We’re always being asked “why can’t I just use Google Translate/Babelfish/[insert name of machine translation tool here] instead? It’s free!” Where do I start?…

Well, it’s true of translation as much as of anything else: you do get what you pay for. So if you are paying nothing for your translation, you can guess how good (or not) it’s likely to be.

The free automated translation tools can sometimes be very useful for getting an understanding of the text. But if you intend on publishing the text, this is the last thing you would want to use as the automated translations are very literal.
For example, there’s nothing French about french fries, but a translation machine doesn’t know that and you could end up with a very odd text! (more…)

This – the second guest posting on our company blog – comes from Spanish translator Carlos Montilla. Unsurprisingly, given the subject of his post, tourism is one of his specialisms but here he recounts a tale from his recent trip to Peru in near native English: cheers Carlos!

Spanish from Peru

Puno is a city in south Peru located on the shore of Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest navigable lake. Puno’s access to the lake is surrounded by some 40 man-made floating islands inhabited by the Uros people. The Uros people live on these islands and depend on the lake and tourism for their survival. We took a boat with members of a Chivay Cultural Association and their families and disembarked at one of the islands, where part of the Uros community welcomed us.

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Having shelled out money, time, and other resources on getting a web translation done, it’s important to choose the right person to review it if this step is part of your process. An inexperienced or overzealous reviewer can change the meaning of the text entirely, or introduce errors if they are rushed or their written skills in that language are inadequate.

There’s a delicate balance that must be struck between the translator’s knowledge of their language, and the client reviewer’s knowledge of their company and products. So who is the best choice as a reviewer? (more…)

Oh dear, who did that translation for you, Hillary? Next time, give us a call!

If you haven’t seen the latest US foreign relations gaffe on the news, have a look at youtube – it really is quite funny! Hillary Clinton, in an attempt to improve US/Russian relations, had a meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, and presented him with a gift in front of a room full of reporters. The red button on a black and yellow base was supposed to say ‘reset’ in English and Russian, and was intended to be symbolic of Russia and the US restarting their relationship.

Clinton: “We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?”

Lavrov: “You got it wrong; this says ‘peregruzka,’ which means overcharged.”

Ooops!

After my last post about cleaning the uncleanable, I thought that crying over broken ttx files was a thing of the past.  Well, it wasn’t, unfortunately.  This week I had another file that would not clean up, no matter how many tricks I tried.   This problem was (somewhat) solved by:  1) obtaining the TM used by the proofreader 2) running the source file through Trados Workbench’s “Translate” function to create a new bilingual ttx file based on the translations present in the proofreader’s TM 3) cleaning up the ttx file as normal. 

The problem may have been caused by the large number of broken tags, but attempts at repairing these and then cleaning the ttx file as normal just did not work.  So, after I was able to create a new bilingual ttx file and clean that, the resulting file was still a mishmash of Swedish with English where the tags were broken.  Some copy/paste magic was needed to get the file into its final state, but at least it didn’t take too long

This post is just to point both new and regular readers in the direction of our updated Industry Glossary.

This glossary gladly serves to save you the hassle and embarrasment of asking your resident techno-geek for an overly convoluted explanation of any industry terms, by providing simple, jargon-free definitions of the terms below…

If you would like to add to the exisiting definitions, or have a fantastic industry term that you can’t wait to define, let me know and I’ll add it to our list.

Many major Brazilian newspapers are finally implementing a new spelling reform. The reform was to include all Portuguese speaking countries and aimed to unify spelling but only Brazil, Cape Verde, and Portugal signed up initially in 1990, with Brazil, only now, actually implementing the changes.

It is believed that 0.5 percent of words used in Brazil will be affected, against the 1.6 percent of Portuguese words. Furthermore, around 98 percent of the spelling discrepancies between the two countries will be eliminated once Portugal implements the agreement. They have until 2014 and are not likely to act before that time given the resistance to it of the people. The reason? Many common usage words will be effected whereas Brazilians must only become accustomed to a few missing accents, for example in idéia and vôo (which are now spelled ideia and voo), and also to new hyphenation rules.

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It’s a favourite cautionary tale among translation professionals: Make sure your translations are accurate or you and your product could become a laughing stock. The first step in achieving this is to use a native speaker – a golden rule that should never be broken.

Here are a few examples (many of which you may have seen before – but the old ones are often the best) of mistranslations into English – a language I would hate to have to learn as a foreign language myself, as there are so many exceptions to rules and slight nuances as the following will demonstrate:

“We take your bags and send them in all directions” – Airline Ticket Office, Copenhagen                (Never a truer word said!) 

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We’ve already given our dos and don’ts for clients who want to buy translation services, but what about those selling them? Yes, I’m talking about translators – the missing link in our business equation. Those who help us make it happen for each and every one of our clients.

Here is an early Christmas gift – just a few pointers for translators who are looking to increase their client base (and in the current economic climate, who isn’t?) by applying to agencies.

1. Your CV: Cast a critical eye over your CV. The same rules generally apply for translators as they do for anyone applying for work: anything over 2 pages is just too long. Two pages is ample to give an overview of your relevant experience, qualificiations and specialist subjects – you can keep a list of translation projects you’ve worked on separately, then it’s ready to provide should someone ask for it. Doesn’t belong in your CV!

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This blog post is dedicated to all of the Céciles, Célines, Josés and Frédérics out there…

An easy way to make someone feel appreciated is to get their name right!  (I’m sorry, Petar, for writing “Peter” in my email last week…)  It does get a bit tricky when you are writing to Jesús or Agnès, however, as to really get their name right you need to stick in one of those funny accent marks…

The obvious way is to click the “insert symbol” function in Word or Outlook and look through all of the characters until you find the one you need, but this can sometimes take a while.  When I was at university, typing out too many French essays, I reassigned the functions of all the function keys on my laptop, so that when I hit “F2″, an “à” appeared, and “F3″ an “è”, etc.  (I don’t think it worked for F1 for some reason.)  I re-learnt to type with an extra row of keys and it really did speed up my essay-writing!

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