This post is essentially a glorified “to-do list” for myself: a list of three things I want to find automated solutions for to cut out on some of the more tedious aspects of my work and make things run a little more smoothly. By sharing the post here, I aim to try and formulate more clearly what exactly I want. On the one hand, thinking about some of these ideas or problems might be of general interest; on the other, perhaps someone reading might be able to save me the work of looking by telling me of a solution that already exists!
1. Better email auto-reply management
As a freelancer, when I’m away from the desk, there’s nobody to respond to messages on my behalf, and even in the days of the smartphone there will be times when I am unavailable or unable to respond immediately. A lot of the project managers I work with value quick responses so that they know whether or not they can place a certain job with me. At the moment, I notify my regular clients in advance if I have periods of unavailability and manually set up an auto-reply through the settings of my email client, Gmail.
However, it is currently slightly cumbersome to have to manually retype different auto-reply messages for different scenarios (“I am temporarily away from my desk, but will respond shortly” vs. “I am not available for work for the next few days”). In my current set-up, it is also not possible to create timed “out of hours” auto-replies, and difficult to set up an auto-reply at short notice if, say, I am unexpectedly delayed.
Ideally, it would be great to simply be able to preconfigure a series of different auto-reply messages (with options such as timing) that I could then activate or deactivate via a phone app or a simple browser interface. I have been told this is possible for other email clients, but I have been surprised not to have been able to find any suitable solutions so far in Google Labs.
2. Email attachment/folder word counts
I often receive emails from clients with texts for translation attached with the query: “Can you fit this job in?” “How long will it take?”. If I know the word count (or better yet, the character count) I can estimate fairly precisely how long I will need, but it is hard to tell simply from glancing at how much text the document appears to contain.
However, checking the word count can be quite cumbersome: the files have to be downloaded and then opened in a separate program (whether a standard program like MS Word, or a dedicated word counting program for file formats such as ppt or pdf). This is particularly tricky if I’m responding to a job offer on my phone rather than my PC. Even on the PC, it may not be the most time-consuming task in the world but when you are responding to multiple job offers in a short period of time while under time pressure to finish an existing job, it can be quite annoying.
Ideally, it would be nice if I could click a button in my email client (Gmail) to display an automatic word/character count for the attached files without needing to download them. Alternatively/additionally (since sometimes clients send files as links rather than attachments), it would be handy if the word/character count could be automatically displayed in the window view of the downloads folder without needing to open them in another program first.
3. Advanced quality control and search tools
For translations and (especially) proofreading, there are certain checks that I currently have to carry out manually, many of which are very tedious and mechanical, because they are things I can easily overlook by simply reading through a text. For example:
I believe the solution to this problem already lies close to hand. Most of these problems simply require an automated search that flags up whenever a certain whole word or string of characters appears, and I assume it must be possible to configure translation memory software (such as my preferred tool, memoQ) to automatically alert me to “prohibited” words or strings of characters in quality assurance checks. It is just a matter of working out how to do so and then compiling a list of such terms. A lot of work, but it would save me a lot of time in the future.
What is rather more complicated (but is perhaps still possible even within a tool like memoQ) would be searches that exclude a certain subset of the results. For instance, when searching for prohibited “ize” spellings in a UK text, it would be preferable to exclude very common words such as “size” from the alerts; or, when checking Oxford commas, to flag up only instances of the whole word “and” or “or” that appear in a sentence that contains a comma prior to, but not immediately prior to, the “and” or “or”.
Do other translators (or proofreaders/freelancers in general) have a similar wishlist? Do you already have solutions or workarounds for similar problems? Or any other bugbears you wish you could sort out using automatic?
As a freelancer, when I’m away from the desk, there’s nobody to respond to messages on my behalf, and even in the days of the smartphone there will be times when I am unavailable or unable to respond immediately. A lot of the project managers I work with value quick responses so that they know whether or not they can place a certain job with me. At the moment, I notify my regular clients in advance if I have periods of unavailability and manually set up an auto-reply through the settings of my email client, Gmail.
However, it is currently slightly cumbersome to have to manually retype different auto-reply messages for different scenarios (“I am temporarily away from my desk, but will respond shortly” vs. “I am not available for work for the next few days”). In my current set-up, it is also not possible to create timed “out of hours” auto-replies, and difficult to set up an auto-reply at short notice if, say, I am unexpectedly delayed.
Ideally, it would be great to simply be able to preconfigure a series of different auto-reply messages (with options such as timing) that I could then activate or deactivate via a phone app or a simple browser interface. I have been told this is possible for other email clients, but I have been surprised not to have been able to find any suitable solutions so far in Google Labs.
2. Email attachment/folder word counts
I often receive emails from clients with texts for translation attached with the query: “Can you fit this job in?” “How long will it take?”. If I know the word count (or better yet, the character count) I can estimate fairly precisely how long I will need, but it is hard to tell simply from glancing at how much text the document appears to contain.
However, checking the word count can be quite cumbersome: the files have to be downloaded and then opened in a separate program (whether a standard program like MS Word, or a dedicated word counting program for file formats such as ppt or pdf). This is particularly tricky if I’m responding to a job offer on my phone rather than my PC. Even on the PC, it may not be the most time-consuming task in the world but when you are responding to multiple job offers in a short period of time while under time pressure to finish an existing job, it can be quite annoying.
Ideally, it would be nice if I could click a button in my email client (Gmail) to display an automatic word/character count for the attached files without needing to download them. Alternatively/additionally (since sometimes clients send files as links rather than attachments), it would be handy if the word/character count could be automatically displayed in the window view of the downloads folder without needing to open them in another program first.
3. Advanced quality control and search tools
For translations and (especially) proofreading, there are certain checks that I currently have to carry out manually, many of which are very tedious and mechanical, because they are things I can easily overlook by simply reading through a text. For example:
- US/UK English words: when writing/checking a text in US English, as a UK native speaker there are all sorts of words and turns of phrase that it is easy to forget are not used in US English (or not in the same way) but that do not show up as spelling mistakes. In the reverse direction, I generally prefer -ise rather than -ize forms for UK English (e.g. realise rather than realize) and some of my clients request this, but, again, this does not show up as a spelling mistake in Word’s spellcheck. There are also terms such as “program” that are usually incorrect in UK English.
- Spelling: my Word spellcheck, for whatever reason, does not pick up “und” as a spelling mistake, and it is very easy to overlook when it has been carried across from German. There are also some differences between the Word spellcheck and the spellings/hyphenations recommended by the OED (Nikki Graham has helpfully listed many of them in a series of posts here).
- Common German mistakes: false friends or direct transpositions that are regularly misused in English by German native speakers (“respectively” springs to mind) that often need to be flagged up in proofreads
- Punctuation: the use of dashes, the use of "straight" or „German“ quotation marks and apostrophes, the use of Oxford comma in US English
- Contractions: when translating an informal text from German, it is easy to directly transpose non-contracted verb forms (do not, is not, it is) even though the English would use contracted forms (don’t, isn’t, it’s). Or, conversely, sometimes contractions can slip into a more formal English text where they are not necessarily appropriate.
I believe the solution to this problem already lies close to hand. Most of these problems simply require an automated search that flags up whenever a certain whole word or string of characters appears, and I assume it must be possible to configure translation memory software (such as my preferred tool, memoQ) to automatically alert me to “prohibited” words or strings of characters in quality assurance checks. It is just a matter of working out how to do so and then compiling a list of such terms. A lot of work, but it would save me a lot of time in the future.
What is rather more complicated (but is perhaps still possible even within a tool like memoQ) would be searches that exclude a certain subset of the results. For instance, when searching for prohibited “ize” spellings in a UK text, it would be preferable to exclude very common words such as “size” from the alerts; or, when checking Oxford commas, to flag up only instances of the whole word “and” or “or” that appear in a sentence that contains a comma prior to, but not immediately prior to, the “and” or “or”.
Do other translators (or proofreaders/freelancers in general) have a similar wishlist? Do you already have solutions or workarounds for similar problems? Or any other bugbears you wish you could sort out using automatic?
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