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Weekly log: 20120219 (take 2)
This is the first week since a while that I took up any regular assignments from the other place I volunteer at. With the translation done and an extension for the two review assignments confirmed, the week is now officially … Continue reading
The true destructive power of simplified characters
I used to dislike simplified Chinese for its visual inelegance. Since a few years ago this is no longer the case. For one thing, I started spotting simplified Chinese fonts with glyphs that are more visually balanced; but more importantly, … Continue reading
Weekly log: 20120219
What is it really like to be a volunteer translator? Is it like in-house, or is it like freelance, or is it, like, neither? (After all, people have this silly notion that volunteers have a lower standard, don’t they?) It … Continue reading
The word “herbal”
While working on a project that involved translation (but was not itself a translation project), I found out that the formulas prescribed by traditional Chinese medicine practitioners are called “herbal remedies” in English. The other day, I happened to want … Continue reading
Weekly log: 20120115
Sometimes, I really wonder if people (or agencies) collecting translation memories realize they might be collecting junk. I joined a number of segments this week. Now if you think that I should have tweaked my segmentation rules to avoid these … Continue reading
Weekly log: 20120108
The deadline was looming, and I had already checked my translation once. So I sent it away, with an apology to my monolingual reviewer for my bad writing. But when he got back to me I was a bit taken … Continue reading
You want this translated into what?
The way some translation requests are worded really makes people wonder. “I want this translated into Mandarin”… “I want this translated into Cantonese”… I mean, you want this translated into what? You see, saying “I want this translated into Mandarin” … Continue reading
Being informed about machine translation
There is a lot of hype about machine translation (MT). But we all know that MT, in its current form, generally cannot produce good translations. So how hard is it really for the machine to translate? You might want to … Continue reading