a culture of language and thought

In catching up on the week’s RSS feeds this morning, I came across two translator profiles on two different sites and just had to share them here.
The first is from the site Publishing Perspectives, which is wonderfully international in scope. The post from Friday is called "M. Frédéric Grellier, The Blind Book Translator of Paris". [...]

I am a huge proponent of negotiation – not simply taking the price and terms you’re offered by anyone and everyone for a translation job, but seriously examining the time and effort the work will take, evaluating your experience and overhead, asking for what you’re worth. But that’s not to say I don’t find the [...]

Andrea G. Labinger is Professor of Spanish Emerita at the University of La Verne. She has published numerous translations of Latin American prose fiction. Her most recent publications include a translation of Angelina Muñiz-Huberman’s The Confidantes (Gaon Books, 2009) and Ana María Shua’s Death as a Side Effect (forthcoming from the University of Nebraska [...]

Daína Chaviano is the award-winning author of several novels published in Spanish. She won the acclaimed Azorín Award for Best Novel for El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (Man, Woman and Hunger). The Island of Eternal Love, which is her most recent work, was the recipient of the 2006 Florida Book Awards’ Gold Medal [...]

The title of this post likely has most translators blinking in disbelief. We get paid by the word, after all, so don’t we want to *increase* not *decrease* our word counts??True, what I’m advocating may cut down on your bottom line, but it will also improve your writing and your readers will thank you.
Redundancies
Particularly when [...]

I occasionally wonder how my business benefits from my website. I must confess, I haven’t been very good about doing SEO (search engine optimization), promoting my blog, using tags, finding ways to move my stats up in Google ranking, etc.
That being said, I do think it’s important to have a Web presence and have had [...]

As you likely know, Edith Grossman’s new book entitled Why Translation Matters is due out very soon. It has been getting a lot of press, including a recent review by Jessica Crispin of Bookslut.com at The Smart Set.
Ms. Crispin is irreverent, but she may very well have a point:
I know Grossman just wants her hard work [...]

My latest novel translation went off to the publisher on Monday and the break I was aching for sadly hasn’t happened as deadline after deadline for my government/corporate clients rolled around immediately after. In a way it’s good to have been this busy as I often fall into a bit of a funk when a [...]

I’ve been incredibly busy for the last couple of months.  My work days have been 10-14 hours, 6 if not 7 days a week.
In the meantime, Jon redesigned my site (if you hadn’t noticed, take a look around!), and in every e-mail I found the time to write, I asked friends and family for their [...]

If it wasn’t already apparent, I’m Canadian. All of the works I have ever translated have been for U.S. publishers and, while I think that has been very much to my professional advantage, that I am excluded by the Canadian system does bother me at times.
We have a wonderful but terribly underfunded agency, The Canada [...]