JALTranslation

August 13, 2013

Twittering Translators

While today’s post perhaps represents a departure from my usual blog articles which revolve around exploring a certain part of the translation act with accompanying examples, it is probably a more conventional use of a blogging space in that it more closely resembles the form of an opinion piece. That said, however, it is something…

July 30, 2013

Managing mistakes: Getting ‘wrong’ right

While the topic for today’s post is something that I touched upon in my recent guide to translating medical texts, I feel that it is something so engrained in the translation act that it is worth a more detailed exploration. In that post (under the sub-heading of ‘Poorly written texts’) I explained that technical texts…

July 18, 2013

Metaphors for Translation from Ferrymen to Omelettes

Throughout history translators have demonstrated an overwhelming desire to label their task with an endless stream of metaphors, each giving a slightly different reflection of the translation process as well as reflecting a particular author’s views or prevailing attitudes at the time. Indeed, this need for metaphor is perhaps buried in the very etymology of…

July 9, 2013

Getting to the Heart of Medical Texts

After all the fun of Fawlty Towers last time out, I thought I would tackle a topic that is more concretely tied to the profession this time around and give an insight into some of the issues I’ve found in my work as a medical translator. There are many key characteristics of medical texts that…

June 26, 2013

When a third language complicates the translation process: A look at L3 from Tolstoy to trays.

Translation is considered as the transferral of meaning from one language to another, and the entire foundation of translation theory revolves around binary oppositions e.g. free vs literal translation, dynamic vs formal equivalence, source text and target text. And yet there are many situations (primarily in literary and audiovisual translation) that see the introduction of…

June 20, 2013

Guest Post: Film Titles – A Puzzling Matter.

Having enjoyed Joseph’s articles on translating film titles (The Good, the Bad and the Inexplicable and the sequel), I accepted his ‘challenge’ to talk (well, write) about English film titles translated into Romanian: the good and the bad. As a film lover and a linguist, I could go on and on and on and on…

June 9, 2013

Where to go when lost for words?

Everyone involved in translation knows that terminology plays a key role in the profession: it seems fairly obvious really – finding the right word for the right situation is at the very heart of the translation process – but just how important is terminology mining? Although figures can vary depending upon where you look –…

May 30, 2013

The Terminology of the Beautiful Game

Partially inspired by this great BBC article entitled ”In the six’ and football’s other strange Americanisms’ which looks at the interesting terminological differences which exist between soccer and football, and partially due to that fact that it is a great passion of mine, I thought I would dedicate this post to introducing footballing terminology, as…

May 22, 2013

Top 100 Language Professional Blogs – Voting

Hello again everybody! Just a quick one. I’m excited to announce that my blog has been selected as one of the Top 100 Language Professional blogs in the ‘Top Language Lovers 2013’ competition and I need your votes to get as high up that list as possible! http://en.bab.la/news/top-100-language-professional-blogs-2013-voting Voting runs from 22nd May to 9th…

May 22, 2013

The Delicate Art of Subtitling: Capturing the language of the banlieues.

I thought that today I would try to deal with a subject that is slightly alien to me, yet one which I find extremely interesting and something that everyone will have come across: the art of subtitling. First of all, I have to admit that I am not an expert in subtitling, far from it.…