yndigo

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Computer Assisted Translation

There’s nothing new here for experienced CAT tool people, as this post is more geared toward giving translation customers a clear idea of what CAT tools can mean for them.
Computer Assisted Translation, or Computer Aided Translation refers to a broad range of tools from the very simple spell-checkers and word-count features to the [...]

[Read more →]

Machine Translation: je t’aime… moi non plus *

Had blogs existed with the advent of the ATM machine, bank tellers would no doubt have spilled many bytes of virtual ink in an effort to disparage them. And then, little by little, a few may have come around to extoll their virtues, claiming that the new machine [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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, [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]