The GITS Blog

I just put up a short story I wrote:
Intellectual Property – A Short Story
I didn't think that it fit the blog format very well, so I put it on its own page.
The story is about an imagined near-future of accelerating technological progress, and what it might mean for translators and IP. Can we say "niche [...]

One of my New Year's resolutions this year was to create a Japanese-language website. I waited until November, but I managed to get one up by year's end.
Here it is:
BetterTechEnglish.com
My goal for the site is to give pointers on technical-English writing to Japanese native speakers, while creating a presence that will help me attract Japanese [...]

One problem with using netbooks for real work is the lack of screen real estate. Kohjinsha may have helped to solve this: it's demoing a new "dual-screen" netbook (hat tip: gizmodo).

The new Kohjinsha netbook features two 10-inch screens, which can be pulled out side by side. This seems like a good solution for translators [...]

The other day, I wrote about when translators should leave information in the original out of their translations.
Today, I want to write about the opposite case: when you should add information not included in the original.
This often happens when the grammar of the target language requires certain information to be explicit that's optional in the [...]

Machine translation has always reminded me of the zombies in Dawn of the Living Dead: really scary looking, and if one catches you then you know it'll eat your brains, but the thing moves slower than my grandpa without his walker. There's no way it'll ever catch up to us.
If you're a science fiction fan, [...]

I believe that the translator's job is to recreate the effect of the original in the target language, rather than just "translate the words." In some cases, accurately producing the effect of the original means leaving things out.
Glosses for abbreviations
One example is glosses that explain abbreviations that are common in the English speaking world, [...]

What if the Japanese-to-English translation industry were the rocket-science industry? What if instead of clients with dubious English skills "incorrecting" your translations on the authority of high-school English textbooks and long-retired sempai, they used hoary old physics textbooks to correct your equations?
I think it might be something like this.
Acme Rocket Industries: Hi, Joe. Have you [...]

A couple of days ago, I got an email from one of the translation agencies I work for, addressed to all their freelancers. The email warned translators not to use Google Translator Toolkit (GTT) for any work done for that agency.
The reason they gave was confidentiality: they said that even if you don't save your [...]

Last Friday morning, I woke up with a bad cold. All I wanted to do was lie in bed and be miserable, but I had a deadline; so I had to drag myself out of bed, translate a few paragraphs, go lie down again, and go back and translate a little more.
By this process, I [...]

On Monday morning, I got a call from a client. "How's the translation coming?" she asked.
"Fine," I replied. "I'll be sending you the translation a few hours early."
"Really?" she asked. "Even that second set of files I sent you?"
At this point I began to feel the symptoms of panic setting in. "What files?" I asked.
"The [...]