Your professional translator

I've been hearing a lot about pluses and minuses of machine translation lately. I had some discussions with a person who strongly believes in machine translation and its quality. I also met some other people who honestly believe that professional translators think too highly of themselves and their skills while in reality it's a simple job that can easily be done with the help of some software. Then last week I came across an article about a recent scandal in the Web connected with machine translation. Guess which organization tried to use it to translate its website? You won't believe it. It was Russian Academy of Sciences . Nobody knows how it happened that this institution chose to use machine translation (or hired a "professional" who used it). The result of this "work" was instantly noticed by bloggers all over the web.Some pearls include: the Squirrel Institute (instead of Institute of Protein Research ), Botanic sad-institute of wounds (it sh...

Yesterday, on September 30th, we celebrated International Translator's Day . I am glad there's a holiday like that because it tells me that what I and my colleagues do IS important and valuable . A little about the history of the holiday: Actually it's the day of Saint Jerome's death . That's how this awesome man of God looked like: He was the one who translated the Holy bible into Latin and the one who is considered to be the patron saint of all translators and interpreters. He is also one of the Church Fathers. He wrote a great number of texts on theology, commentaries to the Holy Scripture, and he was an excellent translator who was not just concerned about the practical side of this job, but reflected on the theory of translation. He discussed the issue of the "right" or "adequate" translation, reflected on the usage of literal translations and comparative translations. Saint Jerome traveled a lot and finally decided to stay in Bet...