4 Foreign Language Translation Tips

When translating your website, marketing materials, documentation, owner’s manuals, user guides and instruction booklets it is important to keep the following items in mind.

1.  Hire a professional subject-matter expert who is a native speaker of the language you need translation for.  Your company’s international reputation and brand are in the hands of your translation team.  A reputable translation agency will have the experience, software and team to handle your specific project.

2.  Foreign language translation is not just typing your document into another language.  Your entire document’s meaning can be mistranslated and could cause legal trouble and lose of sales.  Experienced translators are intimately familiar with both the language and the subject matter - while non-native translators may miss a phrase or a word’s culture-specific meaning.  This could change the entire meaning of the document.  The art of translation should be left to the professionals. 

3.  Use a human translator.  Instant computer translated documents can have humorous-yet disastrous results. If your original documents took you several days or weeks to prepare - be wary if your translation doesn’t take some time to translate as the same care should be implemented for your translated documents.

4.  Do not be tempted to use cheap and fast translations that may actually be SPAM.  These translations can mean huge problems later.  There should be a balance between the price, the turn around time and the quality of the translation.  Technical translations can be more time consuming.  Be realistic with your deadlines. 

5 Translation Options for Businesses - Which One is Best for You?

Many people who need or are using translation services use the following translator types:

1. University Language Student

I would like to start with what is perceived as the least expensive choice, having a language student from the local university help you out. While this seems like a good economical choice, while helping students get some experience, I caution you highly in this arena. Often times students do not have a full practical working knowledge of the language (are not natives) and lack the subject matter expertise to do a translation justice. I have heard many stories from my clients about how they started out using this service and ended up having to have their documents re-translated and even having some legal implications due to mistranslations.

2. Staff member who is bi-lingual

Choosing a current bi-lingual employee to translate, also seems like a very economical choice. However, maybe not. If the employee was hired to provide engineering expertise or for other positions, that is their speciality. Just because someone is bi-lingual does not mean the are good writers or translators. The art of translation takes practice and a certain way with words to convey messages clearly and appropriately in another language. They were hired to do their job or expertise not as translators. In addition, often these folks are paid very well for their expertise and using them to translate brings down their productivity since they don’t usually practice this art, they are not as fast and accurate so your cost actually goes up by using these readily accessible resources.

3. Language Instructor/Friend

Many of my clients have used bi-lingual friends or their foreign language instructors to help translate documents and have been very disappointed with the results. Often times these people are doing a favor so the turn around time and quality checks are very slow and non-existent. While the perceived cost seems low, the actually working cost is usually high due to timing, quality and process issues. These people typically do not have the experience to translate documents. Their expertise is usually in either grammar or their job as opposed to the job of translation.

4. Independent Translators

This option may be perfect for your organization if you have the ability to test and check the quality of a translator with an in-country reviewer. Finding a “good” one can be challenging as just about anyone in the world can hang a shingle, create a website and call themselves a translator. There are several college, university, and certificate programs that a translator should have. In addition, practice. Years of experience does help with a translator mastering their craft. But not always. Not all translators can translate all materials and often only specialize in one language. This may cause you to have several different translators in one language to handle all your document needs or a bank of translators to handle all the languages you need. On top of that, they all need to be tested, reviewed and managed. They all require different payment options, live all over the world and often times their spoken English skills are left to be desired, so communicating your needs could be a very frustrating task. Due to their global locations, they all work in different time zones, and rarely have another set of eyes to review their translations to proof and edit. Very few translators can work in several desktop publishing software programs like InDesign, FrameMaker, and many others. They usually only work with the Microsoft suite of products like Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc.

5. Translation Agency

While this last option may seem a bit more expensive than the others, it is the most thorough and the best bet for quality translations. An agency does a lot of the work for you to test the translators, look at their subject matter expertise, native tongue proficiency, deals with them in their native languages and in their specific time zones. They usually have a very detailed quality process that includes proofreading and desktop publishing services and a final editing step. They have several years of experience and a very vast net of qualified translators. However, not ALL agencies are the same. There are good ones and bad ones. There are no guarantees here. But the odds are with you if you do your due diligence and do your research before hiring the translation agency.

So which translation option is right for you and your organization?

10 Tips to Choosing a Translator

Anyone can hang a shingle on their door and call themselves a translator. Translating your materials is a huge matter of trust…after all, can you proofread the text in a different language? Most of our customers cannot. They are trusting us to take their English words and help them be understood when they go global. With over 1,000 dialects and 180 parent languages around the world, who wouldn’t be a bit confused.

You already know not to use a machine to translate your materials but how do you choose the “right” translator for you and your organization.

Many people claim to be professional translators when they are not. How do you differentiate? It is difficult unless you test them. Many people are bi-lingual or tri-lingual but just because they can speak another language does not always make them a good translator.

Qualities to look for are:

1. They are native speakers for your target language.

2. They live in the country/region you are seeking to enter. Language changes and those that are living and breathing the language will be your best guides.

3. They have extensive experience with the type of work you want to be translated (i.e. engineering documentation, medical records, legal patents, contracts etc.)

4. They are professional and courteous. Now I know that you think this seems obvious but many translators we have tested don’t get back to us right away or their English skills are sketchy at best.

5. They can deal in your time zone. Trust me, you don’t want to be up at midnight working with a translator on an issue.

6. They communicate their holiday schedules. Believe or not, other countries do not have the same holidays as us and these need to be expressed, so that no delays are unexpected.

7. They must be tested. This is a bit tricky if you don’t have someone who can read your target language but it will help you feel confident in your translators work down the road.

8. They must be able to work in the file formats of your original documents. Can they work in Frame Maker, InDesign or re-create your document from scratch if you only have a PDF?

9. They should use some form of a translation memory software. This will help your documents stay consistent and may save you some money if you have large amounts of text that are similar.

10. They must have a quality check process that includes, proofreading the translation as well as editing the document once it is placed into the original file format.

Translation

a place where you should be picky and that the cheapest price may not be the best choice for taking your professional image and brand globally.

Machine Translation vs. Human Translation - The Big Debate

So…you decided to take your business global and need to translate your marketing materials, website and technical documentation…where do you start?

Under no uncertain terms - DO NOT USE MACHINE TRANSLATION!

I know you are tempted because you don’t have the budget or the time and think simply copying and pasting into Babelfish or some other program from Google or Yahoo will do the trick.  Don’t be fooled. These programs will not do your material justice in the translated language. 

Translation is an art…one that many subject matter experts spend their entire lives mastering.  Just like English writers, whether creative or technical, they master their craft as they practice and by training - so do translators.  They are very good at understanding the contextual meaning of the source language and translating it into their native language.  As an example, have you ever taken a sentence and tried to rewrite that sentence in English to say the same thing only using entirely different words?  It is difficult, but translators do that every day into the target language. 

Don’t make a mistake and use a translation software that gets the context incorrect or that is not localized for the target market.  You do NOT want to jeopardize your entire business image just to save a few dollars.  I promise you the headaches are not worth it. 

Right now the software is just not sophisticated enough to do a decent job in translating meaning and context. In the future - that may change.  We will have to wait and see.