Michael Beijer has
been working in the European translation industry for the last 15 years,
rendering business and technical texts from Dutch and Flemish into English.
Although he is primarily a translator, his keen interest in terminology is
reflected in his Wordbook.nl project, a one-stop shop for Dutch-English
terminology resources. Wordbook.nl is the result of over 15 years of research
and is a well-loved resource within the Dutch–English translation community,
with dozens of downloads each week, and daily requests about site content.
Translation and
terminology run in his family, as his mother is also a translator who ran a
successful small translation agency first in the Netherlands and later in
Greece. His academic background is in philosophy and fine arts, which he
studied at the American College of Greece and at the Rietveld Art Academy in
Amsterdam, respectively. Michael is Dutch/English bilingual, but having lived
in a number of European countries he also speaks Spanish, Greek, French and
German to varying degrees of fluency, and as such is a true European!
Michael keeps up to
date with the latest developments in the translation world by participating in
a wide range of online forums, mailing lists, translation & terminology
blogs, and he subscribes to various professional journals, magazines, and
newsletters. He is also very active in the Proz.com forums where he can usually
be found among the top three ‘KudoZ points leaders’ in his language pair. His favorite hangout at the moment is CafeTranslators, the CafeTran mailing list,
where you will find him arguing about the minutiae of various CAT tool features
and brainstorming ways of improving them.
Could you please tell us a little bit about yourself?
Michael Beijer:
I
am a full-time professional translator and terminologist with over 15 years of
experience working in the European translation industry. I refer to myself as a
‘translator & terminologist’, but I could just as well call myself a
‘language consultant’, ‘CAT tool consultant’ or ‘linguist’ instead. However,
while I have many different interests and am constantly discovering new things,
I pay my bills translating and doing terminology extraction and consulting, so
that’s what ends up on my calling card.
I translate mainly
business and technical texts from Dutch and Flemish into English. Although I
spend most of my time translating audit reports, contracts and product manuals,
I have recently also become interested in literary translation. I am also well
known online as a translation technology nerd, and I am an active member of
many mailing lists relating to translation, CAT tools and terminology. One of
my favorite pastimes is arguing about the nuts and bolts of the technical side
of CAT tools in the CafeTran and memoQ mailing lists. I am also very active on
the Proz.com forums for translators,
where I spend a lot of time helping beginning translators translate difficult
terms and asking more experienced ones for help myself.
Could you briefly describe what the following phrases remind you of?
Michael
Beijer:
- Terminology: I used to call myself just a translator. I added
‘terminologist’ only recently because I realized that my particular style of
translating relies heavily on knowing the correct terminology. I don’t
translate novels, and neither do I like doing expressive marketing material (I
leave that to my brother, Steven Beijer). My forte is technical contracts or
specialised and detailed product manuals. These are areas with highly standardized and specific terminology where consistency is of prime importance.
For example, using three slightly different terms to refer to a specific device
in a 50-page manual is not going to do anyone any good. Correct terminology and
terminological consistency are therefore both extremely important in my work
and this realization soon led me to start paying much more attention to
terminology.
- Mother tongue:
Rule number one:
Only translate into your native language. No matter how talented you are,
someone will notice. Although I was raised fully bilingually (with a
Dutch father and an American mother), I only translate into English. I have
been writing and speaking English all my life, and I find it easier to express
myself in English. I did try translating into Dutch once, long ago, but was
lucky enough to have a friend of mine suggest I ‘stick to English’.
Of course, there are
people who do it, and even people who do a good job. However, they are most
likely having their finished translations checked by a native speaker, which
ensures the finished text is indistinguishable from one produced in the target
language.
- Simultaneous
interpreting:
I don’t feel that
simultaneous interpreting is a good mesh with my own abilities and so I have
steered away from it. As befits a terminologist, my working style involves
extensive use of computer-based tools and other reference materials. I am much
better suited to meticulous research and cross-referencing than speed and ease
of translation, and this has led me to develop these skills
instead, although I have the greatest respect for those who can work under such
pressure and at such high speed – and for their excellent memories! My focus
continues to be on improving the industry’s terminology research and glossary
creation methodologies and technologies. Language work is a broad field and
there are as many different aptitudes within it as translators – knowing your
own strengths and working on developing them is key to a successful career.
- The EU’s 23
official working languages:
The more the
merrier! The wide range of working languages can only mean more work for us
translators, particularly as the number of official languages means that
terminological consistency is a pressing issue for the EU, which is where I
come in. I am also especially pleased that the EU has provided such
a large amount of good translation memories (the DGT-TMs, etc.), although these
do contain their fair share of mistakes and must therefore be used with
circumspection.
Could you describe your Wordbook Project? What is your source of
inspiration for this project?
Michael Beijer:
The term ‘Wordbook’, for me, encompasses a range of
different possibilities. Perhaps the most concrete and accessible of these
right now is the Wordbook webpage, hosted on my website. Here visitors can
access over 350 resources, including different Dutch-English dictionaries,
glossaries and search websites. Between one and five glossaries are downloaded
daily, and the site attracts hundreds of visitors per month. Much of my work
has been to source appropriate resources and to present them in a variety of
formats, including tab-delimited UTF-8 text files – that is, files that can be
imported directly into CAT tools. This puts high-quality, specialised
terminology at your fingertips, so you can spend less time looking up terms and
more time translating. Wordbook has been my pet project for the last five
years, as can be seen from the glossaries in my own CAT tool, memoQ, currently
comprised of over 500,000 entries. I recently conducted an experiment, asking
my copywriter wife, Jen Rouse, to ‘translate’ a small Dutch text using my memoQ
glossaries. With her writing skills and the extensive glossary in memoQ she
managed to turn out an acceptable translation without any real knowledge of
Dutch. Of course, this is far from the ideal situation, but it goes some way
towards demonstrating the benefits of extensive, accurate glossaries when
deployed by a skilled translator. My dream is to one day develop Wordbook into
a collaborative online dictionary for translators, rather like a wiki in
principle, where community members will be able to contribute to a bank of
language resources that would be available for all to use freely.
Isn’t it hard to keep the glossaries update all the time?
Michael Beijer:
Keeping Wordbook.nl up to date is indeed a lot of
work. I usually work on it in bursts, depending on how much free time I have.
However, I do always try to add any new resources I might come across during my
day-to-day work. I usually quickly open up Dreamweaver and add the link. If I
have a little extra time I might also download the glossary in question and
convert it to my standard tab-delimited UTF-8 text file format, and then upload
it to the content directory of Wordbook.nl, linking it to my entry in the
resource directory.
Do
you want to publish your own dictionary one day (if yes/no why)?
Michael Beijer:
I once did, yes, but I soon realised what that would
really mean in terms of time and effort, and quickly wrote it off as a youthful
fantasy! I currently subscribe to three of the best specialist online reference
works for my language pair, and using them soon showed me exactly how much work
goes into writing and maintaining a good dictionary. In fact, this realisation
was what drew me toward an alternative, collaborative approach to terminology,
and I am extraordinarily grateful for the improvements in technology that make
this approach more and more feasible.
What are the challenging aspects of Terminology Work that you face most?
Michael Beijer:
One of the hardest things about terminology work is
how little translators know about terminology. Even CAT tool developers are
relatively uninformed as to the interaction between their software and its
applications to the real job of translating. From the user’s perspective,
translating is hard enough as it is without having to constantly hack your
tools to try and get them to do what you want. I have wasted a lot of time
fighting with my translation tools – time that would be better spent on my work
itself. You would be surprised how many translators don’t even use the glossary
feature in their CAT tools. Another thing that puzzles me is how many
translators aren’t even aware of the fact that there are a number of very good
dictionaries (both print and online) that would greatly assist them in their
daily work. I feel strongly that investing a bit of time and money in learning
about these possibilities pays dividends, but there is still a lot of educative
work to be done in order to encourage people to take advantage of them.
Michael Beijer:
Focus on the content. How you find, edit, sort,
manage, store and access your terminology (its ‘form’) is of course also
important, but without good content, what’s the point? It might be fun or
intellectually stimulating to devise The Ultimate Terminology Management System
(believe me, I have tried), but when it comes down to it, you are going to need
something to put in it. Unless you are one of the lucky few, you are also going
to need to pay your bills – that is, you are going to need to find someone who
is willing to pay you for your work. One of the things that got me into
terminology, for example, was large LSPs (Language Service Providers) asking me
if I could extract monolingual glossaries for them from massive amounts of
corporate data. These (usually English) glossaries of mine would then be
translated into scores of other languages to create a basic glossary that would
be sent to all of the translators in large, multilingual translation (or
‘localisation’) projects. Another area where terminologists are in constant
demand at the moment is in the world of online business. Corporate keyword
consultancy and multilingual search websites and glossaries (supported by ads)
are both budding new areas for tech-savvy terminologists trying to get a
foothold.
Michael Beijer:
I am probably the wrong person to ask, as funnily
enough I have no academic training in translation or terminology work. However,
if I were to hazard a guess I suppose I would have to say yes. After all, not
all terminology is bilingual or multilingual. Monolingual terminology, for
example, has very little to do with translation. As shown by the relative
reluctance of translators to delve far into
terminology, there are many specific technical skills that apply to the
creation, management and dissemination of terminological resources, and I
believe the relative paucity of skills in this area is one reason why
translators shy away from accessing the wealth of resources floating around out
there. The industry needs more skilled terminologists with programming skills
who can help close this gap, to improve data management and create
user-friendly resources, and these technical skills are not addressed in
traditional translation courses.
Do
you define yourself more like a Translator or a Terminologist? Or which work do
you prefer more and why?
Michael Beijer:
Although I have a lot of fun hunting down the right
term online or in my many dictionaries and slowly improving my own glossaries
and term bases, I will always be a translator at heart. Anyone who knows me
will tell you that terminology is always at the forefront of my mind when
working on a translation, and I turn this to my advantage when choosing work to
undertake. So, for me, the two are inextricable.
10. You prefer to
Translate into one language only. What are the advantages and disadvantages of
this choice in the market?
Michael Beijer: I have always been
slightly skeptical that anyone could do a good job translating into more than
one language. How many languages a person can translate out of, on the other
hand, is a different matter, although I am often deeply skeptical about the
credentials of some multilingual translators. I think as translation relies on
fluency and ease of communication, a person should do themselves and their
readers a favour, and only translate into their native language. Excellent
research, extensive vocabulary and grammar and wide reading can only get you so
far, and ultimately working in your native language lends your writing an
authority it can otherwise lack. You can also feel much more confident in the
quality of your work. Another more practical reason to focus on one language
pair and direction is the amount of money you will save on resources. I spend
quite a bit of money every month on dictionary subscriptions and this is only
for my pair and direction Dutch into English. If I also undertook English to
Dutch, or added more languages to my repertoire, this would soon increase substantially.
For me personally, choosing to specialize in a particular pair, a particular
direction and particular subject fields has allowed me to carve out a niche in
the market, and with hard work I am now in the fortunate position of being able
to choose which jobs to take. Reputation goes a long way in this industry. We
have all heard the horror stories about cowboy operators and machine
translators working for pennies and delivering shoddy work. In my experience, specialization has allowed me to develop my visibility as a trustworthy
identity in the industry, got me work, and allowed me to create good working
relationships.
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