The GITS Blog

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

A couple of days ago, I did a translation of an equipment manual. The client had helpfully supplied a glossary with the English translations of the various parts of the equipment. One of them caught my eye: Erection status monitor I suggested to the client that they change that one to something a bit less, [...]

I lost a really great potential job today due to a series of misunderstandings. A couple of days ago, another translator gave me a referral to an attorney, who was looking for an IT translator. The attorney sent me several files, and asked for an estimate, CCing his client. The client then emailed me and [...]

A recent discussion on the Honyaku mailing list about low rates, and the clients who offer them and the translators who accept them, had me asking myself: should we care how much other translators charge? I generally have no problem with what other translators want to charge, and wouldn't take kindly to other translators trying [...]