Why tea is strong, not sturdy: Collocations and their crucial role in language and translation What are collocations and why are they important? If you ask the average citizen what collocations are, they may not know what you’re talking about, although they will surely use them. Well everybody uses them, but most of
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Ce mois-ci, nous avons lancé notre processus d’assurance de la qualité linguistique (LQA), qui vise à évaluer chaque semaine plusieurs traductions effectuées par nos équipes. Outre nos traducteurs en interne, nous disposons de chefs de projets qui sont également des locuteurs natifs, ce qui nous permet de veiller à la qualité du travail réalisé. Toutefois,
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Recently, a few of my translator colleagues and I were invited by one of our customers to spend a week at their offices. This customer localises their content into four languages for local markets across the globe, and we provide English to German translations for their blog posts, help resources and legal content. This meeting
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We are getting excited! Over the coming days and weeks, Smartling will be releasing their new and improved translation interface, which promises to increase translator productivity (so you can translate faster), improve translation quality (using comprehensive QA checks) and add some serious flexibility (by allowing you to customise shortcuts to your liking). Here are five of
Read More...To quote Robin Williams’ brilliant character John Keating in Dead Poets Society, “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race […] poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” Besides being what keeps us going as a species,
Read More...When it comes to internships, one can’t help but think of “important” tasks such as making photocopies, brewing coffee or doing the grocery shopping for your manager’s in-laws (speaking from experience there…). Unfortunately this stereotype is true for some internships – but luckily it’s far from the truth for a translation internship at AJT! Here’s
Read More...Tone of voice is a big part of our translation work. In order to accurately convey our client’s message in another language, we need to understand who they are themselves, who their potential customers are and how they want to come across to those potential customers. When working with bigger brands, we often receive a very well-defined style guide
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Last week, my colleague Sarah and I attended the ELIA Together conference in Barcelona, Spain. ELIA is the premier European language industry association and the main aim of the event was to provide a space for translation companies and freelancers to network, exchange ideas and discuss industry-specific challenges. From freelancers to large translation companies to translation
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English is such a wonderfully ‘bendy’ language that allows for all sorts of sentence structures, repurposes words for new meanings and turns adjectives into nouns at the drop of a hat (‘I had 3 new likes on Facebook today!’). Unfortunately, German isn’t quite so flexible, owing to its more complex grammatical structure. So when we
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Starting out as a freelance translator can be tough. It’s hard enough trying to land your first translation job without much experience (everyone wants experienced translators but how can you get experience in the first place?). And once you HAVE got that first translation project, how do you retain that customer so they turn into
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