For those of us who began translating before the advent of Google, and primarily those who usually translate from English into Spanish, the arrival of the Silicon Valley giant has created a host of resources that never cease to amaze both professionals and clients alike. I won’t get into the most well-known resources, but rather, […]
In Chasing Amy, by U.S. filmmaker Kevin Smith, the lead character in the film makes an unexpected switch in her relationship preferences and decides to tell her friends, all of whom are lesbians, that she is going out with “someone.” Her friends, without missing a beat, start to interrogate the character named Alyssa, played by […]
In a previous post we mentioned the ambiguity of or in day-to-day speech. There is another construction that also exhibits this kind of ambiguity, but while the dual meaning of or is legendary and well documented, the one I’m writing about now is far less known. As a matter of fact, I have never seen […]
A couple of weeks ago, in the weekly Chess tactics lesson of my local club (Oh, no! Not another entry about Chess!), the game we were considering contained the following funny sentence: ¡nunca se sabe por dónde saldrá el sol! (you never know where the sun will rise!) I didn’t notice at the time, but […]
One of the most curious ambiguities that I know of is the two different meanings of the connective “or”. It’s got an “inclusive” and an “exclusive” meaning, and both of them coexist happily in everyday English. Which of the two is intended in a particular case is usually clarified from the context. Among the reasons […]
We read in a TAUS (Translation Automaton User Society) report: Future developments In general, academic MT observers have tended to view postediting as the weak link in the MT value chain. One of their research targets is to remove the need for postediting as an unfortunate human intrusion into a fully-automatic process. I’ve already expressed my opinion […]