Bernie Bierman has an article in the latest issue of the Translation Journal.
In it he claims, among other things, that translation is becoming a profession for "housewives" (yes, he actually writes this), and that an annual income of $70,000 is practically poverty level in the United States.
Let's look at these claims, starting with the most […]
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 […]
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 […]
I think my first post to this blog was a (partially) fictionalized account of clueless clients and their "incorrections" to perfectly good translations.
Over on the Honyaku mailing list, Tom Donahue wrote about how he deals with client revisions.
Another private client was a company that published a quarterly magazine. Quite of few of the middle management […]
I'm translating the revision of a document. This is the third time I've done this particular document, including the original.
This year, the manuscript to be translated came from the client together with the "final publication" version that they printed last year. I see that an intrepid window sitter has taken the trouble to correct my […]
The Translation Journal blog has a post about doing unpaid translation trials. One question raised there, and heard rather frequently among translators, is whether some unscrupulous companies are piecing together free trials and delivering them to clients.
I'm pretty much with About Translation here: such practices are mostly an urban legend. That said, I have witnessed […]
Masked Translator advises new translators to stay away from translators' organizations and conferences at first (he specifically mentions the ATA).
I've never been a member of the ATA or been to an ATA conference, but I joined JAT shortly after going freelance as a translator, and scraped together a few hundred dollars to attend my first […]
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