A few months ago I wrote about Maya Hess and her big “Red T” education effort. Maya has set up a page on Facebook. “The Red T raises awareness of the plight of translators and interpreters working in conflict zones, detention camps, and prisons,” she says.
Maya believes that the profession is under siege, and “its practitioners face extreme distrust.” Her advocacy is driven by years of interpretation for national security and law enforcement.
“In Iraq, while interpreting between troops and local populations, interpreters wear face masks to avoid being recognized, denounced as traitors, tortured, or killed when they return to their communities. In Afghanistan, letters are slid under translators’ doors threatening the execution of their families. In the United States, linguists for alleged and convicted terrorists have been accused/convicted of aiding [...]

A language goes extinct every twenty-two minutes. Maybe. It might be less frequent; in fact, they probably don’t go extinct but once a week or something. But once every twenty-two minutes is a much better meme. You watch. It will get around.
Whatever the rate at which languages are going extinct, when you take a language offline, a lot goes with it. Like the sum of all human knowledge. A whole way of thinking, of viewing, of knowing, lost forever, a little universe collapsing past the event horizon.  Forgotten. Or if preserved, shadows of meaning on word lists and reels of tape, unused, unfelt, unknown, lost to the hearts of man.
“Efforts to stanch extinctions of linguistic, cultural, and biological life have yielded a ‘biocultural’ perspective that integrates the three,” blog Maywa Montenegro and Terry [...]

My recent post on the Russian language got me thinking about the familiar vs. the formal as used in Russian and most languages in Europe―except for English, which is now strictly formal. We ditched the familiar pronouns of thee and thou long ago.  Here’s a list with guide to usage.
When the familiar and formal levels of speech are used in other languages, contemporary English speakers just don’t get the joke. So the recent stir in the Russian press over the tone Putin takes with Medvedev just doesn’t translate for us.
Three hundred years ago, Englishmen used “thee” and “thou” when making familiar with friends and family, but whenever the use of “thou” might have risked offense, “you” was the safe pronoun.  Eventually “thee” and “thou” seemed so 14th Century that everyone started to [...]

Tak Fujii made his name on the Internet last month with an incomprehensibly bad English-language presentation at Konami’s E3 press conference.

Tak is a manager and producer in Konami, and has previously worked as an audio director and specialized in localizing games in different languages. One of us. Not sure if I’ve even met him or not.
This is a follow-up on my post about how growing global English fluency means that interpreters are no longer required by many of my clients.
Right now, because we are working on presentation issues for one such client, Tak’s career-making moment struck a chord when I watched it on Wimp a few days ago. Plus, it seemed like another chance for Translation Guy to pig-pile on an internet meme gone viral for my own selfish promotional interests.
So, for the [...]

Translation: IBM has announced the creation of an open-source project around its Translation Manager/2 (TM/2) software and named it OpenTM2. The project’s aim is to promote open standards like Translation Memory eXchange (TMX) in the translation and localization industry, and to develop an open source translation platform based on such standards. To achieve this, IBM is cooperating with the Localisation Industry Standards Association (LISA), which oversees TMX spec development.
A reference implementation of a fully open translation environment is available to integrate the OpenTM2 CAT system with the free Joomla CMS and the equally free GlobalSight translation management system by Welocalize. OpenTM2 for Windows is released and available to download free of charge.
Don DePalma in Global Watchtower said that translator preferences include translation memories unattached to competitors’ apron strings, so this one [...]

Are you a CTP? That’s “Certified Translation Professional” to industry insiders. And I guess you’ve got to be pretty inside, because I just heard about it while trolling for blog fodder on this lazy Friday afternoon.
“The Certified Translation Professional (CTP) Program is a 100% online based translator training and certification program which can be completed in 3-5 months.
“Being certified can give you credibility when approaching new clients or applying for new projects. The CTP is now the #1 most popular and respected online translation certification program in the industry.”
Right. Reminds me of when I first came to NYC during the last “not so great” recession in 1980. Spent months looking for work, wore out a lot of shoe leather, and polished a lot of doorknobs, as the Germans say. But hell, [...]