Learning by Translating

Now that I have more free time, I’m finally back with a post in English! *hopes her English-speaking readers didn’t miss her*

I should update this site more often, because “Learning by Translating” is a site I created to share my experiences as a student translator (or Translation student, fate voi, like we say in Italian). Unfortunately, I’ve been very busy with my classes and couldn’t update more than I actually did. Classes till 7 p.m. almost every day + homework = very little time for other activities (besides writing, I’ve been neglecting another hobby of mine, scrapbooking).

As some of you may already know from reading my posts on Twitter, I switched to Mac. My MacBook Pro has  a 13 inch monitor, OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) installed, a 160 GB hard disk drive, 2 GB of RAM (which are enough for running OS X, but not for using XP as a virtual machine with Parallels. I created a partition for XP using Boot Camp, and if I boot XP at startup, it works perfectly). I needed to install XP on a partition because, as you might already know, Trados doesn’t work on OS X. I’m going to learn how to use it in the second semester, so I have to install it somewhere. I use Subtitle Workshop for subtitles (I’ve been subtitling short films in French class), and there isn’t a Mac version of the software. By the way, I’m happy with my new computer! It hardly crashes, and there’s no need to format your hard drive because of viruses. I’m getting used to the different keyboard shortcuts, and to the fact that there’s no “Del” button on Mac keyboards.  I didn’t need to insert a CD when I plugged my printer, OS X recognized and installed it by itself! I still have a lot to learn though. I’ve been told: “You’ll never get back to Windows after you get a Mac”. I hope so.

P.S.: You can even choose which language to use. For example, I’m using it in English. It was in Italian when I bought it, and it took me a while to realize that “Scrivania” is “Desktop” and “Archivio” is “File”. Why were they localized that way, when “File” and “Desktop” are commonly used in Italian? I don’t get it.

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)

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.

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…)