Food for Translators – Translation Blog

So, you’re working along, deep in concentration, when up pops a value written with units that won’t be understood in the target language. What next? Do you:
a) Pull out an old battery-powered calculator and a printed conversion chart.
b) Use an online conversion chart and the infuriatingly crummy calculator built into Windows/OSX...

Widely acknowledged as the go-to book on American-English style, The Chicago Manual of Style – now in its 16th edition – is an absolutely indispensable resource for translators; however, for some, the very idea of spending 65 dollars* on a book can result...

Wikipedia is so helpful to translators that most of us would rather not admit quite how much we rely on it — partly because, as everyone knows, Wikipedia has a certain less-than-perfect reputation when it comes to accuracy. However, a surprisingly large...

A friend of mine (whose first language isn’t English) recently asked me how to contract “they are”, to which I replied “they’re”. The same person then asked how to contract “there are”, to which I replied “there’re” (I was speaking not writing at the...