The translation crowdsourcing debate has made several appearances on this blog. It’s back with a vengeance thanks to a seriously deficient crowdsourced translation, which — ironically — comes from an online translators’ portal. Protecting the French linguistic heirloom (sic)…how about protecting your image for starters? The quality of the copy on this page speaks for [...]

From exchange-traded futures to naked swaps, recent…ahem…innovations in the financial markets and planned regulatory changes to deal with the aftermath of some of these products have spawned a slate of new financial terms, neatly inventoried in a recent Reuters article. Here is an example — handily, the article not only offers up a definition, but [...]

I’ve talked about translating marketing and advertising copy on this blog before. Have you ever wondered how some of your favorite ads would read if the agencies had hired Dieter to write the copy?  Well, now you can see for yourself! One of my favorite magazines, Vanity Fair, has worked some Google Translate magic on [...]

Last week I attended a Grenoble Ecole de Management conference on the future of manufacturing. The high-level panel — top executives from major French corporations and a journalist from a leading economic daily — brought in quite a crowd, and the auditorium was jam packed. One nugget that grabbed the attention of a number of [...]

Over at Seth Godin’s blog, check out this gem of a post about accent and the underlying attitudes it conveys. What kind of accent does your writing have?

According to this article in the LA Times today, today’s translation and interpreting market is about more than just speaking two languages — increasingly, it is about speaking two languages and possessing expertise in a particular subject area. This results in high-demand niches like « German to English waste management » or « Russian to Farsi nuclear engineering » [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the translatability of corporate mission statements here. Over at Marcomments, the discussion continues with some tips about how to write a good mission statement in the first place.  Corporate mission statements would be easier to translate into other languages if they followed a few of the tips [...]

Over at Bad Language, you can now download Matthew Stibbe’s new e-book on business writing. It is set up as a 30-day course with step-by-step tips on how to approach and improve your business writing. I’m very excited about this — so excited in fact that I have decided to kill a few trees and [...]

The recent translation crowdsourcing debate has got me thinking about the many different segments on the translation market–which has made me realize more than ever what a jungle it is for buyers. Add to this an interesting discussion I had recently with a marketing executive from a multinational (dissatisfied with marketing translations purchased from some [...]

Translation crowdsourcing just keeps on cropping up on the blogosphere and in translation industry news these days. The American Translators Association recently took an official stance against crowdsourcing by LinkedIn and many individual translators have jumped on the bandwagon, forming a group on LinkedIn (Translators Against Crowdsourcing) and talking up the issue in the blogosphere. [...]