I'm a freshman in college, and I'd like to know what I should study in order to become a freelance translator.
Every once in a while, I see questions like this posed on mailing lists for translators. Sometimes people will find my blog and contact me directly with similar questions.
I think that freshman year of college [...]
As a freelance independent translator, I often have a hard time saying no to my clients. This is a pretty common problem with translators.
There are a lot of reasons why translators have trouble saying no to clients. One is that translators are generally on the introverted side. You kind of have to be introverted if [...]
I lot of translation agencies make unrealistic promises when it comes to translation memory. Here's one:
Cost savings
You will never again pay for previously translated sentences – irrespective of how many times these sentences reappear in different documents we translate for you.
To a customer, that probably sounds great. But let's think about this for a minute. [...]
The yndigo blog has an interesting post about "untranslatables" — when a word in one language has no good equivalent translation into another. One of the commenters also pointed out a German word that he believed couldn't be captured in English satisfactorily.
The idea that certain words simply can't be translated into another language seems to [...]
I'm a technical Japanese-to-English translator. "Fuzzy" stuff is OK once in a while, but I really prefer technical documents to translate. Technical documents have a precise meaning, so it's possible to translate them in a precise way. As long as I know the subject area, can understand the original, and can write authentically in the [...]
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, [...]
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