“All my professional life, I have felt that translators are in the business of spinning an illusion – the illusion is that the reader is reading not a translation but the real thing.” Anthea Bell Among the great names of distinguished authors and linguists, the world has lost yet another great one. On the past […]
As a reflection on one of the very first cinematic explorations on the relationship between technology and mankind, the film Metropolis (considered to be one of the first science fiction films ever created) pondered the delicate balance between man and machine working together to achieve progress. Metropolis which was originally released in 1927 by German […]
Last week, as if by some sort of divine intervention, I had the privilege of visiting the private home of Xul Solar, one the most significant Argentine artists of our era. “I am a painter, a writer, not an inventor but a re-creator. Father to a panlingua who strives for perfection and which almost no one […]
In our last post on usability, we briefly touched on Machine Translation’s role in the matter and the tools that can be useful to achieve a desired final product. This time, we will focus more on the types of contents or contexts in which machine translation (MT) is more appropriate and effective standing fornent the […]
Some will say that the postmodern days of the machine translation (MT) era might have brought along a lot more options when it comes to fulfilling clients’ needs. Others would dare argue that these so-called options might be considered more of a vice than a blessing. We’ve pondered several times before about the main drivers […]
Last time we established that the translation industry is one of the most document-heavy industries around. So why should any of our companies consider going paperless? Well, for as long as we can remember, both clients and translators have been dealing with vast accumulations of paper, printing out numerous manuscripts, writing out billions of letters […]
Going Paperless… that would be the dream. Mother Earth would definitely be thankful for one. I mean, we’re all still literally wiping our butts with the Amazon rainforest on a daily basis, but that doesn’t mean we should also have to wipe our cracks on nature’s face with your source documents either, does it? Basically […]
So, to change our usual subject a bit, I’ve been asked to dedicate a few lines to my own personal experience dealing with complicated documents. Working for major medical, insurance and legal companies on a daily basis presents all sorts of different challenges, ranging from a huge variety of uncommon language pairs that require immediate […]
As we’ve established before, Machine Translation is a trend on the rise, threatening to swallow whole any translators who don’t seek to adapt to the times as “they’re a-changin’”. But what will happen when machines are able to do everything we do by themselves? Is it even possible? Do we really want them to get […]
We’ve debated many times in the past about the “natural” advantages Machine Translation might have over our fellow translators composed of mere “flesh and bone.” Their lives decaying and finite against the colossal golem that threatens to take over the entire industry, eventually rendering us humans obsolete. Will we become the outdated dusty VCRs of […]