Post Editing: Legal governments

Law is the antithesis of many things — wrong, chaos, freedom, grace — depending on the context and who invokes it. For translators and language service providers, law usually means something more practical and straightforward: revenue. 

Government, also, can be either a reference to corruption or a reference to order, or possibly both. Linguists will point out that the word means management, which is always a handy concept for any business-minded professional.

In this issue, we have two overview articles on legal and government translation work, by Dena Bugel-Shunra and Jennifer DeCamp, respectively. Kate Edwards also provides a column on cultural laws around the world, and Earl Mardle has a Perspective on the revolutionary use of social media, both in toppling governments and in advancing humanitarianism.

We also introduce our Core Focus, bringing the Getting Started Guides of yore into our magazine pages. The articles in this new section will explore some of the more basic concepts and practices in the language and global business industry. This time we cover localization, starting off with some tips on localizing software, websites and mobile applications from Amir Helzer, boosted by a helpful localization maturity sidebar from Common Sense Advisory. Next up, Emmanuel Margetic outlines the makings of a professional translator and how translators fit into the broader localization supply chain. François Massion offers a detailed article on localizing machine software, which may interest those who already have a bit of background in localization.

And there’s more — much more. Barbara Inge Karsch presents the results of a terminology survey outlining, among other things, who in the localization supply chain uses terminology, where it most often fails and why. Georg Rhem and Hans Uszkoreit announce META-NET and explain how professionals can get involved in this endeavor to protect European languages.

In our regular columns, Lori Thicke interviews Pablo Vasquez of Cisco on machine translation testing, and John Frievalds has some thoughts on taxi rides. We have two reviews, one on MultiTrans, by Angelika Zerfass, and one on John Yunker’s The Savvy Client’s Guide to Translation Agencies by Ultan Ó Broin. Speaking of John Yunker, he’s also the author of our Takeaway, celebrating a font-tastic, truly international internet.