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 on Copyblogger, a great reminder about getting back to basics by focusing on writing great paragraphs, something that also happens to make copy more translatable. In French to English translation, two of the things that can easily throw me off track are redundancies (which are often disguised in French by using a variety of [...]

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 » [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Over at MarComments, the Harding Marketing marketing communication blog, this post about avoiding a world of trouble when translating brochures and other marketing materials, with which I couldn’t agree more. I would also add the following tips: Simple, concrete, active sentences are not only easier to translate, they often read better, too. I refer back [...]

Creating a consistent image is one of the best ways to ensure that your message is clearly understood by customers, business partners, and other stakeholders. And consistency often boils down to attention to detail. A couple of interesting cases have come across my desk recently — two examples of lack of attention to detail and [...]

It looks like Areva might be getting ready to overhaul its branding as an employer. What looks like an excerpt from a creative agency brief has just been published in a translation job ad on a public website. Human resources policies are most likely a key pillar of any company’s post-crisis bounce-back strategy. And innovative [...]

Today I was browsing online translation workplace Proz.com when I stumbled upon this question asked in the « Kudoz » terminology forum. The question is an interesting one (how to translate « cascader » into English). What is cringe-inducing, however, is the disturbing lack of concern for the confidentiality of customer documents. This is clearly an internal document and [...]

The past few months have been busy ones, at least in my corner of the translation industry (corporate communications, including financial). The crisis currently buffeting the financial markets has generated a lot of analysis and commentary – all of which needs to be translated! This surge in demand has brought with it a bevy of [...]