Author Archives: translatorpower

Originally posted on Patenttranslator's Blog:
“Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.” Woody Allen https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=27&v=0bjB-IWEYI0 According to a survey of rates paid to translators in Belgium published in an article in Slator on October 24, 2014:“The…

Originally posted on Patenttranslator's Blog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5QgTzCQyMU We lost because we told ourselves we lost. Leo Tolstoy  “You cannot focus on direct clients only. This is a utipia [sic]. Direct clients pay more, but are a one-time client or one…

Originally posted on Patenttranslator's Blog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=13&v=vK3xgCmpXdk “What translators are saying is that machine translation should be forbidden and only human translations should be allowed,” said a commenter on a Facebook group of translators recently. It should be noted that…

Originally posted on Patenttranslator's Blog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szU49_rlRQY As I wrote in my previous post, it was about 15 years ago when I realized for the first time that major and possibly irreversible changes were taking place in the translation business…

Originally posted on Patenttranslator's Blog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAOmC5qT02w One of the biggest problems with the “translation industry” is the astonishing ignorance of the people who run the “industry” and work in it. A few years ago, I was contacted by a…

Originally posted on Patenttranslator's Blog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrvkHAxnjzI Is Trados at least co-responsible for the wage theft known in the translation industry lingo as “full and fuzzy matches” and the resulting reduction of at least 30% in the rates being now…

Originally posted on Patenttranslator's Blog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-qHtYfktiQ The consequences of a nuclear war are difficult to predict. Difficult, but not completely impossible to prepare for and anticipate. In fact, the world has been preparing for nuclear Armageddon for about 70…

Originally posted on Translation Wordshop:
Getting your own business website is a huge milestone. I loved the excitement of the the design phase, creating the content, and finally seeing it out there “live” on the internet. Of course I’d heard…

Originally posted on Patenttranslator's Blog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-P2qL3qkzk This is a question I often see asked on social media, usually but not always by beginning translators or those who are relatively new to the profession. I of course don’t have an…

Originally posted on Patenttranslator's Blog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY2yjAdbvdQ “Globalization”, “Globalizierung”, “globalizace”, “mondalization” – I hear or read this word in various languages whenever I watch news or read a newspaper online. Globalization has had a major impact on our world: it…

Originally posted on The Professional Interpreter:
Dear Colleagues: We have been under constant and merciless attacks from the big multinational language “industry” corporations for several years. These uninvited guests at the professional language services table have stubbornly fought to take…

Originally posted on Patenttranslator's Blog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcrbM1l_BoI I made an interesting discovery recently when I was translating a fairly long Japanese utility model into English. Usually, when I am translating the text of Japanese patent applications, I automatically download a…

Originally posted on Patenttranslator's Blog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehu3wy4WkHs At least as far as some translators are concerned, it’s definitely an ugly word. They say it with the same kind of disdain that most right-wing ideologues in the United States reserve for…

Originally posted on The Professional Interpreter:
Dear Colleagues: On the first part of this entry we discussed the role that professional associations should play on the face of antitrust legislation and its adverse effect on our profession.  Today we will…

Originally posted on The Professional Interpreter:
Dear Colleagues: Every now and then something happens in our profession that makes me wonder if we are truly doing what is best for all of us: individually and collectively as interpreters and translators. …

Originally posted on Carol's Adventures in Translation:
Welcome back to our wonderful and inspiring Greatest Women in Translation series! Our last interviewee, Muriel Vasconcellos, decided to write a tribute to her role model, Deanna Hammond, whose life was cut…

Originally posted on Patenttranslator's Blog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynGcAyEZkX4 In one of my silly posts in which I was complaining about how sick and tired I am of being surrounded by marketing everywhere I go and everywhere I look, I said that…

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,700 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it … Continue reading →