I received a small English-to-Japanese translation job from a Tokyo-based translation agency yesteday. It's a weblog article written by a certain company executive of a world-renowned IT company.
With the increase of blogs written by corporate executives, I am involved in this kind of project from time to time. The volume of blog translation is not so big... maybe 300-500 words on average. I can complete it within a couple of hours. However, blog translation requires some techniques that are different from manual/business letter/online help translation.
Blog is certainly not a formal document. Translators must produce translation using friendly, enjoyable, and simple sentences. When working on blog translation, what matters are...
1) Translate using spoken/colloquial language
--- Readers must have a friendly impression with the translated text.2) Avoid an excessive use of technical/enigmatic expressions
--- Blog must be easy to read. It's better to use plain words.3) Avoid lengthy sentences
--- Long sentences make it more difficult to understand the context.Come to think of it... writing the articles of Tropical Radio (this blog) is nothing less than blog translation. Every day I personally write English articles of this blog, then translate them into Japanese. So I can say blog translation must be one of my forte.
But a problem is... I cannot get translation fees from writing/translating this blog!
