If you want to be successful in your job or career, you have to fit into a niche. This has always been true, about any job. There may be quite a few niches available to you in a particular profession or vocation, or not that many. I found out that this is true about translators as well, or at least about this translator. What’s more, I also realized a long time ago that the characteristics of a particular niche into which one fits so comfortably at first are likely to change over time, so much so that the original niche that was so favorable to your particular strength or weaknesses may kind ..read more

Poetry is what gets lost in translation. Robert Frost             Of course, much more is lost in translation, although some things that are gained through translation would be lost forever without it. The meaning of what was said or written in one language to people who don’t know that particular language, which in every case is the majority of people on this planet, for starters. But it is true that poetry is untranslatable. Most poetry in most European languages is supposed to rhyme if it is true poetry. At least I believe so. In class ..read more

Did Machine Translation Finally Killed Translators Like Myself As Was Gleefully Predicted by Some Commenters Already some 15 Years Ago on My Blog? I thought that it might do that soon, I really did, the arguments of MT enthusiasts seemed convincing, although I tried to counter them with my defense of, basically common sense, or human brain. Common sense was telling me that machines will never be able to think the way humans and translators in particular must be capable of doing to do their job properly. But to be on the safe side, I did file for early retirement when I was 64.5 instead of wai ..read more

History is a collection of lies commonly agreed upon. Voltaire 2020 will go down in history as the year of the mildest pandemic in the last 2,000 years. It’s demonstrably true. Even those of us who tend to believe the BS that we are being fed on daily basis by mainstream media, and there are fewer and fewer of them among us, probably know in their heart of hears that something is wrong with the numbers of “positive cases” that the mainstream media is beating us over the head with on a daily basis. What is wrong with those numbers? How about everything? How many of these “cases” are in fact si ..read more

Wouldn’t you agree? It is an uncommon number, for counting years, anyway. The last time we had a very similar number to the one we have now was 1010, which was a very long time ago, basically still in the early Middle Ages, and the next one would be 3030. But after relatively peaceful and almost idyllic Middle Ages (compared to our times), we managed to screw up our world so perfectly that it is pretty clear to me that there will not be a 3030 year for humans on this planet. All humans will be long gone by then, erased from the face of the Earth by a major nuclear conflict, or some sneaky dis ..read more

It has been two years since I did what I put in the title of my post today. People who follow my silly blog regularly may remember that after I moved, I was kind of running out of steam and inspiration when I was asking whether I should continue with my blog at all. I am happy to say that nobody told me, Steve, give it up already, 10 years is long enough to be running a blog about translation. You must have exhausted all mildly interesting subjects. You had your moments of exaltation when the view count went through the roof, such as with this blog post, as well as your fair share of nasty tr ..read more

Somewhat to my surprise, my small patent translation business is doing quite well, definitely much better than I thought it would, given the big changes in my life over the last three years, including the fact that officially I have been retired for three years now. After being married for 34 years to the same person, I could no longer stand my wife, and she could no longer stand me either. So one morning when she gave me a hateful look as I was going down the stairs and called me a “lemon”, which she never did before, although she was not shy about giving me nasty names, I promptly suggested ..read more

I think the virus caught up with me in mid February of this year, devastated me pretty bad and stayed with me for most of the week. I cannot really be sure about it, although I see in my trusty Letts of London diary that shortly after that I cancelled a Japanese lesson that I was supposed to give to two students because I did not want to give it to them in case I really did have something like that. Mid February was kind of early for Covid-19 here in Czech Republic – nobody really worried about the virus here too much then, it was thought that it was still in China and not here, and the gover ..read more

I have been writing on the topic of machine translation and how MT is likely or unlikely to influence human translation for a very long time now. This was one of the subjects that I used to discuss endlessly with many commenters on my silly blog for more than ten years now. But even before I published my first post on my blog, I used to write among other subjects about machine translation for publications for translators online and on paper since the early nineties, for example online on the Translation Journal, on paper in the ATA Chronicle, the Translorial (publication of the Northern Calif ..read more

There is an old Czech song by Voskovec and Werich from the nineteen thirties about a young donkey who is being coached by an “Uncle Ox” and an equally mature and even more experienced “Auntie Cow”. In the old song the bovine relatives of the young donkey explain to the inexperienced newbie the best strategy for achieving success in life. “Keep to the road in the middle”, says Ox. It’s always been the golden road. “You are young, you are dumb”, chimes in Cow. I am an Old Cow!” The donkey, mindful of the sage advice received from old, experienced relatives, keeps to the road in the middle. Unfo ..read more