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? Read More »
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? Read More »
What Makes Us the Best at What We Do? What is it about a Honyaku Plus translation that makes it stand out—or even unique? We like to think that it is our process—that is, the method and the people that we employ to try and get as close as possible to the elusive goal of
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The ＃1 way to tell a good translation To tell a good translation from a bad one, ask yourself this: Does it read naturally? The road to translation hell is paved with slavish adherence to the source text Some translators follow a word-for-word approach in which every word of the original text has a corresponding
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Certified and Notarized Translations of Birth Certificates and Other Official Japanese Documents Why do I need it? Commonwealth ex-patriots in Japan are often confronted with the need to have a certificate, such as the Japanese birth certificate for a new-born child or a marriage certificate, translated from Japanese into English for the purposes of a
