Happy International Translation Day! In celebration of this annual event, we want to honor and highlight the accomplishments of Chiara Conte (pictured on the right), the Chief Italian Linguist here at CSOFT. In this featured interview, Melissa Taing (left) enjoys a lively chat with Chiara, who lights up with passion about the challenges and rewards of her work, and expounds on the difference between good translators and great translators.

Chiara Conte grew up in Otranto, a remote seaside village in southern Italy with a population of just over 5,000 people. Chiara brings with her nine years of translation experience, having first obtained a bachelor’s degree in Translation and Interpretation at the University of Lecce, later having received two master’s degrees: one in Asian Languages for International Cooperation from the University of Cà Foscari in Venice, and the other as a Linguistic Expert for International Enterprises from the University of Salento.

In her free time, Chiara is an avid reader and self-professed lover of pizza in all its forms. She’s got a feisty wit and is quick to laugh—both at herself and at others. She was an absolute delight to interview, so I hope you all enjoy.

It’s Monday again, folks. And though we’re all still a bit dead in the brain (before that first cup of coffee, at least), it’s important to keep those synapses firing quickly. So here’s a quick Monday Morning Quote by Henry Ford, key player in the development of the modern assembly line, who is rumored to have bottled the dying breath of his hero and good friend, Thomas Edison. Weird, huh? Anyway, here’s the quote:

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. - Henry Ford Founder of the Ford Motor Company

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Issue Five of Your Own Terms, the biweekly comic about Sir Terminus: Crusader of Logic, Manly Valor, and Multilingual Terminology Management.

Click here for previous issues.

More information:

It’s no joke—we love talking data categories (which, admittedly, has never made us cool at parties). The fact of the matter is, the way in which you manage terminological attributes in your glossary has a direct effect on the usefulness, consistency, scalability, and integrability of your multilingual termbase. When looking for the right terminology management system for your organization, you should pay attention to how new data is entered and what measures are in place to minimize human error.

In traditional terminology management models, you generally have one of two options for entering new records. The most common way is to create entries outside of the terminology management system in a spreadsheet application. This is all well and good, but the problem with spreadsheets (aside from complete lack of traceability) is that they don’t enable you to avail yourself of “pick lists,” or drop-down menus with finite values for a given data category.

Without pick lists, the terminologist (or translator, project manager, etc.) has to enter data manually, which is less efficient, and which also paves the way for introducing human error. For example, if someone simply misspells a data category, then you are going to encounter problems when you go to import, convert, or migrate your terminological data to another system.

The other method of adding new terms and translations is to enter them directly into a terminology management system. As long as the system has an intuitive interface, users can take advantage of the productivity gains inherent in pick lists and ensure the consistency of the data they enter. Consistent data is key to producing a versatile glossary, because it’s absent of any variables that might otherwise muck up your import, conversion, or integration processes.

TermWiki, the localization industry’s first completely online, wiki-based and collaborative terminology management system, enables you to define data categories and pick lists in a manner that best suits your content management needs. Because TermWiki is hosted online with a centralized database, any updates to data categories are automatically implemented throughout your entire glossary to ensure consistency between terms and across languages. So whether you’re managing a hundred terms or a million, TermWiki’s intuitive, standardized user interface will help ensure that no term ever goes astray.

• Click here for more detailed information on TermWiki.
• Test drive TermWiki yourself at TermWiki.com.
• Learn more about terminology management.

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We’ve got a few hours before Wednesday ends on the Western Hemisphere, and that’s just enough time for this week’s Wacky Word Wednesday, a weekly celebration of some of the wackiest and most interesting words from around the world.

Today’s wacky word is: Callipygian.

The definition from Dictionary.com:

cal·li·pyg·i·an [kal-uh-pij-ee-uhn] -adjective having well-shaped buttocks

It comes from a combination of the Greek neoclassical element calli- (meaning beautiful in loanwords from Greek, like calligraphy) and pyge (for buttocks or rump). Callipygian was originally used to refer to a series of statues of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, beauty and fertility. These statues (one of which is shown below) feature Aphrodite checking out her own booty, and are therefore known as the “Aphrodite Kallipygos” or Aphrodite of the beautiful buttocks. (And no, her gesture is not the antiquated equivalent of “Do I look fat in this peplos?”—so don’t even go there.)

Tomorrow is the 15^th day of the eighth lunar month, which means that the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节) has arrived here in China. It usually coincides with the autumnal equinox, one of only two occasions in the year when the length of night and day are nearly equal.

Like a fair amount of Chinese holidays, the Mid-Autumn Festival is also a posthumous celebration of bitter-sweet romance. (Check out our last entry on the Qixi Festival for another example of this.) There’s a lot of disagreement about the specifics behind the Mid-Autumn Festival, but most accounts agree that there once was a totally amazing, Chuck Norris-like archer named Houyi (hoe-ee) who, in typical awesome-hero fashion, had a beautiful wife named Chang’e (chong-uh).

The following is the mythology behind the Mid-Autumn Festival recreated for you in 10 easy-to-digest bullet points.

So it’s Monday again (can we get a half-hearted yay?) and that means it’s time for the Monday Morning Quote. Here’s a good one from Herbert Hoover, 31st President of the United States, who is rumored to have spoken Mandarin Chinese with his wife whenever they wanted to communicate privately in front of mixed company.

About the time we can make the ends meet, somebody moves the ends. - Herbert Hoover 31st President of the United States

Edited to add: We just realized it was International Talk Like a Pirate Day on the 19th. In belated celebration, we had the above quote transcreated into Pirate: “Y’aaar. Jus’ as we be havin’ doubloons aplenty, some bilge-sucking son of a biscuit eater goes an’ feeds me plans to the fishes.”

Any other suggestions? (Unfortunately, we didn’t have a glossary.)

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In celebration of a long-awaited Friday, I thought it might be fun to teach ya’ll a little Chinese. If you enjoy this kind of thing, maybe we can do it more often.

This won’t be a Chinese lesson—not in the grammatical and learn-new-vocabulary sense. Rather, I wanted to share the history behind an interesting phrase. For those who aren’t familiar with the Chinese language, it’s uniquely possessed of many, many metaphorical idioms (often consisting of four characters) that derive from ancient stories and literature. Everyday conversations are literally teeming with these sayings, which often offer concise insight into a common experience or situation.

The phrase I’d like to focus on today is 马后炮 (mă hòu pào), which literally means “a canon behind the horse.” In colloquial use, when you tell someone not to canon-behind-the-horse you, it means that an incident has already occurred. You can’t change it, so there’s no use bringing it up. This phrase is especially useful when responding to I-told-you-so situations in which someone scolds you, or offers a post hoc solution to something that has already happened, and is thereby unavoidable.

But what does this have to do with horses and canons? Oddly enough, the phrase comes from Chinese Chess. Here’s some quick background information:

Hey everyone, and welcome back! You’re just in time for Wacky Word Wednesday, a weekly celebration of some of the wackiest and most interesting words from around the world.

Today’s wacky word is: presque vu.

The definition:

pres·que vu [prehs-kuh voo] -noun the inability to remember a word or put your finger on the right word.

Presque vu is French for “almost seen”—a fancy-pants way of saying “brain fart” or “having a senior moment.” Basically, presque vu is a French neologism that refers to the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (TOT). TOTs are instances in which, for no good reason at all, you temporarily forget a key word during conversation and are irritated by the feeling that it’s right at the tip of your tongue. Interestingly enough, presque vu is a psychological anomaly that may share the same synaptic origins as déjà vu, which is French for “already seen,” which is French for “already seen.”—Wait, did I say that twice?

Guest blog entry by Jasmine Liu, Business Development Manager at CSOFT.

A few weeks back I dropped my iPhone 3GS and cracked the glass. And I mean really cracked it. But I promised myself that I wouldn’t get a new phone until next January so, in the meantime, I’ve still got to make do with my Frankenstein phone.

In order to keep from cutting myself every time I thumb through my apps, I taped a giant piece of anti-glare film over the glass. It’s frustrating to see all my precious little applications living behind a terrible-looking screen—and it’s really difficult to navigate. But I can still use it and—in a typical deranged Apple-fan fashion—I’m just happy that I still have my iPhone, in spite of its not being pretty anymore.

Seeing as I’d rather tape my iPhone up like an electronic mummy than exchange it for something else, it’s clear that I’ve got a bit of an addiction. And it’s not an addiction that’s limited to Americans alone. A lot of iPhone App developers are turning to localization as a strategy to further increase their sales abroad, a sign that foreign consumers also suffer an unhealthy dependence on their beloved apps.

Aaaaand it’s Monday, which means that it’s time for a Monday Morning Quote. We thought this one was appropriate in light of Translation Review Week. Hope you have a great Monday! (Well, y’know… insofar as Mondays can be great.)

If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over? - John Wooden Legendary UCLA Basketball Coach

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