Tag Archives: translation best practices

         

Professional-Quality Translation at Light Speed: Why Voice Recognition May Well be the Most Disruptive Translation Technology You’ve Never Heard of.

Published on September 3, 2013
    


I’m sort of amazed translators working into English today still type out their translations on keyboards. Hunched over for endless hours at a time, day after day, banging away on an electronic version of a 19th century invention – a barely improved technology from Gutenberg’s movable type of the 15th century – all the while straining their fingers, eyes, wrists, back and weary souls. It’s slow. It’s tedious. It’s exhausting. It’s also why translator productivity keeps banging its head up against that relentlessly stubborn 2,000 – 3,000 words-per-day concrete ceiling.  It’s about time to ask ourselves this: Why are we translators in the 21st century caught in a typing trap? Human speech is five to seven times faster; cognitive processing about ten to fifteen times faster. Our translating brains actually work closer to these speeds – something any simultaneous interpreter…



Translation is Not About Words. It’s About What the Words are About.

Published on December 14, 2012
    


Subject-matter knowledge is not just “important” to translation.  It’s the very essence of translation. Buried deep in the bedrock of every profession are certain truths that are universally understood and accepted by modern practitioners. In medicine, for example, those include a recognition that the human body exists in a physical universe subject to the laws of science and not to a fictitious universe of mysterious spirits accessible to the chosen, pre-ordained few, a concept that had dominated human medicine for millennia. As a result, medical doctors strolling through a cocktail party today would never encounter questions from their friends, patients or colleagues about the effectiveness of specific spells, incantations or charms in their medical practice. Mysticism and superstition in medicine have been duly and effectively discarded in the proverbial dustbin of history. Not so for translation. We translators can spend…



Confirmation Bias: Why Collaboration is the Path to Translators’ Best Work

Published on November 29, 2012
    


A great pitfall in scientific research – and in everyday life – is the very human penchant to see what we want to see rather what is actually there. In psychology and cognitive science, this tendency to filter reality to bolster our own views, theories or explanations is called confirmation bias. It’s deadly in scientific research because it drives well-meaning and quite dedicated researchers to interpret evidence in a way that’s unwittingly partial to existing beliefs or theories, which skews results, blocks valid conclusions and often points in the wrong direction. Confirmation bias also explains why we think our political views, for example, are self-evident to all rational people, and why those holding opposing views must be mistaken. In the extreme, political punditry in the U.S. owes its entire existence to confirmation bias. People seek out news, entertainment and commentary…


             
  
   
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