When I finally decided to make translating my career instead of an occasional activity, I started looking into translation software. I was a bit skeptical about it because I had seen how Babelfish and other online translators operated and thought them utterly useless for my work. However, after casually searching in Google, I came across [...]
This brief note is dedicated to all those who have spent a long time learning Spanish and want to add Portuguese as an easy "second" more or less in the same manner a German symphony orchestra would throw in a Strauss waltz as a "bonbon" to finish off an otherwise all-Bruckner night with a light [...]
Behind the online translator there is a software program that analyses the text according to predefined linguistic rules and reconstructs the text in a different language according to the corresponding rules of the target language. As opposed to an online dictionary, which only translates single words or phrases, an online translator can translate larger text [...]
What is an Agency? Translators have all had to deal with agencies at one point or another. Although some of us work exclusively with agencies, others of us have our own clients, and a still others work in-house for a company or organization. Nonetheless, no translator can afford, literally or figuratively, to ignore agencies, and [...]
The Translator?s Balance Sheet: The Black Side Translators earn most of their income from translation work. Some translators also edit or proofread translations, write abstracts or language analyses, or provide other language-oriented services. Still others teach the languages they know or even translation itself. And doubtlessly some do work wholly unrelated to translation. The easiest [...]
Academic Training in Principle The basic approach to academic training for translators seems to remain unchanged from the time of the School of Scribes in ancient Egypt. Student translators are given short texts to translate, then their translations are evaluated by teachers, and finally the translations are discussed in great depth and detail among all [...]
Translating only implies simple string translation of code, you may do it in a clever way or a painful (very) way scanning all the code and translating strings. This method tends to produce errors (Have you ever seen a site in Spanglish?) and it is not reusable, just a patch. Internationalization defines a strategy to [...]
The Translation Job The first thing you have to do when you get a job, be it by fax, overnight mail, or email, is confirm that it was you expected it to be. I?ve actually received jobs which were supposed to be in Japanese but in fact were in Russian, and I?ve been sent the [...]
This article is a modest first step in what we believe is the right direction. It is an example of coopetition between two periodicals focusing on the language industry towards a simple objective that is beneficial to our whole industry: clarifying our most basic terms. This article will be published, more or less simultaneously, in [...]
The importance of translation services that address the complex issues involved with localization cannot be overemphasized. In a global marketplace, more and more businesses both large and small are reaching their overseas customers through websites, software, brochures and legal contracts that have been translated into the local language. This process can be a complicated one, [...]