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| Paul Danaher can be reached at TIMSeV@compuserve.com | |
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 | From the Editor/Webmaster You Asked for It by Gabe Bokor |
| Translator Profiles Take care of the sense... by Paul Danaher |
| In Memoriam: Dr. Deanna L. Hammond by Jane M. Zorrilla |
| Legal Translation Workshop Teaching German-English Legal Translation by Margaret Marks |
| Dictator v. Dictator First Impressions of ViaVoice from IBM by Roger Fletcher |
| NaturallySpeaking from Dragon Systems by William J. Grimes | |
| Science & Technology A Translator’s Guide to Organic Chemical Nomenclature IX by Chester E. Claff, Jr., Ph.D. |
| Banking and Finance The Language of Inflation by Danilo Nogueira |
| Translation in the News The Onionskin by Chris Durban |
| Caught in the Web Web Surfing for Fun and Profit by Cathy Flick, Ph.D. |
| Translators’ On-Line Resources by Gabe Bokor | |
| Translators’ Events |
| Letters to the Editor |
| Call for Papers |
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Take care of the senseby Paul Danaher |
Paul Danaher, born 1946 in the UK. Freelance translator (and interpreter and narrator for recordings) for almost 20 years, currently living in Germany and working in cyberspace.Since Gabe Bokor’s temporarilyexhausted the list of distinguished and prominent translators who otherwiseappear in this slot, he’s asked me to write a self-portrait, offering whateverinsights I might have for present and potential colleagues. Hugely flattered,I’ve agreed to stand in while he refurbishes his database. (Editor’s Note: Come on, Paul, don’t be so modest!) I don’t think there’s anythingin my education which is of interest or relevant to my fellows in translationand interpreting, apart perhaps from the comment of a schoolmaster thatI had no talent whatsoever for foreign languages. There are two morals tothis: the first is that hardly anybody (especially schoolmasters and potentialmothers-in-law) has any idea what a translator is or does (“How manylanguages do you speak?”), and the second is that the most useful thingfor a translator is an easy facility in the tongue of primary use (whatwe used to call “the mother tongue” in less enlightened and circumlocutorydays). In fact, as far as translation goes the most important thing I learnedduring my schooling was to type, which I did outside the school system. My pre-translator professionaldevelopment can best be described as disjointed, with four key experiences.The first was working in a circulation analysis department of a publishingempire made up of recently-merged and warring trade magazines. As nobodywould give us any information, the staff spent its time solving and composingcrosswords in the daily London newspapers, including The Times. (Englishcrossword clues are exercises in riddling—one of my favourites was“golden parent” in three letters, answer “mum.”) Thisearly practice in puzzling out meaning from deliberately cryptic phraseshas been invaluable over the years when intuiting the meaning of badly-writtensource texts. Later, I wrote reports onthe economies of the less important industrialised nations (which taughtme jargon) and offers for market research studies based on econometric techniquesexploiting the new electronic calculators (which taught me to write brieflyand to the point). Finally, I worked as a singerin a radio choir, which gave me practice with simultaneous inputs (readingnew music at sight while watching the conductor and listening to the orchestralaccompaniment on earphones). The singing, of course, was very useful trainingfor interpreting, and also accustomed me to anti-social working hours. I got my first job in translationon the strength of a test piece on French monetary policy. The agency managerwho took me on was mainly impressed by the fact that my translation hadvirtually nothing in common with his own: he had followed the conventionalstrategy of dictating the English translation based on the French sentences,while I had merely read the French and typed what an English economist wouldhave written on the same subject. Perhaps significantly, he hired me toreview the German translations, commenting that if I was destined to bea translator the work would find its way to me. (It did.) The next career move was typically passive and improbable: I was asked to go to Frankfurt and doa television version of a modern children’s opera. After three weeks ofrehearsal and recording, I found myself in Germany with no particular tiesor goals. I decided to stay and look around, which I’ve been doing now forover fifteen years. Like most vagrant foreigners, I started by teachingcommercial English and translation at a privately-owned language school.After a couple of years, I had too much translation work to have time forteaching, and I had also decided that I did not have the personality typeneeded to be an inspiring teacher. Around this time I bought my first dedicated word processor, a punched tape machine which producedvery stylish printouts (for its day) and made revision a lot easier. Twoyears later came another dedicated word processor with a full-page screenand electronic data medium storage (8" floppy disks). This introducedme to the ability to revise and correct on the fly, and also opened up themagic world of copying and supercopying (copying from one document to another).The increase in productivity from the new technology boosted my translationincome to six figures (translated into dollars), where it has stayed since. I also started to feel that I had to be doing something right as a translator, and began making myselfunpopular with colleagues by arguing that a translator with good keyboardingskills working in a familiar area should be able to produce three, fouror more pages an hour, essentially by combining the output of an interpreterwith the ability to revise and correct on screen. On the whole, I get theimpression that people think I’m lying. In return, I think they’re lazy—a facile opinion, given that I find translation far too enjoyablean activity to rate as work. In return for spending 8-12hours a day in front of my 20" monitor (I finally got glasses, butI’m used to a big screen now), I get to stay at home with my family, workas a freelance without having to answer to anybody (except my family) anddo something I enjoy more than any of the other careers I’ve toyed with(or vice versa). All this sounds too goodto be true, and of course it is. One of the problems with enjoying workso much is that I feel I’m featherbedding my way through life without facingthe real challenges. Another problem is that I can bury myself in work andignore other aspects of being self-employed that need attention—likebook-keeping, tracking expenses and taking care of tax returns. Given howeasy it is to earn money, I qualify financially as an “airline pilot”—as my local bank manager tersely characterises the modern Micawber.Finally, I’ve lost a number of clients (and a couple of friends) over theyears by losing touch with reality over deadlines. At present, my concerns (outside my family) are to improve the quality I provide. This involves a number of efforts:
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