Saturday, January 21, 2012
SWET Open Forum 2009: Wordsmithing in Japan
Where to go for translators’ resources, how to control your computer’s Japanese inputting settings, what an editor needs to know about word processing and other software, how to market your professional skills and carve your niche, how to get your work published, what to tell a Japanese author who wants his/her work published—these were some of the questions that were asked and answered on April 21, 2009 at the SWET Open Forum on wordsmithing in Japan.
Thursday, January 05, 2012
From the Steerage
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Tidbits among the Triumphalism
Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language, by Robert McCrum. (New York: Penguin Books, 2010). ISBN 978-0-141-02710-4.
Reviewed by Charles De Wolf
Slave to the Word • Michael Karpa
In an efficiency-first, high-tech world, will human translators soon be transformed into skilled slaves? We bring to the task of translation understanding and consciousness, exactly what both rule-based and statistically based MT translation lack, and the completeness of our understanding becomes the measure of what we do. Karpa recalls the history of reading text when there were no spaces between words (scriptura continua), a laborious task sometimes assigned to slaves. He cites studies illuminating how different parts of the brain are mobilized for reading ideographic characters and alphabetic characters. He discusses the processes involved in reading and understanding, mobilizing complex components and functions of the brain. By understanding how we understand, we can transcend the slave. Author of Translating in the Deep End (The ATA Chronicle, American Translators Association, Alexandria VA, Jan 2011), Michael Karpa is a long-time Japanese-to-English translator based in San Francisco, California.