Translation is a complex service that often doesn’t quite get the recognition it deserves. Many people who buy translation may never have lived in another country and so have no frame of reference for the level of skill required to complete a good translation.

Consequently many fall into the trap of buying translation as a commodity, as if buying rice or cotton. But translation is a service, and like all services, it is performed by people so education, skill and time all contribute to delivering the final ‘product’ (for want of a better expression).

While it’s logical that you would want a service to be performed by the best people, it’s actually quite alien to most of us to buy a service from a) someone you don’t know b) aren’t ever likely to meet and c) where you as a buyer do not actually consume or experience the service first-hand.

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Yet another social network - so what’s special about this one?

Finnish-created XIHA is the world’s first multilingual social network. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn do offer content in different languages, but this is supported through a monolingual implementation - you have to choose one language for the user interface, and would mostly update your status & post comments, etc in that language. Multilingual people are therefore not easily able to fully express themselves, as to choose one language might alienate friends and followers who do not understand it.

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 Have a look at some of the recent projects we’ve been working on: 

• South African Airways, national airline of this year’s World Cup host nation - this project involves website localisation and managing multilingual updates.
• Aspinal of London, famous for their iconic leather goods - we set up a new ecommerce system, localised the site, and Aspinal now have a fully functioning Japanese ecommerce site.
• The Dorchester Collection, an international hotel management company - we’ve localised websites for various individual hotels in the collection, and translated documents for print as well.
• Future Publishing, an international special-interest media group - we provide translations of newsletters, press releases and magazine articles for their client Colnago.
• Citigroup, a leading global financial services company that operates in 140 countries - we translate various documents and web copy for several departments.
• Quiet PC, a leading supplier of PC cooling and quietening products - Used our International Blast service to test new markets to see where their products would be most popular.

If you’d like to be featured as one of our success stories, get in touch!

With J. K. Rowling’s final instalment of the Harry Potter books coming out in cinemas soon, a blog post about how other countries have learnt about this brilliant saga is long overdue! The best selling series of books has been translated into at least 64 different languages, including Latin and Ancient Greek.

With so many new and invented words, translators had a hard time making the book as magical for their own nation as it has been for us!

Lord Voldemort, meaning ‘flight of death’ in French, has been difficult to translate as his real name - Tom Marvolo Riddle - forms an anagram of ‘I am Lord Voldemort’. This means his name had to change with the language.

In Icelandic, he is called Trevor Delgome; he became Tom Gus Mervolo Dolder in Swedish which is an anagram of ‘ego sum Lord Voldemort’ - that’s Latin, not Swedish! And my personal favourite is the French, where He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named goes by the name of Tom Elvis Jedusor.

Many of the spells in the books come from Latin words, and usually we British can get the basic gist of them. For example, from the word Expelliarmus we could take out the words ‘expel’ and ‘armed’ or ‘armour’ to figure out that this spell disarms somebody.

However, for languages that don’t stem from Latin, other methods were used to create the same effect. In the Hindi version, translators used words that derived from Sanskrit to invent the spells.

As well as the authorised translations, other illegal, amateur translations have been made - in China in particular. Among these was a version completely different to the genuine books. It was called Harry Potter and Leopard Walk up to Dragon. In this book, Harry becomes a fat, hairy dwarf, is stripped of all his magical powers and is made to fight a dragon that embodies all the world’s evil!

Maybe we should just stick to the films for now…

Guest article by Annie Smith.

Latest EU regulations demand that all packaging and instruction leaflets for pharmaceutical products and medical devices are translated into the official language of the country they are being exported to.

American companies in this sector who intend to export their products to Europe must comply with these regulations, and indeed should embrace multilingual packaging in order to compete with their European counterparts.

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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?

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This month in Yorkshire’s Insider magazine, Daniel Rajkumar, managing director of Web-Translations answered readers’ questions about web translation and emails, and setting up internationally usable websites.

Q: I have set up a new arm of my company in France as a base for drawing in business from across Europe. As I am looking at a lot of different countries do I need translation of the whole of my website or blog into all the possible European languages? Won’t English do?

A: “If you are serious about drawing business in from Europe you will have to have the website or blog professionally translated for the main language of each country you are targeting. People use the web for research and they search in their native language, so if your website is not multilingual, it will simply not be found.

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Trade figures have recently shown an improvement in business exports  - partly due to the weakened value of our currency. According to research, companies which trade internationally are more likely to stay in business longer and are usually more profitable than those which choose to concentrate only on domestic sales.

Exporting is a great way to expand your business – those who trade internationally grow faster and fail less often than companies that don’t, and the current weak curerncy makes our prices much more competitive, so there’s no time like the present.

Which products/services sell well in Europe?

Machinery, engineering products and consultancy, vehicles, aircraft, plastics, crude oil, chemicals, plastic and rubber, metals, foodstuffs, beverages, textiles & clothing are all in demand throughout the Eurozone, and a little effort in approaching a potential client in their own language can go a long way. Even something as small as localising key pages of your website for a foreign market show that you are interested in foreign customers, and are a forward-thinking company.

What about in Asia?

The main exports to China are electrical/mechanical equipment, precision instruments (medical, optical, photo, technical), plastics, iron & steel, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, and Automotive , Biotechnology & pharmaceuticals, Construction, Engineering, Financial services & ICT are all industries which have experienced growth there. As for India, there is a similar focus on engineering, sciences and technology, but in fact opportunities exist there for most sectors.

Where else should we look to?

Emerging markets have been identified in Poland, Vietnam, Mexico, United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, Singapore, and Argentina. Opportunities exist in various sectors in these countries, notably design, consultancy and engineering - the sectors that are most commonly successful for overseas trade.

Brazil and Russia will also continue to be key areas for companies trading internationally.

[caption id="attachment_901" align="alignright" width="247" caption="Web-Translations help Smythson to achieve record sales"][/caption]

Smythson of Bond Street have enjoyed a profitable Christmas with online sales to Japan reaching record levels. We’re so pleased with the success of the Smythson project, we’ve taken the case study a step further by creating our first video!

Laura elegantly explains the steps we took to launch, promote and maintain the Japanese website for Smythson. We hope you like it, please do let us know your thoughts.
Turn up your speakers, sit back and enjoy. rnrn [caption id = "attachment_901" align = "alignright" width = "247" caption = "Web-Translations Smythson aiutare a raggiungere vendite record"] < img class = "dimensioni-pieno wp-image-901" title = "Smythson di Bond Street" src = "http://blog.web-translations.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/capture2.jpg" alt = "Web-Translations Smythson aiutare a raggiungere record di vendita" width = "247" height = "184" /> [/ caption] rnrnSmythson di Bond Street hanno goduto di un proficuo Natale con le vendite online in Giappone raggiungendo livelli record. Siamo così soddisfatti del successo del progetto Smythson, abbiamo preso la caso di studio un ulteriore passo avanti, creando il nostro primo video! rnrnLaura elegantemente spiega abbiamo preso le misure per avviare, promuovere e mantenere il sito web per Smythson giapponese. Ci auguriamo che ti piace, si prega di non farci sapere la vostra thoughts.rnTurn i diffusori, e godetevi.

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.