What I did this week
I continued to edit and co-translate the accessibility book. Thanks to Jo and Catrin for working together on this. It has been more like editing an issue of a journal than a series of short articles. It has therefore taken longer than expected.
In practice, I have:
- firstly edited the English (me and Jo)
- used Phrase to pre-translate the work
- compiled a technical glossary about digital accessibility and upload it to the terms database in Phrase
- edited the translation together in Phrase (me and Catrin)
- commented on the English in Phrase – any errors, overly-long, repetitive or meaningless sentences
- held a trio editing session with Jo and Catrin to further edit the English
- done more solo editing in Phrase (with Catrin)
- downloaded the edited translation of Phrase
- post-edited the Welsh in a Word document (me and Catrin)
I’m sure there are elements of this workflow that would scare some! But there have been advantages to doing things like this rather than completing the English and then translating the Welsh.
One of the best ways to find unnecessary words and meaningless sentences is to translate them. Without a way of reporting that back to the author (and without an author who is ready to receive feedback) then the English content will stay that way. And as a result, in a bad scenario, it will be necessary to create meaningless content in Welsh to match the English. Collaboration improves the content in both languages.
That reminds me of a lesson the Poet Ceri Wyn Jones taught the Taliesin Society Literary at Aberystwyth University years ago. Here’s a beautiful-sounding line of cynghanedd poetry which could easily deceive the ear:
Oer a gwyn yw’r eira i gyd
But translate it and what do you get?
All the snow is white and cold
It’s not so poetic anymore!
Post-editing the Welsh in a Word document outside of Phrase was also essential. Without the “disturbance” of English, it was possible to see a few things in a purely Welsh light – so that the language could be made more natural on its own merits. As if the English didn’t exist. Almost!
Parts of the book reflect the technical style of the accessibility field but I believe we have done a good job in making it Cymraeg, not just translating it.
Highlights
On Tuesday, we got together as an organization. It was great to see so many people. The day felt different to the previous ones too, with a very specific focus on the next 12 months for CDPS. I’m lucky to work in an organization of such capable and passionate people.
I had a great chat with a member of the Content Design Cymru community. This is someone in an evolving content role and in a growing organisation in Wales. There is important work ahead of them. It was good to discuss the content designer’s challenges, fears and hopes. I will keep in touch to see how the work is progressing, hoping to be able to share that with the community as we go along.