Dear all,

be notified that the next payments will be released on January, 17.
Reason: As we are located in Israel, tomorrow - January, 15 - is already the start of our weekend. We are back on Sunday.

Reminder: Don’t forget to request your payment as withdrawal on the site and send us the invoice.

Thanks for all the work done,
Ursula

Hi all,
nothing spectacular, only a small job by a a very nice customer I would like to help:
Is there anyone on the team who can do English to Apache translation?”
Or do you know a translator I could recommend to our customer?

Either place a comment or contact me (ursula [at] babylon.com).

Thanks,
Ursula

(Lunch will have to wait).

Remember, late October I sent out an email to the whole team inviting you to fill in your additional language pairs in a Google online form. By this I was trying to evaluate which language combination (others then the existing form and to English ones) I could add to our regular online service. This is what we call in Babylon jargon and in a terrible wrong way: Cross-Translation.

The whole thing turned out to be a catastrophe! The forms we filled out wrongly and I ended up with data I couldn’t use. Still I think that “Cross-Translation” would an important step forward for BHT and for you. So please let’s give it a second try:
1.) Send me emails (please either send it form the email account you use for BHT or clearly state your BHT email account - this is the only way I can connect between you and your translator ID)
2.) Because this is missing in so many of your profiles - let me know your native language.
3.) List all the language combination you work with.
4.) Use this as the subject line of your email: Cross-Translation

So the email I would like to get should simply look like this:

BHT email account: test@test.com
Native language: Japanese
Language combinations:
German to Japanese
French to Japanese
Italian to Japanese

Please - the sooner I get your feedback, the sooner I will be able to finally have your full potential represented in the system.

Thanks,
Ursula (very hungry)

No - still not about the new features, sorry, but certainly of general importance:

Once in a while I am using our system to request special tasks. I saw that this can lead to some confusion (especially when translators accept the job before reading it

I therefore will use in the future the following as the first line of a job submitted by me that lies beyond the regular jobs: BHT - SPECIAL JOB ASSIGNMENT.
So whenever you encounter a text to be translated starting with “BHT - SPECIAL JOB ASSIGNMENT” take some time to read the instruction and then act.

I am using this mainly in the following cases:
1.) Translations that cannot be submitted automatically through the system, such as images and screened texts. To help out some of our customers I make a manual word count of the material that needs translation. So here I give general information about the job, while the specific text has to be requested from me per email.
2.) Large jobs by business costumers that come with a different rate; so here I first have to check which translators would agree to the new job with a lower rate.
3.) Locating translators with experience of certain terminology.
4.) Locating translators with language pairs that are not covered by the system (e.g. German to French).

IMPORTANT NOTE: For some of these jobs I clearly state NOT TO ACCEPT THE JOB. So please don’t!!

Again - should be done anyhow for any text that you consider translating - review the text first, before accepting a job.

Regards,
Ursula (gone for lunch)

Hi all,

before addressing the new version, I simply must use this opportunity to point out some of the most common mistakes done by translators. Mistakes that cause us a lot of problems and consume a lot of our time and energy:

1.) Missing parts in translations:
It happens over and over again that you miss out on parts of the translation. One reason - you simple do not scroll down to the end of a text that was entered in the plain text area.

2.) Spelling mistakes!
Our customers are entitled to receive even the shortest translation without spelling mistakes. Therefore - just as mentioned on the website - do not make your translations directly in the translated text area. Always use MS Word or any other application that has a spellchecker.

Regards,
Ursula

Dear colleagues,

some important issues need my attention right now.
I will post about the new features during the next three hours.

Sorry and please return,
Ursula