What is the difference between Machine Translation and Translation Memory? There seems to be some confusion about what, precisely, distinguishes Machine Translation from Translation Memory. This may be the result of the similarity of their acronyms in English - MT and...
Since 2009, Google has been the leading search engine in most countries in the world. This means that, on a global scale, whatever Google says about SEO goes. But the big exceptions to this rule are China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the Czech Republic, in which...
One of the most important aspects of internet marketing is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), the name given to techniques which increase a website's ranking in search engines. These techniques fall into two categories: 'white hat' and 'black hat' SEO. 'White hat' SEO...
There are a number of potential pitfalls involved in working with Translation Memory (TM). The first, most general, doubt people have about TM is that it seems to go against conventional wisdom about translation; surely, people say, translators should translate the...
There is a growing tendency in the translation industry to 'pool' Translation Memories (TMs). This is partly an aspect of a broader shift towards crowd sourcing in translation and partly a result of the philosophy of online translation engines like Google Translate,...
Last week, I quoted two authors' divergent perspectives on writing in a language which has been imposed on your culture by a colonising power. Following on from this, today I want to look at a few approaches to the politics of literary translation. Tejaswini...
We have a lot of trouble with food. A tortilla de patatas, for example, could be translated as Spanish omelette. But should we assume that English speakers know that what a tortilla is? Should you translate it as Spanish omelette even though (in the UK, at least) a...
By way of a trailer for an upcoming blog post on eBooks and translation, I wanted to share a couple of quotes I found in the course of researching it. The first is Borges: "De todos los instrumentos del hombre, el más asombroso es, sin duda, el libro. Los demás son...
I have just come across a thrillingly imaginative bit of etymological scholarship, and I wanted to summarise it briefly for the non-Spanish-speakers among my readership. I was interested in the peninsular Spanish expression '(echar) un polvo', which is broadly...
Here is a poem, or rather a song, which is written in five languages, with one verse each: Provençal, Italian, French, Gascon and Galician. The sixth verse is written in all these languages, in the same order, with two lines each. It is by the troubadour Raimbaut de...