Tips for interpreters What is interpretation? In a nut shell, interpretation is “oral translation”. That is, an interpreter is responsible for transferring someone’s oral discourse into an equivalent discourse in a different language. By definition, translators are interpreters -although a good interpreter, besides ha
I’m always looking for glossaries, dictionaries and other resources that can help working professionals. Thanks to a Venezuelan colleague, in her blog La Traducción al descubierto, I discovered Invertext.com -a dictionary that covers different business areas. It has around 100 terms in English and Spanish with defini
The Royal Spanish Academy and the Association of Spanish Language Academies present a New Grammar for Spanish Language. This is the first time the academy produces a grammar book since 1931.The two volumes, and a third one being published soon, is a result of eleven year of work from the twenty-two academies of Spanish Lang
As I promised here’s the last part of the glossary of Neutral Spanish terms, which I shared with you in previous posts. quitar (take off, take out) rabo (tail) rasurar (shave) refresco (soda,”coke”) refrigerador (fridge) renta (rent) retrete, excusado (toilet) rosquillas (donuts) sabroso (tasty, yummy) sala (liv
This the third part of the glossary (just one more left) is a continuation of the previous posts 1 and 2. Below are words from letter F to P. falda (skirt) fontanero (plumber) fregadero (sink; kitchen) fresa (strawberry) frijol (bean) gafas, lentes (glasses) galleta (cracker, cookie) gaveta (drawer) golpiza (beating, th
Spanish is the second most-common language in the United States. There are 45 million Hispanics who speak Spanish in the United States, making it the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking community. German, Italian, Polish, Russian and Greek are also spoken among older generations of immigrants. Also spoken are Tag
This is part 2 from the previous post. Included here are terms in Neutral Spanish from letters C to E. I’d like to remind you that this list is specifically for subtitling and voice over; there may be different options. Feel free to leave your comments or suggestions to add to the list. cabello (hair) […]
Here an additional note on Neutral Spanish. I’d like to share with you the first part of a list of neutral terms (not exclusive), complied for the use of the movie industry, mainly for subtitling and voice over. As I mentioned in a previous article, these terms are only a standardized version, that is, the […]
Remember the Telephone Game? Most of you probably remember it from childhood. You would whisper a short sentence into someone’s ear and so on until it went full circle. When the message reached the last person it was totally different from the original and it had everyone laughing out loud. You’re probably thinking, “
To wrap up my previous post, I’d like to make a brief comment on this subject. A translation targeted towards different Spanish speaking regions or countries should be translated into “Neutral Spanish”. As I mentioned before, it’s very important that the client be aware of this. What we’re talking about is a stand
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 Aca
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 doc
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 i
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
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 yo
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 applicati
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
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 Spa