Memories that Don't Need Translation

by Al Daigen

Like most North American tech writers of the Boomer generation, I started in another field and stumbled into ours. I spent 8 years as a French-to-English translator, made a 13-year detour into technical writing, and have since gone back to translation full-time. Here's a brief account of how these two fields have overlapped for me and of how radically technology has changed my life as a translator for the better over the years.

Course Offerings

In the mid-1970s, the U.S. grad school where I received my translation degree focused on economic and political translation. They didn't even offer a course in scientific or technical translation. But when I graduated and accepted a job with the Government of Canada's Translation Bureau in Toronto, I was immediately expected to translate a steady diet of scientific and technical papers in fields I knew nothing about such as fish population dynamics, tree-ring chronologies, the structure of the atmospheric boundary layer over the St. Lawrence River, and so on.

Doing it the Hard Way -- The Only Way

To do research on terms and concepts, I used the limited resources of my section's library, and a painfully slow line-printer terminal that accessed the earliest version of the Translation Bureau's terminology database. When these resources failed, I'd spend entire days plumbing the journals of the University of Toronto's Science and Medicine library, searching almost randomly for English-language articles that might contain the information I needed. I spent hours on the phone questioning my authors. My daily output was abysmally low, and my bosses weren't too shy to complain about it!

Technological Advances

To produce my translations physically, I prepared drafts on an electric typewriter. A typing pool then completely rekeyed them as clean copies. Next, I would proofread the clean copies and mark up any errors, which the typists then corrected with white-out fluid and correction tape. It could take three or four iterations to eliminate all the typos. When my section bought its first standalone word-processing machines (at about $18,000 a pop), I jumped on the chance to use them. The freedom to revise and refine my work, and to deliver it without waiting for the typing pool, was exhilarating.

Years as a Technical Writer

After eight years on the job, I was ready for a change and began working as a tech writer in Waterloo Region's booming high-tech industry. On the side, I continued to do translations for the Canadian federal government, as a freelancer. I bought my own PC and learned to use WordStar, WordPerfect, and Word. My access to local research libraries was limited, so I avoided highly technical translations when I could. To exchange the necessary reams of paper with my clients, I bought a photocopier and a fax machine and opened accounts with Purolator and Fedex. Meanwhile, in my work as a tech writer, my constant exposure to new developments in information technology and to new authoring tools gave me a competitive edge as a translator. My clients began to steer me lots of IT-related translations that other translators avoided. My ability to translate slide presentations, spreadsheets, and graphics in their native software packages also made me the first pick for many jobs.

Web-based Technology

Most momentously, I remember the day that a product manager showed me his latest toy: a very early version of the Mosaic Web browser. It blew me away. I knew that sooner rather than later, the Web would revolutionize the way I researched my translations.

Fast-forward to 2003. Thanks to e-mail, I exchange all documents with my clients electronically -- my courier bills have dropped to zero; my fax machine gathers dust. Thanks to Google, confirming equivalencies for French and English terms takes me seconds instead of hours. When I need an overview of a subject, or details about some particular aspect of it, I can find authoritative sources on the Web just about instantly. In short, the comfort with technology that I gained as a tech writer has been critical to my success as a translator. I enjoy my work immensely. I'm a very lucky man.