yndigo

A [h]istoric confusion
You can read paragraph upon paragraph of British English and not even notice a difference. And then all of a sudden, someone bites into a butty or gets struck by a lorry and you feel an ocean dividing us. A British colleague years ago stopped me dead in my tracks when she said [...]

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The changing rules of typography
Two spaces after a period. Period! OK…maybe not anymore. The first time I was told to break this rule was about 15 years ago in an office entering bibliographies into a database. The office computer guy informed us the proprietary database didn’t like double spaces, and added that one space would [...]

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Acronyms pose a special problem for translators. They are hard to research because they often refer to specialized industry jargon or internal corporate processes. The internet has many resources for terminology research and pages devoted to acronyms but it can still be a hit-or-miss pursuit. As translators, we’re responsible for leaving no stone unturned in [...]

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Noun and verb forms in legal writing
Nominalization, an issue I had touched on in my post about language contraction in English, is also the subject of a few of Wayne Schiess’ recent posts. He asserts that, although it is very common for lawyers unsure of their English style to use strong nouns and weak verbs, [...]

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The plain trend in legal language

Theater critics have complained that many contemporary stagers of Shakespeare take the Bard too seriously. His plays are bawdy and bloody and funny but to many theater-goers today, they are just stuffy. Some of this comes, I think, from the fact that, as imitators, we revere the original so much [...]

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Brackets: A rather delicate translator tool

contrast to [sic], which lets the translator wipe his hands of an error in the source, brackets rectify the problem while alerting the reader something’s a bit off.
As an aside, the unqualified bracket means the square version in American usage, where for Brits this would mean parenthesis, thus their need [...]

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Sic: use and abuse
Not limited to academia and journalism, sic makes an appearance pretty often in translation. The latin means “so” or “thus,” or, according to Meriam Webster, “intentionally so written.”
The translator — a fortiori, the legal translator — is a reporter of sorts, trying his best to move communication from a writer to a [...]

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Contraction and expansion in translated text
A while back I took part in a blog discussion that was attempting to establish a matrix for translation expansion and contraction by language pair. The secondary discussion in the thread interested me more: although the word count grows in many foreign languages when translated from English, it never seems [...]

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