global voices, one world

I just finished my first translation for Global Voices Lingua Dutch. It’s a post where bloggers discuss their thoughts on possible causes behind the floods in the Philippines. A couple of observations:

• After five years in the States and having no one to speak Dutch with, my Dutch has deteriorated so much, it’s really really rusty. The other person (who is great) I am working with is a professional translator, and I am almost to the point of being embarrassed about the quality of my translation.
• It took me about 90 minutes to translate my first post.
• With so many possible interesting posts I could translate, I wasn’t sure where to start, until the Global Voices Daily Digest came into my mailbox; proceeded to pick my first post to translate from the digest.
• Useful tool: Google Translate. At least for the purpose of translating English to Dutch. I had less useful experiences when translating Chinese to a Roman language.
• Also useful: having two windows of text editors displayed on your screen, with on the left the original text, on the right the translation.
• Coordination of articles to be translated now consists of starting a blog in Wordpress and saving it as a draft, so before I start translating a post, I first check which posts are already being translated by others by checking the blog post drafts. I was very impressed with the way the GV Lingua Chinese team uses wiki to coordinate their activities.
• Dutch online dictionaries suck. The Van Dale, which is considered the authoritative dictionary in Dutch, has two versions online, both you have to pay for. As always, if you just want to check the spelling of a word, just search for it in Google.

EDIT: Percy, who is our fearless leader at GV Dutch, was so kind to suggest two very useful websites to me: Woordenlijst, which is a reference website for looking up correct spelling, and Taaladvies, a reference website for Dutch grammar.