Christof's Blog

plus is minus and red is green

Christof — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:14:45 +0000

My brother in law is an electronic genius and he is also colour blind. He used to make a joke about it by saying “it is all very simple, all you have to remember is that plus is minus and blue is black. He left me feeling uneasy about his hobby.

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L10nbridge “opens onramp to their Freeway 2.0″

admin — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 12:50:39 +0000

People have asked what the story is with Freeway 2.0 - the most intriguing question I heard was “what about Freeway 1.0?”. The thing is: there is no 1.0 version.

Still, much has been said about Freeway 2.0. The story is basically that you can link your CMS to it and it will facilitate the localisation process. ,Great! If you were looking for more information, you found not much.

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how translation theory informs the translation process

admin — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 12:48:31 +0000

We all know that the craft of translation requires more than intimate knowledge of both source and target language and culture. But do we share the insight that translation also requires professional training?

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Rainbow, Olifant et al at Okapi

admin — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 07:30:25 +0000

Enlaso’s more or less trusted tools were gifted and taken on by the Open Source people at the source forge.

They developed the tools further and you can download Rainbow and the good old Olifant TM editor from
http://okapi.sourceforge.net/

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translate more for less and less effort

admin — Tue, 08 May 2007 06:21:56 +0000

This is how the Common Sense Advisory explains why a 20% market increase in the translation industry does only translate into a 7.5% growth of the sector:

Why this discrepancy? In this highly competitive market, most productivity gains benefit the customer, not the LSP. We do not find price erosion in core metrics like price per new word, but we do see the impact of translation automation and reduced publishing costs from XML conversion. LSPs are literally doing more for less but for less effort. The 15-20 percent growth in overall demand translates into a blended 7.5 percent increase in revenue.

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"If You Want a Higher Salary, Lie about Your Birthday&a

admin — Tue, 01 May 2007 23:31:55 +0000

The Common Sense Advisory has recently released the results of their localisation industry wage and salary survey. Not sure that it makes a very good read, but surely it should be interesting for any professional in the field to have a look at (and come to terms with) - check it out on http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/wagesoflocalization/

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Bananas or Rubber - Chinese translation in crisis

admin — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 03:31:20 +0000

Slowly the issue of Chinese translation in crisis creeps into consciousness thanks to the media.
In yet another article the figures are repeated and some interesting examples are given. Some are funny:

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Chinese translation still struggling

admin — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 04:42:43 +0000

It has been written here before: one of the biggest problems for the Chinese Economy to stand a chance in the globablised world is the lack of translators into and - more importantly - from Chinese.

As a reminder of this problem, just read up on this on

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TAUS meeting in Taos to talk TM sharing

admin — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 01:35:18 +0000

This is an interesting development and it’ll be rather interesting to see them working out a business model later this year (October). TM sharing is an interesting approach and I still wonder about copy-right and confidentiality issues. But anyway - (most of) the big guys are moving on it, according to this press release:

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Finally "Euodicatum" is "back"

admin — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 02:10:45 +0000

What started years ago as Eurodicatum and was discontinued to merge into a EU Terminology project has finally been launched as IATE - the “Inter Active Terminology for Europe”

Despite the strange name it is pretty much what we were used from the good olden days - though it does feature a few more languages.

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