yndigo

When a word has no good equivalent
In my last post, I talked about words that were so closely tied to a certain country’s sporting event, they are inevitably used internationally in their original language. But how about words that don’t translate at all because the situation they grew out of just doesn’t exist elsewhere?
Many websites [...]

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Wictionary.org defines translatorese as: “(pejorative) Stilted or unidiomatic language produced by translation.” That doesn’t sound good.
However some contend there are certain types of documents and certain audiences where erring on the literal side is a safer bet. Not literature of course (ironically we can’t take literature literally as one of my grad school professors used [...]

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If it smells like legalese, it must be…

I’ve mentioned Wayne Schiess’ blog in the past because, although translators are often good writers (as I argued in an earlier post, writing is the translator’s most marketable skill), they gain a lot from writing tips from within their industry’s specialty. The point of Mr. Schiess’ blog, if [...]

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Translation tests in today’s market

Nothing seems to rile translators more these days than the translation tests requested so frequently by agencies. There’s vitriol in abundance on almost every translator forum and blog I read. Why?
Well I’ve never been on the receiving end of one of these requests so I’m just going to guess. Translators are [...]

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Increasing need for qualified medical interpreters
The Boston Globe today published an article on the growing need in Boston and elsewhere for qualified medical interpreters in several languages.
Where once a medical professional would rely on someone from the cleaning staff to communicate with a patient, MetroWest Medical Center realized the potential danger in this practice [...]

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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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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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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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