This week, Ursula and I discuss working trips, and the toll they take on us. We also have updates on our individual productivity, and wrap it up by talking to our friend Jenn Mercer about how she stays productive as a professional French-English translator!
Links for this Episode:
- Jenn Mercer’s Professional Website
- Jenn’s Twitter
- Jenn’s Instagram
- Ravelty
- ComicBookRealm
- American Translator’s Association
- SCL Trados Studio
- MemoQ
- ABBYY FineReader
- Scrivener
- Wordfast
- OmegaT
- GDPR
- The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart
- NaNoWriMo
- K. Tempest Bradford
- Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome
- Brain.FM
- CloudHQ
- datexx TimeCube Pomodoro Timer
- Fight or Flight Comics
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I think the quote you were looking for might be, from James Davis Nicoll ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll ):
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
Have heard about The Drunken Botanist many times on the other podcast I listen to – The Modern Barcart
https://www.modernbarcart.com/podcast
Loved this episode, and I hope you can have Jenn back on to tangent for two hours just about French and contextual meanings.
I was hired onto a company a few years ago when the GHS product label standard developed in the EU was adopted by OSHA. (Essentially these are new safety emojis.) All the company’s product labels and safety documents had to be updated to the new standard. They also sold products into South America, Mexico, and Canada, and I spoke enough Spanish and French to find the relevant sections in the EU documents and copy the correct text onto our documents.
This was actually a good-enough solution, UNTIL a salesdude sold one of product lines into Saudi Arabia without asking what the legal requirements for labeling were there and promising a delivery date in the very near future. Surprise, it cost tens of thousands of dollars to get the proper consultation and official translations, and all that puts the production schedule behind several months!
As you said in the episode, it IS extremely beneficial to take sojourns to other departments in your company!