I keep thinking back to this idea that rather than readers paying for publications, writers will eventually have to pay readers for their attention. Many – maybe most – of my friends consider themselves writers of some type. They hang onto different labels – novelist, short story writer, journalist, columnist, researcher, poet – but, in [...]

The following is my translation of Paula Gonzalo’s interview with Juan Arellano about the Lingua Project on Global Voices. Links have been changed to their English-language equivalents when possible.
Juan Arellano is one of the bloggers who, beginning in 2007, has been working as an editor for the Global Voices Lingua project, one of the sites [...]

On September 19, 2005 a tall, dark, and handsome Taiwanese blogger who goes by the strange name of “Portnoy” decided that he would start translating select blog posts from Global Voices into Chinese. His first translation was of a post by Indonesian blogger Enda Nasution which summed up the week’s news from Indonesia through the [...]

In The Omnivore’s Dilema Michael Pollan reminds us that food is an inelastic good, which is to say that, obesity aside, there is a limit to how many calories a person can consume in a single day. Any more and we would explode.

Once we all reach that caloric daily limit then the food industry [...]

I intended for this post to serve as some sort of table of contents for what I’ll be writing about over the next couple months, but I think that this is really me trying to keep my head on straight as I flutter and flounder all over the map.
The Soul of the New Machine: Human [...]

Itzpapalotl continues to be one of my favorite bloggers. I love her life vignettes. Today’s sorta took the words right out of my brain-fluff:
A nosotros la tierra nos expulsa, cada ciudad es como un trampolín desbalanceado. Vivimos al portal de la semana próxima, con amigos tenues y lugares hermosos, bañados de la luz benéfica de [...]

A Cameroon national, Fidelis Morfaw received his B.A. in Modern Languages from the University of Sierra Leone, his M.A. from Penn State, a Translator’s Diploma from Georgetown University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas in Austin. He is now based in Brazzaville, Congo where he oversees the translation of documents at the World [...]

I’m going to try to get back in the blogging habit by translating at least one newspaper article or blog post a day from Spanish into English. We’ll see how long it lasts. From today’s La Nación, here are reactions by various Latin American presidents to the victory of ex-bishop, Fernando Lugo in Uruguay’s Sunday [...]

In the last post of this series, we looked at how producers of open source software and open content are usually faced with three types of translation: software, website interface, and content. This post will take a closer look at some of the processes and obstacles regarding the third type, content. As an example, I’ll [...]

A few weeks ago a very friendly Martina Recchiuti wrote me an email asking if I’d mind if the Italian magazine, Internazionale translated and published my blog post about traffic in the developing world. Mind? I was honored of course.

You can find the resulting blog post here. They have also translated recent posts by friends [...]