|
About the Articles Knowledgebase
|
ProZ.com has created this section with the goals of:
Further enabling knowledge sharing among professionals
Providing resources for the education of clients and translators
Offering an additional channel for promotion of ProZ.com members (as authors)
We invite your participation and feedback concerning this new resource.
|
|
|
|
Steve Vlasta Vitek
|
Steve Vlasta Vitek was born in Czechoslovakia, where he majored in Japanese studies and received his M.A. (Magister of Arts) degree from Charles University in Prague in 1980. He emigrated through West Germany, where he lived and worked in 1981-82, to the United States in 1982. He later moved from San Francisco to Tokyo, Japan, where he worked for a Japanese company as a translator from Japanese and German into English between 1985 and 1986, when he returned to US to start his freelance translation business in San Francisco in 1987. Since then, he has been earning a living as a freelance technical translator, mostly from Japanese, but also from German, Czech and Slovak, and occasionally also from Russian, Polish and French. He now lives in the city of Santa Rosa in the heart of the Wine Country in Northern California, 1 hour north of San Francisco. After almost 20 years of living in different countries with no one to speak to in his native Czech, he does not have a native language any more. His sister, who is Czech, told him that he speaks funny Czech, his wife, who is Japanese, told him that he speaks funny Japanese, and although his monolingual children who speak only English don't dare to tell him that his English is funny too, this is probably because they want to stay on his good side as they find his ability to translate the text on their Japanese Pokemon cards into English very handy. He has three dogs who are trilingual�they obey commands in English, Japanese, and Czech, although they seem to prefer Japanese, which is a much more expressive language than English or Czech, and in spite of its shortcomings, clearly a superior language for the purposes of communication with intelligent canines.
|
Articles by this Author
»
Reflections of a Human Translator on Machine Translation Will MT Become the "Deus Ex Machina" Rendering Humans Obsolete in an Age When "Deus Est Machina?"
|
There's a tremendous gulf between microprocessors and brains. People still don't know exactly how the brain works. Brains remain quite a mystery. ...... A machine can collect lots of data and make inferences and judgement. It becomes philosophical: What does it mean to understand? You can create something that has the look of understanding and the feeling of understanding. But it is what lets us m ...
|
»
Useful Machine Translations of Japanese Patents Have Become a Reality
|
Computers may in the future weigh no more than 1.5 tons. Popular Mechanics, 1949. The number of transistors on a microprocessor will double approximately every 18 months. Gordon Moore, 1965. Some two years ago, I wrote an article entitled "Reflections of a Human Translator on Machine Translation" in which I was considering the phenomenon of machine translation from the viewpoint of a human ...
|
»
The Changing World of Japanese Patent Translators
|
Anything that creates unity and harmony and dispels distrust and hatred is a step forward. The translator, obviously, has a very important role to play. I think I am carrying out a task which, in their way, my parents wanted me to perform, and I know that all those teachers and friends from the older generations who guided me and helped me along wanted me to do this, too. The microcosm and the mac ...
|
»
It's a Small World
|
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. Robert Frost My wife likes to criticize a certain Polish girl just before 10 AM on most weekday mornings. We never met this particular Polish girl. Her ...
|
|
|
printer version