The GITS Blog

Last week, I launched my latest development project: The official site for the band Murasaki (紫). I was happy to take on this project, partly because Murasaki is something of a legend in the Japanese rock scene (and especially here in their home prefecture of Okinawa), and partly because it would be a good chance [...]

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, [...]

I've created a repository for my mailer module on bitbucket. Here's the project URL: http://bitbucket.org/ginstrom/mailer Apparently you can't open write access to everyone, so if you'd like write privileges, then please let me know your account name. About mailer mailer is a wrapper around the Python email and mimetypes libraries.

IJET-21 is under way, and this year it's being broadcast live! Link to broadcast feed Kudos to Mike Sekine and the others who made this possible. If you translate between Japanese and English, but didn't get a chance to go to IJET, then by all means check it out.

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 [...]