A rule that works in a printed paragraph can fail inside a link, a slug, a menu label, or an error message. That is the problem with many dash rules in technical editing. They treat every string of text as prose, when technical copy often includes interface labels, file names, URLs, commands, headings, identifiers, and generated content. The result is familiar: an editor changes a hyphen to an en dash because the style guide says so, then the developer changes it back because

There's more to Australian and New Zealand English than adding mate or gidday to a sentence. We don't live in a cartoon. Using AI and MT tools unsupervised for these regions risks inserting some of the worst local stereotypes into business-critical texts. See a real-life example of machine translation output below (United States => Australian English): I'll give you a hint: 'It's the sentence that ends in 'mate'. Just another reason why you need a human to watch over your imp

If I've learnt anything from my multiple Alexa devices, it's that technology's cool for some things but when you need reliable service,...

Blog post update - June 2022 Earlier on, I posted about how happy I was to be contacted by an agency about being added to the game's credits. But years later, websites with a list of game credits still don't mention me or any of the rest of the translation team. Odd, right? As a result, I can't tell you the name of the game I worked on because this information hasn't reached the public realm. It's still covered by my NDA (non-disclosure agreement). This is a situation many vi

Just when I was beginning to give up hope for video game translation and proofreading, I was contacted by an agency to ask if I'd like to be listed in a game's credits. The game is an AAA civilization-building game, nominated for Best SIM/Strategy Game at the Game Awards 2021 (held in December 2021). As soon as it's finalised, and am 100% certain I've been added to the credits, I'll post more details here.

Low pay and poor work conditions for subtitlers are forcing people to leave the profession in droves at a time when the demand for...

Translating video games from French into English sounds like a lot of fun and it can be, but there's much more to video game translation...

Machine translation (MT) is rather good these days. Luckily for human translators, machines have difficulty translating imaginative or literary texts... among other things. Machines struggle to detect and faithfully translate shades of meaning and cultural nuances. We need human translators to identify these things in a foreign text and convey them fluently, in a culturally appropriate way. This is what localisation is all about, and it's a field in which human translators ar

The 30th of April is Moehanga Day. What's that you ask? It's the anniversary celebrating the "discovery" of Great Britain by New...

One of Joe Biden's first steps as President of the United States has been to reinstate the Spanish language version of the Whitehouse.gov...