Native speaker

One thing I am utterly fed up with is people (agencies, other translators) bleating about "native speaker" as a quality mark for translation. How in the world are we supposed to appear as a group of professionals if we keep using this subjective, poorly defined and irrelevant term as some kind of a holy grail?

I may come back to this point.

Scarlett Johansson

Ha! I sincerely hope that somebody gets this page when what they were looking for was something about Scarlett Johansson. Then they'll know how I feel every day when my Google news search emails me the results for my simple key word: "translation". Is it REALLY necessary for journalists to mention that pesky film every time they write something about her?

And while we're at it, shall we just stop the "lost in translation" references altogether, when writing anything about translation, anywhere? I for one don't think it's awfully original or funny or clever anymore (as if it ever was).

The news in my google alerts that aren't about Scarlett Johansson, but instead are making clever references to the movie title, are usually about interpreting - that's right; INTERPRETING. It's different. That's speaking, translating is about the written word. How hard can it be?

Stupid Google, stupid news, stupid Coppola, stupid everything.

Tags: Translation, Google news search, rant