turktrans blog

When asked about the most popular or most favorite Turkish to English translation blooper, perhaps all translators would mention “chicken translate” as their all-time favorite. It is so popular that it became a real “classic” in translation bloopers. It had some media coverage too. Feature writers wrote about it, newspapers published it, and it is included in most of the web pages on translation bloopers. Even, there is a Yahoo group with that name. I myself registered a domain both with net and com versions for it: chickentranslate dot com and dot net (now expired, unfortunately due to lack of time to dedicate to that domain). Then, what is this chickentranslate?

The Message

Now, let us see the picture of the medium for the message hung over a busy street to attract the attention of foreigners:

The Medium

Be it a small local restaurant, or a multinational giant corporation, being seen and heard is crucial for any business.

A busy street in a Turkish town. A local restaurant owner, being aware of the importance of visibility, hung this banner to attract foreign tourists to his restaurant serving, as the ads says, chicken translate (“rotisserie”) on charcoal to its customers. An exquisite taste if you are not a vegetarian! If only you could get the message.

“Çevirme” in Turkish means, inter alia, to translate, turn, rotate, etc. As a noun, it means rotisserie , or barbeque within the context of cooking, i.e., the name is derived from the technique.
It seems that our lay translator, perhaps the restaurant owner himself, picked up a dictionary, found the first English word for “çevirme,” and translated accordingly.

Having thus English version as well, the owner now can be sure that the message would be received by his potential foreign customers!

He has the medium, but unfortunately lacks the message!

As I wrote in my last post, I am working on a voluminous translation project about Turkish legislation on EHS. The direction is from English to Turkish, and sometimes, I find it difficult to grasp the meaning of certain sentences, expressions, and terms. And after some back-and-forth, the true meaning occurs to me like an “Aha” insight!

Just a moment ago, I was trying to translate a certain sentence explaininig the aim of Turkish Law No 1380 on Aquatic Products. The sentence reads: [the Law] delineates the water quality standards for goods containing water.” It was like a difficult riddle at first. Simply, I felt that it is incomprehensible or I am lacking something critical.

Ant after a while, it came like a revelation that the expression goods containing water should in fact be aquatic products! Yes, the Law in question regulates the water quality requirements for aquatic products. I now understand that the source document is in fact a translation from Turkish.

That is to say, I am translating a document from English to Turkish which is itself a translation from Turkish to English! A backtranslation! Having noted this funny blooper, now I can return to work.

I am translating a series of documents on the Turkish legislation on Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) currently applicable in Turkey. Documents cover up-to-date information on almost all regulations, decrees, laws, communiques, etc. with a direct relevance to EHS with extensive citations, examples, etc.

The project is rather large. It will take a whole month or so to deliver the project. After completing it, I will take a break (well, a long break) in July. Therefore, I will not be available for new English Turkish translations until August 1st.

If you reached this page while searching a Turkish translator, please visit our freelance Turkish translators page to find an available colleague for your project.

If you have a blog with a decent PR, your blog is exposed to a specific kind of automated link spam attack called commentspam. A botlike program crawls the web, identifies the blogs, and tries to post comments to each and every message it finds with backlinks to the spammer’s site. And this is what I am experiencing recently.

By default, I turned the comments option off as a guard against comment spamming. Nevertheless, and to my disappointment, Wordpress (at least Version 1.5) is unable to defend itself against comment spamming even if the comments option is turned off. My blog receives some 50 comment spams a day on the average. All are related to some credit card, mortgage, casino, travel or pharmacy sites selling viagra or similar drugs.

Thanks to God they are not published automatically, as I checked the “moderation required” option to moderate any comments. But I need to check my blog once in a while to delete all the comments posted so as to prevent the blog database from swelling too much.

I recently read a post in Google’s blogpost on comment spam again. It recommends using “nofollow” attribute for links in comments to fight against comment spam. But it is of no avail in many cases. It only tells the search engine(s) that you do not vouch for the link, that the link is “worthless” to visit. It does not prevent the spammer from stuffing your page with keywords that are in no way related to your site or the topic of your page. The only way is to ban such comments alltogether.

Perhaps it is time to upgrade my wordpress. I will check if the Wordpress 2 has a way to prevent such automatic posting of comments.

As in any other business, freelance translators are not able to work at their own pace. It is our customers, and not we, who determine our workload. Sometimes, we receive multiple translation assignments, some small, some large, from our regular clients that we find hard to decline.

Sometimes, even though you explicitly state that you have some rush jobs to be returned, that you have no time to take another assignment, your clients choose to insist that theirs would take only one hour, that it is very critical, that they should return the translation soon, that they would like to have it translated by you, etc. At the end, you understand that exchanging some emails to politely decline the job already takes some time, and finally you give in. You accept the assignment unwillingly, and suspend your current job to handle the new one.

When we receive such multiple assignments, each with its own “urgency,” we are faced with working overtime, or running the risk of missing a deadline. If you are wise enough to quote flexible deadlines, and have a good typing speed, you can handle a lot of such unexpected assignments.
Currently, I have a large translation project assigned by EUGS-British Council covering some Grant Projects funded by the EU. And considering that I will receive some additional assignments from my loyal clients within this period, I think I will not be able to accept any more assignment for the whole April.

And I have another, but highly challenging assignment for this month: Optimization of the website of a major US State University. Well, it is not a well-paid job, I must admit, since I accepted it as a challenge rather than as a good-paying job, at least initially. I thought that a good reference from a State University for my search engine optimization services would be converted into cash in future optimization projects!

This month is the initial evaluation review period for the said site. I will study the site, its competitors, its position in search engine SERPs (search engine results pages), the potential problem areas that may be leading to its poor position, and remedies to improve its SERP position. At the end of this month, I will write a review together with my suggestions for improvement. Our goal is to have the said University site on the first page of major search engines when internet surfers type in certain keywords. Good luck!

Meanwhile, I am trying to transfer my published English to Turkish Dictionary of Psychology into MYSQL for publishing it online on one of my sites. I need to find a way to uniformly format the existing MS Word document so that it can be converted /imported into Excel, and then to CSV, then to MYSQL. Therefore, I need a good script, preferably in PHP, that does it for me. I tried a couple of such scripts, but failed to get satisfactory results. I think I will have to make some online research, and modify one of the existing scripts to have it fit to my specific requirements.

There is a Turkish saying: “Bir koltukta iki karpuz” that roughly translates as “carrying two watermelons under one arm!” implying that you are bound to break either one or both. I hope I would not break any!