The Tool Kit. A biweekly newsletter for people in the translation industry who want to get more out of their computers.

The Translator Help Wiki. For when your head is feeling all fuzzy and you want to shoot the Trados help writer.

A review of Budapeste (previously featured at the EM) in English

Localizing Documentation. For translation geeks only.

GILT Industry Ethics: Guidelines and Model Contract. This is the draft version of the LISA ethic guidelines. LISA rocks.

Miniature Essays on Linguistics. A colllection of 120 mini-essays by William Z. Shetter, retired foreign languages and linguistics professor.

The Importance of Terminology. The distinction between TERMINOLOGY and LEXICOLOGY, TERMINOGRAPHY and LEXICOGRAPHY, among other things.

A large majority of documents today are designed for specialist communication (including business and commercial texts). They are thus written in specialist language, 30-80% of which (depending on the particular domain and type of text in question) is composed of terminology(2). In other words, terminology (which as we have seen may also include non-linguistic items such as formulae, codes, symbols and graphics) is the main vehicle by which facts, opinions and other "higher" units of knowledge are represented and conveyed. Sound terminology work reduces ambiguity and increases clarity - in other words, the quality of specialist communication depends to a large extent on the quality of the terminology employed, and terminology can thus be a safety factor, a quality factor and a productivity factor in its own right.

The communication of specialist knowledge and information, whether monolingual or multilingual, is thus irretrievably bound up with the creation and dissemination of terminological resources and with terminology management in the widest sense of the word. This process is not restricted to science and engineering, but is also vital to law, public administration, and health care, to quote just three examples. In addition, terminology plays a key role in the production and dissemination of documents, and in workflow. Terminology as an academic discipline offers concepts and methodologies for high-quality, effective knowledge representation and transfer. These methodologies can be used both by language specialists and by domain specialists after appropriate training. In addition, they form the basis for an increasing number of tools for the identification, extraction, ordering, transfer, storage and maintenance of terminological resources and other types of knowledge.

Internationalizing code from the start minimizes costs and leads to big payoffs. Dos and Dont's for software developers.

Towards A More Equitable Pricing Structure: A Translator's Perspective. My nerdy link of the week, an article by Translator X.

I have been a professional translator for over 20 years in Canada, one place in this world where translation is regarded as what it really is: transferring messages between different cultures. In Canada, we have two main official languages, English and French.
In this article, I take issue with certain claims made by translation memory (TM) and content management system (CMS) vendors. In addition to the lingo of "fuzzy matches" and "exact matches," there is the publicity claiming, "Don't pay twice to translate the same word," and "Save up to 80% on your production costs." I beg to diverge on that last one. My figures are a bit different. First, one must understand what is the target, and what can be obtained from it.

And more: What planet are they on?, a translator's wishlist of computing features.

Michael Ondaatje conversa con sus traductores
Translation Technology Failures and Future
Translator's Intuition by TermSeek and reviews from the ProZ foruns

Typography and Layout as a Translation Problem

Online Library. "Questia is the first online library that provides 24/7 access to the world's largest online collection of books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences. You can search each and every word of all of the books and journal articles in the collection. You can read every title cover to cover (Mermaid warning: not so. in many cases you will only be able to read the first page of each chapter, unless you subscribe). Anyone doing research or just interested in topics that touch on the humanities and social sciences will find titles of interest in Questia."

Translation Memory and More. Localizers and translators, click this way for an excellent compilation of translation and localization tools, concordancers, and what have you.