Linguistic Team International Forum

I would like to add something here too: you guys are rockin' in the guidelines business youhuuuu!!

Seems pretty reasonable to me. Could we synthesize that into: The strings should be cut according to the grammatical rules of the sentence structure, as long as possible but avoiding to go over the limits of <1,5; >6 seconds and <85 characters?

I wonder if 85 characters isn't too much?

hugs

Here is a feedback from Oksana, Lithuanian team, which seems very important to consider:

"I don't have an example right now, but that missing punctuation in the end of the line really doesn't help with translating and sometimes might take extra time and effort to understand a long sentence correctly, since we don't get to actually hear how it was said and have the text only. Staring at the sentence trying to figure out (or more like guess, since it's not always obvious) is it supposed to have a colon or just a simple comma in there is no fun."

I can see how heavy the task can become there, loosing time figuring out what the sentence really means, wondering on a possible comma. They could also ask the English Proofers, of course. But I imagine many translators have a poor English level, despite that being the best that some teams have to offer at the moment, and these situations might become frequent in 1 single video. What do you think we could do about this folks? The feedbacks aren't many around this issue but that doesn't mean those situations aren't common. I think they are very much, from my Non-English native perpective; I would guess that the low number of feedbacks like the one from Oksana is more a lack of care for quality, in the mid of the day by day stress wanting that the videos translations be done as soon as possible.

I am thining now on those moments when Jacque throws ideas with half of the words, without building up any sentence with a clear structure. That must be hard for many of the translators.

What could we do to help minimize this situation that Oksana is sharing?
hugs

As potentially distracting as I feel they are, I feel the best approach for Oksana's feedback would be to no longer intentionally remove the commas at the end of a string.

As for dealing with partial sentences, I developed a somewhat comprehensive approach to that back when I was proofreading all of Peter's BlogTalk Radio broadcasts. Perhaps we should call for occasional English Proofreading Team voice-chat sessions where we bring up examples and work together to make the Guidelines more precise on how to best handle those. The results could then be shared with all current & potential transcribers.

Quoted from "nomada"

Here is a feedback from Oksana, Lithuanian team, which seems very important to consider:

"I don't have an example right now, but that missing punctuation in the end of the line really doesn't help with translating and sometimes might take extra time and effort to understand a long sentence correctly, since we don't get to actually hear how it was said and have the text only. Staring at the sentence trying to figure out (or more like guess, since it's not always obvious) is it supposed to have a colon or just a simple comma in there is no fun."

As the guideline rule stands now, we are omitting commas ONLY at the ends of lines. So, the 'quick' answer for Oksana is that the only mark omitted at the end of the line is a comma. If there should be a colon or a semicolon at the end of the line, then it would NOT be omitted. We decided to omit commas because there's a natural pause at the end of the line in English, and the translators who were in attendance at the meeting when we discussed the guideline said this would not be a problem for them.

Having said that, I have no objection to putting the comma back. Jacque is not at all easy to proofread. He speaks slowly, which is nice, but he often doesn't finish sentences and he likes to give examples in story-form with dialogue between two people, often himself and another. We decided to indicate this change of speaker in Jacque's stories with the use of quotation marks, not hyphens, because this would conflict with the use of hyphens when there's an actual change of speakers (as in interviews).

We should probably have another discussion since Paradise or Oblivion has caused us all to revisit what is best for translators. It seems to me in the Eng. Guidelines, we should do whatever makes translation easier. But, what's that?
I hope others answer this discussion topic, so we can know what would be best to do.

Love to all who have worked so hard,
Di

A conundrum indeed. Actually just conflicting requirements, as they say in my line of work. I agree it'd be a good time to have a live session on TS sometime soon to hammer this out. I'm in NC this week on bizness and only have evenings free, but will be as accommodating as possible.

In the meantime, Teach- I have a dumb question for you: Where do our guidelines actually come from? Are they based on industry standards, for example http://www.ncicap.org/? Or are we kinda making it up as we go along? or what? I wouldn't be surprised if it was the latter, as I doubt even industry "standards" take into account the complexities and nuances of translating into 30+ languages, exactly like we are dealing with now. We are pioneers in this regard I think...