by Arline Lyons | Apr 3, 2017 | Translation as an investment
The idea of volume discounts works for manufacturing. You design a widget and build a widget-maker for a million euro. Raw materials cost 10 cents per widget. If you make a million widgets, the cost of manufacturing is one euro and ten cents each. If you make two...
by Arline Lyons | Mar 31, 2017 | Basic Information
You’ll find them everywhere: free online translation services, low-cost human translation or freelancer portals, and companies claiming expertise in all languages and subjects. They’re all happy to take your content in one language and send it back in...
by Arline Lyons | Mar 31, 2017 | Basic Information
Switzerland Global Enterprise hosted their annual Impulse event in February 2017, this time on the topic of the “4th Industrial Revolution”. Guests included speakers from Credit Suisse discussing the performance of the Japanese economy, the Japanese...
by Arline Lyons | Mar 31, 2017 | Stress-free localisation
To be user-friendly and intuitive, interfaces need the most appropriate words to describe their functionality. This means that the translator needs to understand the software’s functionality in order to translate properly. Think about translating...
by Arline Lyons | Apr 15, 2016 | Basic Information
Despite the disruption caused by March’s terrorist attacks on Brussels Airport and metro, the NU-AGE final conference went ahead on Tuesday 5 April 2016. My flights were cancelled at the last minute, but I was able to travel up by train and attend. What is...
by Arline Lyons | Jan 24, 2016 | Stress-free localisation
It always pays to look a little deeper when translating and localising – sometimes the problem isn’t what you think. When translating Asian recipes from Japanese into English, I was also asked to check what the ingredients were called in Asian food shops...
by Arline Lyons | Jul 22, 2015 | Basic Information
Don’t be alarmed if a translator working from Japanese to English asks you how to pronounce (or read) a personal or place name. This isn’t a sign that they lack basic knowledge of the language, but rather a comment on how complex Japanese names can be. The...
by Arline Lyons | Jul 22, 2015 | Basic Information
Japanese uses three alphabets: kanji, derived from Chinese pictograms, and hiragana and katakana (collectively referred to as kana) two phonetic alphabets made up of simpler glyphs. 薔薇 (kanji) バラ (katakana) ばら (hiragana) rose Katakana is most often used for foreign...
by Arline Lyons | Jul 22, 2015 | Common problems
Japanese sounds do not map perfectly onto English ones, which is no real surprise with two such different languages. This can lead to problems when Japanese words are rendered in English – especially personal and place names. 松本 Matsumoto Matumoto (pronounced...
by Arline Lyons | Jul 15, 2015 | Basic Information
Japanese can be written in English letters using a system called romanisation, which maps Japanese sounds onto the Latin alphabet. There are several varieties of romanisation which produce slightly different versions of the same Japanese word due to differences in how...
