"Unlike cooking... writing is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food."
My first acquaintance with Rakoff's work was hearing him on "This American Life" recite a hilarious take on William Carlos Williams's "This is Just to Say" in his Bond-villain voice. I thought it was delightful and brilliant, but failed to read any further until this book came along. "Half Empty" gives you the opportunity to tag along and listen to this master pessimist as he winds his way through post-lapsarian America. During the brief hours you spend with this book, Rakoff, alternatively fascinated and appalled, trains his relentless sarcastic searchlight on subjects as diverse as American optimism, the difficulties of writing and cancer, and also visits Southern California, Utah and Walt Disney World's Innoventions Dream Home.
If the book tends towards the darker tonalities of the spectrum, you somehow feel that Rakoff never really turns on the full power of his sarcasm, which is tempered throughout by a compassion for the shared human condition. There is, for one thing, the self-deprecation that includes this description of himself as "possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness," which serves as a pretty accurate approximation of the experience of reading his work. There is also the knowledge of our own mortality and the suspicion that perhaps others have to be perpetual optimists for the temperamentally pessimistic to enjoy certain human achievements: "If one's dreams having to come true was the only referendum on whether they were beautiful, or worth dreaming, well then, no one would wish for anything. And that would be so much sadder." While you may deplore the same things he deplores, you end up hoping the world remains as crazy and nonsensical as it is so that the author can continue to reverse-engineer his delectable writing.
Estoy seguro de que la crisis financiera cuyo segundo aniversario comenté hace un par de semanas será vista en el futuro como una larga serie de crisis encadenadas. Del mismo modo, aunque el crac (¿de dónde vendrá esta palabra?) de la Bolsa de Nueva York en octubre de 1929 fue la campanada final a los excesos de la década del charlestón, también fue el pistoletazo inicial para una larga serie de pánicos y debacles que incluyó desde eventos catastróficos --como una ola mundial de deflación, crisis bancarias en Europa y aumentos masivos del desempleo-- hasta dramas menos importantes pero igualmente sonados --como la quiebra y suicidio del "Rey de las Cerillas" Ivar Kreuger y el enjuiciamiento del presidente de la Bolsa de Nueva York, Eli Whitney, por fraude.
El mejor libro hasta ahora sobre la crisis financiera de 2008.
La actual crisis también empieza a perfilarse como una serie de burbujas que crecieron hasta el estallido de la más inflada: el mercado hipotecario estadounidense. Entre las secuelas más dañinas se encuentran Islandia --descrito por algunos como un país que se convirtió en un gigantesco hedge fund y luego explotó-- y la crisis griega, retratada este mes de forma brillante en un ensayo en Vanity Fair por Michael Lewis. Lewis es sin duda el cronista más entretenido de la Gran Recesión, principalmente a través de The Big Short, aparecido a principios de este año, donde narra la historia de tres grupos muy distintos (y pintorescos) de inversores que vieron que el mercado hipotecario estaba hiperinflado (al contrario de las protestas de que "nadie pudo haber pronosticado la crisis") e hicieron apuestas gigantescas contra él.
Lewis saltó a la fama hace 20 años cuando, tras una breve carrera como vendedor de bonos en Salomon Brothers, publicó una memoria de sus años ochenta llamada Liar's Poker, traducida al castellano en 1990 (y nunca reimpresa) como El póquer del mentiroso: los años ochenta en Wall Street y Londres. Es uno de los libros más divertidos que he leído y un clásico contemporáneo de la literatura sobre el mundo financiero. El estilo de Lewis consiste en disimular cualquier juicio sobre la realidad que describe y tratar de transmitir lo absurda que es de forma oblicua. Fue así que retrató el interior de Salomon como un estrafalario mundo al revés que incluía criaturas inolvidables como "La piraña humana" (que decía fuck cada cuatro palabras) o los subordinados de Lewis Ranieri —padre de la titulización de hipotecas— pintados como un grupo de banqueros obesos que ordenaban cuatrocientos dólares en comida mexicana y se la engullían en una sola sentada, suscitando el asombro del narrador: "Nadie se puede comer cuatrocientos dólares en comida mexicana... Nadie".
El libro despertó mucha polémica, por cuanto desmitificó el mundo de Wall Street: en lugar de los tiburones corruptos estilo Gordon Gekko, Lewis insistía que los bancos de inversión estaban poblados por individuos que sabían poco más que el público en general sobre los riesgos que corrían. La imagen era poco halagadora y plantea el problema de cómo prefiere uno que le vean: como un supervillano genial o como un idiota capaz de dispararse a sí mismo en el pie. Al final, la vanidad recomienda lo primero. El torpe aprendiz de brujo no tiene ningún misterio.
Ahora le toca a la economía griega el "tratamiento Lewis". Y la pieza en Vanity Fair no decepciona. Está llena de perlas:
El tsunami de crédito barato que rodó por todo el planeta entre 2002 y 2007 acaba de crear una nueva oportunidad para viajar: el turismo de desastres financieros. El crédito no era simplemente dinero: era una tentación. Ofreció a sociedades enteras la oportunidad de revelar aspectos de sus caracteres que normalmente no podrían darse el lujo de complacer. A países enteros se les dijo: "Las luces están apagadas, pueden hacer lo que quieran y nadie jamás lo sabrá". Lo que optaron por hacer con el dinero en la oscuridad presentó variaciones de un país a otro. Los americanos desearon comprar hogares muy superiores a los que podían costear y permitir que los fuertes explotasen a los débiles. El deseo de los islandeses fue dejar de pescar, convertirse en banqueros de inversión y permitir que sus machos alfa diesen rienda suelta a una megalomanía que hasta entonces había quedado suprimida. El deseo de los alemanes fue volverse más alemanes; el de los irlandeses fue dejar de ser irlandeses.
(...)
Resultó que lo que los griegos ansiaban hacer cuando se apagaron las luces y estaban a solas en la oscuridad con una montaña de dinero prestado fue convertir su gobierno es una piñata rellena de sumas fantásticas y darles a tantos ciudadanos como fuese posible un chance de propinarle un garrotazo.
El foco del artículo es un escándalo que involucró un célebre monasterio visitado por Lewis. Los monjes de Vatopaidi lograron que el gobierno griego cambiase terrenos muy valiosos por propiedades eclesiásticas que valían considerablemente menos en circunstancias aún turbias. El autor relata su encuentro con el jefe de la abadía:
En ese momento, de la nada, entra el padre Efraín. Es redondo, con mejillas sonrosadas y una barba blanca. Es más o menos un doble de San Nicolás. Hasta le brillan las pupilas. Unos meses antes había sido convocado a rendir testimonio ante el Parlamento griego. Uno de sus interrogadores dijo que el gobierno griego había actuado con una eficacia increíble al intercambiar el lago de Vatopaidi por las propiedades comerciales del Ministerio de Agricultura. Le preguntó a Efraín cómo lo había logrado. — ¿Es que acaso Ud. no cree en milagros? —respondió Efraín. —Estoy empezando a creer en ellos —afirmó el parlamentario griego.
En fin, para reír y llorar. Entre las cifras que cita el autor está el datazo de que la deuda per cápita de los giregos es 250.000 dólares, o unos 190.000 euros al cambio actual. Lo que hace pensar que los sustos de deuda soberana estarán acompañándonos durante cierto tiempo por venir.
This week I needed to align two files, convert the result into .tmx and import it into SDLX. The problem is the files had *.docx extensions because they were created with Word 2007. I had at my disposal SDL Trados's WinAlign, Wordfast's align function and the free YouAlign online app offered by Terminotix.
Trados WinAlign, the one I'm most familiarized with, failed to process any of the files, even after converting them to .rtf and saving them as Word97-2003.
Wordfast's Aligner was simply unmanageable. It was my first time using it and, despite an interface that superficially looks like WinAlign, I was unable to make heads or tails out of it after several attempts.
I vaguely remembered something about a free alignment tool . A quick Google search brought me to YouAlign. It worked like a charm, on the first attempt and without a single mistake. Amazing. It is offered by the same company that sells Terminotix. Although I don't own their CAT program, the YouAlign experience made me feel fuzzy and warn towards them. Therefore, I highly recommend it next time you get tripped up by your licensed programs.
(Alas, the import into SDLX failed for whatever reason, but such is the way of the CAT tool.)
It's hard to believe that two years have passed since the dramatic week that started on a Friday when the leaders of the major Wall Street banks converged on the headquarters of the New York Federal Reserve. As has been chronicled in many books, articles and movies, the head honchos failed to come up with a solution to save Lehman Brothers, which was allowed to go under on Sunday evening (despite one firm offer from Britain's Barclays), nearly bringing down the rest of the international financial system with it. There are many human anecdotes from that dramatic week that punctuate how dire the situation was. To select only a single one: Mohammed El-Erian, one of the leading fund managers in the world, called his wife after the run on money market funds and told her to withdraw as much cash as she could from the ATMs because banks (i.e., all banks) might not open their doors the following morning. You have to take a step back to gauge the gravity of this story. This man is probably a millionaire several times over and he is telling his wife to take out $500 or $1,000 or whatever she can get because that is the only thing they might have to live on for the next few weeks. That is simply Great Depression territory. Scary, scary.
As we all know, the "Clusterf**** to the Poorhouse" (as the Daily Show dubbed it) began with the least complicated of financial products: the humble mortgage. Except these mortgages had a twist: they were subprime mortgages. By now everyone is familiarized with the concept. Thanks to ultra-low interest rates, people with low credit scores began to be granted home loans. Back before the housing bubble, banks had found that some people with bad credit scores could actually be granted mortgages and that the default rate was relatively low, since payments on a house tend to be the last payment that is cut when economic hardship hits. This was a niche activity, however. But once everyone with good credit scores had remortgaged in the early 2000s, the market had no one else to turn to. So banks and originators expanded the subprime niche by many multiples to keep the profit machine churning. The theory was that as long as rates stayed low, even people with unspectacular credit could make their regular payments and renew at the ultra-low rates when the basement teaser rates ended. This time was different. Eventually, rates began to inch upward only slightly (as expected), but there were massive defaults (which was not expected), and institutions all over the world crumbled and the rest is history.
Now, given its status as one of the major buzzwords of 2008, the term has received several different translations in Spain's El País:
Therefore, you have a reasonably large selection for a single (often authoritative) source. However, "hipotecas basura" and "hipotecas subprime" by far get the most hits on that archive.
Now, one thing to keep in mind is that the word "subprime" is an elegant example of financial re-branding. To understand that, think of the analogous case of junk bonds, which are debt securities with a higher yield. Why do they offer a higher yield? Well, because they are issued by companies with less-than-sterling credit. To receive money from the market, they have to pay more than a more reputable company. Thus the less-than-admiring moniker of junk bonds. When these low-quality bonds became a hot property in the 1980s, bright young things began thinking up ways of selling them off. But for that you needed a shiny new name. "Junk" bond simply wouldn't do. "How about high-yield bond?" "Hmmm, that sounds a LOT better. Kind of like a new, improved sort of bond." After all, higher yield is good, right? And thus was born another speculative mania using completely inappropriate assets.
The term "hipoteca basura" suggested by the Spanish newspapers is a nod at this history. And it is certainly suggestive, since it points out emphatically (in a way the original English original doesn't) that we are talking about junk mortgages. The word "subprime" is a nifty little sleight of hand. See this pile of mortgages held by people with lower credit scores? They're packaged into junk mortgage CDOs. And, by the art of securitization and the intricacies of the rating system, they are transmuted into AAA-rated subprime bonds. Sounds better, right? "They're not junk, they're just not-good, less-than-prime, prime-minus, subprime." Voilá, another catastrophe is born.
Therefore, if it is up to you, by all means use "hipoteca basura." It is blunt, suggestive and calls to mind an entire spectrum of meanings that help us think about the Moneygeddon in Spanish. However, keep in mind that it is a loaded term, with heavily negative connotations that your audience or client may not like. In conclusion, all of the options taken from El País are valid, but weigh beforehand the nuances of every one of the options before committing yourself to one. And for God's sake don't buy subprime mortgage bonds.
"The Volcker Rule has forced Goldman Sachs to sell off its Principal Strategies unit, which was its internal hedge fund devoted to prop trading." Huh? A quick googling reveals that this refers to proprietary trading, which doesn't bring the translator any closer to an answer. Forget printed sources. Financial jargon develops at such breakneck speed in the early 21st century that the dictionaries on your shelf are of little use. It helps to know the meaning: it refers to the trades that banks engage in with their own money. As the name implies, a brokerage house should really be only a broker. In theory, it should simply buy and sell the stuff its clients order it to. And charge huge commissions for those services. As the senior partner explains to Eddie Murphy's character in Trading Places:
Randolph Duke: Good, William! Now, some of our clients are speculating that the price of gold will rise in the future. And we have other clients who are speculating that the price of gold will fall. They place their orders with us, and we buy or sell their gold for them. Mortimer Duke: Tell him the good part. Randolph Duke: The good part, William, is that, no matter whether our clients make money or lose money, Duke & Duke get the commissions. Mortimer Duke: Well? What do you think, Valentine? Billy Ray: Sounds to me like you guys a couple of bookies. Randolph Duke: [chuckling, patting Billy Ray on the back] I told you he'd understand.
However, that was back in a simpler, more innocent time known as the eighties. In the past quarter century, trading with your own money acquired a much, much greater importance. For instance, instead of buying mortgages, packaging mortgages, and selling them off, banks began to keep a lot of that stuff they "created" on their balance sheets. In theory, the housing meltdown should not have imperiled the financial system, but since the banks peddling these securities were just another participant holding a lot of this toxic material in their warehouses, the brokers almost went under, along with their clients. Contrary to the case of a bookie, who profits regardless of whether the Giants win or lose.
This is what the Volcker Rule has ended. So how do you translate it? As is the case for a lot of financial innovation, there is no agreed term for it. And as is also often the case, Spanish-speaking professionals working in the financial world simply use the term in the original English. One example:
The reporter from Cinco Días expands the term without exactly translating it, although it could be shortened to "intermediación por cuenta propia."
The next option is a mistake:
El dirigente norteamericano anunció a principios de enero la puesta en marcha de una severa regulación para las entidades bancarias que lleve a limitar e, incluso, prohibir ciertas actividades financieras, para evitar la especulación en los mercados de los bancos, tanto por cuenta propia (a través del proprietary Trading, o comercio con capital propio) como para terceros. http://www.wharton.universia.net/index.cfm?fa=viewArticle&ID=1844
The author is tripped up by the term trading, which could mean comercio, in the sense of buying and selling stuff, but which in the financial sphere refers specifically to"buying and selling securities" and needs to be transmitted using something such as intermediación, operación, compra y venta de valores, etc. However, the "capital propio" part of the option is correct.
Then there is this option, culled from ProZ.com and WordReference.com:
It is presented as authoritative, but is it really widespread throughout the industry? Google the phrase "Administración de Cartera Propia" and you get this curious result: You only get 20 or so hits. This is a very low tally that indicates the term has not caught on. Moreover, half the hits refer to an executive in a universal bank (not an investment bank) that was fined for a securities infraction. The term is almost exclusive to this one institution. It is therefore somewhat suspect. Moreover, it is not very exact, (as in the case of "comercio," above) since "administración" does not really transmit the meaning of trading. It should be viewed cum grano salis.
Therefore, after reviewing the different options, I feel the following are acceptable: intermediación por cuenta propia, intermediación con capital propio, operaciones por cuenta propia.
However, since none of these options are established (and depending upon the context), the term should be accompanied by the original in round brackets the first time it appears in the text.
That is, of course, unless the client simply asks you to leave it the original English, which happens frequently and renders the preceding moot. ;o) Although you can propose your preferred option in round brackets.
Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there.Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.
The WSJ published a great series on the amount of tracking cookies (and "beacons," which I had never heard of) that even top sites install on your PC to keep tabs on what you browse and where you shop. Here is the homepage with all the resources (no subscription required): http://online.wsj.com/public/page/what-they-know-digital-privacy.html.
Personally, I am not too paranoid by the thought of a company where I shop keeping tabs on what I do if it helps the shopping experience (plus, if I disable all cookies, I have to punch in my login details every time I go to Amazon or check my e-mail). However, the third-party tracking applications are a concern; i.e., cookies beamed into your PC by advertising companies that draw up anonymous (but highly detailed) profiles of who you are.
As in the case of Google Books, I don't believe companies necessarily would put this information to uses that I might object to. However, they might do so in the future and that is a potential problem. Likewise, I applaud the Google Books initiative since it will revolutionize the world of books and knowledge. Besides, if debt-ridden governments don't do it, why shouldn't you let a private company willing to pony up the cash? However, as Robert Darnton has argued, Google could use some of the provisions of its agreement with libraries to establish a monopoly over out-of-print books that creates huge barriers to entry for would-be competitors. And that is a little scary.
A word is simply a worn-out metaphor, a French poet once said (Breton? Apollinaire? I forget…). In the case of the word “tighten” in relation to interest rates, one can almost see a metaphor in the process of hardening from metaphor to commonplace usage to new meaning. The phrase “tighten interest rates” is now so commonplace that its users probably never realize that it is actually a figure of speech. If one looks it up in the dictionary, the technical sense of “tighten” as in “to raise interest rates” simply does not show up:
Definition of TIGHTEN
transitive verb
: to make tight or tighter
intransitive verb
: to become tight or tighter
— tight•en•er\ˈtīt-nər, ˈtī-tən-ər\ noun
— tighten one's belt
: to practice strict economy
This is just the monolingual English dictionaries. The bilingual English-Spanish dictionaries are no help either. The ones that come closest without exactly hitting the nail on the head are Alcaraz Varó and Hughes, with “tightening of credit (BANCA restricción de crédito)” and Marina Orellana’s Glosario internacional para el traductor, which also comes close without illuminating the perplexed translator with “tightening of credit: contracción (rigidez) del crédito.” Both options dance around the issue without solving the conundrum definitively.
And yet the phrase is as common as grass. Try googling "tighten interest rates" between quotation marks in order to get the exact phrase and you get 129,000 hits. Moreover, the phrase is not recent: a short search on Google Books reveals a first hit dating from 1934.
Interest rates can only go up or down (or stay static, if you're very fastidious). If the translator knows that much, she can just decide that her challenge is to decide which meaning (up or down) needs to be identified. To “tighten credit” is itself a metaphor, of course. It means to make lending more restrictive. The way to restrict lending is to discourage potential lenders from taking on more borrowing. And how do you do that? By raising rates, of course. The “tightening of credit” probably migrated to the “tightening of interest rates.” Therefore, the correct translation is “aumentar las tasas de interés” or “elevar los tipos.” Or, if your text is very repetitive and you can get away with it, "restringir la oferta monetaria."A good example of relatively common technical jargon that is not found in either monolingual or bilingual dictionaries.
A search for books on “direct mail marketing” on Amazon turns up only a single item dating after 2007. A glance at some small business marketing books using the preview feature reveals that the subject, while not totally absent from recent publications, is usually reduced to a single chapter and increasingly treated as a historical curiosity that is progressively being phased out like the fax machine. In view of this, reading Robert Bly’s Lead Generation, published 12 years ago, can feel a little like firing up the DeLorean to take a spin with Doc. After all, the book predates social media and the Web 2.0. In an inversion of the current status quo, direct mail techniques occupy the bulk of the book and e-mail marketing is relegated to a single chapter (“the Internet… is revolutionizing the way computer users communicate”). Moreover, the chapter on techniques to reel in prospective customers via e-mail reads eerily like a recipe for cooking up a little spam and wasting a few instants of your fellow human beings’ finite time on Earth: “Telling a story in your e-mail instantly engages the reader and creates the perception that the message is from someone you know rather than an unsolicited advertisement,” (p. 216). Hmmmm.... You can just picture scammers diligently taking notes.
OK, that was a simpler time, before Monicagate and anti-spam laws. My question is whether the apparent abandonment of direct mail as a topic by the publishing industry is closing a potentially useful marketing avenue for freelance professionals and small businesses. I wonder whether e-mail and Internet marketing is hogging all of the attention because of its obviously lower cost per impression. My two cents is that this book is still worth reading by the 21st century freelancer. For instance, one of the most original tips in Judy and Dagmar Jenner’s Entrepreneurial Linguist is to write a press release about your business to drum up some press coverage. An intriguing recommendation that is, however, only lightly sketched out. A book such as Bly’s provides a wealth of detail from a copywriter’s viewpoint about how to produce and distribute eye-catching press releases. Prior to reading this book, I thought that the Jenners’ idea, while original, was just not right for me. But now I am starting to think that there might actually be a few contexts in which I could give the technique a try.
Therefore, yes, a book like this has aged, but I would not rush to relegate it to the dustbin. A new medium does not make old ones obsolete but rather enriches the way we communicate. Similarly, I wonder whether our instinctive rejection of “snail mail” as "sooo nineties" blinds us to a potentially rich avenue for getting the word out there. Indeed, I would not be surprised if snail mail and other traditional media offered a higher “cost per impression” but also a higher response rate and (perhaps) a higher lead quality. Of course, I can’t actually prove this hunch. But at the very least I would not dismiss a book like this out of hand, since it contains a nugget or two of useful know-how.
Time to return to the tried and true Classic version of a beloved product?
OK, two more projects with Wordfast Pro and I am even closer to throwing in the towel. It is not an easy step to take, because I had been a fan of the tool ever since it came out in the early naughties. Back then, it generated a lot of buzz by providing very similar capabilities to Trados for free. Later on, it started to charge for licenses, but they were still far cheaper than the hundreds charged by Trados for a tool that, frankly, semed stuck in the 1990s.
Part of the attraction (for me) of the scrappy underdog that WF was back then was how cheap and flimsy it looked. It amazed me that what looked basically like a glorified MS Word macro could kick the pants off a behemoth like Trados. It was a garage-band CAT tool. It looked like a grad student project. But that was its charm. At a fraction of the price, it offered virtually the same functionality as Trados. It was even better in some respects. Yes, we don't travel around in jetpacks, but the very least you could ask of a translation program is to have the capacity to jump back from your current segment to the previous one. This was too much to ask of the industry leader. But Wordfast could do it. And I loved it.
It was the tortoise to the hare. Less sleek and shiny but more versatile. And less obviously mercantile. No pushy sales force. If you peeked under the hood at the capabilities in the Pandora's Box, you could find a function for seemingly any requirement, no matter how esoteric. Did you want to identify words in all caps as term candidates? Or as placeables? Or words with caps in the middle of the word? Did you want to specify a hierarchy of precedence in the automatic propagation of terms during a pre-translation? Different colors for different glossaries? How many glossaries do you want to use?
Also, the interface for editing your TM was a dream. I never really understood the process under Trados WB. And everything was done without ever leaving the comfortable and familiar environment of MS Word, which is a plus for the uninitiated.
It was, to put it briefly, friendly. You could learn the basic functionality in a few minutes. And if you wanted more sophisticated functions, you simply read the manual. (Did I mention the manual? It was written in relatively plain language. Not like other tools, which seem to be purposefully obscure in order to get you to pay for additional training.) The reassuring lime green and black buttons on your screen were a delight: you had bought a better tool for a small part of the competitor's cost. Trados fanatics insisted that the tools were very different. Bull paddies. I handed in projects several times using Wordfast tags for use in Trados and it was absolutely not a problem. Documents produced under one tool were easily processed by its twin. You could clean a Trados-tagged doc using WF and a WF-tagged doc in Trados WB.
So I looked with some trepidation at the abandonment by WF of its cozy MS Word ecosystem in favor of a stand-alone environment. But I decided to give it a shot anyway. At first glance, it was obvious that a lot of the nifty little Pandora tricks had disappeared under the new makeover. Not a problem, I thought. The developers will surely add little gadgets and doo-dads as time passes.
However, the experience of using WF Pro for everyday work is simply disappointing. The major drawbacks are as follows, jotted down during the course of today's work session:
1.- The Shift+Ctrl+left or right arrow that allows you to select entire words for deletion or copying as you write has been eliminated. As I have used this for writing since the Clinton administration, this forces me to re-learn the skill of typing. Yes, it's basically kindergarten time for me. Which undoubtedly slows down my productivity. Not good for a productivity tool.
2.- The tool is slow. This is the main drawback. You can literally see the program groaning under the weight of its own lack of efficiency as you wait for it to unfreeze and resume the session. Before a pencil-necked you-know-what asks whether I am using an old machine, here are my specs: 2.2GHz Intel Core2 Duo Processor/ 4 GB DDR2 RAM / 320GB SATA Hard Drive. So there. I think that should be enough to keep the program from working like a 1950s mainframe. If you try to jump around with the mouse from one segment to another further back or further ahead, WF Pro tends to freeze up and go into a deep meditative mode with a dismaying frequency. In fact, I've been writing this blog post during the frequent Zen breaks that the tool has been forcing upon me. So, thank you, Wordfast! My inner life is becoming richer thanks to your frequent pauses.
3.- By the way, what the h*#%& did the designers do with the shortcut for the euro sign?
4.- In WF Classic, if you had different options in your TM for the segment you're translating, you could toggle between the different candidates in case the higher-rated candidate was inappropriate for whatever reason. That capability in WF Pro? Gone with the wind. Or, if it exists, it is sufficiently buried within the tool's documentation that it requires me to slow down my rate of work even further.
5.- Then this little bug: the tool refuses to provide options from the TM you know are there and spits out this message at times: "Failed to leverage segment. The following error occur: Main ENG-SPA WfMemory Nov 2008.txt: Failed to leverage segment. unknown Wordfast escape." (This I was actually able to fix after googling it and finding a WF support page: It required opening up the TM using Notepad, locating the offending unit and deleting it.)
6.- There was one Java-related crash. I lost 30-45 minutes of work. The work simply wasn't in the TM after the program recovered from the crash. Trados may have had a lot of drawbacks, but you never lost any work no matter how badly or frequently Workbench crashed. This is truly the last straw. I am truly flabbergasted at how poor this tool is. I really find it hard to believe that real people actually tested this software and came to the decision that it was even close to ready for release. (I now realize that this crash was triggered by the "Find/Replace" function, which is clunky as heck).
Ok, my rant is over. Looking back, thrashing a program you used to love is not comfortable. Maybe I overdid it. To quote Opus Penguin during a brief stint as movie critic for the Bloom Picayune after lambasting a movie and feeling a tinge of regret: " Well, maybe it wasn't that bad, but, Lord, it wasn't good." I think the timehas come to dust off the old Classic version or find greener pastures.
Half Empty by David Rakoff
