Blog Archive

What danger lies in clouds When several translators are working on a big project simultaneously, it seems very alluring to put the translation memory in some cloud, connect all the vendors to it, and the translations of one of them will be immediately available to all the others as if working with a server or […]

Linguogeographic notes In 1542, two islands of the archipelago, which would receive the name of the Philippines later,—Leyte and Samar—were named Felipinas after Philip (Felipe) II, the king of Spain at that time. After that, the name of “the Philippines” (Las Islas Filipinas) was extended to the whole archipelago. Up to 1989, for almost 400 years, the Philippines have […]

A post about how to get rid of a prehistoric error in a prehistoric program * * * When the Illegal index message appears in the Translator’s Workbench window, restart the program immediately, even if it works just fine. This usually happens after numerous openings and closings of the translation memory or crashes. It means […]

This error appears not only in Trados Studio We wrote about the Attempted to divide by zero error in Trados Studio before, and now it has been caught by MultiTerm, a free app for processing termbases. The error appears right during simple scrolling through term records. What causes this error, typically, is unknown, but it […]

Many Westerners tend to think that Ukrainian and Russian are very similar and even mutually intelligible. This misconception partly arises from a commonly used classification of language families: On this picture, you see Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian on the same branch, and Ukrainian is put aside from Slovak and Polish. But this picture is closer […]

While attending conferences and talking to different language service providers (LSPs) in the U.S., we noticed that some translation agencies have a policy of working only with freelancers and do not consider subcontracting to an LSP from the country where the target language is spoken—for example, outsourcing translation into Ukrainian to a translation agency in […]

Since 2022, we have seen numerous cases of Western companies searching for Ukrainian translators but insisting that they MUST NOT be located in Ukraine. Often, Ukrainian suppliers are excluded from contracts due to so-called “safety considerations.” Let me explain why this approach is misguided. We understand where these fears come from. Every day, you see […]

With the beginning of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, translation industry in Ukraine has faced new ethical constraints and dilemmas, which have become a near-daily challenge. A Straight-out “No” to Orders from Government and Businesses of Russian Federation The rationale behind this approach is clear: it is immoral to work for those involved in attempting […]

As this article is being written, the war in Ukraine has been raging for almost three years. How is it influencing Ukrainian business, particularly the translation and localization industry? Translation companies facilitate international relations and trade, making them fully dependent on the volume of these activities. In Ukraine’s case, while trade volumes have fallen, international […]

At least half of the more or less prominent Ukrainian translation agencies claim to be “the leaders,” “the largest ones,” or “the first ones” on their websites and social media pages. Most often this is just a marketing ploy, and the written words do not match the reality. We will try to find some objective […]