The strange tale of the Mechanical Turk The Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing automaton built in the 1760’s by the Hungarian inventor Hans von Kempelen, reputedly to impress the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. It consisted of a large, box-like chess table, with an ornately costumed mannequin sitting behind it, and intricate mechanical systems for […]
What lies hidden in the machine? (J) 続きを読む »
People unfamiliar with the Japanese language (or with the translation industry in general) often tend to assume that translation between any two languages poses roughly the same degree of a challenge to the translator. This is far from being the case, however, and the Japanese-English language pair must rank as one of the most difficult
Why is Japanese-English translation more difficult than other language pairs? (J) 続きを読む »
The road to translation hell is paved with slavish adherence to the source text.
“But that’s what it says in the source text!” (J) 続きを読む »
The Japanese translation market and other markets are as different as night and 日.
What is so special about translation between Japanese and English? (J) 続きを読む »
How should a translation company approach a high-volume project? And what is the most ethical response to a client that insists that it needs an extremely high volume of material translated in an unrealistically short time?
A bridge too far—how not to manage a large-scale translation project (J) 続きを読む »
