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 [...]

Collaborative websites, open authoring, content management systems, wikis…the number of organizations I work with that have multi-authored collaborative websites has exploded over the past two years. Now all stakeholders within an organization are capable of maintaining and updating their own web pages without going through a corporate webmaster. Sounds great, doesnt’ it? Well, it is…but [...]

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 [...]

I recently spent some time playing around with the beta version of Windows Live Translator (AKA Systran), which is now online. The verdict? Not nearly as bad as I thought…but it doesn’t exactly have me worried about losing my job, either. I started with a quote by General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt from an article [...]

Grenoble’s college radio station, CampusGrenoble 90.8 FM, features a twice-weekly half-hour English Talk Radio segment (Sundays at 11 a.m. and Wednesdays at 6 p.m.). The broadcast is available over the airwaves at 90.8 FM for those in the region, and online at http://www.campusgrenoble.org/ for listeners everywhere. Grenoble English Talk Radio host Vivian Draper recently had [...]

Online search giants Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are racing to improve automatic translation technology to allow web surfers to tap in to more content in more languages, but English remains the most effective choice for web search. Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117997041379112887.html?mod=hps_europe_inside_today