It started with a seemingly harmless question: “Japan did more good than harm to China in the period 1900-45.’ Do you agree? Explain your answer.” Combined with two historical readings, it seemed like a nice item to measure critical thinking among Hong Kong history students. Not Just the Students Weighed In That question blew up […]

What would you do if your client required you to use a time-saving tool that actually made your work more time consuming? For one group of language service providers in Canada, the answer was clear: get a lawyer and sue their client, the Canadian Translation Bureau. Wait, What Tool Is This? The tool at the […]

Exploring the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and some recent research. Do people think differently because they speak different languages? Or is it just the way they say it? It gets kind of chicken-eggy pretty quickly, but the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis nailed it down a long time ago as language shapes thought. It became the bedrock of science for […]

How fair is fair? In the world of high-stakes testing and other communication, how do we keep bias at bay? Implicit bias is a deeply uncomfortable topic for many people, but it’s an important one. The effects of implicit bias can cause real harm when everyday opportunities become unevenly distributed. Also, because of the nature […]

Companies want highly-qualified applicants and job seekers want opportunities to stand out from the competition. Should LinkedIn Skill Assessments be the only data point when companies make a hiring decision? No, of course not. But there’s no harm in having it be one data point among many. As we often say around the office: “Trust, […]

Involved parents and teachers improve student outcomes. One way of letting parents and teachers know what to focus on to support their students is to provide them with adequate student data. But how should student data be used? Who should it be shared with? Let’s look closer at what parents and teachers really think about […]

Is Google Translate good enough for government work? Google is increasingly proud of its Google Translate product, but the company still recommends that users of its automatic translation put up disclaimers such as: “Reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate translation, however, no automated translation is perfect nor is it intended to replace […]

He is a lawyer. She is a housewife. He is smart. She is beautiful. Simple enough to translate. So, what could possibly go wrong when machine translation learns from us? Neural machine translation (or NMT), like the new Google Neural Machine Translation system, copies what it learns from its training data and produces what it […]

Or the Secret Sauce to Keeping Your Customers Happy At Responsive Translation we increased our NPS score more than 10 points over the last decade. From an NPS score of 83 in 2008, we achieved a sky-high NPS score of 96 last year, translating to the highest rate of customer satisfaction in the language services […]

Scammers exist in a variety of industries, including the translation industry, unfortunately. They are the scourge of real translators and hiring managers alike, damaging reputations and wasting time and money. But now, one well-organized group is fighting back.