The GITS Blog

Starting next Monday (August 2), I'll be taking an eight-day, intensive simultaneous interpreting course at Okinawa Christian University. My friend and colleague David Ulvog is one of the instructors, and I think that I heard about the course from him. I'm not really interested in becoming an interpreter, simultaneous or otherwise, but the profession has [...]

I feel fortunate to be a freelance translator. It's allowed me to choose where and how I work. A couple of weeks ago, someone close to me died after a long fight with cancer. When we both lived in mainland Japan, we'd talk about moving to Okinawa, and living a more relaxed life. One day, [...]

My wife and son were walking the dogs when this little critter came running out of the sugar cane fields. Which is pretty unusual, since cats usually don't go running after strangers, especially when they're walking two dogs. Assuming it was a stray (a depressingly large number of people come to the cane fields to [...]

Via the Honyaku mailing list, I read an interesting article on localization from a developer's perspective. As both a translator and software developer, I'd like to comment on this article from a translator's perspective. The author (Wil Shipley) recommends that you only send string files to your translators to localize: To make our localizers’ jobs [...]

I've just released version 2.0 of Count Anything. Download the latest version here. This version adds support for Open Office files (Writer, Calc, and Impress), and features a newly designed front page. Support for Open Office Count Anything now supports Open Office document formats. You don't need to have Open Office installed to get word [...]

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."    – Mark Twain Often you'll hear relatively inexperienced translators complaining about the [...]

I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the leisure to make it shorter. —Blaise Pascal As with all writing, conciseness takes extra effort in translation. Although what you write is pretty much decided in translation, how you convey that information isn't, and interference from the source language tends [...]

At the end of July, I traveled with my family to the US for two weeks, mainly to visit relatives and old friends. By the time I got back last Wednesday, I was so tired from my vacation that I needed a few days to recover. I wonder how restorative a vacation can be when [...]

… you acknowledge that you owe me a hamburger by next Tuesday. If that sounds silly, why would this disclaimer in an email signature sound any less so? By receiving this email, you are acknowledging that it contains attachments or other information that is intended solely for the use of the named recipient or recipients.

Often, an English word will be adopted into the Japanese language, and then take on a life of its own. It comes to be used outside the original English meaning, but clients are resistant to using a different English word in the translation ("It's already English, you don't need to translate it."). One example is [...]