I am excited to introduce a guest post by Miryam Blum, a seasoned Hebrew<>English translator, who has been translating articles for the financial pages of Haaretz/TheMarker for over ten years and has a freelance business, translating mainly academic articles and PR films and materials for Jewish education projects. Miryam’s first introduction of the AutoCorrect technique, at the Israel Translators Association 2008 convention, won instant accolades. Miryam can be reached at miryam.blum at gmail.com

AutoCorrect – One of Microsoft Office’s most time-saving features for translators (or anyone who types a lot, for that matter) is AutoCorrect. Initially designed to automatically correct common typing errors, such as teh, instead of the, or feild, instead of field, AutoCorrect allows you to add words that you commonly misspell. In order to increase productivity, you can also add entries that you make up, so that you only need to type 2, 3 or 4 letters in a word or phrase, and the program will do the rest.

Any word that has seven or more letters, and even some four-letter words and two-word phrases with only 6 letters can be made into AutoCorrect entries to save time while typing.

The main principle is to reduce the number of keystrokes and switching back and forth between the right and left hands. Even a city name as simple as Lod can be shortened to ld if it appears many times in a text.

AutoCorrect is really helpful for typing words that use the same fingers on both hands, and which can be misspelled because the message goes to the correct finger, but on the wrong hand. One classic example is also. I have an AutoCorrect entry for this, so that I never have to think about switching back and forth between hands to type the l and the o. I just type aso, and Word fills in the l for me.  Another example is future – five out of its six letters are typed with the index finger, and your brain has to send messages alternately to each hand. Why bother, when you can type the whole word with one finger of one hand: ftr. If you are translating a document about furniture, you can change your AutoCorrect entry for ftr to expand to furniture instead of future.

AutoCorrect’s does not limit the length of the entries, making it possible to “type” entire paragraphs with just several keystrokes. This comes especially handy in client communications via Outlook. You can create shortcuts for large blocks of information (payment details, driving instructions, project rules, etc). AutoCorrect entries can be changed as often as you want, to suit your evolving needs.

The more AutoCorrect entries you have, once you develop a system that makes it easy for you to remember your entries, the more you can increase your productivity. The following example, taken at random from a newspaper article I translated, illustrates how maximizing the use of AutoCorrect can increase your translation speed from 600 words per hour to as many as 1,400 words per hour.

How AutoCorrect works:

AutoCorrect is activated by the space bar, the Tab key, Enter, and any punctuation mark – comma, period, apostrophe, question or exclamation mark, or mathematical symbol – so you can even use AutoCorrect to help speed up typing formulas.

The fact that AutoCorrect is activated by the space bar and the punctuation marks really speeds up typing, because once you learn the abbreviations that you create, you just type the three or four-letter combinations as you go along, without even thinking about them – the computer does the rest.

Make short words even shorter:

Type 3 letters for 3-word phrases:

Like any Microsoft feature, you can access and add or change AutoCorrect entries in several ways. Read more about AutoCorrect on Microsoft’s Support site.

Create AutoCorrect entries for:

• Common words
• Frequently used phrases
• Names of people, places, countries, institutions
• Acronyms – let AutoCorrect capitalize them for you
• Frequently used information chunks

Your goals when creating AutoCorrect entries:

• Reduce the number of keystrokes and hand changes.
• Any word or phrase with more than 6 letters that is used repeatedly should have an AutoCorrect entry

Keys to creating easy-to-remember AutoCorrect entries:

• Find letter combinations that are not real words, but are easy for you to remember.
• 3-letter combinations work best
• Use the main consonants or sounds in a word or phrase

Tips for maximizing your AutoCorrect glossary:

• When you create an entry for a noun, create a second entry for its plural
• Add suffixes to the 3-letter basic abbreviation eg.: dfr = different; dfrc = difference; dfrly = differently
• Change the 3-letter entries as necessary – you can always change them back

Would you believe seeing a clause from Google’s Terms of Service could become a jaw-dropping experience for a group of professionals and business owners? Neither could I, until last week I presented a short resources workshop to a Jerusalem networking group.

When asked whether they use Google Translate in their workflow, almost one half of the participants raised their hands. However, when I showed a slide with the following excerpts from Google’s TOS, hands clapped over mouths all around the room:

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