The GITS Blog

Translation agencies tend to bear the brunt of translator complaints, but there are some great agencies out there that truly "get it." I want to list 5 things that agencies can do to win the loyalty and commitment of their translators.
1. Offer to raise rates without being asked
Of course, everybody likes to make more money, [...]

The Durf.org blog asks how long until we get artificial brains capable of replacing human translators, if ever:
On the other hand, though, if the scientists ever crack this mystery wide open (perhaps by giving up on computers with nothing but 0s and 1s to deal with and creating new machines that function more like a [...]

I recently implemented IDocHostUIHandler in one of my WTL projects hosting the web browser. You need to implement this interface if you want to do things like control the context menu of the web browser.
I had to go spelunking in various forums and documentation to piece together how to do this, and I never found [...]

In an auction, buyers compete to offer the highest buying price; in a reverse auction, sellers compete to offer the lowest selling price.
Reverse auctions are one of the ways that big corporations cut their expenses down to the bone. They know that everybody wants a "big" client, and they take advantage of this fact ruthlessly.
A [...]

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 [...]

Culturally bound size references are a bane of translators. For example, Japanese authors used to be very fond of giving land area references in terms of "Tokyo Domes." As in, "An area of forest equivalent to 112 Tokyo Domes is lost every year."
The English-speaking reader is liable to look at such a translation and think, [...]

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 [...]

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 easier, what [...]

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 counts of OO documents.
New [...]