Catégorie : Lost in translation

Sponge Mode

After a burst of activity around these parts, things have been rather quiet lately. For one thing, my muse is far away. For another, I’ve been working like a fiend. For once, I’d love to talk about that, because I’ve been translating pretty high-visibility stuff, for instance for a company whose products I use and…

WBMFM

I translate software programs, and the associated help files and manuals, for a living. Most of these programs (and manuals) are American and I translate them into French. And they are not obscure little programs. No. They are created by big international companies, like Microsomething, and HAL, etc. The best of them are not inspiring…

Translation and Politics: Follow-Up

Remember this story I blogged about a few days ago ? Well, 20 Minutes reports that the management of the France 2 TV station was not amused by the translator who took some liberties when translating Nicolas Sarkozy’s speech. An « Inadmissible » incident is what they called it, and it cost the translator his job. But…

Translation and Politics

I’m a translator. It’s actually quite a strange thing to write for me, because this state of fact kind of crept up on me over the last few years. But professionally, that’s what I am now. Officially. It’s also presidential election time in France. 10 days to the 2nd round. Nicolas Sarkozy the conservative against…

The Woof Commences Now

So Microsoft is said to have a half-billion dollar budget to advertise its new Windows Vista operating system. And they came up with the following, inspiring slogan: « The Wow Starts Now », next to the new, rounded Windows « Start » button. Umm, OK. I couldn’t help remembering that when the first iMac came out, you know, the…

Best of one world, worst of the other

For my translation work, 90% of the time, I have to use a specialized translation software package by TRADOS (basically, it’s a database system that stores pairs of orginal and translated phrases, and speeds up translation work by making it possible to translate repetitive text only once). This is Windows-only software, and even though it…

Coming up for air

Haven’t had any time for sknoblog or any other artistic activity lately. I’ve been doing software localization and translation work to feed the kiddies. Most translation work in the Internet age is outsourced by software companies to China and India, and translation rates have fallen dramatically (generally to a few lousy cents per source-language word).…