yndigo

Specialties and the translator CV

A few years ago a client called asking for a Japanese-French interpreter in Connecticut. The person had to have experience in the fashion industry, and the conference was only four days away. Also, flying someone in wasn’t in the budget.
I tried not to laugh. Prepared to say “good luck with [...]

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The importance of clearly written patent claims
The Patent Prospecter blogged recently that inventors and the prosecutors they hire often fail to draft adequate patent claims, leading to a worthless patent.
According to the post, “[b]esides creativity, discipline and a fluency in English are key ingredients for an inventor to benefit from the U.S. patent [...]

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Mastering the legal translator’s most popular tool

The translation industry is creating and improving software all the time to help translators do their jobs. Still, we haven’t scrapped an old standby: Microsoft Word. And no group knows this more than legal translators, who use Word every day, yet many have still not harnessed all of its [...]

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A couple recent news items illustrate the role translators and interpreters play in politics and international security.
The Taipei Times reported that China’s President Ma Ying-jeou gave a speech last week in Tokyo to a Japanese delegation where an interpreter error soured the President’s otherwise fraternal message. Blamed on poor sound volume, a portion of [...]

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Pricing remains stable in translation industry

Business globalization research and consulting firm Common Sense Advisory just put out this press release, claiming that our $12 billion industry is not suffering from the sluggish economy. According to the press release, as globalization increases there is a growing demand for translation, so translators and translation services have not [...]

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Law firms and globalization

The translation industry has taken on much more than just translation over the last several years. As the world’s economies quickly become one, localization and internationalization services are expanding to keep pace, to the extent that our industry is now known as the Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation industry (GILT). For a [...]

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Specialized glossaries on the web

Translators know this fact well but to many, oddly enough, it seems to come as a surprise: knowing a language doesn’t mean you know all the words in that language. “How do you say ‘joist’ in French?” a friend of mine renovating his apartment asked while giving his French neighbor and [...]

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Noun and verb forms in legal writing
Nominalization, an issue I had touched on in my post about language contraction in English, is also the subject of a few of Wayne Schiess’ recent posts. He asserts that, although it is very common for lawyers unsure of their English style to use strong nouns and weak verbs, [...]

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Project Manager meets the real world

A friend and one-time project manager, Alyssa, once described the role of the translation project manager as a nexus of abuse — abuse coming from both client and translator — often with no authority to vent the frustration in either direction (some translators may beg do differ with me on [...]

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Handling Rush Jobs

I’ve seen 28,000 words of Russian translated in a 12-hour period; 36,000 words of Spanish overnight; 1.2 million words of French in under a week. From a translator’s perspective, jobs like this should never happen because achieving high quality results seems pretty unlikely. From a client’s standpoint, there’s simply no choice.
Projects of [...]

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