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
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
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
Love languages? Looking for a stimulating career path or some freelance work on the side? Becoming a translator may be for you. Professional translation has been growing rapidly in the past decade, yet remains a mystery to many outside the field. What does it take to get started in the translation industry? What does a [&he
The objective of any company making a product or providing a service is of course selling that product or service. To do so, companies hire creative marketing specialists, sociologists and publicists; they perform tests, studies, statistical analyses, advertising campaigns and so on. An astronomical sum of money invested in
To avoid falling into the trap of a literal translation (an exceedingly strict adherence to the source text’s composition and grammatical structure), which is justifiable only in some isolated cases, we generally use a variety of methods. These are almost always done automatically, without knowing which approach we
“Just like a musician, an interpreter must have a keen ear for accents as well as a certain aptitude for languages,” states an article published this week in the Orlando Sentinel. The article is on the prosperous business of translations, which, according to the ATA spokesperson, is a 17 billion dollar-a-year in
Trusted Translations, the leading producer of Spanish translation services in the U.S., has set the goal of reducing paper consumption by 90% in the next two years. Using the Environmental Working Group’s Ten Elements for Improving Environmental Performance and Compliance, Trusted Translations will implement policies to o
Myth 1: Anyone bilingual person can be a good translator. This is probably the most common misconception. It is indeed necessary to know more than one language to be a translator, but to be a good translator, the most important requirement is being a good writer. A professional translator needs a mastery of words, plus [&he
We are constantly bombarded with advertisements promising us products for keeping our bodies looking young. But… What about our minds? Should we just assume that there’s no way to keep our minds getting old? Well, before you let this get you down, science has a bit of good news for bilingual people: it appears t
I always think about a professor from University who would insist– and rightly so– that it was imperative for us to check and recheck that we had correctly translated all the different figures correctly: prices, amounts, measurements, dates, etc. An incorrect sum or total in a contract, for example, could lead t
After hearing about the now infamous Obama/Osama slips (John Ashcroft, Mitt Romney, etc.), plus the thousands of intentional “jokes” (Rush Limbaugh, Liz Trotta) on an almost weekly basis, one would think that the election and campaign mix-ups and mistakes would have run out by now. But a translated letter sent o
Many people think that anyone who speaks a second language would make a good translator. It’s not enough however, for the translator to just be bilingual. He or she must be “bicultural” as well. Understanding their “second language’s” culture is a must for translators. A professor from Un
With so much often said about the infiltration of English into the Spanish language, one often forgets that borrowed words and loan words are a two-way street. United States English has its share of linguistic contributions from Spanish, words that come from Mexico, Cuba, Spain and beyond. The two most common classification
“Translations” The same thing always happened to him. When someone translated one of his poems into a foreign language (at least, a foreign language that he knew), his own verses sounded better than in the original. This is why it came as no surprise that he found the French version of his poem “Time and [
The general consensus about Spanish in the U.S. is that its use, in terms of the number of speakers and general “visibility” (mainstream media, advertising, etc.), is growing exponentially. And with record numbers of Spanish-speaking immigrants coming from South and Central America, it looks like this will conti
The United States has long prided itself on being a “melting pot” of different cultures and backgrounds and this becomes especially apparent amidst talk of the different voter demographics and the pledges made to different ethnic groups. Apart from the Spanish translations that I mentioned before on McCain and O
She is known by many names: Malinalli, Malintzin(Spanish transliterations of her original name– the tzin suffix was added to indicate hierarchy and nobility), “Doña Marina,” or most commonly, La Malinche. Malineli Tenepatl (c.1502 – c.1529), a Mexican girl born into the upper class, was presented to
Personally, one of the things about translating that gets under my skin is having to check over it once I’m done. I hate it. But after a few jobs where I wanted to bang my head against the wall because I hadn’t gone back over it and spotted my stupid mistake (but of course someone […]
With the U.S. presidential election around the corner, both John McCain and Barack Obama are fighting harder and harder for the Hispanic vote. McCain however, has been accused of trying to take advantage of the supposed Spanish-English language barrier to make contradictory claims to English and Spanish speaking voters. It