Support The Auto Industry Initiative
December 9, 2008 by Beverly Cornell
Filed under Announcements, Translation, Translation in the news
We are so excited about the grassroots initiative our company started only 4 weeks to get help support the Automotive Industry.
Iterotext has served the auto industry and its suppliers for over 30 years and wanted to give back.
We are looking for suppliers to offer incentives beyond the vendor plans OEMs offer to encourage new American Made vehicle sales.
With more vehicle sales during this slow recession we hope to at least sustain the industry until the economy bounces back and people are better able to purchase vehicles on their own.
We would love your support.
Please visit www.SupportTheAutoIndustry.com for more information and to sign up your company’s incentives.
Expansion of Languages when you translate from English
November 3, 2008 by Beverly Cornell
Filed under Desktop publishing, Translation, Writing for Translation
Thinking about how your document will look in English is what most of our customers think about. But there is more when you are translating your documents. Specifically expansion and contraction of your text when translated.
For example, when translating into a romance language such as French or Spanish, text can expand as much as 20%. Other languages such as Dutch and German tend to use longer words than English and can expand as well. This can present formatting and desktop publishing challenges if not planned well. For example, a table in English that fits nicely on one page may spill over to the next page if translated into Korean. I have provided approximate expansion or contraction rates below when translating from English into the following languages:
Language % Difference
Arabic 104
Chinese 61
Czech 117
Dutch 128
Finnish 103
French 111
German 108
Hindi 83
Hungarian 113
Italian 109
Japanese 115
Korean 123
Portuguese 110
Russian 115
Spanish 117
Swedish 95
Keep this in mind when formatting your English – don’t squeeze all of your text into a cramped space with tiny font as this will cause issues for your translation projects.
Top 10 Countries and Languages that Matter Most
October 31, 2008 by Beverly Cornell
Filed under Translation
Based on a 2007 report by Common Sense Advisory the following countries and languages are important in today’s economy.
1. U.S.A/English
2. Japan/Japanese
3. Germany/German
4. China/China
5. United Kingdom/English
6. France/French
7. Italy/Italian
8. Canada/English and French
9. Spain/Spanish
10. Brazil/Portuguese
The full list includes the top 25 ranking.
When taking your products and services global think about these markets and translating into these languages to appeal to more customers.
Document Translation – Source Files
October 29, 2008 by Beverly Cornell
Filed under Technical Translation Services, Translation
The PDF format has been a great way to share files through email by making the documents much smaller. Many people request a price quote for translation and editing of a document by sending over PDFs.
It would be helpful to send the original document to your translator. This also alleviates the extra time and desktop publishing (DPT) work by the graphic design team to recreate the file to look like the original document.
To reduce costs for you and save time on your project, send the translation agency the original editable documents for translation.
10 Tips for Buying Translation Services
October 22, 2008 by Beverly Cornell
Filed under Translation, Translation Tools
For non-linguists or people not familiar with translation services buying foreign language translation services can be frustrating. There are a few things to think about before translating all your documents.
1. Decide which information really needs to be translated for your global employees, distributors and customers. Be sure to translate only the relevant information in your documentation so that you produce shorter text and minimize your translation costs and timing.
2. Use of pictures, charts, graphs and diagrams can help your communication be more straight forward and understood. This will aid in technical translations and trying to get just the right term in the foreign language as well as reduce the amount of words that need to be translated. Only use text when absolutely necessary.
3. Do not create materials without thinking of your global audience. Don’t use puns, and culturally specific terms in your English versions – these do NOT translate well and become very awkward when translated.
4. Calculate how much time you spent creating your English documents, this is a good idea for the how long the translation process will take.
5. Do you need a translator or a translation agency? An agency will help with the translator selection, project management, quality control, file conversations, standardized presentation of multiple projects. Thus a translation agency will be more costly than an individual translator.
6. Determine if you need a translation and if it will be used for reference (for-information)or if it needs to be rewritten/adapted (for-publication)to be used for sales. This will affect timing and costs for the project. In addition, share with the translation company who the audience will be for the translation and what output or medium will be used.
7. Resist the temptation to have your documents translated by an internal person who speaks the language in need. This is dangerous as speaking is NOT writing. Just because a person has oral fluency does not guarantee smooth, stylish writing.
8. Provide your final version – do not provide a draft and make changes along the way. This will cost you more and cause issues in fluidity of the translation.
9. Machine translation is perfect if you are pressed for time and want to get just the gist of the meaning of a document. However…do NOT use raw computer output for anything outbound.
10. Use local schools and universities with caution. These could work for inbound translations to get a general sense of the meaning but translating a foreign language is an art. Would you have your company’s business plan or financial documents done by a university business student?
Getting yourself up to speed on the subject of translations is not that difficult. We are here to help you feel more comfortable with the process. This can be a fun and very rewarding part of your job, let us help you look good.
