“Blazing a Trail to Business Success” was the title of the American Translators Association, Translation Company Division conference last week in Phoenix. Made me think of a pack of grubby woodsmen running through a darkened forest, swinging axes and defacing trees, which is a nice way to visualize your competition.
Actually, I found them to be a pretty nice bunch (especially after I had a few drinks), and it was great to see old friends, make new ones, and compare notes on the trade. As we hurtle towards the Translation Singularity, I’m going to start going more frequently to these meetings to keep my fingers on the fading pulse of translation as we know it. I was amazed by some of the stuff people in the industry are doing and thinking.
I had [...]

Machine translation technology is available for free on the Internet.
Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft all provide free translation of any text using their computer-based translation technology.
Google has announced that documents stored in Google Docs can now be translated and shared with others. Microsoft also announced that you can integrate its translation technology into Office 2007 to translate entire documents.
We used to offer free translation at 1-800-Translate but stopped years ago. I’m thinking of starting again. With all these new solutions available, I’m sure people are using it differently than they used to. I’m trying to figure out how. Tell me what you are looking for and I’ll see if I can come up with the machine translation field of your dreams.
How do you use MT? What do you want to use [...]

Jerry Birenz, top lawyer for Conde Nast, issued the dictate: “Management has decided that the September issue of U.S. GQ magazine containing Scott Anderson’s article ‘Vladimir Putin’s Dark Rise to Power’ should not be distributed in Russia.”
Reported on NPR Friday, Journalist Scott Anderson, found his story spiked on digital and international editions. GQ’s corporate owners went to extraordinary lengths to try to ensure no Russians will ever see it.
So of course, the story is all over the internet. If Conde Nast thought they could keep it under wraps in the face of internet bloggers and tweeters, they must have been pretty dumb. Yeah, dumb like a fox. Birenz has figured out a way for Conde Nast to have its cake and eat it too, and serve themselves a second helping. [...]

Jerry Birenz, top lawyer for Conde Nast, issued the dictate: “Management has decided that the September issue of U.S. GQ magazine containing Scott Anderson’s article ‘Vladimir Putin’s Dark Rise to Power’ should not be distributed in Russia.”
Reported on NPR Friday, Journalist Scott Anderson, found his story spiked on digital and international editions. GQ’s corporate owners went to extraordinary lengths to try to ensure no Russians will ever see it.
So of course, the story is all over the internet. If Conde Nast thought they could keep it under wraps in the face of internet bloggers and tweeters, they must have been pretty dumb. Yeah, dumb like a fox. Birenz has figured out a way for Conde Nast to have its cake and eat it too, and serve themselves a second helping. [...]

Question: Why is it that someone in my line of business, with a blog bearing the name it bears, doesn’t actually do any translating?
Answer: Why, sir, I wear that incongruity and low level shame as a badge of honor.
But sometimes I help. I was very proud to save a translation project the other day, despite my inability to speak Japanese much beyond ordering a beer or finding my way to the rest room. (I learned early on not to ask “Where,” but to ask “Which way…” (a pointed finger is usually the best linguistic clue one could ask for.) They don’t call it body language for nothing.
Okay, so in my house, I’m the one who speaks the worst Japanese. And my fourteen-year-old daughter, who loves to correct my Japanese [...]

I promised that I would try to make this blog interesting. In that spirit, it’s only right to begin by quoting obscure translation poetry. Actually, I guess it’s not too obscure, since it appears to appear in a zillion postings on the Web (just did a Google search). So let’s call it an old chestnut instead. (On the matter of chestnuts, I promise no mention of St. Jerome, the patron saint of translators, on these pages ― but that’s just a promise, so stay tuned.) And there’s that “No Va” story about translation screw-ups, too.
Anyway, Nabokov on Translating Eugene Onegin:
What is translation? On a platter
A poet’s pale and glaring head,
A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
The parasites you were so hard on
Are pardoned if I have your [...]