So, you’re working along, deep in concentration, when up pops a value written with units that won’t be understood in the target language. What next? Do you:
a) Pull out an old battery-powered calculator and a printed conversion chart.
b) Use an online conversion chart and the infuriatingly crummy calculator built into Windows/OSX
c) Type your problem into Google and hope for the best…or
Widely acknowledged as the go-to book on American-English style, The Chicago Manual of Style – now in its 16th edition – is an absolutely indispensable resource for translators; however, for some, the very idea of spending 65 dollars* on a book can result in sleepless nights and cold sweats, which is perhaps why the good folk at The Chicago Manual of Style Online make the entire 1st edition available for download absolutely free of charge. Yes, that’s right: free! Don’t believe us? – then click on ‘complete facsimile of the 1st edition‘ at the top of this page. However, before you get too excited, we’d better mention that the 1st edition is a bit dated…
Wikipedia is so helpful to translators that most of us would rather not admit quite how much we rely on it — partly because, as everyone knows, Wikipedia has a certain less-than-perfect reputation when it comes to accuracy. However, a surprisingly large number of translators don’t realize that the Wikimedia Foundation (the organization that actually operates Wikipedia) also runs a number of other collaborative wiki projects that can at tmes also be very enlightening. Projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity and Wikimedia Incubator might come in handy the next time you need a quick reference on somethng while translating. Let’s take a closer look!
A friend of mine (whose first language isn’t English) recently asked me how to contract “they are”, to which I replied “they’re”. The same person then asked how to contract “there are”, to which I replied “there’re” (I was speaking not writing at the time). I was then asked by said person to show them how to write these contractions, to which I pointed out that we hardly ever use these in written English and, if you ever do, the majority of people will probably tell you they’re (sorry — I mean: “they are”) wrong. I then wondered how many other commonly-spoken-but-rarely-ever-written contractions there’re (sorry, ahem, “there are”) in this crazy language we call English…
Here’s a little (and by no-means complete) list:
The title says it all really: “Thirty Five of the Very Best Quotes on Translation” – we actually set out to put together a list of just fifteen, but there was just so many that seemed to either make us smile and/or capture the essence of what it all-so-often feels like to portray one language in another, we ended up with another twenty!
I sincerely doubt there’s a single professional translator out there who needs reminding of any of the following (unfortunately quite common) grammar mistakes – however, I’ll bet there’s also not a single professional translator out there who hasn’t, at some point in the past, made (or perhaps failed to pick up on) at least one or two of them… all be it probably when they’ve pushed themselves too hard and/or gone without a proper night’s sleep for too many days in a row…
Twitter is an awesome means of not only drawing attention to your own online activities (and offline activities for that matter) but also to those of others, such as all the people involved in translation who continue to create great content – much of which we tweet about on a near daily basis @FfTranslators. Here’s some of the very best translation-related posts and articles we shared in 2013. Enjoy:
It’s no surprise that translators love languages, they/we usually prick our ears up upon merely hearing the word ‘language’ – be it on the news, the radio, a party* or wherever… but combine the word ‘language’ with another word we’re usually hyper-tuned into, like ‘fluent, ‘learn’ or, say, ‘hard’ (as in ‘difficult’) and we’re usually pretty much hooked! So here goes then, let’s ask a question that’s practically guaranteed to interest translation/language lovers: What are the hardest languages [for native English speakers] to learn?
Throughout the year we tweet a lot of great content that translators will hopefully find useful and/or interesting. The best way to keep track of all this information is, of course, to follow us on Twitter; however, unless you’re glued to the screen 24-7 (we hope not), you’re bound to miss heaps – here’s a list of our favorites from 2012:
‘Best’ – now THAT’S a tricky word. The Oxford Dictionary of English gives the meaning of ‘best’ as ‘of the most excellent or desirable type or quality’ (was the author a Bill & Ted fan I wonder…), however, what makes something ‘better’ than something else depends on a whole bunch of usually unstated – and often changeable – criteria: the relative importance of which often depends on a number of other – sometimes subjective – factors. Take blog posts for example: which are the ‘best’, or ‘of the most excellent type or quality’, blog posts? The ones with the most page views? The ones with most comments? Maybe the ones with the most Tweets? Or perhaps it’s important to consider a number of such things? …for the sake of simplicity, let’s just brush the issue under the carpet and go with the number of Facebook ‘likes’: