As Dimetra Academy’s MT masterclass approaches, the buzz around machine translation and its facets seems to grow and there is one question that keeps coming up regularly: is there a difference between CAT and MT? Although I am not an expert in machine translation, I have 20+ years’ experience as a professional translator using both […]

“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably”, wrote the British author Clive Staples Lewis. Not only do they combine, we might add, they also have interesting things in common, especially regarding the specific features of online reading. In a landmark article of 2001, Leslie O’Flahavan and Marilynne Rudick use the food metaphor to […]

Santiago de Compostela is a cathedral city and the ending point of arguably the leading pilgrimage in Europe. Pilgrims set out from all over the continent aiming to celebrate St. James (Jacob) on 25 July at the church. As a pilgrim, there is one rule you cannot break: you have to walk it. All of […]

“Easy reading is damn hard writing” wrote the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. This holds particularly true for web writing, that is writing for an environment in which reading is a particularly difficult activity. As Jakob Nielsen wrote in a seminal article, more than ten years ago, readers on the web often don’t read, they simply […]

Intercultural communication is like a boat trip for your clients. They know the point of departure and have a vague idea of where they want to end up. The bit in between is your job: getting them there and doing it while leaving positive memories behind, whatever the weather. What does it take to be […]

You’ve been hearing the term “intercultural communication” for years now, but do you actually know what it truly means and entails? Have you considered its impact on you as a translator or on the practice of translation as an intercultural activity? Have you ever thought of yourself as an intercultural mediator? Have you thought about the […]

“The only kind of writing is rewriting”, wrote Ernest Hemingway, referring to the painstaking revisions that writers have to make to their own texts. Not only writers but translators, copywriters, web writers, you name them… All text creators rewrite continuously, until they reach their objective: being understood and appreciated by readers. Each author has a […]

How did this all start In August 2017 there was a call for papers for the Elia Together conference which would take place in Athens in February 2018, and with my good friend Vilelmini we decided to send out an abstract. The abstract was based on the idea that SMEs, especially in small countries like […]

When businesses wish to sell their products or services abroad, they necessarily cross cultural boundaries and often linguistic boundaries. This is by no means an easy task. The success or failure of their endeavor depends, among others, on the realisation that customers abroad buy their products and services for completely different reasons than those in […]

Τhis is today’s newsletter title sent out by Slator. Call me nuts but I really don’t believe that translation is only about machine translation, Google, SDL and the like. What I do believe in, though, is the power of communication beyond machines and automated processes. As a matter of fact, I believe in communication and […]