Sep 1st, 2010 | Translation | 1 Comment
Sometimes lucid, at other times obscure, there is always something new in the river of translation. BY STEVE VITEK
You can never step into the same river twice, for new waters are always flowing on to you, it is not the same river and you are not the same person.
—Heraclitus
I have been translating patents from Japanese, German, French and other languages into English for more than 22 years now. Before I start working, I usually download a legible copy of the original document from the European Patent Office (EPO) or Japan Patent Office (JPO) website. I usually first go to the EPO website because it lists a “family” of documents. This is very useful because many patents published in foreign languages may have been already filed in English in Europe, North America or Australia. A “Japanese patent” filed by IBM is in fact a Japanese translation of a US patent that was originally published in English, and a “French” patent may have been already translated into English at some point and filed, often in a modified version, in US or Europe, etc. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2010 | Machine Translation, Translation | 1 Comment
Machine Translation: Part 1 of 5 – Dr. Raymond Flournoy, Adobe.
Find the remaining 4 parts of that NCTA Presentation Series at Vimeo.com.
“Hybrid” is the way to go in machine translation systems. BY BARBARA GUGGEMOS
At the NCTA’s general meeting on May 1, a packed room heard three perspectives on current uses of machine translation (MT) and the role of professional translators in this rapidly evolving field. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2010 | NCTA Events | No Comments
BY JAVIER H. MORENO-POLLAROLO
Translators had the perfect excuse to get out of the house on Sunday, June 13, and enjoy a wonderful, sunny, and slightly windy day at our annual NCTA Picnic at beautiful Paradise Beach Park in Tiburon! The park, located in the Bay Area’s beautiful Marin County, was an outstanding background for all the translators and their families to gather under the sun and enjoy delicious grilled and barbecued meat, along with other healthy food. What a great way to start the first summer of a new decade! What a beautiful, enjoyable Sunday, after several weeks of gloom and rain! We all know it was a miserable, cold, and wet winter, and most of us were stuck in our offices, so I personally enjoyed getting out on a Sunday and joining people who do the same kind of professional work. It was like a corporate day out for freelancers. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2010 | Business, Continuing Ed. | No Comments
Linguists receive valuable tips on how to run their business. BY SARAH LLEWELLYN
Linguist and author Judy Jenner, who runs Twin Translations in Las Vegas, presented a half-day workshop in downtown San Francisco on April 10 to share some of the lessons she learned in business school and explain how they could be applied to the field of freelance translation and interpreting. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2010 | Continuing Ed., Interpretation | No Comments
Ines Swaney demonstrates improvisation techniques.
BY NORMA KAMINSKY
Allow me to introduce myself. You may have seen my name occasionally in this publication or in connection with NCTA Continuing Education, but, on May 8th at the behest of Ines Swaney, in her “Improvisation Techniques for Language Professionals” workshop, I proudly renamed myself No-Nonsense Norma. As participants we had to introduce ourselves by matching our names with adjectives that began with the same letter as our names and that revealed something about each of us. Thus, we met Sunny Sarah, Romantic Rebecca, and Exuberant Emilia. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2010 | Spanish, Translation | No Comments
Standardizing terminology within a company is a difficult task, the more so because Spanish has 20+ varieties. BY MARIO CHÁVEZ
A quick definition of terminology is the creation, organization, and classification of terms. A glossary is just a list of specialized terms. Monolingual glossaries were the ancestors of our modern dictionaries.1 Translators have been using lists of terms since the beginning of our profession, aided now by increasingly—and sometimes maddeningly—complex terminology software, one example of which, MultiTerm, they’re quite familiar with. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2010 | Education, Reports, Translation | No Comments
International Technical Translation Conference stimulating for specialized scientific translators. BY KAREN TKACZYK
Thirty-six nationalities were represented by the 200 translators present at this two-day conference held in Lisbon on 28-29 May 2010. That alone made it a stimulating environment for any member of the T&I community, even before we consider the technical sessions. English was the language of almost all of the sessions, but there was great linguistic diversity in the hallways and meeting areas. Apart from regional European attendees, there were people from most of the Portuguese speaking countries, many English dialects from both southern and northern hemispheres, and there was a delegation from China. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2010 | Business Tools | No Comments
BY JOST ZETZSCHE
Another Office? Should We Care?
To give you just a first impression (those of you who have seen the new version will agree with this): Office 2010 in relation to Office 2007 is like Windows 7 is to Windows Vista. You see, Windows Vista was really quite good, but possibly not quite ready for show time. Quite a few aspects were a bit half-baked. You could see the good intentions behind many of the features, but they were either too hard to use and/or tedious or simply did not work quite right. Most of that was fixed in Windows 7, which turned out to be a stable and very workable operating system. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2010 | Business Tools | No Comments
The alphabet soup of the upcoming Office for Mac.
BY YVES AVÉROUS
Fall is always a good time to sharpen our pencils before tackling the new season. As dire as the technology prospects were for us, translators on Macs last year, I think there may be a ray of hope on our tool landscape. All this in part thanks to… Microsoft?! And Wordfast, and Parallels, and, of course, Apple, itself.
Why Microsoft? First, because now, with more ways to use Windows 7 on your Mac than I can describe here, thanks to the speedy Parallels 5, you can run Windows app seamlessly, mingling in-between you Mac apps. With names like Crystal and Coherence, you’ll find one that suits you… I particularly like Coherence, which allows you to control your virtual machine from the Mac’s Dock and menu bar. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2010 | Literary Translation | No Comments
Acclaimed translator of Russian literature gives practical tips and guidelines for producing a good literary translation. BY CHRISTY RODGERS
NCTA and the Center for the Art of Translation held a joint workshop at the Mechanics’ Institute Library in San Francisco on Saturday, March 20th: “Literary Translation: an introduction for the novice and new ideas for the experienced translator.” The workshop was conducted by Marian Schwartz, an acclaimed translator of Russian literature, who also has an extensive background as an editor. → continue reading
May 1st, 2010 | British English, Essays, Translation | 7 Comments
Defending English Against “Passive” Translation1… How has it become acceptable for English to be treated as if it had no country or history? BY WENDELL RICKETTS
Let me begin with a simple statement, one guaranteed to have any group of translators howling at each other within minutes: translators can be defined as professional (by which I mean, among other things, that they are entitled to charge money for what they do) solely and exclusively if they work from their second (or other) language into their native one.
In case that doesn’t ignite a row, I’ll add a corollary: translating into one’s dominant language is not a sufficient condition for holding oneself out as a professional, but it is a necessary one. It is, to break into a language that is not my native tongue, the sine qua non of professional translation. Without it, there is nothing. → continue reading
