Thoughts On Translation

This past weekend, I had the good fortune to attend Translate in the Catskills, a conference on target language writing skills for translators. Where to start? This conference made me think more about the actual quality and style of my translations than I have in a long time, and made me realize that there are [...]

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Keep Calm and Carry On seems to be the takeaway from Global Watchtower’s recent survey of 277 freelance language professionals. When asked about the fourth quarter of 2008, more than three quarters of respondents said that their business was either good or satisfactory, despite that quarter’s distinction as the most financially disastrous in recent history. [...]

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Today’s installment of Talk of the Nation (a good lunchtime or mid-afternoon listen, depending on your time zone) gave many interesting examples of how recessions reshape entire industries. For example, the number of startup auto companies in the U.S. has jumped since the Big Three have been teetering on the verge of collapse or obsolescence. [...]

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At long last, episode two of Speaking of Translation is available for your listening pleasure. This podcast, which is Eve Bodeux’s brain child and which I co-host, features news and views from the translation industry. The current episode is exciting because it features the live interviews that Eve and I did at the ATA conference [...]

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A few interesting items from the world outside the home office: The pre-release version of Wordfast 6.0 is out. As of this release, Wordfast is splitting into a “classic” version that still works within Microsoft Word, and a standalone version that is platform independent. I saw the standalone version demo in Orlando and I am [...]

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This Monday morning, many translators across the U.S. are either heading home from the ATA conference or are already at home, clearing out the inbox and following up on contacts made at the conference. As someone who a) is not a Disney fan and b) hails from a city that is the cultural opposite of [...]

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It’s an exciting day for lovers of French literature everywhere. Today in Sweden, French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first French-language author to do so since Claude Simon in 1985 (Gao Xingjian, a French citizen who writes in Chinese, won in 2000). Le Clézio has [...]

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A new site of interest to translators is Translators Training, run by Jost Zetzsche (who writes the translation technology e-newsletter The Took Kit) and Intrawelt, a language services and e-learning company. Translators Training offers “unbiased, objective information about translation tools,” which is something that’s certainly needed in our industry. Translators Training seems to have gone [...]

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