yndigo

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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Client meets translator

While applying for a teaching fellowship to France back in 1993, I needed my birth certificate translated into French, so I went to the consulate in Boston to find out how to do it. They gave me a list of translators and phone numbers and told me I should expect to pay about [...]

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Beyond words: Collocations

If you don’t have one, get one. It’s not the reference book I use most, but it’s definitely my favorite. It’s the BBI Dictionary of Word Combinations, by Morton Benson, Evelyn Benson and Robert Ilson.
According to Wikipedia’s entry on the topic, a collocation refers to “the restrictions on how words can be [...]

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The state of terminology research on-line and off

A proper translator’s resume used to include a line about the hundreds of dictionaries she had in her library. This practice is fading as the Internet’s content grows more comprehensive. Many early Internet glossaries, like sites in general, were inchoate and neglected, and “real” dictionaries remained indispensible. One [...]

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