| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3] | Freelancing for a Living Thread poster: Ozgur Demirel
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Ozgur Demirel wrote:
About taxes, I'm not really sure if Turkish Ministry of Finance regulates freelancing translators making them liable for taxation.
Please let me know, if this is true I will relocate to Turkey tomorrow
PS I did not find your answer to me offensive at all, just fyi
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Dave Bindon wrote:
Understanding English may be relatively simple (although I see a lot of non-native English speakers - even professional translators - getting confused when, for example, a word could be either a noun or a verb). Translating into English, however, is a different kettle of fish. Many non-native speakers may think it's easy to translate into English, but native-speakers spot the errors even more easily.
You shall not make for yourself an idol of a native speaker. Some time ago a 100% native speaker corrected in my text "its" to "it's" in the sentence below:
"To restore a toolbar to its original position you will have to move the toolbar manually."
| | | | Ty Kendall 
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:09
Hebrew to English
| Response to Alexander... | Sep 11, 2011 |
I don't think Dave Bindon was trying to idolise native speakers.
There are native speakers in every language whose grasp on their own language is tenuous at best. No doubt the native speaker who "corrected" your sentence was amongst them.
I actually wanted to address a point you made earlier about English grammar being "easy" because it is not a highly inflected language like the Slavic languages.
Languages which lack complexity in one area (noun morphology... See more I don't think Dave Bindon was trying to idolise native speakers.
There are native speakers in every language whose grasp on their own language is tenuous at best. No doubt the native speaker who "corrected" your sentence was amongst them.
I actually wanted to address a point you made earlier about English grammar being "easy" because it is not a highly inflected language like the Slavic languages.
Languages which lack complexity in one area (noun morphology for example) tend to make up for it in others.
English doesn't have the case system of Russian or Polish, but it does have:
1. One of the world's most crazy spelling systems.
2. Rigid syntax: although you'd think this would make it easier for non-native speakers, more often than not the strange placement of an adverbial, or the exhange of noun/verb phrases/weird use of conjunctions etc often serve to identify the non-native speaker who is probably all too accustomed to being more care-free with sentence structure.
4. More subtle syntactical rules: - a common example:
compare "a cute little puppy" vs "a little cute puppy". Even if the native speaker can't tell you why, they know instinctively which of these phrases sounds natural, and which sounds wrong. (Answer: opinion adjectives come before size adjectives).
5. The VAST lexicon. Thanks to all those pesky foreigners invading our rainy shores and a little something called colonialism, English has a ridiculous number of synonyms, near synonyms...enough to even bamboozle the most linguistically minded. The real challenge in this is knowing which synonym fits which context.
6. Lots of verb tenses. Not as many as the Romance languages, but not far behind.
7. Rare phonemes (Voiceless and voiced dental fricatives - θ ð ) I can probably count the number of non-native speakers who I heard master these. Unless you happen to speak Greek, or Albanian, or northern dialects of Spanish, these phonemes won't come easily to you.
8. Enough irregular verbs to make you wonder if there is any point in having rules.
9. Phrasal and prepositional verbs. Need I say more?
This list isn't exhaustive, I could go on, but the point is that English grammar is not "easy". Even non-natives who claim near-native-levelness of English usually can be spotted by the odd slip rooted in grammar (which they claim to have "mastered").
I just think that as translators, linguists etc we should have a healthy respect for grammar, (of any language). It is complex and subtle in different ways.
A language which is morphologically complex (like Russian, Polish) shouldn't be considered as easier than a language which is phonologically or syntactically complex.(Like English) ....(or pragmatically or...you get the idea).
And besides, difficulty is relative.
I think Dave was not trying to say that native speakers are beyond criticism, or that they are infallable in English, just that the process of translating into English shouldn't be underestimated. And that many non-native translators' over-confidence has (in his experience) led to rather poor results. As so often is the case with over-confidence in any situation. And that these types of mistakes (made by non-natives) may be too subtle for a non-native to spot, but stick out like a sore thumb to a native speaker.
(which surely cannot be disputed, it is a given that non-natives rarely acquire that "instinct" with their second, third etc languages as they have with their mother tongue).
P.S I'm fully aware that "near-native-levelness" is a neologism. Remember, you saw it here first! ▲ Collapse
| | | | Jenn Mercer
United States
Local time: 11:09
Member (2009)
French to English
| English: contents may have shifted during shipping | Sep 11, 2011 |
Ty Kendall wrote:
...
I think Dave was not trying to say that native speakers are beyond criticism, or that they are infallable in English, just that the process of translating into English shouldn't be underestimated. And that many non-native translators' over-confidence has (in his experience) led to rather poor results. As so often is the case with over-confidence in any situation. And that these types of mistakes (made by non-natives) may be too subtle for a non-native to spot, but stick out like a sore thumb to a native speaker.
(which surely cannot be disputed, it is a given that non-natives rarely acquire that "instinct" with their second, third etc languages as they have with their mother tongue).
P.S I'm fully aware that "near-native-levelness" is a neologism. Remember, you saw it here first!
Ty is spot on here about the possibility for criticizing native speakers. I was born in the U.S., have lived here for (gasp) nearly 40 years, have a degree in not just English, but creative writing specifically and I have PLENTY of questions about how this messed up language is supposed to work. I have seen ProZians criticize posts [putting Mod hat on* Please remember to be nice to your fellow professionals or risk having your posts zapped into the ether. *Mod had off] as being examples of the dangers of non-native English when, in fact, they write better than much of the English that you can find in the wild.
That being said, in order to translate into English you need to not just know a language, but know it in your bones. The instruction manuals may be sketchy and often wrong, but a native will sniff out the irregularities in a second.
P.S. Don't worry, Ty, you will get FULL CREDIT for making up "near-native-levelness
P.P.S. You get the award though for misspelling "infallable"[sic]
[Edited at 2011-09-19 14:08 GMT]
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Ty Kendall
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:09
Hebrew to English
| I knew there'd be one in there somewhere | Sep 11, 2011 |
Hahah thanks Jenn!
It was an incredibly long post and it was getting late, I knew there'd be a spelling mistake in there somewhere, maybe I was sub-consciously trying to prove my own point?
| | | | | pro's and contra's... | Sep 11, 2011 |
Hi, Ty,
Thank you very much for your detailed answer.
However, if we look at your arguments through the prism of Some-Language-to-English translation, we can make a conclusion that these problems are not so unbeatable as they may seem at first sight....
Ty Kendall wrote:
1. One of the world's most crazy spelling systems.
That's right... but it's much easier these days - we have various types of spellcheckers, online dictionaries and other tools.
Ty Kendall wrote:
2. Rigid syntax: although you'd think this would make it easier for non-native
Quite easy, really... You need to learn just one simple scheme:
[adverb] (attribute) subject predicate (attribute) object [adverb]
Ty Kendall wrote:
4. More subtle syntactical rules: - a common example:
compare "a cute little puppy" vs "a little cute puppy". Even if the native speaker can't tell you why, they know instinctively which of these phrases sounds natural, and which sounds wrong. (Answer: opinion adjectives come before size adjectives).
Ty Kendall wrote: 5. The VAST lexicon. Thanks to all those pesky foreigners invading our rainy shores and a little something called colonialism, English has a ridiculous number of synonyms, near synonyms...enough to even bamboozle the most linguistically minded. The real challenge in this is knowing which synonym fits which context.
These two can be a problem sometimes, but here we are not talking about translating Leo Tolstoy works into English... Of course, this type of translation should be left to native speakers... and not only native speakers but to real masters of the language like the late Mr. Scott Fitzgerald, for example.
6. Lots of verb tenses. Not as many as the Romance languages, but not far behind.
This can be a problem, but you really do not need them all to translate a contract or a technical specification.
7. Rare phonemes (Voiceless and voiced dental fricatives - θ ð ) I can probably count the number of non-native speakers who I heard master these. Unless you happen to speak Greek, or Albanian, or northern dialects of Spanish, these phonemes won't come easily to you.
This is irrelevant, your honor. (For written translations, I mean )
8. Enough irregular verbs to make you wonder if there is any point in having rules.
If one learns, say, ten irregular verbs one can suddenly realize that it's almost all
9. Phrasal and prepositional verbs.
I think this is rather a problem when you translate from English...
p.s. I will tell you that one of the most difficult problems is to learn how to put those little things called articles in the right place (or at least not very far from it).
| | | | Ty Kendall
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:09
Hebrew to English
| Articles? How did I forget articles??? | Sep 11, 2011 |
Thanks Alexander, you're right, I was approaching the subject of grammar more from a generic angle than a specifically translation one.
Most of the issues I highlighted can be mitigated in written translation when the person has enough time to sift out all the slip ups. (Unlike my spelling mistake in my previous post)
On the issue of articles, you remind me of two Polish girls I know. They both have great... See more Thanks Alexander, you're right, I was approaching the subject of grammar more from a generic angle than a specifically translation one.
Most of the issues I highlighted can be mitigated in written translation when the person has enough time to sift out all the slip ups. (Unlike my spelling mistake in my previous post)
On the issue of articles, you remind me of two Polish girls I know. They both have great English and did their undergrad degrees with me. The both even have *almost* perfect accents, when I met the one, I could have sworn she was English! BUT...
what used to let them down consistently was the sometimes-bizarre use of definite and indefinite articles. I know this is especially difficult for speakers of Slavic languages as they lack this completely.... so I forgave them
What I notice more often is the issue of appropriacy and naturalness. Often a sentence is perfectly grammatical, it just sounds..."off". I think this trips non-natives up quite often as there is no real "rule book" about this (although you can buy various specialist dictionaries, few, if any cover this intricate level of language use - it's considered something you learn "on the go").
This is also the reason you would have to hold me at gunpoint to translate INTO my source language, I would always be paranoid that my chosen usage is somehow not quite right.
Or that might be my OCD perfectionist character trait.
Anyhow, I'm going to shut up now, I'm hijacking this thread and going ever so naughtily off-topic. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Williamson
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:09
Flemish to English
+ ...
Alexander Onishko wrote:
Williamson wrote:
English an easy language? Read through the Economist or the BBC-webpages and try to translate say the science page without using a dictionary. You'll notice how easy English is.
But why??? One is free to use dictionaries. If you don't know something - don't be afraid to look up. This is only good.
Saying that English is easy, I meant English grammar first of all. For example, compared to Slavonic languages that have declensions and conjugations, English grammar is very simple.
[Edited at 2011-09-11 20:18 GMT]
Why?
For those wanting to move on from translation to serious interpreting at serious schools will have to take and pass an admission test. Usually, they will get articles from Fleet street newspapers or their foreign equivalents (El País, Die Welt, Le Monde, The Economist,...) to translate into your target-language. Sometimes the preselection test are far-fetched meanings of words. No dictionary allowed.
When you studied English, how easy did you find prepositions. Using the wrong preposition can have awkward results. Prepositions tend to be the means of expressing nuances.
On the other hand, I don't agree with the native-only dogma.
I am a native plumber, who has attended an Assimil course of say German and therefore I can translate from German into English. Doesn't it all depend upon the educational level of a person and his/her sociolinguistic environment. I am a native M.D., who lived 10 years in Germany and therefore I translate medical text from German into English and from English into German is more plausible. Moreover, there is such a thing as a constant learning curve. If you don't start translating into the other direction, you will never actively assimilate the vocabulary, syntax and semantics and difficulties of the source language.
I don't know why, but this native-only ugly beast pops up time and again. For natives of English, it is the first of the ten commandments of translation. Of course, they never heard of working together with an educated native speaker or a professional editor.
Back on topic, which was Freelancing for a living.
You don't have to be a math genius to figure out that in a country with high taxes -in some countries you have to pay those taxes in advance based upon your previous quarter-and Indian rates, paid at customary Italian delays, it is not feasible to earn a living with freelancing. If on the other hand, you get a decent rate in a country with reasonable/no (United Arab Emirates)/low taxes (there are a lot of them) paid on time (max.30 days), you can make a decent living with translation.
[Edited at 2011-09-12 07:11 GMT]
[Edited at 2011-09-12 07:18 GMT]
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Ty Kendall wrote:
On the issue of articles, you remind me of two Polish girls I know. They both have great English and did their undergrad degrees with me. The both even have *almost* perfect accents, when I met the one, I could have sworn she was English! BUT...
what used to let them down consistently was the sometimes-bizarre use of definite and indefinite articles. I know this is especially difficult for speakers of Slavic languages as they lack this completely.... so I forgave them
Not only Slavic languages, of all Fenno-Ugrian languages as well (for example); in fact, as far as I know, the majority of world's languages don't use articles... So it (use of articles) could even be considered a kind of Germanic/Romance idiosyncracy
(Sorry for continuing this off-topic issue, but I found this a very interesting discussion )
As for the original topic, for my part I can't really comprehend how can anyone be an employee for a living... But then that's probably just me...
| | | | | For me it is! | Sep 29, 2011 |
I have been freelancing for over 20 years and have brought up 2 daughters on my own.
I am not saying it's always easy; sometimes I have thought that it would be more secure to get wages at the end of each month... but then I remember why I am doing it.
I love my job and the independence it allows me to have and I can be there for my daughters whenever they need me (sometimes it means working late at night to catch up.... but I can do it once in a while) and help them with school. I... See more I have been freelancing for over 20 years and have brought up 2 daughters on my own.
I am not saying it's always easy; sometimes I have thought that it would be more secure to get wages at the end of each month... but then I remember why I am doing it.
I love my job and the independence it allows me to have and I can be there for my daughters whenever they need me (sometimes it means working late at night to catch up.... but I can do it once in a while) and help them with school. I can also work wherever I am and take time off if I need to.
To me this is the right way to work! ▲ Collapse
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Williamson wrote:
Why?
For those wanting to move on from translation to serious interpreting at serious schools will have to take and pass an admission test. Usually, they will get articles from Fleet street newspapers or their foreign equivalents (El País, Die Welt, Le Monde, The Economist,...) to translate into your target-language. Sometimes the preselection test are far-fetched meanings of words. No dictionary allowed.
That's a dilettante approach to translation. 
Williamson wrote:
When you studied English, how easy did you find prepositions. Using the wrong preposition can have awkward results. Prepositions tend to be the means of expressing nuances.
Yes, I studied prepositions at my university. I don't think I can make a serious mistake with them.
[Edited at 2011-09-29 14:44 GMT]
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