The GITS Blog

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 [...]

Non-translators often have wrong notions about what makes translation hard. They think the problem is in understanding all those funny squiggles, or if they're a bit more sophisticated, they think the hard part is knowing all those technical terms. They're wrong, of course. Firstly, you're not ready to start thinking about becoming a translator until [...]

About a year ago, I wrote about the differences in Website aesthetics between Japan and the West. I was recently translating the review of a redesigned mobile website, and found a similar aesthetic. The mobile site was for the Japanese subsidiary of a major European brand/fashion corporation. The company had changed the site from a [...]

Often when translating software documentation from Japanese to English, I'll have to find the exact corresponding English names for various OS and other software components. These are things that you can't just make up, because the user will be looking for that actual text on her computer. I recently discovered a site that makes this [...]

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 [...]