Beginning in 1969
with medical translations commissioned by Brooke Army Hospital in San Antonio,
dealing with skin conditions suffered during combat by Army personnel in the
Vietnam War – principally severe burns – I found that I liked technical
translation. The people at Brooke must have liked my translations also because
I quickly became the go-to guy (out of about 16 enlisted-ranked linguists
stationed at Fort Hood) for the longest, most complex burn-related assignments,
as well as for translations of citizen-status documents drawn up originally in
German: divorce decrees, marriage and birth certificates, and documents regarding
change of nationality.

Once I was
honorably discharged from the Army, technical translations and I had a parting
of the ways for some years. But the most important profession I chose after
that – technical indexing – was closely related to translations, and in
addition gave me much wider technical exposure. I became, in 1973, one of a
team of experts hired by the Technical Information Service of the American
Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics to do indexing of technical books and
articles. I note with satisfaction that this type of activity has spread to the
internet big-time! Even YouTube videos now have identifying tags and terms
assigned to them, making it easier for users to find them. Back-of-the-book
indexing (which we did not do at AIAA) is a related skill – almost an art, and
it makes it hugely easier for readers to locate something in a text.

What did we index
at AIAA? Everything and anything that relates to aerospace: aircraft and
spacecraft design; atmospheric physics; materials (especially composites)
useful in aircraft and spacecraft); astrophysics; aerodynamics; and weather. We
used the NASA Thesaurus as our guide to selecting the proper terms and tags, a
publication that was constantly updated to include the latest things in the
aerospace field.

After sixteen
years and eight months of being an indexer, I decided to become my own man, so
to speak: to establish a free-lance translation service called Languages of
Montour. I offered translations from Russian to English and German to English
initially.

Very early in the
free-lance game a cousin drew my attention to the American Translators
Association, and I joined ATA in June 1990 and have never regretted doing so. I
took their accreditation test in Russian to English translations and passed it
on the first try.  I also volunteered to
help the organization: to edit their monthly Translation Inquirer column for our
monthly flagship publication, The ATA Chronicle. The translation business was
in transition at that time to exclusive reliance on online searches for help in
translating difficult words and terms, so it is almost a miracle that, with the
help of my correspondents, I kept the column going from 1993 until 2017, when internet
technology caused the demand for the old, slow way of posing queries and answering
them was entirely superseded by online feedback within one day, if not within
the hour.

My freelance
business morphed in ways I did not expect. One client from north Georgia liked
my style and gave me vast amounts of work that had to do with damaged BMWs,
vehicles that had suffered body damage somewhere between the manufacturing
plant in Bavaria and the port city of Bremerhaven. The paperwork connected with
this had to be translated into English and had to accompany the vehicle when it
was sold.

Siemens was
expanding its building and operating of railroad trainsets into North America
at that time, and with it came a need for translations of manuals for checking,
maintaining and repairing these highly complex vehicles. Everything from the
ground up had a manual for it, and in this area I found a secure position as
the editor of other translators’ work. The focus was a branch of BNSF from
Oceanside to San Marcos and Escondido, California, which was rebuilt and
equipped with Siemens trainsets – the VT-642 non-electrified models for
Sprinter service in North San Diego County.

Another type of
assignment that I eased into, ever so gradually, was patents. German patents are
so much wordier and more complete than their Russian counterparts; and also,
German patent cases often include paperwork on litigated cases, instances in
which patents are contested by rival patent-issuing firms.

Entirely on my
own, I learned to create graphs and tables, guided only by intuition and
trial-and-error.  But, in a profession
that relies very heavily on word count for computing prices for invoices, tables
and graphs represented an alien element: how to meaningfully include this added
value into the price?  It always has to
be worked out in advance with the client.

Russian as a
language for translation started out strong in my practice, but gradually
weakened.  Oil-field translations nearly
dried up. Even the educational transcripts and personal documents became rare. I
had to consider studying another language, and I chose one that would have
links with both German and English. Swedish seemed to be the right fit, so I
began seven years of professional study of that language in April 2000. 

Then I surprised
myself in October 2012 with taking up a fourth language pair, having the same
basic profile – Dutch. To my great delight, I discovered that a Dutch-to-Swedish
general dictionary existed, the Middelgroot Wordenboek Nederlands – Zweeds, published
by Van Dale, and it helped immensely in my studies. Once I let the world of
professional translation know that I was ready to translate Dutch into English,
I found the business to be even more brisk than  Swedish to English.

For many years I
had a secure faith that computer-aided translation of natural language would
never come close to the quality that a human translator brings to the process.
That faith has now been shaken by the appearance of DeepL, a professional
service from Cologne, Germany that appears to have made immense progress in
this regard. On October 15^th of this year I fed it an especially
vexing bit of text and what DeepL produced surprised and impressed me. It was
not perfect by any means, but it was so much better than anything I had seen
before, that I was compelled to revise my decades-old prejudice. I might need
to consider machine translated post-editing if the translated material is up to
DeepL standards, though it surprises me to read that it is I who is writing
this.