Specialized Generalists or General Specialists?

This is a bit of an oxymoron, (I know) . However, I am more and more convinced that in order to be a proficient Spanish legal translator, we need to know a lot about laws, and a little bit about everything else under the sun.

Specializing is all about knowing about a specialized field. Translators are constantly being encouraged to specialize, and I agree with this advice wholeheartedly. Nevertheless, no topic can be solely restricted to that topic itself. Take death certificates, for example. You will often find a doctor's report dealing with the cause of death. If you do not know a smattering of medical terminology and wording, you will be lost.

Other documents include a great deal of business and financial terms. Someone translating the contract of sale or employment agreement will have to battle with terminology that has little to do with legal lingo, strictly speaking. I would be remiss if I did not mention personal testimony which can sometimes be handwritten and in versions which digress from Mexican or other Latin American Standard forms of written language.

Then there is the totally unrelated issue hardware and software. When I first started translating, I was a novice at Microsoft Word, and had no idea what a CAT tool was. I had to ask for help in order to hook up the mouse and keyboard to my PC. Now I find myself creating Word macros and plugging in all sorts of USB devices all by my very own self. But alas, that is a horse of a different color; Eso es harina de otro costal...

So I pose a question to you, the Spanish legal translator: Generally speaking (no pun intended), do you feel that you are generalizing or specializing?

A Word Macro for the legal translator:

Do you work with macros in Word, or any other program? It would seem that not all of the translator community is comfortable or aware of macros. Nevertheless, when used properly and in the right quantity, they can do a world of good in: speeding up translations, formatting final drafts, and lending a great deal of uniformity and quality assurance to both source and target documents without having to squint at each instance in order to make sure it has been properly modified.

Below is a Word macro that I designed especially for certificates and divorce decrees. I find that these documents are easier to read when people's names are in boldface. I used to spend precious time, and hence money, poring over each individual name, highlighting it, and pressing the Control + B key combination. Then it dawned on me that I could use Word's Find and Replace dialog, and do a mass replace, in other words, immediately make all instances of a particular name boldfaced. After a little tinkering, I came up with the following macro which will perform the same function as using Find and Replace, but with fewer keystrokes, and hence less effort. Here is the macro:

Sub BoldNames()
'
' BoldNames Macro
' Macro created 10/13/2006 by Reed D. James
'
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Text = "enter name here"
.Replacement.Text = ""
.Replacement.Font.Bold = True
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.MatchWholeWord = True
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub


All you need to do is to copy the text between "Sub" and "End Sub" lines. When you actually run the macro, you will want to replace the "enter name here" (only the text between quotes) with the name that you want to make boldfaced e.g. "Juan Pérez".

Letters are for Translators -- and so are Numbers

0123456789876543210

After a long spate of intensive work, I am now able to take a moment to add to this blog.

If you are like me, you feel much more comfortable dealing with words than with numbers. I thought that math was over and done with when I finish that last obligatory course back in college. I now see that that is entirely untrue. Besides dealing with invoices and word counts, there is another matter that we legal translators must deal with all the time: ID numbers and other official figures that are expressed a certain way in Spanish.

I am not talking about your average figure expressed in pesos, which can be readily converted by replacing the comma with a period, and vice versa (1,342,512.214 = 1.342.512,214 U.S. and European formats respectively). Rather, I am talking about official ID numbers which, when altered, do not look the same, and cannot be answered or located in a database.

When I first wondered about this dilemma, I asked a question on a Proz forum. Here is what expert legal translators had to say about expressing special numbers: ###