Welcome to our blog! This is where we explore topics that we hold dear or that are relevant to the world we live in. Serious, with a hint of humor and spiced up by our passion for writing, our blog will allow readers to see us for who we are.
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Fellow translators… what was the last book you read?
The idea is to push your brain out of its comfort zone, to challenge it and help it grow and expand. We tend to only go for things we already know we like. Not too often do we venture into worlds we “feel” we might not like or that, in the past, we didn’t appreciate. However, as people, we’re always evolving, and so should our professional skills.
“Winter blues” – What is it?
Winter doesn’t have to be a sad time! We have the tools to deal with all the challenges we face in life. We just need to learn how to use them. There are always things we can do to improve our psychic well-being.
Is post-editing a relevant skill?
In the past, it was often easier to work directly from the source text and translate from scratch than to post-edit the usually poorly generated content. But advances in machine translation, mostly driven by the post-edited text being fed back into the engines for learning, now allow for a higher-quality output, and this has been increasing the demand for this service.
Considerations on the Portuguese Language and the Orthographic Agreement – Part II
The pursued unification is utopian, in addition to being unnecessary, and the changes in the new agreement give rise to a series of linguistic problems for which the experts have not yet found an answer. The addition of optional rules and double spellings has only aggravated the problem and further disfigured our centuries-old and very rich language.
Considerations on the Portuguese Language and the Orthographic Agreement – Part I
Portuguese is a Latin language, yes, but only because, along with other prior influences, it is derived from Latin just like languages such as Spanish, French, and Italian. Latin is a dead language, disseminated by the ancient Roman Empire, in times when the Roman and Greek people were the pinnacle of Western civilization and considered all other cultures mere “barbarians.”
Certified translations & “certified” or “sworn” translators
Nor is it necessary to hire an “official” translator, i.e., a member of the Portuguese Translators Association—as some institutions unknowingly demand—to carry out a certified translation. Any professional translator can perform the translation, which will subsequently be certified by the competent authority, and the document produced will have legal validity.
Technology: what’s in store for translators? – Part 3
The border between literary and non-literary translators is now becoming a bit blurred. Non-literary translation has also expanded rapidly from being mostly technical, legal, and medical to include a much wider range of content, such as marketing and publicity, business, scientific, pharmaceutical, digital content, video games, subtitling, etc.
Technology: a two-faced game changer – Part 2
Technology has also brought up significant changes in the perspective and approach of multilingual communication.
On one hand, this is mutually beneficial: just as technology benefited translation professionals, technical translation is also vital for multiple technological fields—from construction and engineering to automation and robotics.
Technology: the evolution of translation – Part 1
All the way back in 1964, to describe the phenomenon by which the world’s culture was simultaneously shrinking and expanding due to the instantaneous sharing of culture originated by technological progress, the media and communication theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the term “global village.”