Always beware of so-called small translations: they are the ones where the biggest mistakes occur. There are various reasons: you have bigger translations to do, deadlines to meet, they bring in more revenue in absolute terms and in relative terms (short translations take up a disproportionate amount of time), you have less context, and so…
Anyone can add new words or sentences to Google Translate by going to http://translate.google.com/community. Users must select at least two languages, one of which must be English “as most evaluations focus on quality to or from English”. So if you want to translate from Chinese to Spanish – both of which have more speakers than…
Professional translators can never be wholly satisfied with their work, because there is no such thing as a definitive translation. The criteria change with time, justifying new translations of classics, such as that by Oliver Ready, winner of the Inttranet™ Linguist of the Year 2015 Award for his version of Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”. Measure…
With the volume of information about people and companies available on the Internet, there is no reason not to carry out due diligence before entering into any commercial relationship, whether to hire or be hired. The difficulty lies in knowing where to find information that is a) reliable, b) relevant and c) professional. Facebook is…
Despite the dangers and risks involved in its use, machine translation is wreaking vast damage to the market for professional translators. (During the second half of 2014, SDL alone machine-translated over 91.4 billion words). How can we compete? Here is the first of a series of items in the strategy we have devised. No matter…
