yndigo

The October issue of the American Translators Association’s ATA Chronicle features an article by Diane Howard called Ethical Codes: Where Are We? The article, besides being very clear and well written, made the argument that much more precision is needed in ATA’s Code of Professional Conduct and Business Practices, which is currently under review. [...]

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I happened upon a New York Times blog post listing the 100 things restaurant staffers should never do — part one and two — and thought the idea good enough to steal (somehow, “no stealing” wasn’t high on our list). Despite the title, many of the don’ts apply more to agencies and their staff. Some [...]

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Who is your audience?
Or should I say, Who are your audience? I’ll have to defer to M Lynne “Lynneguist” Murphy over at separated by a common language for that one. Lynne delves into the minute linguistic variations between our side of the pond and hers, which can be surpisingly practical when you’re considering whether to [...]

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Confidence and Experience in Translation
Watching the French Open finals this morning between Dinara Safina and Svetlana Kuznetsova, I heard “S’il vous plaît, mesdames et messieurs” come over the loudspeaker to quiet the crowd before play (By the way, when did the wave make its transition to the tennis stadium?).
My very funny wife Jen echoed the [...]

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I was editing a particularly spectacular translation the other day. Creative turns of phrase, source meaning fully intact, and just beautifully readable English. The translator obviously had a nuanced understanding of the source language paired with a level of comprehension of the subject matter that usually betrays an industry insider. My editing was moot. Any [...]

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I’m not a good speller. Not in my acquired language, French, nor in English. In fact I’m worse in English, but we should all be forgiven; English orthography is about as regular as the M101 bus in Manhattan, winner of the latest Schleppie Award for least reliable bus.
So I’ve gotten in the habit of [...]

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Many translators working outside the field of legal translation are surprised how often our source documents in the legal realm are still scanned images, the original Word, Excel or PowerPoint versions of which are unavailable to us.
Not only unavailable to us translators, but unavailable to the litigators too. This is because documents are [...]

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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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