De Perdidos, Al Río

by Calum O’Donnell, 4th year student in LINCS








  1. Find a flat.
  2. Enrol in University.
  3. Improve my Spanish.







Hasta luego!

Inventions for Freelancers part 2

Author: Jonathan Downie

Part 2: Interpreters


1)    Auto-mute


2)    Joke Predictor


3)    Silent Air-Con


4)     Rambler Swatter



5)    Accu-Brief


Once again, over to you.

Inventions For Freelancers pt. 1

Part 1: Translators


1)    Dayjamas


2)    Desktop Tanning Lamp


3)    Online coffee


4)    360 degree networking headset



Vow of Silence: Day 3




Not much use if you’re Deaf, of course.


Do me a favour. Not a bit of it.












Author: Graham Turner

Orkney Can Wait

it was for someone to overcome a disability and communicate confidently with
hearing people like me, who cannot fingerspell to save my

I was, of course, wrong.

the Deaf to Orkney!








Let’s vote.


Hear hear! I say, let’s vote!



major decisions at the local level.



Author: Katerina Strani

You Might be a Translator if…

LifeinLINCS usually does serious, thought-provoking, analytical posts but it’s summer, so it’s time for a little fun too. So, if you have ever wondered whether you or someone close to you might be a translator, here are some signs to look for:

You might be a translator if…

1)    Your favourite comics have characters who can’t decide between electronic and paper dictionaries.
2)    The nearest you get to a suntan is when you forget to turn down the brightness on one of your three computer monitors.
3)    Seeing the phrase “scanned pdf” sends you running for a crucifix, a clove of garlic and overpriced OCR software
4)    You actually understood number 3.
5)    You write your Christmas and Valentine’s cards using CAT software.
6)    Your CAT crashes and hangs more often than it purrs.
7)    You have complained to your pets about your clients
8)    … in three different languages
9)    … in the past hour alone.
10)    You are not sure whether to find Google Translation funny, annoying or insulting
11)    … but you still secretly use it to get the gist of blog posts written in languages you don’t use
12)    … and you will never, ever openly admit to that!
13)    “Being invited to a party” means “being on an online conference call”
14)    … but you still brought snacks.
15)    You completed a job while still wearing your pyjamas.
16)    People in your family are wondering when you will “get a proper job”.
17)    Your working hours are dictated more by the routine of your children or pets than by the clock.
18)    To you, misplacing a comma is a crime worthy of the death penalty.
19)    The last time you left the house, someone called the police to report a possible intruder in the neighbourhood.
20)    You have a masters degree and a bunch of certificates and yet you still have people asking you to work for less than your local minimum wage.

A Year and a Bit of Blogging About Research

On 1st October this year, LifeinLINCS celebrated a year since its launch. Since then we have covered a whole range of topics from subtitling to court interpreting and from getting a career in translation and interpreting to minority language rights and why people would put careers on hold to go and do research.

It has to be said that the reception has been superb. People from more than 110 countries have checked out the blog. Since the end of February this year, more than 12,000 different people have read at least one post. More than that, almost 100 comments have been left since the blog began, which means that our number of comments far outstrips the number of times we have posted!

And what have you been saying? Well, it seems that odd client behaviour isn’t actually as odd as it might seem. The UK government’s arrangements for court interpreting still inspire anger and it is impossible to over-exaggerate the personality quirks of language professionals.

All of this from a blog that struggled to gain 10 visits a day in its first week. If you had asked the experts then if a blog about research aimed at practising professionals would survive, the answer would have been hidden in fits of laughter. Nowadays, one of our editors gets a bit disappointed if we get less than 100 visits per day and it is not unknown for days to hit ten or even twenty times that!

If nothing else, the past year and a bit has shown that professional practice and rigorous belong together. It has also shown that when this research and the thinking that goes alongside it are presented in an easily accessible way, people will not only read it but will start to talk about it.

So, maybe translation and interpreting isn’t in such bad shape after all!

There is more to come from LifeinLINCS as we seek to broaden the range of language research from Heriot-Watt that we cover, as well as commenting on language stories in the news and, of course, attempting to be funny from time to time. Lookout for next week’s post on what modelling clay can tell us about our clients.

Author: Jonathan Downie

Is it all over for Interpreting?

If you believe the hype, the interpreting profession is on its last legs. NTT Docomo, the biggest mobile phone network has at last managed to provide a service that allows anyone with a smartphone to instantly have their words interpreted. According to this article from the BBC, other companies are working on the same technology. All that remains now is for a few minor tweaks to be done and language barriers are a thing of the past. Cool, eh?

Well, it might be, if things were really that simple. On the accompanying video, BBC presenter, Richard Taylor feeds the software a simple sentence “are there any good restaurants near here?” and an interpreter (mislabelled “translator,” thanks BBC!) responds with something equally as simple. This is the kind of thing that 1st year language students could do in their sleep and even good Machine Translation software could churn out without too much difficulty.

Faced with this simple task, the software performs pretty poorly. Its English-Japanese version is, according to the interpreter, understandable but not much better than that. The Japanese-English, meanwhile, would not exactly be what an interpreter would produce. We are not in minor tweak territory here. We are actually about 10 years behind the current state of the art in machine translation and parsecs away from what one could call “interpreting.”

So, no need to worry, interpreters still have jobs for a few years yet. It is still worth doing training and looking for work.

Even if this technology does work, will it do humans out of work? The answer is, probably not. Just as machine translation has only really cornered the market in getting the “gist” of emails, letters and the like and has actually become another tool for human translators, we can expect something similar to happen here. The only people who might really feel threatened by this technology are phrase book publishers. For simple requests for the direction of the tourist office and panicked searches for the nearest public toilets, a machine translation-enabled smartphone will (eventually) do the trick.

It is difficult to foresee this technology taking over in the court, conference or business markets. Would you really want your perfectly crafted speech to be turned into garbled but minimally understandable googlish? And that might represent the best outcome!

This well-known video illustrates just what the limitations of NTT Docomo’s technology are likely to be. For those with non-standard accents such as Geordies, Aberdonians or even, (shock!) Glaswegians, voice recognition is already struggling. Add in a layer of not quite perfect machine translation and we are looking at comedic breakthroughs rather than technological ones.

Of course, we can never dismiss technology out of hand. It is possible that, just as google managed to create a step change in machine translation by using texts from large international organisations, someone might manage something similar with this. It is just possible that, with years of work and a lot of training, NTT Docomo or someone else might manage to move this from being a gimmick to being of some use. For the foreseeable future, that’s the best that can be hoped for.

So, while reports of the death of interpreting would be greatly exaggerated, phrase books might be pining for the fjords. Once voice activated machine translation can handle those two obscure allusions said in a Glaswegian accent and produce an entertaining version in another language, then we need to start worrying!

Translator Sayings

(in honour of International Translation Day)

Here at Heriot-Watt, we love doing cutting edge research but we can also have a bit of fun. On Wednesday, normal service will be resumed with a post on why some of our PhD students chose to do research. But for now, in honour of International Translation Day, here is a list of the top 10 most common Translator sayings.

10) Working from home does not mean I can spring clean the house before you get back from work!

Yep, it’s the perennial favourite, the myth that working from home means translators do nothing all day. Of course, translators can spring clean the house, wash the cat, dust the dog and change the light bulbs before our partners, children and/or pets get home. No problem! This 3,000 word contract will take care of itself, right?

9) These aren’t pyjamas; they’re my work clothes!

Okay, so few translators actually translate in their pyjamas (we think!). Still, it can be a mite embarrassing when you answer the door to the postman at 10am and are a) still in the house and b) still wearing scrappy clothes. Still, it’s better than having to get up and don a suit by 7am. The idea of being in all day leads to…

8) No, I do not need to “get a job.” I already have one, thank you!

Ever met relatives who felt sorry for you because you didn’t have a 2 hour morning commute to an office? Yeah, someone’s logic is flawed there!

7) It’s 5,000 words long and you want if for 5pm today?

Show me a translator who hasn’t taken one of those calls and I will show you a translator on their first few jobs! It’s is absolutely incredible how we can all fit in so many words before the end of the day, even after we have finished washing the cat!

6) Sorry, I don’t do discounts for large jobs.

… mostly because translators don’t want to lock themselves into a poor rate of pay for months on end!

5) Sorry, I don’t do discounts for “easy” jobs either.

… mostly because clients and translators have different opinions as to what counts as “easy!”  Doing 5,000 words by 5pm today does not count as easy! Especially when you have a cat to wash.

4) I use Trados, MemoQ and thirteen software packages you have never heard of.

… which is an excuse for charging at least the going rate!

3) My specialist areas are x, y and z.

… which means you know you are getting someone who knows what they are doing. It also means it has cost time, effort and money to get this expertise so that’s why the rates are so high.

2) Conference? Did someone say conference?

One of the drawbacks of most translators’ schedules is that it means spending long hours alone. A conference, meet up, tweet up or even random course can mean actually going outside (shock!) and meeting other people (double shock!). Believe it or not, most translators actually know how to make conversation, once their eyes adjust to the light, that is. This leads nicely to the most common thing I have read and heard translators say…

1)    I love my job!

Author: Jonathan Downie