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  • Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after. (Anne Morrow Lindbergh)     
  • Writers will happen in the best of families. (Rita Mae Brown)     
  • Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs. (Jack Lynch)    
  • Why do writers write? Because it isn't there. (Thomas Berger)    
  • The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication. (Hans Georg Gadamer)    
  • I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. (Oscar Wilde)    
  • The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. (Edwin Schlossberg)     
  • Writing well means never having to say, 'I guess you had to be there.' (Jef Mallett)    
  • Western Europe owes its civilization to translators. (Kelly Louis)    
  • The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it. (Benjamin Disraeli)    
  • Language is an art, like brewing or baking. (Charles Darwin)    
  • If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. (Isaac Asimov)     
  • The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. (George Bernard Shaw)     
  • No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft. (H. G. Wells)    
  • Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards. (Robert Heinlein)     
  • We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has. (Deborah Tannen)    

technical translation websites

crate tilting deviceDelmeco is an extraordinary company. They can make, design, install, optimise and manage just about anything from machines, to installations or pulse fishing equipment. This spring I translated their sites from Dutch to English. Each daughter company has its own site.

technical translation
The challenge for me in this project lay in the terminology. When you have to translate words like ‘crate tilting device’ some heavy research is involved. And all the while you have to keep in mind that the translation is not just about these words, but about the text as a whole. The text has to be be rock-solid too.

network recommendations
The way I acquired this job is worth noting. It all started on twitter. Two very sweet and very much appreciated recommendations went out to Nedbase, the party behind the development of the Delmeco sites. Nedbase in their turn recommended me (and several other translators) to Delmeco. It just goes to show that a network without heroes like Elco, Flip and Jaap is no network at all. Thank you so much guys!

The English texts are online now and Delmeco is ready to go international!

more about translations by SBText
check out the English Delmeco sites