Fukuyama City, Hiroshima. Business consulting. Translation. Interpreting. Printing. DTP.
Cross-border ramblings

Translation

Context is everything

I am often asked to translate a single sentence (or even a lone word). That, however, is unrealistic at best, and often impossible. The best you could do is giving a dictionary equivalent for each word and massage the grammar so it meant something. There is, however, a great chance that it won’t mean what it did before it was “translated”. Depending on the language, there is often information needed for the translation that is not in the sentence. Every language has its own grammar and rules. When two people are communicating in that language, there are relatively few misunderstandings as both people know what the conversation is about, and …

Right tool for the right job

The psychologist, Abraham Maslow, said that, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” It seems that many people who are more comfortable using MS-Excel use it for things for which it was never designed. MS-Excel is a spreadsheet application used mainly for creating lists and automating calculations. However, many people—especially engineers—seem to prefer it to more suitable applications such as its friend, MS-Word, for creating instruction manuals, quality manuals, and various other documents that would be better created with a word–processing application than a spreadsheet. The document they create may look fine when printed and serve its initial purpose. …

Seven spices, but only one reading

In Japanese there are two (main) ways to read the number “7”. It can be read as either “nana” or “shichi” depending on the context and with which other characters it is combined. The Japanese character for seven is “七”. However, when it is put together with the character “味”, which means taste, it is only ever pronounced as “shichi”. The spicy mix of at least seven spices with red pepper as the main ingredient is written as “七味” and read “shichimi”. This is actually an abbreviation of “七味唐辛子” which is read as “shichimi togarashi”. No Japanese person, or anybody who had spent any real time living in Japan would …

Oolong tea

Here’s an example of what happens when you don’t hire a professional translator. You may have saved a few pennies, but that must be very little to the amount you spent on the product, printing, packaging, and distribution. Unfortunately, many people will see the translated text and use that to decide whether or not to purchase your product. The Japanese is even worse than the English! (Click the image to see a full-size version.)

Felix — a friendly CAT

There are now a variety of Computer Aided Translation (CAT) applications on the market. Most have their good and bad points, but one is in a class of its own. Felix, a CAT application developed by Ginstrom IT Solutions (GITS), which is run by a professional translator based in Okinawa, has all the benefits of your computer remembering what you have translated and showing you similar translations from the past so you can improve both your speed and consistency, but without any of the headaches and steep learning curves of the other software. Add in the fact that it costs less than most of the other CAT applications—most of which …

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