The Blog

My day job is to create text blocks with illustrations (topics) for technical user manuals. I assemble them to manuals which are published in the following formats:

• PDF documents for printing,
• HTML documents for the web, and
• CHM (Windows help files) for display within our software products (F1 key).

Some of those topics are “reused”, e.g. a topic like “Savety instructions” exists once and is used in all user manuals alike. This is called Single Sourcing.

Of course, all user manuals are translated into a lot of languages.

All the data is stored in a content management system which has a publishing engine capable of generating the aformentioned output formats.

Several people are involved in the process:

• technical writers,
• revisors,
• translators,
• proof-readers, and
• IT specialists to keep the system running.

Here is the process:

My wife wrote a great children’s fantasy book with several illustrations in it. Then she wrote another children’s book, more or less the same style. After a short time she passed me another story and asked me:

“Could you please publish this one, too?”

I answered: “You want that one also translated into German, English and Spanish, and you want it published as both a printed book and in several e-book formats, right?”

This was the exact moment when I said: Wait a moment! It’s not a one-shot deal anymore. Let’s look at the processes:

Hmm? They look the same, don’t they? Yes, I copied the flow chart! Why that? What’s happening behind the scenes?

Writing/Editing

User manuals:

I am doing both the writing and the illustrations. However, we are two writers/illustrators in the department. In addition to that, we sometimes work with external technical writers.

Children’s books:

My wife writes the books. Although we are looking for further children’s book writers, my wife is still the only one. The illustrations are done by freelance illustrators.

So generally speaking, the writing and editing processes are alike.

Revision

The revision process is almost identical: while the user manuals are being revised by my colleagues from the development department, the children’s books are revised by an external freelance revisor.

Translation

User manuals:

We work with freelance translators. I held a presentation about how we do that at MemoQFest in Hungary in April 2009. Here are the slides.

Usually enterprises contract a translation service provider. Anyway, the process is similar.

Children’s books:

I am used to finding and hiring the best translators out there. That’s my job. So I just hired a literary translator for each language pair, it this case:

• Portuguese to Spanish (freelance translator),
• Portuguese to English (freelance translator), and
• Portuguese to German (I do the translations myself).

Proof-reading

There is not a big difference between revision and proof-reading. While the revisor checks if the content is okay (grammar, syntax, logic, content, etc.), the proof-reader checks if the translation and the target language is okay. A proof-reader shouldn’t change the content. Otherwise the original document would have to be re-edited.

Multiple formats

Now that’s the catch!

From a technical point of view the output formats are mere technical requirements. That is, your content management system and the attached publishing engine should be able to provide the following formats for both print and electronic distribution

• User manuals: PDF, HTML and CHM
• Children’s books: PDF, ePUB, LIT, MOBI, LRF, PDB

There is a plethora of content management systems available out there on the market which can handle PDF, HTML and CHM. The e-book market, however, is pretty young. So finding the appropriate system is a big challenge.

I would like to mention three of them with completely different approaches:

• Calibre e-book management
• IGP:FLIP
• Smashwords

If you find other systems/services please feel free to comment.

Conclusion

Question: What’s the difference between user manuals and children’s books?

Answer: Concerning the processes involved there is almost no difference.

For two reasons it’s easier to publish children’s books:

1. There is no such thing as “reuse”. There won’t be identical “topics” which could be reused in different children’s book. For user manuals it’s a “must have” feature.
2. Children’s books don’t suffer changes. User manuals for most products are changed every five months or so because the device or the software gets new functions or features which have to be described. A children’s book on the other hand is published once and that’s it.

I just came across this wonderful page called Smashwords which has been available for some months now.

On the About page it says:

“Smashwords is an ebook publishing and distribution platform for ebook authors, publishers and readers. We offer multi-format, DRM-free ebooks, ready for immediate sampling and purchase, and readable on any e-reading device.
At Smashwords, our authors and publishers have complete control over the sampling, pricing and marketing of their written works.

Smashwords is ideal for publishing novels, short fiction, poetry, personal memoirs, monographs, non-fiction, research reports, essays, or other written forms that haven’t even been invented yet.

It’s free to publish and distribute with Smashwords.”

Authors

If you own an ebook-reader or if you have written a book yourself, you should definitely check out this site. There is a style guide available where you can learn how to prepare your documents. The source format is RTF. They encourage you to prepare your document in MS Word but you may also use OpenOffice and save as RTF.

After uploading your book there is a so-called Meatgrinder technology which converts your document into various ebook formats and make the numerous files available for download.

Resellers

If you have a blog you might want to check out their Affiliate Program. Your will receive a minimum of 11% to 80.5% of  the net sales price. What is even better is that you receive commissions on all purchases with a 48 hour period.

There are some affiliate links on the right of this article you might want to click.

Check out this YouTube video where Smashwords explained in detail:

[...] technologies can sometimes be useful to literary translators as well, says Bowker. “They can compile a list of an author’s favourite expressions, as well as sentences or words that were translated in earlier works. By cataloguing neologisms or lexical creations so that they can be compared with a larger sample, technology can help the translator decide whether a more creative approach is warranted.” Bowker concludes that these technologies should be regarded as tools, not as potential competitors: “Human translators will never run out of work.”
The magazine of the University of Ottawa

First of all: What is a CAT tool? Yes, WikiPedia has it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_translation It’s a software tool that helps translators doing their work. A lot of people call it “Translation Memory System” while I would rather call it “Translation Environment” (TE). Anyway, it’s all the same.
The first book I translated using a TE was the children’s book Mozart in the Future written by my wife in Brazilian Portuguese which I translated into German. Now I am translating my second book written by another Brazilian author. My wife will have to wait. She is already waiting in line with her second children’s book The Legend of the Black Lake. When I find the time I will translate that one, too, using a TE, of course!

Why do I use a CAT tool at all?

The COO of a company that produces and sells a TE asked me this question. Well, here is the answer: You don’t have to, actually. If you have always walked to the bakery which is less than half a mile away, why should you use a car instead? If you always talked to your neighbor personally, why should you call him using a cell phone?
Okay, this is not a philosophical question. I would say that “older” literary translators probably would feel more comfortable without a TE. Computer-savvy and rather “young” translators would and should use a TE. (What about the old and computer-savvy translators?) Here is why.
First of all some basics. In order to be able to translate properly and to be able to reuse already translated “parts” of the text, the TE splits up the whole document into segments. Most of the time these segments are sentences which start with a capital letter and end with a full stop. Consider this sentence: “He asked Mr. Green to paint the wall.” Now this should be one segment even though there is a period right after “Mr”. All TEs have segmentation rules which handle these exceptions.
In my case there was one main reason why I used a TE: In Brazilian Portuguese there are a lot of commas and semicolons. The German sentences have to be as short as possible so a German child can understand the text more easily. So I changed the segmentation rules dividing segments not only by full stops but also by commas and semicolons. Since not all commas and semicolons relate to full stops in the German target sentence, I used the “Join segments” feature of my TE to correct this while translating. This is some extra work, however, the benefits are that I get a lot of short segments which relate directly to more and better matches in the translation memory (TM). A TM is a database that holds all the translated segments. So similar or identical segments do not have to be translated from scratch.
I don’t use the matches in the same way I would use them for technical translations because I want the text to be rich rather than to have repeating or similar phrases. However, the matches give me hints on how I translated a specific sentence before. So I can decide if I want to use it or not.
The book I am translating at the moment is a non-fiction book about a ballet dancer who suffers from a Down syndrome: www.bailarinaespecial.com.br The book is called Eficiência na Deficiência. The dancer’s father is the author. The text is a lot more challenging and the short-sentence-rule doesn’t apply to the target text. Nevertheless, the semicolon-rule applies. So even with this book changing the segmentation rules helped a lot.

What about terminology?

A terminology database or term base is a kind of on-line dictionary which is part of the TE. Yes, also with literary translations the use of a term base can be helpful. You cannot remember all the words you looked up in dictionaries or in reference materials. Again, term base entries only give you a hint. It’s not about consistency or even quality assurance, it’s about helping you to decide if the same term or a synonym should be used.
With the first translation I didn’t use the term base at all. Although I started out to use it, I soon realized that there was not a single term I had to look up. My wife and I are married for 13 years or so (I can’t remember) and we have spoken to each other in Portuguese ever since I can remember. (This is what I do remember.) My wife also speaks Portuguese with our children. Her book Mozart in the Future is written for children, so the language used is quite simple. In the end I couldn’t find a benefit in using the term base.
With the second book it’s different because I haven’t been married to the author. There are some difficult terms which I don’t use on a daily basis so it really helps to store them in a term base for reference. Again, for reference and not only for reuse.

Is machine translation helpful?

I don’t want to discuss machine translation per se. It is definitely not a means for translating literary texts. But it can be helpful. Let me explain how.
When I look up vocabulary I use several resources. There are not a lot of on-line dictionaries for Portuguese-German and most of them are pretty weak. Since I know the meaning of most of the words anyway I use the on-line dictionaries to give me a list of possible translations which help me to decide which term to use. It is easier to use a tool than to let my mind come up with a list. Knowing the meaning of a source word and coming up with a translation from your mind are two different things. Since Spanish is very similar to Portuguese and I also speak Spanish very well, I use LEO quite frequently. If there is a similar word in Spanish I look it up and the German translation might give me an idea. If I am not sure I use an on-line German dictionary from the Universtity of Leipzip. I use the list of synonyms to check if the term I have chosen is fine or if there might be a more appropriate term. I also use the Google translator, especially the list of terms that appear on the lower right.
Looking up terms at different sites is somehow time consuming. So I thought that it might be helpful to have a proposal within the TE.
Steps:

1. Open http://translate.google.com/toolkit, create a private TM, load up your document and have it MT-translated.
2. Download the translated document and import both the original and the translated document into the TE using the alignment tool.
3. Write the aligned matches into a separate TM
4. Set the TM read-only and add it to the translation project as the secondary TM

I think I don’t use a single match of those that were machine translated, but they often give me a hint on how to (or how not to) translate. Quite often the terminology used by Google helps even though I have to use a verb instead of a noun or vice versa.
The use of MT is not always positive. In most cases it’s better to think first before you even read the machine translated text. I wouldn’t explicitly recommend to use MT for literary translations, however, I would recommend to give it a try having in mind the above mentioned thoughts and proceedings.

Conclusion

Forget everything I have written about literary translations using a TE. If you read this articles in this group, that means that you probably already use a TE. And if you would be faced with a literary translation project you would probably use a TE anyway. Everything I have written about the use of the tool itself, the use of terminology and the use of TM and MT really depends on your personal likes and dislikes.
The major drawback of using a CAT tool is that it may influence your creativity. And creativity is important when translating a literary text.

Most people make book buying decisions based on reviews. That’s why we asked both professional and occasional reviewers to read our book “Mozart in the Future” and write an honest review about it.
According to the first 10 reviews my wife, the author, wrote an extraordinary children’s fantasy chapter book which also adults love to read. They say that the book is inspiring and motivating.

Just a few days ago I read a very negative review about the book. I respect everybody’s likes and dislikes. You cannot write a book that pleases everybody.
The reviewer, however, is a professional reviewer and has an astonishing background in writing.
The review starts out with the words: “I don’t like Mozart”. I am still wondering why a professional reviewer accepts to review a book called “Mozart in the Future” if she doesn’t like Mozart…

Anyway, I would like you to read the following two reviews. Both are professional reviews. One of them is very positive, the other one is very negative.
Who is right, who is wrong? Are both of them really professional?

Positive review by Amy Lignor from Bookpleasures.com
Negative review* by Jean Little from Cybils
Here is a 30-page-preview of Mozart in the Future
If you are interested in writing a review about the book, please let me know. I would send you a free copy of course.

Please, give me your opinion.

* Just some remarks concerning some issues the reviewer mentioned: The original language of the book is Brazilian Portuguese. The author is Brazilian and lives in Austria now. Her husband (me) is German and translated the book into standard German. Concerning children’s books there is no difference between the German spoken in Austria and Germany.
Paula Vaz-Carreiro translated the book from Brazilian Portuguese into English. We chose British English because the plot is set in Europe, however, we tried to avoid too many British terms so the book can easily be understood by any English speaking child around the globe.

Mozart in the future is already translated into Swedish.

We are now looking for a publisher to take care of putting the book into Swedish book stores and doing some marketing. The book is translated, however, not revised yet. So there might be some typos. If you spot an error, please tell me. Click on the About me page or leave a comment.

Here is the synopsis in English:
————
Max is really a boy like any other, but he has a talent for music and a strict mother who wants him to be a great musician.
When the doctor says that Max must not to go to school for a few days, Max has no idea that he is about to meet one of his heroes: Mozart, the genius who was one of the greatest composers of all times.

Can you imagine Mozart as a child, going down a snowy slope on a sledge, watching cartoons on TV or eating hamburgers?
Well, in ‘Mozart in the Future’ all that and more is possible when you follow their adventures as they try to return Mozart to his own time, helped along by a mysterious fairy-like being called the Spirit of Music.
————

I had the honor to translate the book into German.
The English and the Spanish version are translated by other professional translators and will be published soon.

Previews:
Swedish: http://issuu.com/calutateo/docs/mozart-i-framtiden
German: http://issuu.com/calutateo/docs/mozart-in-der-zukunft
Portuguese: http://issuu.com/calutateo/docs/mozart_no_futuro

Already published printed versions:
- Amazon.de: http://amazon.rodrigues-peters.com
(There are wonderful reviews!)
- Livraria Cultura (Brazil): http://livrariacultura.rodrigues-peters.com/

Her face looks like “Oh my God, I’m inspired now. You take care of the children and leave me alone for I have to take advantage of this very moment to write down what just came to my mind”.

Oh yes, it’s been twelve years now that we are married, and I am able to read from her face whatever she has in mind. That’s fine. It’s not that hard to be a writer’s husband. Well, in this regard…

Let’s talk about my job for a while. I am a company employee. Everything I do, I have to take care of. Yes, so what? If I wouldn’t do it, my boss would fire me. It’s as easy as that.

So this is what my wife does in the meantime: She is producing loads of words (with meaning, of course). She is writing books over books and stores them all on the uncomplaining hard disk. That’s it. I mean she stores her writings on the hard disk! What you are probably thinking now is: All writer do that, what’s so strange about that? However, there is one question I would like to ask: Who takes the hard disk to the publisher? Yes. That’s me!

Just imagine, you are a company employee. You work from 8 to 5. At 5 o’clock you go home and your boss asks you “where is the data I asked you to prepare”. No problem, you just tell him that everything is on your hard disk and you go home happily.

So the main difference between the writer and her husband is that she writes without a deadline and full of joy, whereas he (me, the husband) reviews and publishes her writings, translates and publishes her translated writings, writes articles for website, twitters whatever is interesting to his followers, organizes readings, gathers marketing tools, does social networking… and all that in a narrow time frame.

No, I don’t bother. Keep writing, baby. Every time I review or translate one of your stories my heart is filled with joy. Just leave everything on the hard disk, I’ll take care of the rest.

I just read the article Can eBooks for Children Really Help them Learn to Read? from The Children’s Book Review.

ebook readers are just too expensive. I heard that a lot of ebook consumers are older than 50 years. Of course, they buy an ebook reader just for fun.

A computer on the other hand is something even parents would buy for their children. It’s an investment. Just imagine all the things you can do with a computer. What can you do with an ebook reader? Well, just read…

While reading the article my attention was instantly drawn to one sentence: “Statistics show that to be on grade level, a 5 year old should have had 1000 hours of reading exposure before they reach school – that is half an hour every day each year for every year they have been alive!”

I think “Can eBooks for Children Really Help them Learn to Read?” is not a relevant question. “How can parents help children learn to read” is what we have to think about. When your child was/will be 5 years old, had it/will it have 1000 hours of reading exposure before it reaches school? Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000 hours rule in his book Ouliers.  So how will you manage to add another 9,000 hours?