Q: What is transcreation? A: Transcreation as a word combines two different words: translation and creation. But the word creation as such is something of a misnomer; transcreation can be more readily understood as a combination of copywriting and translation, amounting to a kind of creative adaptation of a text…
The idea that translation is an art rests on two fundamental premises. The first is that effective translation requires a certain amount of skill, its techniques and methods developed over time not only in the hurly-burly of solitary practice or paid translation projects but also under the guidance of a…
In an era defined both by the limitations and the expansion of artificial intelligence, human writers and translators exist at the same crossroads: that of apparently having to defend themselves against machines, define their value, and decide whether to go on. But this scarcity and fear is the opposite of…
We all have bugaboos and afflictions as human beings. They tend to percolate into our unconscious, dashing our plans, messing with our standards, opening shutters and throttling cabinets in our tidy neuronal offices of the mind, and generally doing everything in their power to ruin a good night’s sleep. And…
Because Spanish and English are two different languages with a myriad of histories, cultures, and ways of conceptualizing the world, they use different rhetorical strategies to form ideas and construct sentences. These strategies and their results in written discourse—which, after all, is the most pertinent for the translator—can be not…
Both inside and outside the translation industry, confusion often abounds about the difference between the terms translation and localization. Some clarity is therefore in order: the two words are indeed different, though far from being so distinct in all situations that they could occupy different sectors of the industry. In…
For the translator in the twenty-first century, one of the most fervently repeated collocations of the times has to be machine and translation, those two suggestive siblings that have gone on to establish their reputations as the acrobats in a traveling circus of technology. As members of the audience, both…
In the world of professional translation, it goes without saying that the technological advances of the past few decades and, in particular, those of the rampant additions to the translation market such as ChatGPT and other kinds of artificial intelligence have meant the continuous upheaval of the industry. But this…
