The GITS Blog

Pair programming is the practice of two programmers working collaboratively at one work station. One person types while the other watches and gives advice, with frequent switches. I've pair programmed before, and I've found that — perhaps counterintuitively — we actually got more work done than if we had worked alone, and the work was [...]

In most places around the world, the common wisdom is that you should translate into a native language. This isn't the case for Japan, where for a variety of economic and social reasons, the vast majority of Japanese to English translation is done by native writers of Japanese. Native writers of Japanese who translate into [...]

Some of the more unscrupulous translation agencies practice what I call the bait and switch. They use their more expensive translators on the first couple of jobs for a new client, and then switch to their cheaper translators after they've locked in a juicy contract. Of course, you always want to do the best possible [...]

All the cool kids these days are putting Ajax into their web applications. Ajax is great for when you want to update data on a page without reloading the entire page. Most of the Ajax tutorials use PHP, so I want to show here how easy it is to do Ajax with cherrpy. Ajax stands [...]

Commoditization is something that you want to avoid as a service provider. When your services become a commodity, they can be replaced by many other service providers. Then you end up competing almost solely on price. There are many ways that you can make your services stand out from the crowd so that they aren't [...]

Last week, I gave a talk at Naha Nishi High School about the translation profession, as well as language learning and some of my experiences in Japan. The talk was arranged through an educational company called Kids Corporation. Although my talk was in Japanese, the students emceed the presentation in both English and Japanese, and [...]

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 [...]

There's an excellent article on the official Google blog about how Google is improving the search engine's natural language understanding. Two of the big areas of improvement are using synonyms and similar words to expand search results, and automatic translation to find results in other languages. These are generally useful, because they get more results [...]

Here's a cool Flash game called "Verbatim" that tests your ability to read obscure kanji compounds and English words (I did best at that). After the time is up, it creates a mecha-robot for you. The more you got right, the cooler your robo.

Just a month after writing about how agencies should give translators direct access to their clients, an agency asked me to go with them to meet their client for a big new job. The back story The end client had been burned a couple of times by horrible translations. So they contracted with this new [...]