapid growth of MT. First, MT is getting better and better as we keep feeding the engines with human translated sentences to improve their domain knowledge and we keep tweaking the rules to improve the word order and forms. Second, a new generation of users are growing up, they are more forgiving, and open to self-service. Users may even step in and offer better terminology and forms of expression as a way to help others and themselves.
MT is here to stay and will be called “translation”. It will be embedded on every website, mobile and car app. Translation will become a utility, just like electricity, water and Internet: a basic resource and a basic human right.
2. High-quality translation will gain recognition
As machine translation becomes so universally available, it is clear that there isn’t just one single translation of a text that fits all. To differentiate their product offerings and appeal to specific customer groups, buyers will recognize the need for high-quality translation - call it personalization, transcreation or hyper-localization. This means that, machines will not replace human translators.
On the contrary, non-perfect MT output will stimulate the need for high-quality translation in a broad range of communication situations. The challenge we face as an industry is to agree on the criteria and the measurements for the level of quality that is needed for each situation. Sometimes MT is simply not an option. Sometimes MT is the only option.
3. Post-editing will come and go
Information travels fast and loses its value quickly. This is especially true for news, entertainment, online shopping and customer support content, but increasingly also for business-to-business and government information.
There is a fundamental shift from static “cast in stone” content to dynamic “on the fly” content. Instead of one or two releases per year, companies are shipping product updates on a weekly if not daily basis. And consumers, citizens and patients are increasingly sharing their reviews, tips and tricks in user blogs and social media in almost real time. Any chunk of information may be relevant and interesting to someone somewhere.
The key attraction of MT in this new information age is that it can deliver real-time translation to meet these changes. Potential cost reduction is only a secondary benefit. And the widespread fear that all human translators will soon be downgraded to mere post-editors of MT output is ungrounded.
Why? Well, in the next few years post-editing will grow quickly, but then we will see it diminish. But if there is no time for translation, then there is time for post-editing either. Real-time is real-time, right? In any case, MT technology will get better, using machine intelligence to learn from its mistakes and not make them again.
Translators who choose to work with computers will customize and personalize MT engines to specific tasks, customers and domains, rather than do stupid, repetitive error fixing. They will be promoted to ‘language quality advisors’ if you like.
4. Translators win when supply chains get shorter
More so than most other industries, the translation industry consists of a complex cascade of suppliers. There may be three or four levels between the translator and the end-user: translation agency, global multi-language vendor, corporate translation department and often an external quality reviewer or subject matter expert.
All these functions add a cost to translation but are they adding any real value in proportion to that cost? Tasks are often replicated and functions overlap. Disintermediation (i.e., ‘cutting out the middleman’) hasn’t really bitten into the translation industry yet as it has in the travel and banking industries, for example. But change is on the way, under pressure from the overarching need to translate more words into more languages.
Corporate and government buyers will analyze their supply chains to reduce their costs, and functions such as project management, quality assurance, vendor selection and translation memory management, will probably be streamlined, simplified or shared. Yet there will be no question about the critical role of the translator at the end of the chain.
Even though MT will be used to translate content streams requiring real-time translation, there will always be a need for a professional translator to tell good from bad language in the communication process.
5. The list of languages keeps growing
As global business is shifting from an export mentality to a world of open trading on a flat playing field, the nature of publishing and communications is also changing fundamentally.
In the old 20th century model the global manufacturer and publisher used to push information out to the world. They would select their markets, pick their most important language communities and translate their own instructions for use, brochures and web pages.
They would probably start with four to six languages and gradually add more languages if the markets prove to be worthwhile. In the new 21st century model, companies are realizing that their customers are not sitting there waiting for the information to be pushed out by manufacturers and publishers.
They are browsing the Internet and pulling down information wherever they find it. And if they can’t find it, they write their own reviews and comments that yet others may then translate to help their local peers. In the old world, content was owned by publishers; in the new world content is shared and earned.
In this radically changing environment, the range of languages for content is constantly growing. Successful global companies need to facilitate communications in a hundred-or more languages instead of the old standard set of seven or at the most twenty.
Translators in many more countries will benefit from this “democratization” of globalization.
6. Sharing data becomes the norm
Our concept of a ‘translation memory’ is about to change. Translation memories and translation memory tools have long been cultivated as our proprietary productivity weapon, perhaps offering a competitive edge in an environment where one fifth of professional translators (according to a recent ProZ.om poll) still don’t even use translation memories.
Yet, we have now reached the limits of potential productivity gains, and, let’s face it, translation memory technology itself – in its current and mostly used form – is no longer state-of-the-art. Most translation memory tools are stuck in a technology time warp and cannot leverage the power of corpus linguistics (see article The Future is Corpus Linguistics). A new generation of translation productivity tools will emerge that allow us to leverage any length of strings of text from very large corpora of translations.
These new tools will in many respects be using features and components that emerged from statistical MT technology, except for the fact that they leave the professional translator in full control of the processes. They will unleash the translational power hidden inside very large corpora of text. They will allow us to do semantic searches and clustering, synonym identification, automatic cleaning and correction of language data, sentiment analyses and predictive translations.
In anticipation of this next generation translation technology, many translators and companies have already started consolidating their translation memory data into large, searchable repositories. Some (more than you think) are even harvesting these language data from the Internet, meaning that they have computers crawling translated web sites, aligning the sentences from these web sites, and reconstructing translation memory files.
Call them pirates if you like. But as we have seen in other industries, they are the drivers of innovation. We at TAUS truly believe that it is this kind of innovation that is needed to unleash the power of the translation industry and enable it to prosper.
The TAUS Data Association was established in 2008 as a legal, not-for-profit member-driven organization aimed at hosting and sharing translation memories for all stakeholders in the global translation industry. The publicly accessible and searchable database already contains four billion words of high-quality translation data in 350-plus language pairs.
7. Translation becomes a business of choices
The future of translation either looks bright or gloomy: it depends on whether you want to change, reinvent yourself and adapt. Admittedly, this is not an easy choice. Nor is there a lot of time to consider all the options, but at least translators now have the luxury of choosing. In the past, you became a translator and you were in it for life. Unless of course you became a literary translator, in which case none of the above applies.
Today, you can choose to be a ‘boutique’ translator, specializing in a domain and providing hyper-localization or transcreation services. In this case, you will drift away from the original concept of a translator once you start specializing in your domain. You may be asked to create local content instead of translating text written for a different culture.
You may be asked to do brand checking for new product names. Your job title may change to ‘language consultant’ or ‘communications adviser’. If what you like is linguistics and computers, you may choose to become a specialist in training domain- and customer-specific MT engines, or in translation optimization, or in new functions such as language data cleaning, data selection on the basis of semantic search, search engine optimization, or sentiment and cultural analysis using customer feedback data.
The availability of language data in so many languages will open a much larger range of choices for specialization and innovation. And yes, you can also opt for post-editing machine translation output. Not so much fun if it is not your first choice, but in many ways this option is similar to the first wave of automation our profession experienced in the 1980s with the arrival of translation memory tools.
The good news now, is that the MT engines will soon learn from the corrections made by post-editors, so you will not have to make the same corrections again and again. And translators (or whatever their new title might be) will become much less solitary and grow closer to their colleagues and end customers.
Collaborative networks will bring language workers together. And buyers of translation and language-related services will eliminate one or two handovers in the supply chain and be able to connect directly with you.
Translation may, in many ways, become a commodity and a utility but that does not spell the end of the profession. On the contrary, it will stimulate the need for differentiation, specialization and value added services. It is up to the world’s translators to rise to the challenge, and open up to these changes, and reinvent their future. Source: http://www.translationautomation.com
Stagii de traducere remunerate
Stagiile de traducere remunerate se acordă doar absolvenţilor de
universitate sau instituţii similare. Scopul lor este de a le permite
stagiarilor să îşi completeze cunoştinţele dobândite în
timpul studiilor şi să se familiarizeze cu activitatea Uniunii Europene, în
special cu cea a Parlamentului European.
Candidaţii la un stagiu de traducere remunerat trebuie:
Pentru a evita saturarea sistemului din cauza numărului mare de
candidaturi, vă sfătuim să nu așteptați ultima zi pentru a vă depune
candidatura.
Stagiile de traducere se desfăşoară la Luxemburg.
Cu titlu indicativ, cuantumul bursei este în 2011 de 1.213,55 EUR pe lună.
Dacă sunteţi interesat de un stagiu de traducere remunerat, vă rugăm să citiţi cu atenţie Normele interne privind stagiile de traducere.
Vă atragem atenţia cu privire la condiţiile de admitere. În cazul în care candidatura dumneavoastră primeşte un răspuns pozitiv în urma preselecţiei, vi se vor solicita următoarele documente justificative:
În cazul în care a primit un răspuns pozitiv în urma preselecţiei, candidatura dumneavoastră va fi valabilă cu condiţia să trimiteţi toate documentele menţionate mai sus.
În cazul în care îndepliniţi condiţiile de admitere la stagiu, vă rugăm să completaţi cererea-tip online.
Vă rugăm să reţineţi faptul că, în cazul în care formularul de candidatură rămâne inactiv timp de 30 de minute, datele pe care le-aţi introdus se pierd. Vă sfătuim aşadar ca, înainte de a completa formularul de candidatură, să citiţi cu atenţie „Normele interne privind stagiile de traducere”.
Înscrierea nu poate fi modificată online şi se realizează într-o singură etapă. Pentru pregătirea dosarului de candidatură înainte de înscrierea online, aveţi la dispoziţie o varianta imprimabilă a modelului de formular.
N.B.: Păstraţi o copie a numărului care vă va fi atribuit după validarea înscrierii online.
Candidaţii la un stagiu de traducere remunerat trebuie:
- să fie cetăţeni ai unui stat membru al Uniunii Europene sau ai unei ţări candidate la aderare (Croaţia, Islanda, Fosta Republică Iugoslavă a Macedoniei, Muntenegru sau Turcia),
- să fi împlinit vârsta de 18 ani la data începerii stagiului,
- să nu fi beneficiat de un stagiu remunerat sau de un angajament salarial de mai mult de patru săptămâni consecutive pe lângă o instituţie europeană, un deputat sau un grup politic din Parlamentul European.
- să fi obţinut, înainte de data limită de depunere a candidaturilor, o diplomă corespunzătoare unui ciclu de studii universitare de minim trei ani;
- să stăpânească perfect una dintre limbile oficiale ale Uniunii Europene sau pe aceea a unei ţări candidate şi să cunoască în mod aprofundat alte două limbi oficiale ale Uniunii Europene.
| Datele de începere a stagiilor și perioadele de înscriere | |
| Începutul stagiilor | Perioada de înscriere |
| 1 ianuarie | de la 15 iunie până la 15 august (miezul nopții) |
| 1 aprilie | de la 15 septembrie până la 15 noiembrie (miezul nopții) |
| 1 iulie | de la 15 decembrie până la 15 februarie (miezul nopții) |
| 1 octombrie | de la 15 martie până la 15 mai (miezul nopții) |
Stagiile de traducere se desfăşoară la Luxemburg.
Cu titlu indicativ, cuantumul bursei este în 2011 de 1.213,55 EUR pe lună.
Dacă sunteţi interesat de un stagiu de traducere remunerat, vă rugăm să citiţi cu atenţie Normele interne privind stagiile de traducere.
Vă atragem atenţia cu privire la condiţiile de admitere. În cazul în care candidatura dumneavoastră primeşte un răspuns pozitiv în urma preselecţiei, vi se vor solicita următoarele documente justificative:
- cererea-tip semnată,
- copia paşaportului sau a cărţii de identitate,
- copii ale diplomelor şi certificatelor,
- copii ale foii matricole (puncte analitice, note), dacă sunt disponibile.
În cazul în care a primit un răspuns pozitiv în urma preselecţiei, candidatura dumneavoastră va fi valabilă cu condiţia să trimiteţi toate documentele menţionate mai sus.
În cazul în care îndepliniţi condiţiile de admitere la stagiu, vă rugăm să completaţi cererea-tip online.
Vă rugăm să reţineţi faptul că, în cazul în care formularul de candidatură rămâne inactiv timp de 30 de minute, datele pe care le-aţi introdus se pierd. Vă sfătuim aşadar ca, înainte de a completa formularul de candidatură, să citiţi cu atenţie „Normele interne privind stagiile de traducere”.
Înscrierea nu poate fi modificată online şi se realizează într-o singură etapă. Pentru pregătirea dosarului de candidatură înainte de înscrierea online, aveţi la dispoziţie o varianta imprimabilă a modelului de formular.
N.B.: Păstraţi o copie a numărului care vă va fi atribuit după validarea înscrierii online.
| Pentru mai multe informaţii, consultaţi: |
 Norme
interne privind stagiile de traducere (pdf) |
Modelul
de formular (pdf)   |
| Cererea-tip
online |
|
FAQ (pdf)
|
How to Delete a Windows Service in Windows 7, Vista or XP
If you are a fan of tweaking your system and disabling services, you
might find that over time your Windows Services list becomes huge and
unwieldy with a large number of services in the list that will never be
enabled.
Instead of just disabling a service, you can alternatively completely delete the service. This technique can be especially helpful if you’ve installed some piece of software that doesn’t uninstall correctly, and leaves an item in the service list.
Important Note: Once you delete a service, it’s gone, and it’s going to be a pain to add it back. Use with caution.
Deleting a Service
The first thing you’ll need to do is identify the name of the service, so open up Services through the start menu or control panel, and then find the service in the list that you want to delete.
You’ll want to open up the properties by double-clicking on the service name, and then highlight the “Service name” value and copy it to the clipboard. This is what we’ll need to disable it.
You’ll need to open up a command prompt, and if you are using Windows 7 or Vista you’ll need to right-click the command prompt and choose Run as Administrator. We’ll use the sc command to actually do the work.
The syntax used to delete a service is this:
Note that I’m not recommending deleting this particular service, it’s just an example.
Now if you use the F5 key to refresh your Services list, you’ll see that the service is gone.
I’ve found that using this technique (carefully) can make your Services list a lot more useful, since you don’t have to weed through dozens of items you will never have enabled.
Note: You should think long and hard before deleting a service, because it’s very difficult to get them back once they are gone.
Instead of just disabling a service, you can alternatively completely delete the service. This technique can be especially helpful if you’ve installed some piece of software that doesn’t uninstall correctly, and leaves an item in the service list.
Important Note: Once you delete a service, it’s gone, and it’s going to be a pain to add it back. Use with caution.
Deleting a Service
The first thing you’ll need to do is identify the name of the service, so open up Services through the start menu or control panel, and then find the service in the list that you want to delete.
You’ll want to open up the properties by double-clicking on the service name, and then highlight the “Service name” value and copy it to the clipboard. This is what we’ll need to disable it.
You’ll need to open up a command prompt, and if you are using Windows 7 or Vista you’ll need to right-click the command prompt and choose Run as Administrator. We’ll use the sc command to actually do the work.
The syntax used to delete a service is this:
sc delete ServiceNameIf your service name has spaces in it, you’ll need to wrap the service name in quotes, like this:
sc delete “Adobe LM Service”
Note that I’m not recommending deleting this particular service, it’s just an example.
Now if you use the F5 key to refresh your Services list, you’ll see that the service is gone.
I’ve found that using this technique (carefully) can make your Services list a lot more useful, since you don’t have to weed through dozens of items you will never have enabled.
Note: You should think long and hard before deleting a service, because it’s very difficult to get them back once they are gone.
Monday, August 29, 2011
FAQ for translation buyers
1. What is translation? Is it the same as interpreting?
Translation is converting written texts from one language (source) to another (target). Interpreting is converting spoken language. Both translators & interpreters are language professionals, however the education, training and skills required for each are different, and only few people can offer both services.
2. What constitutes a good translator?
First of all, it’s not a hobby. Not everybody familiar with a foreign language can do it. A good and professional translator needs the following:
• Ability to read and write well in both source and target languages
• Knowledge of and/or experience in the field of the text to be translated
• Extensive knowledge of syntax/grammar/spelling rules in both source and target languages
• At least 3 years’ experience before cooperating with direct clients. Novice translators should work for translation agencies first, where a proofreader will review their work and provide feedback (however, not all translation agencies follow this process).
• References, i.e. translation agencies or direct clients who have cooperated with the translator in the past and can offer feedback as to their cooperation.
• A professional translator either has a strong technical background (e.g. a medical translator might have a medical degree) combined with linguistic experience or has a strong linguistic background (e.g. a degree in Languages or Translation) combined with technical experience (specialization in a specific field of interest).
3. What constitutes a good translation?
• A good translation is easily understood.
• A good translation is fluent and smooth.
• A good translation conveys the meaning of the source text.
• A good translation fits the purpose that it was intended to fit.
4. Is there a difference between technical translation and literary translation?
Of course there is. Most translators can either the one or the other, very few can do both. Literary translation concerns literary works (novels, short stories, plays, poems, etc.), whereas technical translation concerns texts that relate to specialized, technological, or scientific subject areas. Medical, legal, automotive, marketing etc. translators belong to the second category. Source: proz.com
Translation is converting written texts from one language (source) to another (target). Interpreting is converting spoken language. Both translators & interpreters are language professionals, however the education, training and skills required for each are different, and only few people can offer both services.
2. What constitutes a good translator?
First of all, it’s not a hobby. Not everybody familiar with a foreign language can do it. A good and professional translator needs the following:
• Ability to read and write well in both source and target languages
• Knowledge of and/or experience in the field of the text to be translated
• Extensive knowledge of syntax/grammar/spelling rules in both source and target languages
• At least 3 years’ experience before cooperating with direct clients. Novice translators should work for translation agencies first, where a proofreader will review their work and provide feedback (however, not all translation agencies follow this process).
• References, i.e. translation agencies or direct clients who have cooperated with the translator in the past and can offer feedback as to their cooperation.
• A professional translator either has a strong technical background (e.g. a medical translator might have a medical degree) combined with linguistic experience or has a strong linguistic background (e.g. a degree in Languages or Translation) combined with technical experience (specialization in a specific field of interest).
3. What constitutes a good translation?
• A good translation is easily understood.
• A good translation is fluent and smooth.
• A good translation conveys the meaning of the source text.
• A good translation fits the purpose that it was intended to fit.
4. Is there a difference between technical translation and literary translation?
Of course there is. Most translators can either the one or the other, very few can do both. Literary translation concerns literary works (novels, short stories, plays, poems, etc.), whereas technical translation concerns texts that relate to specialized, technological, or scientific subject areas. Medical, legal, automotive, marketing etc. translators belong to the second category. Source: proz.com
Thursday, August 11, 2011
12 articles on how to get more referrals
While some articles provide similar advice, each piece has at least one unique tip hidden inside. Check out all 12 and build a referral strategy that can explode your business.Source: Freelance Switch
1. The Freelancer’s Guide to Increasing Referral Business
This FreelanceSwitch article starts things off by covering a few reasons why referrals are so great and then gets into 12 solid tips and tactics that you can use to improve the amount of referrals in your freelance business. Two of the gems: asking for client feedback to determine your area of expertise and building a competitive advantage over the rest of the market.
2. Get More Referrals by Asking
This article flips the typical referral script on it’s head and states, “Give and You Shall Receive.” Read more to learn how to make giving a habit and generating referrals a frequent event.
3. How to Get More Referrals & Find Strategic Business Partners with John Jantsch
This 30 minute web show is run by HubSpot and they interview the author of Referral Engine, John Jantsch. John shares all sorts of information about generating referrals for your business in this excellent interview. Two of my favorites include the number one reason why businesses get referrals and the strategy to use to discover what makes your business remarkable and will get people talking.
4. How to Ask for Referrals and Get More Clients
This article is all about how to ask for referrals. It covers real scripts that you can reuse for your freelance business and put into practice today. This article also comes with a list of tips and suggestions to keep in mind when you get ready to ask for a referral.
5. How to get referrals
This throwback article is a hidden gem in Seth Godin’s archive. As only Seth can, he reminds us that referrals aren’t really about our business, but about the customer. Check it out and discover his sage advice on how to make referrals about the only person who matters: the client.
6. How to Get More Referrals
This article covers a crucial aspect of generating freelance referrals: how to get more referrals by taking control of the process and developing a sustainable referral system.
7. How a freelance marketer built her business with referrals
Gail Keith is a successful freelance marketer who left the corporate world almost a decade ago. In this story, she shares how she built her freelance business from the ground up with referrals. You’ll also find 3 specific techniques that you can use to increase the number of referrals you get.
8. How to finesse 156% more referrals
This down-to-earth article covers the typical process of asking for a referral. However, it also covers a not-so-typical — but oh so critical — suggestion of thanking the referrer.
9. How to Ask for a Referral Without Sounding Like a Jerk
This article shares a brief story of a brilliant freelancer who lost his chance for a referral and then shows you what you can do to prevent the same fate happening to you. Don’t miss this short read on how to get more referrals.
10. Attn Freelance Writers: How to Get More Work from Existing Clients
This article is targeted towards freelance writers, but many of the principles will be useful for all freelancers. If you’re interested in learning how to get more business from your existing clients, then this article is for you.
11. 5 Keys to Building Referral Business
This article focuses on web designers and developers, but once again, the principles are sound advice for all freelancers. This piece also raises good points about the ease of contact that you should provide if you want people to refer your work. There are also a few decent points in the comments of this article that highlight the areas freelancers are really struggling with.
12. 15 Tips for Getting Client Referrals to Grow Your Freelance Business
This article from American Writers and Artists, Inc. is filled with 15 tips to help you create a strategy that can generate a stream of referrals in your freelance business. The first tip might be the most important: set a referral goal for each month. If you make referrals a priority, then you’ll discover how to get more referrals much more quickly.
Top misconceptions about training to become an interpreter
1) ANYONE CAN BE AN INTERPRETER
Many believe you don’t need any training at all, you just have to speak a couple of languages to become an interpreter. This misconception possibly arises from the fact that when you watch a good interpreter in action, it all appears so effortless. This may lead the uninitiated to think that anyone can do it that easily.
This is absolutely FALSE. It’s like saying anyone who can use a thermometer can be a doctor, or owning a pair of skis will make you a ski jumper. While the thorough knowledge of languages is absolutely essential to becoming an interpreter, it is not enough in itself. The reason why it all looks so easy is because the interpreter has spent years training and practicing the skills required to do his or her job.
2) INTERPRETERS ARE BORN, NOT MADE
Here, the idea seems to be that some people are born with a “knack” for interpreting and others don’t. It is true that a certain number of “in-born” traits will make it easier for one to learn the skills required to become an interpreter. For instance, it helps to:
- be a good communicator
- have a quick and well-organised mind
- have the ability to concentrate and focus, especially in stressful situations
- have strong nerves
- have intellectual curiosity
- be adaptable to new situations
- be a people person (although not all interpreters are extroverts)
- be a team player
- show personal integrity
3) INTERPRETING CAN’T BE TAUGHT
This one is actually a bit mystifying for me, since most people seem to agree that pretty much every other profession requires training. You want to build a skyscraper? Go and study architecture. You want to run a multinational? Sign up for an MBA. You want to become an interpreter? Apply to a postgraduate interpreting course.
The idea here behind the myth that interpreting can’t be taught would appear to be that since the whole interpreting process all happens so quickly inside one’s head, there is no way to actually figure out what’s going on in there and then teach the techniques required. This is particularly the case for simultaneous translation, where observers see the interpreter listening, mentally analysing and translating the message, and speaking all at the same time.
I’m pleased to say that this belief is also FALSE:
4) ALL INTERPRETING COURSES ARE CREATED EQUAL
This is simply not true. Just as I’m sure you would do a lot of research before applying to an executive MBA, I highly recommend prospective students research various interpreting schools before making their choice. They shouldn’t necessarily just pick the course closest to home, or the one at the university their friends plan to attend.
What to look out for? According to the AIIC (the International Association of Conference Interpreters), which has drafted a list of best practice for conference interpreting training programmes, a course should be at the postgraduate level, be at least one year long, be taught by conference interpreters, include an aptitude test, and teach both consecutive and simultaneous interpreting techniques.
The AIIC’s recommendations, as well as a number of other tips for prospective students of interpreting, can be found on the website of AIB, along with a lot of other useful information about the profession. AIB offers objective, useful information and debunks a lot of myths, including the four I have talked about today.”
You can also watch the video with the interview here. Source: Interpreter’s Diaries blog
Many believe you don’t need any training at all, you just have to speak a couple of languages to become an interpreter. This misconception possibly arises from the fact that when you watch a good interpreter in action, it all appears so effortless. This may lead the uninitiated to think that anyone can do it that easily.
This is absolutely FALSE. It’s like saying anyone who can use a thermometer can be a doctor, or owning a pair of skis will make you a ski jumper. While the thorough knowledge of languages is absolutely essential to becoming an interpreter, it is not enough in itself. The reason why it all looks so easy is because the interpreter has spent years training and practicing the skills required to do his or her job.
2) INTERPRETERS ARE BORN, NOT MADE
Here, the idea seems to be that some people are born with a “knack” for interpreting and others don’t. It is true that a certain number of “in-born” traits will make it easier for one to learn the skills required to become an interpreter. For instance, it helps to:
- be a good communicator
- have a quick and well-organised mind
- have the ability to concentrate and focus, especially in stressful situations
- have strong nerves
- have intellectual curiosity
- be adaptable to new situations
- be a people person (although not all interpreters are extroverts)
- be a team player
- show personal integrity
3) INTERPRETING CAN’T BE TAUGHT
This one is actually a bit mystifying for me, since most people seem to agree that pretty much every other profession requires training. You want to build a skyscraper? Go and study architecture. You want to run a multinational? Sign up for an MBA. You want to become an interpreter? Apply to a postgraduate interpreting course.
The idea here behind the myth that interpreting can’t be taught would appear to be that since the whole interpreting process all happens so quickly inside one’s head, there is no way to actually figure out what’s going on in there and then teach the techniques required. This is particularly the case for simultaneous translation, where observers see the interpreter listening, mentally analysing and translating the message, and speaking all at the same time.
I’m pleased to say that this belief is also FALSE:
4) ALL INTERPRETING COURSES ARE CREATED EQUAL
This is simply not true. Just as I’m sure you would do a lot of research before applying to an executive MBA, I highly recommend prospective students research various interpreting schools before making their choice. They shouldn’t necessarily just pick the course closest to home, or the one at the university their friends plan to attend.
What to look out for? According to the AIIC (the International Association of Conference Interpreters), which has drafted a list of best practice for conference interpreting training programmes, a course should be at the postgraduate level, be at least one year long, be taught by conference interpreters, include an aptitude test, and teach both consecutive and simultaneous interpreting techniques.
The AIIC’s recommendations, as well as a number of other tips for prospective students of interpreting, can be found on the website of AIB, along with a lot of other useful information about the profession. AIB offers objective, useful information and debunks a lot of myths, including the four I have talked about today.”
You can also watch the video with the interview here. Source: Interpreter’s Diaries blog
How to take a screenshot or picture of what’s on your computer screen
There are a couple of reasons you might want to take a screenshot
(a.k.a., screen capture or screen grab) of your desktop or an
application window. One of the most common is to send the image to tech support to show a problem you’re experiencing. Whatever your motive, here’s how to take a screenshot on both Windows and Mac.
Take a Screenshot on Windows
Look for thePrint Screen key on your keyboard, which might be labeled PrtScn.- To capture the entire screen (everything you see on the screen, including all open windows), press the PrtScn button. This screenshot will be placed in your clipboard.
- Alternatively, to capture just the active or foremost window, press Alt+PrtScn.
- Next, open an image editing program like Microsoft Paint and either go to the Edit menu then select Paste or, for a faster method, hit Ctrl+V to paste the image into the program.
- Go to the File menu then choose Save As and save the image to a folder so you can later attach it to an email (or support request).
Using the Snipping Tool
- Click Start, then All Programs, then Accessories, and then Snipping Tool.
- Click the down arrow next to the New button to select your snipping type.
- Then use your mouse to select the area of your screen or window you want to capture.
- You can also use the Snipping Tool to capture a menu option, such as a drop-down that normally disappears when your mouse button is released or the Start menu image you see at left. To do this, press ESC after opening the Snipping tool, then go to or activate the menu you want to capture. Finally, press Ctrl+PrtScn to capture the menu.
- To draw over or highlight parts of the screenshot, click the pen or highlighter buttons in the menu.
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