Can anyone stop the ever growing Spanglish movement in the U.S.? After all, Spanglish is not a language but rather people who speak English and Spanish badly. The North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE, for its initials in Spanish) has taken on this challenge. Seen by some as the “language police”, the Academy [...]

It is commonly believed that any bilingual person can translate. However most fail at written translations. This is because such informal translation is oral, not written. For an informal translator, any translation which communicates the main idea of the message suffices. But in a professional translation, the original document must be understood thoroughly and accurately. [...]

Will the web ever be internationalized? Yes, the web as we know it will change forever by mid 2010. The net regulator ICANN will be introducing web addresses using non-Latin characters, which will allow the use of domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts. ICANN has said that this will be the “biggest change [...]

In a previous post, Justin had mentioned that there are language differences in countries where English is the official language (e.g. in England, the Unites States, Australia and Canada). There are also differences in countries where Spanish is natively spoken, for instance Spain, Latin America, and even Spanish speakers in the United States. Although a [...]

DTP is an acronym used to refer to Desktop Publishing. But what is Desktop Publishing? Its meaning has been redefined since it was first invented over 20 years ago (In 1985, PageMaker was developed for Macintosh computers, the first “desktop publishing” application). Desktop publishing in the 21st century refers to the way people use specific [...]

Certain processes require a certified translation, meaning that the translation must be accompanied with a notarized translation certificate of authenticity and accuracy. This may include an Apostille, a signed certificate from a sworn translator, or a host of other requirements. If you are having a document translated, it is extremely important that you know if [...]

There is no question that the Internet has brought people from around the globe closer (virtually) than ever before, but there are still quite a few barriers to be conquered when one is looking to market  software internationally. English is the unofficial “computer language” of the 21st century, but what if your menus and code [...]

Social networking giant Facebook has taken a somewhat novel approach to providing its service in other languages. It is employing crowdsourcing, or community-based design, to take popular phrases from the site (tag a photo, nudge a friend) and translate Facebook into more than 65 other languages. When the Facebook application first appeared, it only took [...]

Trados can be extraordinarily useful for translating and editing your documents, but using it can be a little daunting if you don’t have much experience with it. This video will help you get started. Source: Trados Video Tutorial

This video tutorial in Spanish will provide you with another Multiterm functionality– creating termbases with mdb, xdt and xml files. “> Source: Video sobre Cómo Importar MDB XDT XML en Multiterm

This is a brief tutorial on how to convert an Excel glossary so that you can use it with MultiTerm. Source: Video Tutorial on Importing Excel Glossaries into Multiterm

Multiterm is one of the most useful translation tools available, and this video will show you how to use it in Microsoft Word.

I found a few jokes for/about translators on a website. Maybe I’ve been at this job too long and they hit too close to home, but some of the jokes didn’t seem too funny to me. They reminded me of some hard times when I had just started out… But there were some others that [...]

People with little to no experience with a foreign language often assume that the process of translating is just replacing word A (source language) with word B (target language). This is how the most primitive machine translations functioned, subsequently butchering even the simplest of sentences: Original I am studying Spanish before I travel to Mexico. [...]

Regionalisms are words or phrases that give a language its local color. They are common in one area, while rare, out of place or non-existent in another area. Some English examples of these would be the “lieu vs. bathroom,” “lift vs. elevator,” “ankle biter vs. rug rat,” etc. Native speakers will be familiar with some [...]

This is a brief tutorial that will get you started on the basics of Trados. Source: How to Get Started with Trados

In this video tutorial you’ll learn how to process xml, xdt or mdb files to create a termbase in Multiterm (Spanish). Source: How to Import xml xdt mdb in Multiterm

Finally a use for machine translations! The site www.translationparty.com is a simple, yet oddly addictive way to kill some time. It uses Google Translator to perform an indefinite number of back translations, typically producing something nonsensical and quite different from the original phrase. It’s kind of like the Telephone game where kids tell a story [...]

As translators, we need our memories to operate at a certain level in order to remember vocabulary, rules, collocations, maxims, exceptions to rules, etc. A few things that can help us with our memories comes from a great website known as The Brain Power Pages (where you can also find tips on taking full advantage [...]

Do you ever get spam that makes absolutely no sense at all? Messages that say things like “summer slim-time muscle man science pill formulations”? Odds are that the original message was written in another language and then run through an online machine translator. Spammers worldwide have realized that they can peddle their garbage to anyone [...]