Business

Columns and Commentary

Off the Map: What makes a country a country?
Tom Edwards
Perhaps nothing stirs the public's consciousness about geography more than the announcement of a new country on the global stage — the ascendance of a nation of people to "country" status, with all the powers, pomp and recognition that such an event implies ...

World Savvy: Mumbo jumbo
John Freivalds
Mumbo jumbo is an English expression denoting something confusing or meaningless. One etymological theory is that the phrase comes from British colonizers in Africa who described a mysterious ritual as mumbo jumbo ...

The Business Side: Unicode primer for the uninitiated
Adam Asnes
Unicode is an underpinning for global software applications and websites, allowing them to support worldwide language scripts. It's a very important standard to be aware of, whether you're in localization, an engineer or a business manager ...

Perspectives: Tactical challenges vs. strategic opportunity: the localization crisis
Nicholas McMahon
Comedian Frank Muir once remarked that "'strategy' is buying a bottle of fine wine when you take a lady out for dinner. 'Tactics' is getting her to drink it." The localization industry needs both for a clear game plan, but too often we're so tied to the tactics ...

Region Focus

CAT tools in Japan
Shigeo Mikawa
Computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools such as translation memory (TM) and translation software are used quite differently in Japan than they are in the United States and Europe. This difference is due to the unique sentence structure of Japanese ...

Linguistic software for Japanese companies
Melanie Siegel & Todd Ettelson
Many of us have seen messages like those on a pocket knife manufactured by a Japanese company: "CAUTION! Blade extremely sharp. Keep out of children." Indeed, websites such as www.engrish.com, which posted this example, are devoted to collecting such errors ...

Gender differences in Japanese localization
Rik Grant & Naomi Okada
The Orient is often referred to as an area with an air of inscrutability, and perhaps one of the foremost reasons for this is its languages. With many intricate characters and myriad meanings gleaned from seemingly cryptic glyphs ...

Indirect communication: I see what you mean
Pernille Rudlin
I keep discovering new Japanese expressions for communicating indirectly, even though I have either lived in or had interactions with Japan for over 30 years now and think of myself as a fluent Japanese speaker. I already knew the word ishindenshin ...

Reviews

The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur
Katie Botkin
The Translator is a snapshot, an autobiography of one life among millions, rather than a textbook example of how to conduct interpretation sessions. Recently featured on US National Public Radio and reviewed by many other media outlets ...

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