The GITS Blog

Masked Translator has a good post on how to avoid getting stiffed by clients.
I may just be lucky, but I've never been stiffed on a job. The closest I've come is when a company tried to get me to lower my invoice after the work was delivered (I agreed but never worked for them again [...]

The scenario: I'm packaging a CherryPy server with py2exe, using Mako as my template engine. So I create my exe file, and fire up the app, and get this 500 Mako error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "cherrypy\_cprequest.pyo", line 551, in respond
  File "cherrypy\_cpdispatch.pyo", line 24, in __call__
  File "main.py", line 210, in index
  File "mako\lookup.pyo", line 70, in [...]

A google for "lecture meeting" turns up over 57,000 hits, nearly all of them from Japanese sites. As far as I checked, the few that aren't from Japanese sites are in different context, such as Lecture: Meeting Global Commitments on Oceans.
"Lecture meeting" is almost always a "translation" for the Japanese 講演会 (kouenkai), which means seminar/workshop/talk [...]

Richard Feynmann popularized the term "cargo cult" outside of anthropology. The concept was later picked up in the field of programming:
A piece of code works. I don’t really understand how it works or what it’s doing. But if I copy it over here, tweak the edges and poke it a few times, I’m pretty sure [...]

The yndigo blog asks whether translation is an art or a science. I say it's neither: it's a craft. But this has been discussed before.
yndigo also asks,

To what extent can these choices be measured as objectively better or worse? How much constraint or freedom does the translator have? What types of source documents (law, patents, [...]

I recently blogged about doing unpaid trial translations, and an agency recently contacted me about doing one. The trial was for a job they were bidding on. It was a fairly technical document dealing with software engineering, something that's squarely in my field of expertise. I'd be happy to do this job if it came [...]