Season's Greetings from the Admerix crew

12 Hilarious Reasons Not to Google Translate Thai

12 Hilarious Reasons Not to Google Translate Thai

Roast duck sanctuary and sweet-fitting Kayasart. Know ye millet grain?...

The chasm between top management and the trenches

TMs, augmented translation, and machine translation—they all have the same goal: replace humans, who are an expense, with an automatic solution which can reduce or even eliminate the need to pay people.

Interestingly enough, these economic concerns are the same reasons companies try to replace experienced project managers with interns.

This is the flow of the industry. TM tools, after all, are meant to enable a company to discount linguists’ work. Linguists even have to pay for this discount by buying the TM tool (in most cases).

Underpinning this is the idea that technology can replicate the work of a specialist linguist so that they can be replaced with a cheaper (or free) generalist. It means one can swap one linguist for another because this technology assists their word choices (although “correct” translation is a lot more than proper word choices and the assist from technology often does not lead to better translation—we pointed this out and coined the “over reverence phenomenon” years ago).

The possible savings are a tempting thing for the C-level folk in localization companies—imagine the cost reduction—and profit increase—if one did not have to pay so much to those pesky translators!

However, the clarion call from production is the same—the need for individual experts and individual subject specialists. Only these human beings can adapt the style and substance to a certain client.

The needs from clients also are clear. They need competent project managers to sort out the mid-project changes that are inevitably part of any project. Harried interns are rarely about rise above hectoring in their efforts to force linguists to adhere to tightened deadlines or other changes.

So this demonstrates the long-standing chasm between top management and the trenches where the work is done. More and more systems with little to show for it, but more bureaucracy…

Admerix is hard at work in July and August!

Admerix is open and hard at work during July and August. This is a period when traditionally localization work is slowed by business holidays in both Europe and the U.S. It often becomes difficult to source translation work during this time and many companies and linguist teams take time off.

During this time Admerix is continuing to handle projects so our clients can leave the office on time and be certain that we are solving all issues while they are asleep.

Also: Our audio studios will also be open as well, providing commercial-grade audio localization in all the languages Admerix specializes in: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Thai, Khmer, Burmese, Lao, Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Dari, Hebrew, Hindi, Punjabi, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Tamil, Nepali, Armenian, and Turkish

Why not allow us to quote on your next project? I am sure we came help you reach your sales goals this year.

Translating Rhythm, Tone, and Slang

We usually handle corporate/commercial translation.

Even in that subject-matter area, which a layman would think is very literal, we often have editors and reviewers who argue over issues of style and tone--even in a rice-cooker manual.
 
Thus it is mind boggling to imagine the issues that come up in literary translation...

The Trick to Translating Rhythm, Tone, and Slang