Isabelle Weiss is the original Woman in Localization! After more than 30 years the founder of Alpha still translates 7 days a week and based on her hands-on experience feels that despite the vast changes in technology translation is still a worthwhile pursuit and is best done in a multi-disciplinary environment.
Most people know that there are 4 official languages in Switzerland – many assume English is one of them. It isn’t. The four are in fact: German, French, Italian and Romansh. This blog is about German only, and it has a very practical purpose: to try and clarify what is meant by DE_CH rather than DE or DE_DE.
The French Prime Minister has spoken. No more “Cher·e·s ami·e·s” and “Cher·e·s électeur·rice·s”. His reasons? It would make the national language even harder to learn. Thus further diminishing the chances of French taking over from English as the official EU language after Brexit.
On this grey and gloomy March Monday, let me cheer you up with some fabulous if light-hearted news about an advance in the realm of voice recognition and instant translation. Of great interest to all of us who love translation – and cats.
As promised, this time we venture onto more dangerous ground, a paragraph from a contemporary piece of literary writing. Sacred ground, you might say.
Okay, I’ll say it: I am in awe of what DeepL can do these days. It can fool me (and perhaps you too) into suspecting a human is behind ist output. Perhaps I am the only one to be fooled, perhaps many of you are in the same boat.
Much has been said in the last decade about the commoditization of translation. With ever increasing volumes of translatable content, the emphasis has shifted to quick turnaround times and low rates. To my surprise, I stumbled on evidence that this type of industrialization is not new at all.
In order to speed up delivery of a successful Covid-19 vaccine pharma companies have been urging the EU to relax its rules on providing printed translations of outer packaging, labelling and patient leaflets into all of the languages of its Member States, as covered by Directive 2001/83/EC.
This issue is inspired by a Christian Morgenstern poem.
As many of us are prevented from travelling abroad to be with family and friends this year, perhaps we’ll have a little more time for reading. You, just like me, may already have a stack of unread classics and other reading matter on your bedside table, but nevertheless I thought I’d share a few suggestions that might also serve as a last-minute gift idea for a colleague, since I have selected books where the protagonist is a translator.