How many times have you run across something written in another language and wanted to understand what it meant? You copy and paste the text in an internet translation tool (also known as Machine Translation, or MT for short), only to receive a broken phrase where you must piece together some semblance of meaning from […]
Heraclitus was an ancient Greek philosopher. He wrote in cryptic verse, purposely obscuring his philosophy in almost riddles, so as only the initiated could fully understand what he was on about. He was the guy who saw the world as being in a constant state of flux, constantly changing. He’s also the guy who started […]
Newspapers, magazines and journals are, in and of themselves, very valuable resources for translators, as reading them imbues us with a current and, more often than not, correct use of language. Moreover, the most important newspapers in the world contain additional resources in their online versions that can be incredibly helpful when getting down to […]
More and more each day, businesses rely on a wider range of languages to do, well business. That means that managers and employees alike are asked to show skills in more than one language at a bilingual level, but both groups of people deal with clients and investors in dozens of different languages, a result […]
In the sci-fi series Farscape, beings from different planets could communicate amongst one another by consuming “translating microbes” which allowed them to understand other languages. Might we one day see something along these lines? Currently, various companies specializing in the area are developing the future of machine translation. What advances might we expect in this […]
In this post, “House Taken Over” is not in reference to the famous story by the renowned writer and translator Julio Cortázar. Rather, it refers to the feeling experienced by human translators in the age of machines. Just as the characters in Cortázar’s story feel displaced by an invading entity, human translators feel displaced by […]
Recently Inc. Magazine published an article with the five most promising industries in 2014. It’s no surprise that within that select group are two that go hand in hand: apps, and translation and localization services. Of course, as far as apps are concerned, there isn’t much else to be said. Currently they are undergoing intense […]
I remember as a kid, growing up in the U.S., always trying to communicate with my friends in secret. One method we used was writing our notes in invisible ink. Also, we thought it was clever to write our notes with the letters backwards but we ended up just holding up the page to the […]
Human Translations: The Path to Professional Quality Professional Human Translation Services In the world of translations, there has been significant emphasis on the development of technology and automatic machine translations. As we will see the next couple of minutes, the use of humans is still essential to achieving professional quality in translations. As you can […]
SymEval is a tool written in Python for measuring the effort invested in the Post-Editing (PE) process. It reports the edit distance between segments in two different translations using the Levenshtein algorithm. To test SymEval we first prepared four TMX files. The first one had the source and the result of translating it with an […]