Corporate communications materials are some of the most difficult and most business-critical documents out there when it comes to translation. The company culture, the target audience, the spin that the company wants to put on its news, the most-used grammatical structures of the source and target … [Read more...] about Link: Tips for translating corporate communications
Translation quality
Paper dictionary to the rescue
Web-based terminology databases are a wonderful thing for translators. As compared to the research tools of times gone by, we now have access to resources that are vast, free, and easily updated when new terms arrive on the scene. A few of my favorites are: Le Grand Dictionnaire … [Read more...] about Paper dictionary to the rescue
How to do an acceptable job on a rush job
First, note that the title of this post is not "How to do a good job on a rush job," because often the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Realistically, no translator does her/his best work under extreme time pressure, but the nature of the industry is such that deadlines are often tight. So, when … [Read more...] about How to do an acceptable job on a rush job
Some thoughts on translation specializations
One of the issues with which beginning translators most frequently struggle is specializing: what to specialize in, how to decide what to specialize in, what the most/least requested specializations are, how important it is to specialize, etc. While there aren't too many hard and fast rules when it … [Read more...] about Some thoughts on translation specializations
Update on tags in OmegaT
A while ago, I wrote about both my love of the free and open source translation environment tool OmegaT and my frustration with tags in OmegaT. Since then, I've found that the easiest solution, as long as the document doesn't contain complex formatting, is to save the document as plain text, then … [Read more...] about Update on tags in OmegaT