‘Lay people’ tend to have a whole lot of weird, unsubstantiated and simply harmful views on translators. Taken away all wrongful misconceptions (like earning much for not doing anything, etc.) there’s still plenty of myths about translators that you can come across. Those listed below are taken from my own experience: believe it or not, […]

Ethical principles, rules and conventions distinguish socially acceptable behaviour from that which is considered socially unacceptable. However, in social science research a few workers consider their work beyond Scrutiny, presumably guided by a disinterested virtue which justifies any means to attain hoped for ends. Ethical problems can relate to both the subject matter of the […]

A few months ago, my prescription glasses suffered an accident. Since Murphy’s Law always prevails, this happened late on a Friday afternoon. I immediately set out to find a temporary stopgap for this problem. I walked into an optical shop and asked the optician who waited on me for “a pair of emergency glasses”. The […]

Science-fiction almost unanimously takes one vision of our future universe for granted: that all peoples shall be able to communicate with one another. The technology enabling this is generally known as the “Universal Translator”: enabling interaction, profitable trade agreements, peaceful resolution of conflicts and cross-cultural understanding. At present, translation and interpreting remain time-consuming tasks, requiring […]

 “We should use technology to assist us. We should not allow technology to assist others in using us.” Rose Newell In order to consolidate concepts useful to the business of some software vendors and some agencies, a translator who opposes machine translation is branded a “luddite.” Machine translation per se should probably not to be […]

I remembered back in 1998 when I attended the first congress on Translation and Interpreting. One of the workshops I attended was related to Machine Translation (MT). The speaker compared a text created by a human translator with another one generated by translation software. The differences were crystal clear: the human translator had produced a […]