English-Italian Business Glossary

Last year I made this bilingual (English and Italian) glossary for an English Interpreting exam. It contains marketing, finance, economics and business terms and expressions (one section of the glossary is dedicated to business-related idioms). You can find the references on the last page of the .pdf file I put here (you need Adobe Reader to open it).

You can download it by clicking on the link below:

English-Italian Business Glossary (.pdf, 1.6 MB)

If you speak English as a second language and would like to learn Business English, you can also download a very useful podcast: Business English Pod. There are also grammar and vocabulary videos (for example, those on Web 2.0 – part 1 and 2). Audio and video files can be downloaded for free, but there are other materials available for subscribers/premium members.

Bibliografia sull’interpretazione televisiva

Ecco una bibliografia contenente riferimenti a libri e pagine web sull’interpretazione televisiva, argomento della mia tesi di Laurea triennale dal titolo “Gli interpreti del piccolo schermo: On-screen Intercultural Mediation”.

• AAE-ESIT, ARTE: la chaîne des langues, 1998 (http://www.geocities.com/Eureka/office/1936/audio2.html).

• AIB, Interpretation on television, ESPaiic, 2001 (http://www.aibcnet.com/consejos_traduccion/television.php?id=en).

• AIIC, Essential do’s and dont’s when using simultaneous conference interpreting on TV (http://www.aiic.net/ViewPage.cfm/article28).

• AIIC Technical and Health Committee, Media Interpreting – a different sort of world (http://www.aiic.net/ViewPage.cfm/article91.htm).

• BROS-BRANN, E., Checklist for TV Interpretation, 1989 (http://www.aiic.net/community/attachments/ViewAttachment.cfm/a456p635-734.pdf?&filename=a456p635-734.pdf&page_id=635).

• BROS-BRANN, E., Simultaneous interpreting and the media: interpreting live for television (http://www.aiic.net/community/attachments/ViewAttachment.cfm/a452p630-726.pdf?&filename=a452p630-726.pdf&page_id=630).

• CHIARO, D., “Linguistic mediation on Italian television: When the interpreter is not an interpreter: a case study”, in GARZONE, G. – VIEZZI, M. (a cura di), Interpreting in the 21st Century. Challenges and opportunities. Selected papers from the 1st Forlì Conference on Interpreting Studies, 9-11 November 2000, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company (Benjamins Translation Library, 43), 2002, pagg. 215-225.

• GAMBIER, Y., GOTTLIEB, H. (a cura di), (Multi) Media Translation: Concepts, Practices, and Research, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001.

• KALINA, S., “‘Microphone off’ – Application of the process model of interpreting to the classroom”, in Kalbotyra, 57 (3), 2007, pag. 116.

• KATAN, D., STRANIERO SERGIO, F., “Look Who’s Talking. The Ethics of Entertainment and Talkshow Interpreting”, in The Translator, Manchester, St. Jerome Publishing, 7, 2, 2001, pagg. 213-237.

• KURZ, I., “Physiological stress responses during media and conference interpreting”, in GARZONE, G. – VIEZZI, M. (a cura di), Interpreting in the 21st Century. Challenges and opportunities. Selected papers from the 1st Forlì Conference on Interpreting Studies, 9-11 November 2000, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company (Benjamins Translation Library, 43), 2002, pagg. 195-202.

• KURZ, I., BROS-BRANN, E., L’interprétation en direct pour la télévision, in GAMBIER, Y. (a cura di), Les transferts linguistiques dans les médias audiovisuels, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion (attualmente in fase di ristampa).

• MACK, G., “L’interpretazione in tv: vecchie e nuove ipotesi di ricerca”, Relazione presentata al Congresso di fondazione dell’Associazione italiana di linguistica applicata AITLA, Pisa, 22 e 23.10.1999 (http://home.sslmit.unibo.it/~aitla/pisa/mack.htm).

• MACK, G., “New perspectives and challenges for interpretation: The example of television”, in GARZONE, G. – VIEZZI, M. (a cura di), Interpreting in the 21^st Century. Challenges and opportunities. Selected papers from the 1st Forlì Conference on Interpreting Studies, 9-11 November 2000, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company (Benjamins Translation Library, 43), 2002, pagg. 203-213.

• NIEMANTS, N., 2001 Unomattina: a case study in media interpreting, tesi di Laurea Specialistica non pubblicata, SSLMIT, Università di Bologna, 2008 (http://www.dailynterpreter.com/my-writings).

• RICCARDI, A., Dalla traduzione all’interpretazione. Studi di interpretazione simultanea, LED, 2003.

• STRANIERO SERGIO, F., “I (Paolo) Limiti dell’interpretazione, ovvero i mediatori antagonisti del testo televisivo”, Relazione presentata al Congresso di fondazione dell’Associazione italiana di linguistica applicata AITLA, Pisa, 22 e 23.10.1999 (http://home.sslmit.unibo.it/~aitla/pisa/straniero.htm).

• STRANIERO SERGIO, F., “Norms and quality in media interpreting: the case of Formula One press conferences”, in The Interpreter’s Newsletter, n. 12, 2003 (http://www.openstarts.units.it/dspace/bitstream/10077/2480/1/06.pdf).

• STRANIERO SERGIO, F., Talkshow Interpreting. La mediazione linguistica nella conversazione spettacolo, Trieste, EUT – Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2007.

Tools of the “Trade” (part III)

4. Lexibar

Lexibar is a very useful tool that lets you add special characters to a text written in another language. It is a good alternative to using keyboard shortcuts (e.g. ALT + 0228 for the German ä, as in Läufer) or the Windows Character Map because it is language-specific. There would be no need to learn shortcuts by heart, and sometimes using the Character Map may be a little more “time-consuming” because you have to find the special character you want to insert among many others.

According to Lexicool.com:

Lexibar is a small toolbar which gives rapid access to special characters not always available on your keyboard.

Once you have installed lexibar, either click on the special characters to insert them directly into your word processor or drag and drop them (using the left-hand mouse button). If these methods do not function, you can copy the characters to the clipboard by double-clicking on them, then paste them into your document.

Lexibar is available, free of charge, in the following languages: Catalan, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish. You can download Lexibar here.

(per i miei lettori italiani: Stefano, autore del blog “trovareXcredere” ha scritto un’ottima recensione di questa utility con un piccolo “tutorial” in italiano. Il link è questo —> http://trovarepercredere.blogspot.com/2009/12/lexibar-utility-gratuita-per-accedere.html)

The Beginner’s Guide to Interpreting [FSTI #002]

You read right, another post about interpreting.

Last night I dreamt that I was shadowing a simultaneous interpretation from English into Italian! I was doing an actual reformulation, not a mere repetition of words! No, I wasn’t interpreting, just rephrasing what was being said in Italian. Maybe that dream is a reminder: practice.interpreting. I haven’t done interpreting practice in a while, I should catch up with it.

When I practice interpreting, I do it just for fun. I download podcasts and play them using VLC media player (if they’re too fast for my level, this software allows me to “slow them down”… it’s rare to find audio files that are slow enough for beginners like me). I record myself using either Audacity (you can also play the audio file you’re interpreting with it, and listen to the original and the interpreted versions after you’ve finished) or a digital audio recorder (before buying one, I used my cell phone’s audio recorder that allowed me to record up to 5 minutes at a time).

Ways in which I practice interpreting:

• Simultaneous interpreting (I think this is self explanatory enough)
• Consecutive interpreting (you take notes using a spiral-bound notepad and a pen/pencil while the speaker is speaking, then you translate after he/she finished his/her speech. You can’t note every single thing, because you don’t have the time to, and you have to pay a lot of attention to the speech. I noticed that the more I pay attention to taking notes, the more I get distracted. Interpreters must learn to split attention between two activities, and I think this doesn’t apply only to simultaneous interpreting, in which you listen and speak at the same time, but also to consecutive interpreting. Most interpreters use abbreviations or symbols while taking notes)
• Sentence-by-sentence interpreting (a kind of interpreting that is usually done in a liaison interpreting context. First there is the sentence in language A, then you interpret it into language B, then the language B speaker replies to the language A speaker, and you interpret what he said into language A, etc. It is not done simultaneously, but it is rather a form of consecutive interpreting without notes)
• Shadowing (like I wrote at the beginning of the post, it is an exercise in which you reformulate, or repeat, what a speaker says in the same language. You can also do it after a few seconds from the original utterance, trying to lag behind the original speaker as if you’re doing simultaneous interpreting)

(I know, I wrote that I’m more of a written translation person, but I’ve got bitten by the interpreting bug from the very first moment)

Tools of the “Trade” (Translation Student Edition) – part II

3. RSS Feed Reader

I read several blogs (about translation, languages and graphics design) and have a Google Reader account. Google Reader (it is not the only RSS feed reader though) helps me keep track of all the blogs I read. Every day there is always something new to read.

Until last year, I used to have a list of my favourite blogs on Firefox, then I discovered Google Reader. Now I can imagine how time consuming it was when I didn’t have an account there. I used to click on every single blog I had bookmarked to check if there were new posts on them. Having a feed reader saves time because, thanks to it, you can know when there is a new post on a blog. There is no need to visit the site  (you can add any site  with an RSS feed to your reader, not only blogs) most of the times: you can read the whole post on your feed reader. There are also other times (I think that depends on the blogging platform used) when the feed reader only shows part of the post, and a link you can click on if you’d like to read the whole post.

The video below is a simple tutorial on how to use Google Reader (very simple to use, in my opinion), but there are also links to other RSS feed readers you can use.

Even “Learning by Translating” can be read using a feed reader.

I found the video here. I tried to put it on my blog, but for some reason the code didn’t work.

Tools of the “Trade” (Translation Student Edition) – part I

Here’s my list of software, websites and tools I find useful while translating, making glossaries, doing my homework, etc. For this post, I got inspired by one posted on Translation Musings some time ago.

1. Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org Writer. Let’s start with a basic “tool”! I use both Word and Writer. In case you’re wondering why, it is because I have Windows Vista on my laptop, and older versions of Microsoft Word (I have Word 2002) or Microsoft Office in general don’t run on Vista. I also heard that in Word 2007 everything is arranged in a different way, and this discouraged me from buying it. “Why pay when I can have something similar for free?”, I thought when I heard of OpenOffice.org. I like Writer because it has a very interesting feature: you can save your file as a PDF, which is always useful when you would like to send a file written with a word processing software to someone else or to view it using a different computer… everything stays the same (there would be no problems in case you decide to use a font which is not a standard one like Times New Roman, for example), and this might not happen if you save the file as a .doc one. I wrote my degree thesis using Word because when I went to a photocopy and typing agency to ask some questions about the format of the thesis, they gave a me a leaflet with instructions to follow when writing it with Word (e.g. how wide the margins should be, acceptable font sizes, and so on).  

2. Mozilla Firefox. I started using it three years ago out of curiosity, but I realized that it is the best browser I’ve ever had! Unlike Internet Explorer (IE from now on), it doesn’t crash often (it is very stable). When I first tried it I found it innovative because it is very customizable (lots of add-ons, like themes and search tools are available here). Some add-ons I have installed include Wired-Marker (a tool for highlighting text on web pages, very useful!), abcTajpu (to insert non-ASCII letters when writing something) and the Delicious Bookmarks Add-On. You can add many search engines to Firefox (some of them are useful for students/translators: Wikipedia, Wordreference, Oxford Paravia ENG-ITA dictionary, De Mauro Paravia ITA synonyms and antonyms, Merriam-Webster, etc.). I use both the “standard” version of Firefox and a portable one (you can download it here), since I use three computers and so I have all my bookmarks saved in the portable version. 

(to be continued…)

Let’s get it started! (FSTI #001)

(no, I’m not going to write a blog post about the Black Eyed Peas song with the same title!)

FSTI stands for “From Student To Interpreter”, a new blog category I’ve just created!

My preparation for the entrance exam has officially begun!

I only hope that four months are enough (the exam is going to be in September).

I downloaded past exam audio files to do some practice. The exam consists of two cloze tests per language and one reformulation exercise for each language. The cloze tests are different from the ones I am used to, because in the former the text is purely oral (I suppose), and in the latter it is written. At the entrance exam you have to fill in a grid with the missing words (you have to insert a word for each beep you hear in the audio file). The “Video Vocab” videos on Business English Pod have a similar exercise, in which there is a part in which  words related to a certain topic, their definitions and examples containing them are shown, and then an exercise in which you have to insert the missing word, that is structured almost in the same way as the entrance exam one (I wrote “almost” because you can read the sentence, instead of just hearing it).

Does anyone know any websites where I can find similar exercises? I would like to do practice on as many subjects as possible, since you can’t know on which subjects you must get ready for the exam. Thanks in advance!

Yesterday I came across an interesting acronym that can be referred, in my opinion, to both studying and interpreting: Preparation Prevents Poor Performances.

Tradurre: a webcast (in Italian) about translation

If you speak Italian and are a translator / a translation student / interested in translation, you may find this twice-monthly webcast very interesting. It is about different aspects of translation and the translator’s job. Each month there is a different theme on which the webcast’s episodes are based (for example, April’s theme is the translator’s visibility, March’s one was the quality of translations). Tradurre (to translate, or translating) is a webinar, hosted by Andrea Spila and Melani Traini of the European School of Translation, that features a different guest (working in the translation field) each time. Quoting Wikipedia, a webinar is:

a specific type of web conference. It is typically one-way, from the speaker to the audience with limited audience interaction, such as in a webcast. A webinar can be collaborative and include polling and question & answer sessions to allow full participation between the audience and the presenter. In some cases, the presenter may speak over a standard telephone line, pointing out information being presented on screen and the audience can respond over their own telephones, preferably a speaker phone. There are web conferencing technologies on the market that have incorporated the use of VoIP audio technology, to allow for a truly web-based communication.

If you would like to participate, you can sign up for free a few days earlier (see the EST blog for dates and topics. You can also subscribe to the EST Newsletter). By participating, you can interact with the hosts and the guest(s). There are also polls related to the topic of the day. If you miss an episode, or would like to watch past episodes, you can watch videos on the Archivi (Archives) page. You can also watch videos of past webinars organized by the EST, like this one on WordFast, which I watched a few days ago. Two years ago, I downloaded WordFast Classic out of curiosity, and tried it with a text. Once I even got an 82% fuzzy match, because two sentences in the text were similar (since I wasn’t using a translation memory, I got mostly “no matches”, and zero 100% matches). Thanks to that video, I learnt something about WordFast I didn’t know before (CAT tools are usually taught during MA courses in Translation, while I attended a BA course in Translation and Interpreting, during which I studied translation theory and techniques, and translated different text typologies, but without CAT tools).

I signed up for the upcoming webcast (it is on April 30), which is going to be on the visibility and the status of the translator’s profession. I’ve never taken part in a webcast/webinar, but I watched the previous episodes of Tradurre, so I already know how it is structured.

I also realized that I’ve been blogging for two months today! Happy 2 months, Learning by Translating!

A Podcast About Translation / Un podcast sulla traduzione

Speaking of Translation is the first podcast about translation I’ve ever found on the Net. I think Eve Bodeux and Corinne McKay had a very good idea! It is about the translation industry and topics of interest to translators. Episodes are published once a month, and I’ve been following this podcast from the very beginning. There are also interviews with professional translators, like in Episode 2, which is about the ATA (American Translators Association) Conference.

Definitely worth listening!

Speaking of Translation è il primo podcast sulla traduzione che abbia mai trovato in Rete. Penso che Eve Bodeux e Corinne McKay abbiano avuto una grande idea! Il podcast parla del settore della traduzione e di argomenti che possono interessare ai traduttori. Gli episodi vengono pubblicati una volta al mese, e seguo questo podcast sin dall’inizio. Ci sono anche interviste a traduttori professionisti, come nell’Episodio 2, che parla della conferenza dell’ATA (American Translators Association).

Vale decisamente la pena di ascoltarlo!