Amir Freimann - Japanese to English Medical and Pharmaceutical Translation

Japanese to English Medical and Pharmaceutical Translation

Work Setup for a Mobile Translator

Over the last twenty years Amir lived in Israel, Japan, UK, Australia and US, and in the process of moving he created a light-weight portable work setup. It consists of two laptops, one with a Japanese and the other with an English operating system, controlled through a single keyboard and mouse connected to a KVM, and a Sony DATA Discman. That's it.

This is how it works:
On the “Japanese computer” Amir converts the Japanese document (if it came in hard copy) into an electronic text file using Kanji OCR (bottom part of screen below) and pastes the text into a Word file (top left). He then uses a combination of up to six of Fujitsu’s ATLAS twenty-five professional dictionaries (top right) as his primary translation tool.

On the “English computer” he uses the Word file (bottom left part of screen below) for typing in his translation, assisted by Trados’ Translator’s Workbench and MultiTerm (top left) with the huge term database he created over the years. Online professional dictionaries (Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC Site, right part) and search engines are used for backup, and the professional electronic dictionaries on his Sony's DATA Discman (including a 250,000-term medical dictionary) are used as final reference.

With this setup, Amir is assisted by dozens of the most updated and largest subject-specific dictionaries, available to him on his computer screens wherever he goes.