I'm a freelance English-Korean translator who enjoys your Journal's excellent articles.
I agree with Andrei Gerasimov (Marketing Your Translation Services) 100% as I had exactly the same experiences with agencies. It is a great pity they don't play the game more honestly. Seasoned translators fully understand that translation jobs are not readily available at all times. Therefore, agencies should better tell us from the beginning that test translations are for screening translators for their future projects.
I applaud Andrei for his excellent description of the market situation. Young-ha Kwon, Seoul, Korea
I have just discovered that your e-zine exists and was pleasantly surprised
at the standard. The article on CAT software in the latest number was
particularly interesting as I am in the throes of trying to familiarise
myself with Transit PE // SDLX // Wordfast and am also playing with a tool
called Glossy, which is intended to make all the odd glossary files I have
scattered all over both hard discs available for every translation.
...
I find the comments on gender bias [in a Letter to the Editor] just plain daft, frankly. Where the male
gender is used it was always understood to mean both, unless otherwise
obvious from the context or specifically stated. Since the female gender is
not excluded in the case mentioned by María Garcia, I fail to understand the
difficulty. Political Correctness has inflicted silly words like
"spokesperson" on us, which make life impossible for anyone translating into
any language using gender-based grammar.
Where the events of September the eleventh are concerned [see comments in another Letter to the Editor], there seems to be a
fashion of assuming that the fault lies with US foreign policy or poverty. The
first is fallacious because the perpetrators' intent is to forcibly
Islamicise as much of the world as they can and only use e.g. the
stationing of US troops including women in the Gulf as an excuse, and the
second because none of the leading personalities is poverty-stricken. On the
contrary - they are virtually without exception wealthy by any standards.
Bin Laden himself is the spoilt brat of a billionaire. These knee-jerk
explanations don't hold water. More and better thinking is needed.
On a completely new and different subject, I'd be interested in hearing how
freelancers fund their social security / essential insurance. In Germany, I
have to pay my pension contributions without entitlement to tax deductions
as my wife works and we are permitted to deduct an amount from tax for
pension provision that doesn't even cover the obligatory contributions a
single employee on an average German salary has to make.
Dave Jacques, Bremen, Germany
Je vais commencer par me présenter: je suis
étudiante en DEA [Diplôme d'études approfondies]
« Discours et Représentations », option
Linguistique, à l'Université de Poitiers, France, en
bénéficiant d'une bourse de 3ème cycle de cette
université. Le sujet de mon mémoire de DEA porte sur une
étude contrastive des temps du passé prétérit
anglais, passé simple / passé composé français et
leurs équivalents roumains et les problèmes de
traduction qu'ils impliquent.
Lors de ma documentation pour ce dossier, j'ai lu
votre article publié dans Translation Journal (volume
6, no 1, janvier 2002) sur Translation and Culture.
Je l'ai trouvé extrêmement intéressant et vous m'avez
aidé à mieux m'orienter pour la problématique que je
me propose d'aborder dans mon travail. Vous m'avez
fait penser à plusieurs pistes qui méritent bien
d'être exploitées, mais malheureusement les limites de
mon dossier vont m'obliger à renoncer à beaucoup de
détails. La complexité du problème m'oblige donc à
bine délimiter le champ de mes observations.
Je pense que vous comprenez ma position assez délicate
car j'appartiens à une culture et à une langue vues
comme « minoritaires », to say the least.
Je me suis proposé d'aborder des questions liées à
« l'uniformisation » et surtout au danger de passer sous
silence les particularités culturelles, ou de gommer
les différences entre les cultures, pour assimiler
« the otherness » de l'autre langue située dans un
rapport d'infériorité.
J'ai pensé faire appel à vous pour éventuellement
échanger quelques opinions là-dessus et pour vous
demander quelques conseils.
Consuela Orzan, Poitiers, France
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