Guns and Overtranslation
on Jan 5, 2009 in Translation Theory Errors The English text used as a source language in an online translation recently concluded contains a word that may easily trip the unwary: "gun". Heathrow Airport is one of the few places in England you can be sure of seeing a gun. In the t

Happy Holidays!
on Dec 15, 2008 in Off topic I'll be traveling abroad for the holidays, and won't be carrying my computer with me, so this is probably my last post for the year. At the beginning of the year I said I would try to post more often: For this year I am resolved to post more of

A useful tool for Trados users
on Nov 26, 2008 in Trados Tools Tips and Tricks Many Trados users complain that it is impossible to use most Trados keyboard shortcuts when working on a laptop. Using the mouse to click on the toolbar icons feels awkward to people accustomed to touch type, and trying to activate the keyboard short...

Trados: beware of wrong links
on Nov 6, 2008 in Trados Translation Quality CAT I have complained in the past of various problems Trados has with fuzzy matches. A particularly insidious one is the way Trados treats Internet URIs and other links. For matching purposes, Trados processes URIs as if they were no different than any...

Editors
on Oct 24, 2008 in Errors Editing A good editor is an essential part of a translation team, but working with a bad one may be a nightmare. A good editor must be a good translator, but sometimes a good translator is not a good editor: a good translator who has too high an opinion of h...

"The sorrow with any translation"
on Oct 14, 2008 in Literary Translation A couple of interesting quotes from a recent, excellent article (from "The Australian") on new translations of Virgil: "The sorrow with any translation is that you're never really quite there, [but] you may be someplace a

Writing in a foreign language
on Oct 1, 2008 in Words As translators, we are not supposed to work into our second language, only from it. However, we have to write in a foreign language when we live and work in a foreign country: We need to be able to write it well to correspond with our customers and c...