I use a computer (either an old MacBook Air or an even older MacBook Pro) pretty much all day every day for work, plus additional stints of blogging and time on my iPhone when I’m out and about or can’t be bothered with the hassle of firing up one of the laptops. Everyone is banging on about AI at the moment, and of course, computers and smartphones have made our lives a lot more interesting and convenient (albeit with some downsides). More to the point, my job as a freelance translator is a world away from what my more senior colleagues had to make do with in the old days, namely typewriters, Tipp-Ex, paper dictionaries, snail mail, and much higher rates. (Oh, hang on, that last one was actually a positive rather than a negative…)
It never ceases to amaze me, however, that despite the obvious advantages of computers, the internet, and all that jazzmatazz, every single item of computer hardware or software that I have ever owned or used has been riddled with bugs, and no matter what incredible feats of calculation, design, word processing, image tinkering, and so on they can achieve, they always suffer from fundamental and – let’s face it – supremely annoying faults that for the most part seem like they ought to be a pretty simple fix for the company or boffin that developed them.
In order to demonstrate exactly what I mean, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks making a note of all the tech problems I’ve encountered. Obviously there are solutions to most of them, and sometimes I do manage to sort things out with a stint of troubleshooting, but this can take a lot of time, effort, and frustration, and is often unsuccessful.
So, for your reading (dis)pleasure, I give you a list that barely scratches the surface of what I will encounter over a longer period of time. Also, I should mention that about three months ago, I almost completely stopped using the most annoying and godawful piece of software it has ever been my displeasure to encounter, namely SDL Trados, which is a so-called CAT (computer assisted translation) tool and seemingly designed by a team of bug-loving gremlins. This alone probably halved the number of items compared to how many there would have been during any given fortnight over the previous two years.
- Speaking of CAT tools, I used one called MemoQ (memoQ? memoq? MeMoQ?) for the first time in a long time, and found it to be fairly high on the want-to-throw-a-brick-through-my-laptop-screen scale. Scrolling through a translation file is the jerkiest thing since Steve Martin ate jerk chicken while dancing the jerk in a jerky video copy of the film The Jerk, while the actual bug that I encountered was the fact that several times a day, I couldn’t type any text in the English translation column. The only solution to this was to quit and restart the program, thereby wasting valuable time that I should have been spending actually translating.
- In its infinite wisdom, Microsoft has decided to axe Skype. Not that I was a huge Skype fan in the first place (why oh why was it impossible to change that infuriating and hard-to-hear ring tone?), but I did still use it to call my bank in the UK and people like my brother who have yet to enter the smartphone (i.e. free WhatsApp calls) age. When I booted up Teams – MS’s existing and now replacement service for Skype – the other day, I tried to install a new version, was told this would not be possible, and – bug alert! – couldn’t quit the program without calling on our old friends Ctrl + Alt + Del > Task Manager > Force Quit
- There is a great plugin (or is it a tool?) called Ten Japanese Reader (formerly Peraperakun/Rikaichan) which, when you hover the cursor over a Japanese word in your browser, displays dictionary entries for said word. For some reason, even though Ten is installed on Firefox on my MacBook Air, it isn’t possible to display it on the toolbar. In other words, I can’t use it (for no discernible reason, it’s fine on Firefox on the MacBook Pro).
- I’ve become an avid sender of audio messages via WhatsApp, partly because it’s difficult to organise proper voice calls with an 8- or 9-hour time difference between Japan and the UK, although I usually record the messages on iPhone Voice Memo and share them to WhatsApp from there. With a view to sending a friend of mine a reply to a voice message of his, I scrolled back through our chat history to remind myself of what he had said, only to be told when I clicked the ‘Play’ triangle, ‘This audio has expired.’ As it turned out, the message was nonsense, and once I had – yes, you guessed it – quit WhatsApp (in this case, the desktop version) and restarted, the audio was fine, dandy, and unexpired.
- More CAT tools: Phrase (formerly Memsource) is the best of a rather bad bunch and mostly glitch-free, but even after confirming all of the so-called translation ‘segments’ on a job I had been doing, I couldn’t complete it – in other words, I couldn’t submit it to the translation agency that assigned it to me (this happened only minutes before the submission deadline, which as you can imagine, added to the suspense). Because Phrase – like mEmOq – functions entirely online, every step in the process of using it takes that little bit longer than would be ideal, and in this case, I had to close the Phrase tab on my browser, click on the link to the job in an email, click on the translation file in a list, then select all and confirm the segments again, all of which wasted several more valuable minutes of the all-too-fleeting time I have left to enjoy my life on this planet.
- Re-reading my list, it would seem that I did use the dreaded Trados recently and sure enough, it caused me unnecessary problems. This time, it took four (four, I tell you!) attempts to verify (i.e. go through and check for mistakes) the file I had translated. On each of the first three attempts, a little window with a red ‘X’ icon appeared to explain what had happened (or rather, not happened) and was accompanied each time with that maddening ‘ping’ sound that you get – not just on Trados, I think – to tell you that something is wrong.
- When I inserted an SD card on the Mac side of my MacBook Air (I’ve used Boot Camp to divide both of my laptops into separate Mac and Windows sides because Trados is only compatible with the latter), it was nowhere to be seen and I couldn’t import any photos from it. When I removed it, though, I still received the ‘Disk not ejected properly’ message, for which I would like to thank the late Steve Jobs and his team of ever-considerate minions.
- When I tried to log in to Phrase on Google Chrome, conveniently, my username and password appeared in the requisite fields via the magic of autofill. Not so conveniently or magically, either Chrome or Phrase failed to recognise either and wouldn’t allow me through to my Phrase dashboard. As you might have guessed, the only solution was to quit and restart Chrome.
- Surprisingly for a piece of software (or rather, online service) that is a) Reasonably well designed and programmed, and b) Absolutely essential for my day-to-day work, a few days ago and possibly due to maintenance or server problems (no explanation was provided), Phrase was temporarily unavailable on several occasions. This time, the only thing I could do was wait, as no amount of quitting, restarting, checking my Wi-Fi connection, hitting my keyboard with a ball-peen hammer, etc. solved the problem.
- My iPhone is just as important for my job, as I am expected to respond to offers of translating assignments as soon as possible after an email request is sent. So you can imagine my annoyance at the fact that so-called banner notifications (round-cornered rectangles displaying the sender’s email address, subject, and first line or so of the message) no longer appear on the iPhone lock screen, even though I have chosen to display them there in my notification settings. For some reason, they do appear on the unlocked screen if I happen to be using the phone at the time.
- The Mail app on my phone handles two email accounts, one personal and one business, and has its own distinct alert sound (currently an echoing bugle called something like Sherwood Forest) so that I know to check it straight away in case the incoming email is an offer of work. At least it should have its own distinct alert sound. The trouble is, no matter how much I fiddle with the settings, one or two other apps insist on using the same one, thereby making me leap into action unnecessarily – for example, when M Jr II’s school sends an utterly non-urgent message about what time sports day will start or the fact that a stray piece of plastic was found in the miso soup at lunchtime.
- One of the things that I check the most often on my phone is the weather (even if I’m not actually going to leave the house that day – what can I say, I’m a bit eccentric, and have a particular fetish for the rainfall radar), and I tested out various apps before coming to the conclusion that Yahoo! produces the best one. This does have a habit of freezing, however, something that can only be rectified by turning my phone on and off or waiting until the next day.
- I am a compulsive list-maker, and after finding out that the Mac Memo app had a habit of not syncing properly across devices and thus losing important items from my shopping list, books I want to read, passwords, restaurants I want to go to, underwear sizes, etc., I switched to Microsoft OneNote. Although not 100% foolproof and with a thoroughly baffling text format, OneNote is better than Memo. But what do you know? I’ve discovered a bug, which is that if you try copying and pasting chunks of text from one memo to another, the app freezes and you have to quit and reopen it.
- Here’s something a little different: a printer problem. Miraculously, my Canon printer, which was purchased at least a decade ago, is still going strong, but it does have its eccentricities. For example, the other day when I was trying to print a scanned image of an English exam marking table for M Jr, a sheet of A4 paper popped out of the front with only part of the image on it. When I used exactly the same combination of settings in exactly the same order again, hey presto and second time lucky, there was no problem at all.
- Having sung the praises of Phrase earlier on in this list, I appear to have had a couple more issues with it lately, namely a) When putting a new entry in my termbase (a kind of personalised Japanese-to-English dictionary extracted a word at a time from translations I’ve done over the past few years), even though it had been registered correctly, the popup menu refused to disappear automatically. Cancelling it manually should have prevented the entry from being, er, entered, but confusingly didn’t, and caused me to duplicate several entries on the same day. And b) If I try to type a quotation mark at the beginning of a line, I get an opening instead of a closing one, which necessitates the very fiddly process of continuing to type text further along the same line, inserting another quotation mark, which this time is the correct, opening one, then going back and deleting the incorrect closing one and the text in between.
- This may have something to do with my combined Boot Camp Windows/Mac setup, but once every couple of months, both OSs refuse to pick up Wi-Fi, which is quite frankly a complete and utter pain in the fecking backside, and can only be fixed by repeatedly restarting the laptop until the problem somehow rectifies itself.
- As you probably know if you live in Japan but will have no idea of if you are anywhere else in the world, LINE is the most popular messaging/free calls app here. But despite being used by tens of millions of Japanese people every day, it has a surprisingly (should I say surprisingly? Perhaps not given what I’ve written in this list so far) large number of bugs – a swarm of bugs, if you will. One of these is that, even if I cancel the option to receive a notification when I sign in to LINE on another device (Luddite that I am, I will never get the hang of typing on a phone and regularly use the desktop version), I still receive the notification. I kid you not, this has been an ongoing thing for several years and will clearly never be fixed.
- You know how if you want to select multiple items in a list – for example, of files in a folder – you can select the first one, hold down the shift key, and when you select the last one, all of the items in between will also be selected (a subtly different action from our old friend ‘select all’)? Well, on Windows 10, actually they won’t, meaning you have to laboriously select each of them one at a time, and if you accidentally miss the check box, end up either losing the whole selection and having to start again and/or opening one of the files instead of just selecting it.
- You know how if you stop a podcast partway through or stop reading a book on Kindle partway through, the software will of course remember where you were so that, even if you listen to a different podcast or read a different book in the intervening time, you will still be able to return to and resume from the same place at a later date? Well, on the Music app on an iPhone, for some utterly bizarre reason, you can’t do this. For my sins, I have a paid subscription to Apple Music and often listen to their playlists – you know the kind of thing: Kenny G Essentials or Best of 90s Death Metal – some of which are ten hours long or more. So why the hell is the Music app so dumb that it won’t allow me to take a break after five hours of Kenny G/death metal and return to the same place in the playlist? Why? WHY?
- When I was finally able – after several attempts over several months – to download the latest version of Outlook, it was a vast improvement on using Hotmail in a browser, but some of the same stupid bloody faults have been lovingly preserved and incorporated in the desktop version. Faults such as the fact that sometimes, if I select all the items in my spam folder, it isn’t possible to report them as phishing scams (the relevant icon is greyed out and inactive).
- I haven’t even used Teams yet since switching from Skype, and already the bugs are beginning to pile up: the iPhone app hasn’t properly imported the contacts from my phone or Skype account, and even though I had an incoming call and a red badge popped up on the Teams icon, information about the call was nowhere to be found in the Activity list. Back in the desktop version, when I tried to sign in to my Skype account, I was told that a verification code would be sent to my phone, and what do you know? No matter how many times I asked for it to be sent and re-sent, the code never arrived.
- Excel is a fiendishly complex piece of software to use, which is fair enough, and as someone who already has an aversion to all things mathematical, I don’t hold out much hope for ever being able to master it myself. It still disappoints me to notice its imperfections, though. For example, a translation I am currently working on was provided as an Excel file (a lot of agencies use this format and don’t seem to realise that despite the ability to use columns and rows for the Japanese original, English translation, notes, and so on, it’s singularly unsuited to accommodating text). The translation is of the subtitles for a corporate video, and in the interests of saving space on screen, one of the columns in the Excel file contains a formula for calculating the ideal number of characters/letters to use for each line of dialogue. Even though exactly the same formula has been pasted to every single row in the column, for no discernible reason, it simply stops working about three quarters of the way through, The formula is a fairly complicated combination of the number of characters in the Japanese original and the time the person in the video takes to say the line in question (there are timecodes from the video in another column), so for the last part of the translation, I have no proper idea of how long or short my translation should be. Thank you, Bill Gates, and I love you, too.
- Last but not least, on the Windows side of my laptop, I use Media Player instead of QuickTime to play videos (not for much longer, I hope – a quick search has just told me that it may be possible to install a Windows version of the latter). The really glaring and surely easy-to-fix fault with this is that the play/pause button doesn’t work properly for much of the time, and the only way I have managed to get videos playing again is to click instead on the dot that moves along the timeline of the video to tell you how far into it you are and far there is to go until the end.
- Oh, and another thing before I forget: The Photos app in Windows is diabolically awkward to use for editing – seriously, try and crop a photo and you’ll see what I mean. It honestly looks as though no human being even tried to use this feature before the app was signed off and approved for inclusion as a standard Windows feature. In fact, ‘feature’ is the wrong word. ‘Incumbrance’ would be more accurate.
So there you have it. Multiply this list of two weeks’ worth of tech fails by about by 26 and you’ll get some idea of what a typical year of using computers and smartphones is like for yours truly (and surely millions of others around the globe – I mean, it’s not just me, right…?) and why it takes every last microgram of self-control to stop myself from hurling my MacBooks out of an upstairs window and smashing them to smithereens on the unforgiving tarmac below.
