yndigo

How concerned should we be about formatting in a meaning-driven profession?

On my morning bike rides, I ride by — ok, stop at — a donut shop in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, my somewhat elevated heart rate helping to persuade me that, ten miles into the ride, I’ve already pre-burned the calories. Mike’s Donuts is outta this [...]

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A lot has been written about the threat posed to the professional translator by machine translation. Some dismiss it as a distant threat. For others, like Jussara who recently commented on one of my old posts, it’s like global warming: it’s real and it’s already happening. And Jussara claims most translators are not even good [...]

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Somehow advertising in every form — TV, radio, print, internet — has really turned me off lately. Maybe the economy has made it all sound more desperate but every ad is the same. All the marketing copy I read might as well be written by the same person. Long unswayed by marketing, I remained impressed [...]

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An artist renders an image. A cook renders fat from a duck. A court renders a judgment. A translator renders a translation?
I’ve always said “produce” a translation. Rather mechanical I know and a testament to my stiffly commercial milieu. The blog transubstantiation has a thought-provoking post asking readers to choose one definition from a first [...]

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Translation as learning process

Not all projects go perfectly. The following describes a recent job a friend at another agency told me about (I know — sounds like, “Doctor, my friend has this problem” but it’s true). I too have my share of past failures to learn from, but this was a doozy.
The project: almost 2,000 [...]

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Swears in translation
I remember an argument among project managers a few years ago about whether we should translate certain vulgarities, or soften them before they reached the client. I was on the side of leaving them as raw as they were in the original. I lost. The prevailing concern seemed to be that sending a [...]

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project managers?
I’ve been a project manager. I still manage translation projects quite often. And I manage other project managers. Project Management, in a translation agency or otherwise, is a tough job if done correctly. But it’s not a profession in the same way being a translator is.
Provocative, right? (Oddly, I don’t fear the kind [...]

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Follow-up on a recent post
The beginnings of a good discussion on a recent post, Getting Testy, made me want to dig a bit deeper into the issue. I know translation tests have already been debated ad nauseam on the web for years but mostly from the freelancer’s point of view. Our discussion included comments [...]

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Translation audience, philosophy, and approach

Many professional translators learn by translating, and often eschew translation theory in favor of a hands-on approach. Their research is practical and centers around the terminology and concepts of various industries. Even many college translation programs favor practical studies over theory.
One pervading philosophy or another, however, often comes to underpin and [...]

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To what extent can translation quality be measured or judged?
I contributed to a discussion on proz.com where a question was raised about stylistic preferences in translation. The original poster had received corrections from a client that caused him to believe the client was seeking not just translation, but copy editing, too.
Although the general consensus is [...]

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