journalist decided to brave the heat and go for a run. His apartment for the duration of the World Cup overlooked the city’s state-of-the-art stadium, so he decided to do a couple of laps.

By the time he rounded the arena for the second time, he had been reduced to walking, his face pink and his T-shirt soaked in sweat. Two police officers at a security checkpoint eyed him suspiciously. They had a brief, whispered conversation before moving to intercept him.

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perfect way to express the feeling of wrapping yourself up in a crocheted blanket with a cosy jumper, a cup of tea and back-to-back episodes of The Bridge. But is it really only the Danes, with their cold Scandinavian evenings, who could have come up with a word for such a specific concept? And is it only the Swedes who could have needed the verb “fika” to describe chatting over a coffee?

The internet abounds with words that lack a single-word English equivalent. In order to be really lacking an English equivalent, it must be a single, indivisible unit of meaning, as phrases are infinitely productive and can be created on demand by combining different words. Take, for example, the claim by Adam Jacot de Boinod in I Never Knew There Was A Word For It, that Malay has a word for the gap between the teeth that English lacks: “gigi rongak”. Well, this appears to be a phrase, and it translates literally as the perfectly cromulent English phrase “tooth gap”.

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er the serving cart. Sometimes these are relatively minor errors — a ham-handed rendering of an author’s prose, the sort of thing a book reviewer might skewer with an acid pen.

But history is littered with more consequential mistranslations — erroneous, intentional or simply misunderstood. For a job that often involves endless hours poring over books or laptop screens, translation can prove surprisingly hazardous.

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a good meal. The more exotic the meal (or the words), the better. Need a good Burmese take-out in Oklahoma City? Ask a translator! A colleague and I recently had a discussion on the taxonomy of the world’s dumplings, from Russian pel’meni to Japanese gyoza. I had to own up that I had never sampled a Filipino siopao. Horrified, he explained the Chinese origins of the term, then procured a sample for me straightaway. Terminology management can be a delicious undertaking!

When I asked my translation students what market niches they wanted to study, it came as no surprise when they suggested culinary translation. What translator is not a subject-matter expert in this field? In preparing my first lecture on the topic—which grew into a presentation at ATA’s 2016 Annual Conference—I did, however, have to put the past behind me. I eventually called the ATA talk “Arugula by Any Other Name.” The choice of title was part of my professional therapy.

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expand your reach, you need to first consider how consumers will search for your products and services, across multiple channels, in several regions, countries, and languages.

1. To improve International SEO, translate your keywords

Unfortunately, one area that is often overlooked is international Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and localization of keywords. To make it easier for foreign consumers to find your offerings, you need to ensure that your keywords don’t get lost in translation.

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tags is not a cyberpunk for me anymore. That’s what we call reality. It’s hard to imagine that this is the result of a centennial fight to build the algorithms of machine translation and that there has been no visible success during half of that period.

The precise developments I’ll discuss in this article set the basis of all modern language processing systems — from search engines to voice-controlled microwaves. I’m talking about the evolution and structure of online translation today.

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conscious choice about how I invest my time translating. Should I put more effort into linguistic quality or subject matter expertise? Needless to say, both of them matter.

Translation as a human process

Linguistic quality is important for the readability of the text, but without subject-specific terms there is no amount of linguistic embellishment that will help you get your point across. At the end of the day, it is important for the target audience to understand the text in the same intention with which the source text was written. It is the translator’s job to achieve just that.

First of all, one must keep in mind that creating translations is a human process… and so is reading them! As such, human translations will always be the product of decisions taken by the translator, and they will always be read with a certain level of subjective criticism.

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translation again finds itself in the foreground of the literary landscape. This year’s shortlist includes novels translated from a diverse array of languages including Arabic (Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi), Hungarian (László Krasznahorkai’s The World Goes On) and Korean (The White Book by Han Kang).

In 2016, the prize evolved from a biennial event, designed to honour one living author’s overall contribution to fiction on the world stage, to a yearly prize for fiction in translation. In Australia, too, literary translation is experiencing something of a moment. Shokoofeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, translated from Farsi, was recently shortlisted for the Stella Prize.

Read here.

Think, for example, of NPR’s translation of a Look At This visual story about the Brazilian rain forest to Spanish and Portuguese, or The New York Times' launch of NYT en español, or BuzzFeed’s translation of an interview with President Obama to Spanish, French, Portuguese and German.

These recent efforts to reach new audiences both in the U.S. and abroad raise all sorts of questions for newsrooms about strategy and workflow. Translation is tricky when you're dealing with text alone, but becomes even more complicated when interactive news applications and graphics come into play.

Read here.

Translation can be easy to take for granted these days, with the availability of mobile apps that promise to make communicating in a foreign country a cinch, and Google Translate on hand to automate translation in a click. However, it’s rarely that simple. Translation is an art that skilled translators work hard to acquire.

If you’re planning to translate content or localize your website, be wary of these 10 common mistakes before you get started.

Amazon is planning to teach Alexa how to translate languages in real time, which would be a welcome feature for the voice-activated digital assistant and the Amazon Echo line of smart speakers.

There are other devices and services that offer early versions of real-time translation, such as the Google Pixel Buds. Amazon, however, is apparently looking to throw its hat into the ring due to the near limitless applications of such technology.

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In my last post, I talked about why you should have a style guide. But what should you include in it? There are many items that will benefit your overall translation and localization process if you specify them before you even start. Here are some details that you need to include in your style guide.

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“Don’t Insist on English” Patricia Ryan
Sometimes you find tips about our industry in the unlikeliest of places. Although TED talks are highly recognized and are a great source of information and insight, not too many of them focus on  translation or the language industry per se.  In the following  lecture, Patricia Ryan discusses language loss and the globalization of English. Because of globalization and economy, English has been  the most preferred and spoken language for business around the world, and because of this cultural globalization and language education, we may be contributing to language loss and the diffusion of new ideas. Focusing solely on English, she argues, we are diminishing the importance of other languages and the importance of  contributions other cultures have to offer.

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Last month, the United Nations officially recognized our favorite holiday (and no, it’s not Christmas). In a new resolution on 24 May, the UN declared September 30th International Translation Day to recognize the important role translators and interpreters play in the organization.

And it’s hard to overstate how much the UN depends on these services. Here are 5 ways translation and interpretation keep the United Nations running.

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Understanding the information on a voting ballot can be tough even for English speakers. For many second language learners the voting process can be so intimidating that they don’t vote, in part because of the lack of materials in their own language.

Now a group of Punjabi people in Fresno want to change that experience.

Almost every afternoon older Indian-American men from the province of Punjab gather under the shade and play cards in Victoria West Community Park in West Fresno. Deep Singh says it’s a chance to get out of the house.

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Terrified domestic violence victims often feel even more frightened by the justice system if they do not speak English. But now they will be getting some extra help when they go to court seeking orders of protection.

Translation services will be made available to non-English speaking victims in court thanks to Assemblymember Helene Weinstein (D-Sheepshead Bay-Flatlands-Canarsie), who worked with state Sen. Marisol Alcántara (D-Manhattan) to put funding in the state budget to make it happen.

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Translation took to the big screen this year in the Academy Award-winning film, Arrival. Indeed, when an ominously oblong spacecraft touches down on Earth, translation proves to be humanity’s only hope. As the world descends into utter chaos, linguistics professor Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is sent to the frontlines to attempt to communicate with the mysterious “Heptapods”—to find out what they want and why they’ve come.

We asked three top translators to watch Arrival and to give us their two cents...

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The American room-rental startup last week revealed its new brand name to be used in China — a three-character moniker “Aibiying”. Each character individually translated means “love,” “mutual” and “welcome.”

Airbnb said in Chinese on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, that the name means “let love meet each other.” The company further explained that more and more Chinese travelers are getting to know each other through Airbnb, and that the name represents their value and mission bringing together tens of millions of neighborhood communities around the world with love.

However, the company totally failed to impress Chinese people with this moniker. Rather, the Chinese name gave Chinese netizens some cheap entertainment, laughing at the expense of Airbnb.

A $1.5 million bill that would translate the government’s website into Spanish was shot down Tuesday, after a Republican representative pointed out the existence of Google Translate.

Democrat State Rep. Robert Martwick (of Chicago) sponsored the bill because he felt the language barrier made it difficult for certain people to fully appreciate the wealth of information available from government resources, specifically online.

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By Radio Poland

He’s only seventeen, but he’s the best. Jędrzej Michalski from Poznań, western Poland, is the winner of the Juvenes Translatores competition organised by the European Commission.

Hear Radio Interview.

When Hazar al-Sibai arrived in Vancouver as a refugee from Syria nearly a year ago, she relied on an interpreter to navigate her new life in Canada. Now, her English has progressed so well, she’s reversed that role, becoming an Arabic interpreter herself for other new arrivals.

“Maybe I’m useful for somebody else,” Ms. al-Sibai says. “And I enjoyed to help them. It gives me very good feeling.”

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Voter pamphlets sent to Spanish-speaking voters in Washington contain an inexact translation, one not used on other state-issued Spanish voter information, that could lead to voters thinking they are not qualified to vote, the Green Party of Washington alleged Monday.

The voter pamphlet tells voters that in order to vote, they must be 18, a U.S. citizen, a Washington resident and not under Department of Corrections supervision for a Washington state felony.

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The Harry Potter books have sold more than 400 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 60 languages. The books are filled with a tricky mix of wordplay, invented words, songs, allusions, British cultural references, and more. Translators were tasked with adapting J.K. Rowling's devices to fit the language and culture of their target audience.

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helping people to communicate across the globe using the tools we love, words. And if we are good, after a few years, we can work wherever we want, whenever we want, experiencing the digital nomad life that everyone seems to covet.

g and aah-ing about the next big thing in human communication and yet at the core it was still good old machine translation.

Granted, we don’t expect anyone outside the language services industry to know the finer details of translation technologies. But why is there such credulity about devices that promise to translate from “any language to any language”?

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