Your professional translator

I prepared the presentation for some people who I occasionally meet online and offline, who think that translators work the same way as Google translate does. And then I thought it would be nice to upload it to slideshare.net so anybody could see it. I should say I am amazed with the results: over 160 views and 1 download just a few hours after the presentation was uploaded. Hope you find it useful :) Here it is: Machine translation versus skilled human translation from Olga Arakelyan

What is translation? What do translators do? Those are two of the most frequent keywords people use to find my blog in search engines. So I thought it would be only natural to prepare a separate post on the topic. But instead of reading you a lecture about the importance of translation, I decided to let famous quotes about translation speak for themselves. So here are your answers. :)

This post is meant for those people and businesses that need translation services. Before you hire a translator, please first think about your priorities concerning the translation project. What's most important for you? Often people ask for these three things: high speed, low rate and premium quality. But is it possible to get all three of them at once? Let's have a look at all these points and then you decide what's more important for you, ok?

First of all, I'd like to remind you about the contest that we are running at Sharp End Training Russia . A simple tweet or Facebook "like" can make you a winner of our Complete Blogging Toolkit for Translators! It's a wonderful opportunity! The contest will be running until October 20, so don't miss your chance! You can read more here . For those who are interested in translation and especially for my wonderful colleagues all over the world, I decided to make a list of 10 cool facts about our profession . I am sure you wouldn't mind if we celebrate our profession once again, would you? So here are the facts:

I had a very interesting experience recently. An agency that I really like (I've been working with them for a long time) asked me to proofread several files which had already been translated by somebody else. I had some free time so I agreed. At first everything went well. I did just what I was supposed to: Proofreading   is  the final stage of the editing process, focusing on surface errors such as m is spellings and m is takes in grammar and punctuation. You should proofread only after you have fin is hed all of your other editing rev is ions. (the definition is taken from here ) Then I found myself in an interesting situation. I noticed that the text suddenly became very weird. The Russian version of the file stopped making sense. Suddenly it dawned on me that part of the text was done by MT! So I suddenly found myself doing post-editing work as well. Postediting  (also written post-editing) “is the process of improving a machine-generated translation with a mini...

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...