Spanish Translation Blog: Spanish Translation US January, 2009 - Spanish Translation Blog: Spanish Translation US
Home » January 2009

Archive for: January, 2009

Google Translate

January 29, 2009 4 Comments »

Those in the translation industry have long laughed at machine translation and its incorrect wording, awkward sentence choice, etc., so when Google Enterprise product manager Cyrus Mistry proclaimed that the new Google Translate would be “analogous to giving every employee in a business 34 translators sitting at their

Untranslatables

In 2004, a translation company surveyed linguists from all over the world to find out what the hardest words to translate. They took every language into account. The winner was ilunga (from a language spoken in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo: tshiluba o luba-kasai), and means ” a person capable

How to Become a Translator Part 4

The final step in this series is on the most crucial step for any aspiring translator- finding translation jobs. You basically have two options here, you work freelance or are on staff at a translation agency. In this post, we will go over some of the pros and cons of these two paths. Translation Agency […]

Bad Words (Part II)

It is common knowledge that language changes over time, and we can easily see that it is not immune to the effects of globalization. Nowadays, the use of swear words has become more standardized: on TV, in movies, in sports, etc. These are areas that reflect the way people actually talk. There are certain channels […

Bad Words (Part I)

In a piece known as “Bad Words,” Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano tells the story of a little girl who was running raucously through the house and tripped and fell. Instead of crying however, the little girl got mad: What’s this shit doing here? Her mother corrected her: No dear, people don’t say tha

How to Become a Translator Part 3

The act of translating has changed significantly over the past decade, with the personal computer having replaced the giant multilingual dictionary as the translator’s single indispensable item. If you are starting out as a freelance translator or interested in a career as a professional translator, there are a few th

How to Become a Translator Part 2

January 8, 2009 2 Comments »

So you’ve honed your writing skills, you’ve read libraries full of books in the source language and now you’re ready to start translating. You’ve already done millions of mental translations in your head, so it should be a breeze now, right? Almost. You will of course learn as you translate, but armi

What Does an Editor Do?

January 5, 2009 1 Comment »

According to the dictionary, an editor “edits or adapts a text”: he or she corrects it, improves it. This isn’t an attempt to “improve” the original, but rather an effort to improve the original translation so that it reads less like a translation and more like something originally written in t