Disqus - Friends of dpritchett

Re: Estereotipos Sobre Españoles

MatthewBennett — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 10:01:25 -0000

Hola Toni, efectivamente, qué fuerte. Uno de Oxford publicó un estudio, no sé si fue el año pasado o el anterior, sobre este mismo tema. Muy interesante cuando pensamos en el reparto de la cultura gallega-irlandesa-bretaña-galesa-celta por las costas occidentales de Ruropa. Tendré que escribir otra entrada sobre ese tema.

Re: Estereotipos Sobre Españoles

MatthewBennett — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 09:03:22 -0000

Laura, léete la siguiente entrada, por favor, para que quede claro que estos aquí son estereotipos, no lo que creo de verdad :-)

http://www.matthewbennett.es/561/estereotipos-s...

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/09/find-similar-people-and-interests-with.html

koltregaskes — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:22:08 -0000

Yes please kolint at gmail dot com.:-)

Re: What you can now expect as a reader from this blog

MatthewBennett — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 05:54:01 -0000

Thanks for saying so Rob, fill your boots! Part of the plan is to not only to blog about Spain but to include more international stuff, as you'll see over the next few days. Look forward to reading your comments.

Re: What you can now expect as a reader from this blog

MatthewBennett — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 02:41:31 -0000

Thanks Céline! There are more ideas for teaching English and Spanish a bit further down the line, but this is a good start.

Re: “Sue First, and Ask Questions Later” – Should We Watch What We Tweet?

lalunablanca — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:33:01 -0000

The anonymous route has the least consequences, but I also imagine the least opportunity for resolution. Great post and questions as society figures this out. Lots of precedences to be set. Hopefully for insightful and intelligent lawmakers. (cringe)

Re: Spanish Economy Might Recover by 2022

MatthewBennett — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:45:09 -0000

I find watching for real-world indicators which confirm trends fascinating although I have no idea if this will really happen of course!

A couple of years before the construction crash, for example (I think it was in November 2006), a friend who works in Murcia's director's institute told me that builders had quietly stopped making orders for more bricks and key construction materials for the following two years.

Then, in January 2007, the photocopying shop where we got all of our photocopying done - and which happened to be the favourite place for lots of architects in Murcia - suddenly appeared to have a lot less work. At the same time, the sales assistant told me that sales of 'for sale' signs had increased ten-fold.

Re: New Lawyer: “I Have No Time To Learn English”

MatthewBennett — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:40:44 -0000

Hi Steven,

We should meet up for a coffee then and swap stories!

I think the kind of informal meet-up you mention definitely has its place but in my experience also some important limitations, depending on the student's situation.

Re: New Lawyer: “I Have No Time To Learn English”

MatthewBennett — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:37:46 -0000

Hi Smee,

Thanks. Good suggestions, I didn't know you could do that with TDT in Spain, I don't watch TV very much but now you've mentioned it I'll have to give it a try.

I think you're spot on with trying to make it part of your everyday life, if learners can do this they'll notice the difference much more quickly.

Great moon/sunrise video you linked to!

Re: ¿Habrá Apagón en el Reino Unido por las Huelgas Salvajes en el Sector Energético?

MatthewBennett — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:33:32 -0000

Muchas gracias Bienve pero sólo son pequeños momentos sueltos que me parece interesante compartir con todos por una razón u otra. A ver si a partir de ahora puedo empezar a escribir un poco más aquí. Gracias por leer y participar.

Re: Crowdsourcing Translations and LinkedIn: A Response to the Global Watchtower Opinion

MatthewBennett — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:28:12 -0000

Tom, I'm sure you're not lacking in empathy but perhaps I could explain a bit better.

It wasn't just me, you see. I was initially annoyed enough to want to tweet about it and leave it at that. But when I went to do so, I found that a few others had already beaten me to it and they weren't a happy bunch.

Over the next few hours, Twitter lit up with dozens of professional translators tweeting about this, all of them unhappy on a scale ranging from mild annoyance to outraged enough to close their LinkedIn account. From this group of people, that reaction is remarkable.

Then came the suggestion for the LinkedIn group which now has 270 members, several threads and dozens of well-written comments on the subject, which I'm sure everyone has benefited from reading and participating in, whatever point of view they hold personally.

The idea with the original blog post was to summarise all of that activity and tell the story a little. It certainly seemed to strike a chord with many people. If my posts have served to further the discussion more, that's even better.

Do you mean that freelancers are perhaps upset at losing out on piece of the LinkedIn translation budget pie?

If so, after reading all the discussion this week, I wouldn't say that's the case; most people participating seem to have more than enough paid work to be getting on with.

I don't know if you've read all of the discussion on LinkedIn but if you haven't I'd encourage you to take some time to do so, as there's been a lot of great informed debate about the different options too.

Re: Crowdsourcing Translations and LinkedIn: A Response to the Global Watchtower Opinion

MatthewBennett — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:54:46 -0000

Hi Tom,

Of course everyone is quite within their rights to respond how they see fit, as is LinkedIn or any other company to ask any questions they like of their users and decide how they want to run their business based on the results.

And once again, the 'fury' this past week hasn't been about LinkedIn as a concept or a site, just the way they have presented and handled this particular project, which most of the professional translators who have participated in the debate believe shows an enormous amount of disrespect towards them and their work from a networking site for professionals where 'relationships matter'.

Neither has anyone said, as far as I can recall, that they have any problem with beta testing; in fact, we all clicked through to the survey in the first place because it was presented as a 'help us to improve our service' questionnaire.

It seems there have been a few people annoyed enough with LinkedIn as a company, though, to delete their profiles as a result.

As a comparison: would you also be happy to do some of their accounting because you know how to count?

Re: Crowdsourced Translations: My Advice to a Big News Brand

MatthewBennett — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:06:08 -0000

Thanks Bob Kerns,

You may, of course, and a fine suggestion it is. I agree, I would say well over half of my projects, even well over 3/4 require some form of urgency because things are left to the last minute. I'm even thinking of changing my rates system to reflect this, offering my clients a bit of a discount for organising themselves better on that front.

I'll have a think about it for another post!

Re: LinkedIn Infuriates Professional Translators: 10 Big Questions

MatthewBennett — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:46:10 -0000

Been busy for most of the morning, going to get stuck in to the new comments on LinkedIn now to digest the overnight responses!

Re: LinkedIn Infuriates Professional Translators: 10 Big Questions

MatthewBennett — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:45:07 -0000

That's a great clip!

Re: LinkedIn Infuriates Professional Translators: 10 Big Questions

MatthewBennett — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:13:40 -0000

Very true, I think we would do well to present and sell ourselves a little better most of the time too. Big companies beat most of us hands down at marketing and sales.

Thanks for your compliment! I'm slowly starting to post more often.

Re: LinkedIn Infuriates Professional Translators: 10 Big Questions

MatthewBennett — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:11:27 -0000

Thanks for your great comments. I know quite a few teachers who seem to be snowed under with extras and who would agree with you on that score.

I would be interesting in reading some of the studies you mention, I have also found that the more I charge my clients (up to a point!!), the more motivated I am to offer better service and the happier they are all round.

I was talking to someone at The Economist about translation a few weeks ago and the subject of shiny badges came up as a possibly useful part of the equation, but certainly not as the only bit or without payment as in this case!

I think companies would do well to court professional tribes - or that part of their existing tribes who have professional skills which could indeed help them - but they must not treat them as random unprofessional hordes.

Re: Ping.fm / Uploaded Image from Matthew Bennett

MatthewBennett — Fri, 22 May 2009 09:40:03 -0000

Thanks! Murcia in the spring is lovely. I like this idea of being able to upload photos from my mobile and chat about them too, people seem to like seeing them.

Re: Twitter: “We Screwed Up” on #fixreplies

lalunablanca — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:54:31 -0000

I don't buy it either. Having managed numerous web-app-dev projects over the years, something isn't adding up here. There is more to this story. Their last three blog posts have a HUGE "spin" odor.

Re: Una Idea Para Hablar De Vocabulario En Twitter

MatthewBennett — Mon, 04 May 2009 11:46:36 -0000

Muy bien. Yo creo que podría ser una de esas ideas que suena bien pero que luego ninguno lo hacemos :-).

Re: Do you really want your lawyer searching for ‘free legal English translation’?

MatthewBennett — Mon, 04 May 2009 11:25:08 -0000

Absolutely, you would definitely hope that if you were hiring an expert then he or she would take things very seriously with your legal affairs and realise that if he doesn't understand something crucial, he needs to contact a professional translator - he knows (or realises) what he doesn't know and decides to do something about it.

Worse for you would be your lawyer knowing what he doesn't know and deciding to do nothing.

I think perhaps what I was trying to get at was more the concept of unknown unknowns as applied to translation - depending on your lawyer's linguistic ability and his confidence in his own ability, he might not even know that he doesn't know what he's looking at - legal terminology and concepts can be very tricky sometimes. Such a situation would be very bad news for your foreign language legal or medical affairs.

Understanding the gist of an article is an important skill and an important step, as you rightly point out, but if I don't understand 20% of the words in the article, how can I possibly know if they're relevant or important enough to require human translation?

Things only get worse in this respect the more we mix the meaning of individual words with the meaning of phrases and paragraphs, and the further up the linguistic difficulty scale we move (e.g. bar side chat > news article > opinion article > academic article/contract/medical reports).

Re: Languages People On Twitter

MatthewBennett — Sun, 03 May 2009 07:11:54 -0000

Right, good, added. Quite hard to keep up with everybody sometimes. Thanks for mentioning it.

Re: An Idea For Discussing Vocabulary on Twitter

MatthewBennett — Fri, 01 May 2009 13:33:48 -0000

Hi Festus: that's great. As for hashtags, I'm not sure it's something we can organise; it seems more like something that people will either start using or not.

Re: An Idea For Discussing Vocabulary on Twitter

MatthewBennett — Fri, 01 May 2009 09:36:14 -0000

Wow, cool, a whole site devoted to this kind of idea. How are you thinking of developing it?

I saw http://twitter.com/search?q=#wordkill on Twitter yesterday which is a fun language-related hashtag too.

Re: An Idea For Discussing Vocabulary on Twitter

MatthewBennett — Fri, 01 May 2009 09:21:59 -0000

Thanks, that's one vote for giving it a try then!

Do you mean a monolingual issue or for a language learner as opposed to a translator? I think language learners/teachers could use this in the same way as translators and maybe for monolingual things you could just do #es or #en?

That's what I found so interesting about the word 'bitácora' the other day with @alunjohn. In English it comes from the log bit - which I think was once a piece of wood used to measure things on ships - and in Spanish it refers to wood but a with a different use - the place they where they kept the log out of inclement weather as you point out. 'Bitacoreros' vs. 'blogueros', 'bitacorear' vs. 'bloguear' :-).