yndigo

Beyond words: Collocations

If you don’t have one, get one. It’s not the reference book I use most, but it’s definitely my favorite. It’s the BBI Dictionary of Word Combinations, by Morton Benson, Evelyn Benson and Robert Ilson.
According to Wikipedia’s entry on the topic, a collocation refers to “the restrictions on how words can be [...]

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The plain trend in legal language

Theater critics have complained that many contemporary stagers of Shakespeare take the Bard too seriously. His plays are bawdy and bloody and funny but to many theater-goers today, they are just stuffy. Some of this comes, I think, from the fact that, as imitators, we revere the original so much [...]

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Translator meets world

When we imagine how others spend their day, we’re often wrong. Especially when the person’s profession is one we know little about. There are, of course, certain very public occupations like a lifeguard or entertainer, where we have a pretty good sense of what it might be like. Then there are professions like [...]

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Brackets: A rather delicate translator tool

contrast to [sic], which lets the translator wipe his hands of an error in the source, brackets rectify the problem while alerting the reader something’s a bit off.
As an aside, the unqualified bracket means the square version in American usage, where for Brits this would mean parenthesis, thus their need [...]

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Sic: use and abuse
Not limited to academia and journalism, sic makes an appearance pretty often in translation. The latin means “so” or “thus,” or, according to Meriam Webster, “intentionally so written.”
The translator — a fortiori, the legal translator — is a reporter of sorts, trying his best to move communication from a writer to a [...]

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There’s no such thing as a certified translator

The United States, as opposed to some other countries, has no licensing authority governing who can and cannot translate. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics: “There is currently no universal form of certification required of interpreters and translators in the United States, [...]

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The state of terminology research on-line and off

A proper translator’s resume used to include a line about the hundreds of dictionaries she had in her library. This practice is fading as the Internet’s content grows more comprehensive. Many early Internet glossaries, like sites in general, were inchoate and neglected, and “real” dictionaries remained indispensible. One [...]

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Contraction and expansion in translated text
A while back I took part in a blog discussion that was attempting to establish a matrix for translation expansion and contraction by language pair. The secondary discussion in the thread interested me more: although the word count grows in many foreign languages when translated from English, it never seems [...]

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Breaking the Golden Rule of Translation
Translators must translate from their acquired language into their native language. So says the consensus, it would seem. And I couldn’t agree more. Rare is the human who can master a foreign language so well that his prose flows like a native. I have tried it myself. So confident in [...]

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Top 5 tips to getting the best interpreter

Don’t wait until the last minute: The best interpreters fill their schedules weeks in advance. If an agency magically offers you a stellar interpreter for a last-minute assignment, be circumspect and DON’T skip the next four items.
Listen for key questions from the agency: To provide the [...]

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