The GITS Blog

Faxes used to be an essential tool for translators, but they seem to be going the way of the dodo these days. Back when faxes were on thermal paper and I got most of my translation documents via fax, having a fax-to-email service was a godsend. It was quicker and cheaper, the faxes were easier [...]

Photo by Steve Wampler A lot of translators charge lower rates than they could otherwise get, especially when they're starting out. There are a few possible reasons for this; here are a couple. Lack of knowledge about the market Desire to get more work Desire to avoid haggling Lack of confidence Lack of knowledge about [...]

The About Translation blog has a great post about choosing the right translation for a given term. The sentence in question was: Heathrow Airport is one of the few places in England you can be sure of seeing a gun. The question revolved around the word "gun," which can be translated various ways in Italian, [...]

Living in a sleepy Okinawan town, and dealing with clients 1,000 miles or more away, it's hard for me to get a gut-level sense of what this recession will mean for my Japanese-to-English translation business, and for the J2E translation industry as a whole. So far, I haven't felt any ill effects from the recession. [...]

This month I've been getting ready to make the trip to IJET-20 in Sydney, Australia. I booked my flight to Australia online via Jetstar. Using amazing high-tech IP-geolocation techniques, Jetstar figured out that I was in Japan and decided to treat me to its Japanese-language site. Fair enough; but if you're going to foist off [...]

There's a trade-off between rates and quality. Although rates don't guarantee quality, you generally get what you pay for; higher rates get you better quality, and lower rates worse. Over on the Honyaku mailing list, Matt Stanton has a rather unique take on this topic: he believes in providing the entire spectrum himself. Then all [...]

One question that often comes up among freelance translators is whether we should give volume discounts. I'm not against giving them in principle, but I think that we need to weigh the pros and cons of doing so. Crossed purposes Often agencies will ask for rather large volume discounts — larger than translators are willing [...]

In the comments to this post by Thoughts on Translation, several translators said that they use 2,000 words per day as a benchmark (or rule) for daily output. In an article about how much to charge for translation, I estimated that translators probably produce around 2,400 words per day on average, and Masked Translator agreed [...]

I'm a professional Japanese-to-English translator, but I didn't start learning Japanese until I was 22. There's a somewhat controversial hypothesis in linguistics called the critical period, which when extended to second-language acquisition, states that after a certain age people find it difficult to impossible to learn a second language with native-like fluency. The cutoff age [...]

As a translator, machine translation is something I always want to keep an eye on. As a dropout from a PhD in computational linguistics, I also find it a fascinating topic. In this post, I want to discuss the past, present and future of machine translation, with a bit of a focus on its implications [...]