Posted in Nubbin, Technology, Translation quality on June 30, 2008 | No Comments »
A while ago, I wrote about both my love of the free and open source translation environment tool OmegaT and my frustration with tags in OmegaT. Since then, I’ve found that the easiest solution, as long as the document doesn’t contain complex formatting, is to save the document as plain text, then translate in OmegaT [...]
Posted in Links, Translation quality on May 22, 2008 | 1 Comment »
If you’re looking for a quick reference sheet of proofreaders’ marks (and I promise, using them is so much faster than doing the corrections in longhand), here are two that seem useful: one from Merriam-Webster and one from Espresso Graphics. Both of these can be printed on one page, and they include helpful examples for [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Translation quality on May 19, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Recently I’ve been taking some copy editing classes with Alice Levine, a Boulder-based editor and trainer whose praises I’ve sung here before. In the translation industry, I think it’s not uncommon that translators who earn a client’s trust are often “promoted” into the role of a translation editor, although very few of us have extensive [...]
Posted in Links, Nubbin, Translation quality on May 6, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Here is an interesting post from the blog “Working Languages” about the EU’s shortage of qualified into-English interpreters. The EU blames the candidates’ poor English skills, characterized by overuse of the word “like,” while the blogger argues that a larger culprit is the lack of financial incentives for qualified interpreters.
Posted in Freelancing, Translation quality on April 21, 2008 | 2 Comments »
For better or for worse, the translation industry does not currently have a standard procedure or body for resolving disputes between translators and clients. So, clients who feel that a translator has delivered substandard work and translators who feel that they’ve been unfairly treated by clients do not have a standard avenue of recourse and [...]
Posted in Links, Nubbin, Translation quality on April 18, 2008 | No Comments »
Here is an interesting post from Nataly Kelly’s blog “From Our Lips to Your Ears,” about the real costs of using unqualified or incompetent interpreters.
Posted in Freelancing, Translation quality on April 16, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Test translations, whereby a potential client, often a translation company, asks a translator to complete an “audition” translation for free before beginning work with the client, are a frequent subject of controversy in the industry. Translators wonder if they should complete unpaid translations, if they should set a limit on the length of test translations, [...]
Posted in Links, Translation quality, Translation technique on April 7, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Thanks to reader Polly-Vous Français (whose blog is my substitute for a trip to Paris these days!) for sending the link to FranceTerme, the official French government site for French terminology and neologisms. Their slogan, “Vous pouvez le dire en français” (You can say it in French) gives you an idea of the theme; for [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Translation quality on April 4, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Recently, the Colorado Translators Association held a great workshop with local editor and editing instructor Alice Levine. This session was really enlightening in a number of ways; Alice is a lively and engaging presenter and she seemed to enjoy speaking to a group of fellow “word geeks,” and it also made me realize that translators [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Translation quality on April 1, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Many translators insist that talking to anyone (clients, potential clients, colleagues, beginning translators, etc.) is unnecessary and detracts from their true calling, which can only be fulfilled by spending at least 10 hours a day at the computer. While that’s somewhat of a joke, I think that many translators do feel that unlike interpreters, they [...]
