Five Tools Available Free to Translator Freelancers

Machine translation has been a great boost for the translation industry, but few believe that it is as good as a human translator. Machine translations have not yet taken over as the main way of facilitating a translation. Virtually all human translators use tools available through machine translation websites. Here are five examples of free tools that translation services can use to improve their work.

Google drive

Google Drive has turned out to be an extremely useful tool for freelancers who are translators, especially when they have to communicate with clients from the other side of the world. Sometimes it is necessary for two translators to work on one document translation, even if it is just for proofreading purposes. The added bonus is that the ‘track changes’ facility can be used so that the other person working on the document can see the changes. 

Dropbox

Dropbox is an internet tool that surpasses email because it can handle far larger files which are easy to load and access. It is particularly useful for closing up distances between people as whoever you give access privileges too these people can share any of the files you choose.

WordPress

WordPress is a website tool that is just suitable for freelance translation services that are great at what they do and want to share it with the world and attract more clients. A translator can compile a brochure featuring examples of work and write a blog too on developments in the translation industry. Contact details can be provided and a place for comments as well. This is a great way for a freelance document translation provider to get firmly established in the translation world.

Skype

This is the all-in-one tool that connects the world. A translator can talk directly with a client; send attachments and text messages at no cost at all if Skype addresses have been shared. Skype uses what is called VOIP technology to link up individuals and translators globally as long as the two parties are connected to the Internet. 

Pixabay

A freelance translator who has his or her own website may wish to add images to brighten up the content. Pixabay is just the answer and it does not cost anything but has a stock of more than 490,000 photos and art illustrations available for freelance translators to access and use. 

Why Even Spaces and Line Breaks Matter in Translation

When you are getting a document translated, even one small error could cost you your reputation.

Translations of contracts, for example, and government documents, have to be 100 percent accurate, otherwise they will fail the translation test. Sometimes it’s possible to get away with using the cheapest translator or even machine translation software but not when a high degree of accuracy is critical.

It might be a bit of a surprise to be told that one of the worst mistakes made is not so much errors in the translation itself but mistakes with blank spaces.

When being totally accurate with a translation, words are not usually translated by translating one word into an equivalent single word meaning in the other language. This is most often the case with Japanese, when a few words in English could be up to a whole page in Japanese.

Many languages, such as German and Dutch, often replace whole phrases with a single word. When translating documents from English to Spanish, Thai, Portuguese or Polish, the amount of words used may shorten the translated text by 15% or more.

How to handle translation space issues

Spacing is important in translation so this is a good reason to use an experienced translation services in Australia so that you can guarantee a flawless return for your translation. Space is important and a translator has to have the expertise to know what can be re-worded or moved around or even omitted completely. Even any mistake in grammar, spelling, content or spacing could mean that the document fails to represent what it is designed to do. For example, in a translated contract it may not appear as it is supposed to because of simple mistakes or omissions.

A good translator will have the experience and knowledge to determine both language and spacing issues when it comes to translating official documents. A good translator will also know how such documents as patents, contracts and articles of incorporation should look like once the technical translation has been completed. A judge listening at a patent proceedings could reject a patent translation due to the breaks in any sentences not being in exactly the same place as the original document.

While working with key forms, text and graphics which have space limitations it is important that your translator can pick up important space and layout issues so that the translated document matches the original one perfectly.

So What’s So Different About Video Game Translation?

Have you ever had one of your kids try and explain a video game to you? It is as if they are speaking a completely different language to your own. In fact, many kids seem to speak in a different language anyway even when they aren’t discussing the latest video game!

You can imagine the challenges of translating the words and phrases which are unique to video games as a genre and to each specific video game as it emerges and evolves. Japanese video game creators and manufacturers have tussled with this unique set of language problems for years, but it is by no means confined to the difficulties in translating Japanese words and characters. 

The fact is that video game translation really requires a team of specialised translation services personnel who deal exclusively with video game language. That’s the ideal scenario, but it’s not always possible of course. The number of truly specialised video game translators is probably quite small. 

The challenges of video game translation for the professional translator are compounded by the fact that new terminology and characters are emerging all the time as video game creators attempt to develop new themes to keep their customers interested and promote sales. A lot of characters in video games are often culturally specific and it takes quite a lot of thinking on the part of the translator to convert these characters into an equivalent that will have the same sort of impact in a different language and cultural setting.

Of course, similar challenges exist when new films have appeared which use language which is obscure or specific to the setting of that film. Think of the Lord of the Rings, for instance. The setting is one taken from a Nordic (Scandinavian) base, with a Tolkienesque twist. Translating the utterances of elves and trolls into Arabic, Vietnamese and Hindi (just to name a few languages) is a major translation feat and yet it has been done because films like that have universal appeal which transcends borders. Video games are in a very similar group, with the added challenge that the language is often even more unique to a particular game. 

One thing is for sure and that is that video games are not going to go away any time soon and that means that there is plenty of scope for the translator who is contemplating a shift to professional translation services specialising in video game translation.

Ever Thought About the Value of Translation for Your Business?

Are you thinking of expanding your business overseas? Have you considered how you are going to get your message across to those who don’t speak English? Research has shown that 80% or more of Internet browsers prefer websites in their own language and they might just miss out on what you have to offer unless you have translated all your marketing material.

In fact, these days it’s not just targeting an overseas market for whatever it is that you produce that’s important. There are many communities right in your midst who appreciate information in their own language, even if they have a working knowledge of the main language of that country.

You might now be thinking how you can cut a few corners with translation tasks. Do you really need to pay out for a professional translation service? The short answer is “yes.” The cheap alternative is to use one or other of the readily available computer generated translation programmes, but they are not up to scratch if you are serious about attracting business. In fact, a poorly translated marketing message could do the opposite to what it is intended to do. It could offend, confuse, amuse or annoy your target audience, but it might not help to sell your goods.

Businesses that most benefit from professional translation services

Businesses depend on professional translators not just when they market their goods. They may need to translate information or technical manuals so they can be used by buyers who speak a different language. That includes businesses that manufacture appliances and technical products of all kinds.

Medical equipment suppliers may need document translation experts to translate medical information and instructions so that their specialised equipment can be used elsewhere.

Most businesses that choose to expand into other countries will find a raft of regulations they have to deal with. They may need legal documents translated, applications for subsidiaries and branch outlets to be set up and a stream of communication that has to be translated so that it can be read and understood by partners and officials anywhere where the business is intending to expand into.

The travel and tourism industry has long embraced professional translation services, although some of the worst translated materials are also present in this sector. Many tourism operators, hotels, travel agents, anyone involved in dealing with overseas tourists will need to make sure they have advertising material and information in the most common languages of the tourists that come regularly to that country. Tourists will come again if they feel at home and welcomed in their host country and well translated, culturally sensitive and accurate material will help to make that all the more certain.

Thinking About Your Translation Needs?: Tips For Entrepreneurs

If you are thinking about expanding your business abroad, it can be an exciting prospect, with many challenges, one of the most important is being able to market your business in the languages commonly spoken in the countries you are expanding into. You will need to use a professional translation services provider if you are serious about communicating your business presence overseas. Here are some tips to help you prepare the way forward.

Tip#1 Avoid machine translations

 

In this computer and Internet savvy era, it is not unexpected to encounter businesses that are just setting about expanding overseas using a machine translation system to do their translation for them. This is not a good idea and could backfire on you. Machine translation at the present stage of its evolution is not intended to provide accurate translations and is more of a draft or amateur translation type. Clients and customer that are subjected to machine translated material would think that they are not important.

Tip#2 Check on how the translation agency charges for work

 

Many translation service providers charge by the word, but some charge by the hour. This makes it a little more difficult to budget for as it is hard to know in advance how long it is going to take for your material to be translated. Make sure you get a quote and ask whether there are any additional charges. Many translators charge extra for jobs done on weekends or public holidays or urgent work. 

Tip#3 Check to make sure the translation agency is experienced in your type of work

 

While it is obvious you will be looking for a translator or agency that is able to translate into the languages you want, you may not be aware of the fact that many translators specialise in certain types of material. Some may be best at legal or medical translations, marketing translations or website translations, technical documents, literary translations and so on. What are you going to translate? Check out a number of different translators to make sure they are familiar with your job specifications.

Tip#4 Larger agencies are often more versatile

 

While many translators work by themselves, you may find it easier to work with a larger agency. They are more likely to have a translator that matches your specifications and can complete the work when you want it done by, too. 

Tip#5 Don’t just look for the cheapest translator

 

How much a translation project costs is not the best guide to how effective your material is going to be. Translation takes time and good translation is done by good translators. Good translators are more likely to have a better grounding in the target language. If you are looking to translate marketing material, you will need to make sure that this is translated taking into account cultural and legal requirements of your target market.

The Talmud Now Available in Italian

The Talmud, an important Jewish work, has now been translated into Italian. The massive document translation project is the very first of its kind in 500 years of history of the Talmud.

The Talmud was originally published in Aramaic, a language that predates Hebrew and Arabic and is still spoken by small communities scattered across the Middle East. Aramaic was widely spoken in the parts of the world where Judaism began many centuries ago, but the oral laws of the Jewish religion were not published for a long time because of the persecution of the Jewish people and the subsequent diaspora.

The new translation has been the project of 20 individual researchers, together with 70 translators, in a state funded project in Italy. At the time of writing of this article, the completed volume of the Rosh Hashanah is due to be presented to Italy’s President Mattarella.

The translation services project cost the Italian Government 5 million euros with an Italian software package called Traduco being used to help complete the translation from the original Amharic into Italian and Hebrew.

The project’s chairman was a Rabbi called Riccardo Di Segni, who is the chief rabbi in Rome. Rabbi Di Segni led the team of historians, linguists, researchers and translators after the project, dubbed “Project Talmud,” was initiated five years ago in 2011.

The Traduco software has been specially designed to help translate ancient texts like the Talmud. It allows researchers and document translation experts wherever they are in the world to communicate and exchange valuable information as they tackle complex translation tasks. Rabbi Di Segni said that it was a very new way of working on the Talmud and envisioned that it could be very useful elsewhere on other translation projects.

The completed volume is to be published by an Italian publishing company called La Giuntina, which is a specialist publisher of Jewish literature.

The Talmud is the source of oral Jewish law, which is divided into two main sections: the Mishnah and the Gemara. The Mishnah is the law as it was originally written down from the oral version and the Gemara comprises the additions and commentary on the law by various rabbis down the centuries.

This may be the first time that the Talmud has been translated into Italian, but it can already be accessed online in Hebrew. Some Orthodox Jews will make it one of their daily tasks to read a page at least of the Talmud, a pursuit which is called Daf Yomi in Hebrew, translated into English as “a page a day.” The word “Talmud” actually means “to learn” or “to teach.”

Good Communication Usually Means a Good Translation

A project manager for an Australian translation services business needs to be good at multitasking, such as, managing the finances of a translation project, helping the linguists and managing multiple languages while being in charge of many projects. All these different components in a translation business require specific skills but the project manager needs to bring these skills together in every translation project.

Every day a new challenge has to be taken on and won successfully so that the translation services in Australia business can go from strength to strength. This often means taking initiatives with a difficult translation project in front of them.

Communication is very important to a translation business, so the project manager must have the ability to communicate effectively in a variety of different situations. Staying positive when communication becomes difficult is a great asset to any translation business.

Flexibility is just part of a good project manager, such as adjusting work hours to suit the projects that are underway, assisting any members of a translation team, meeting up with customers so their requirements can be met and adjusting prices by offering discounts to clients who use the translation services business a second time.
 

Organisational skills

An effective project manager will be well organized to ensure the features of a document translation project are completed in a logical order such as the translation task, the proofreading and editing of it, the correct budgeting for it and of course management of the time frame of the project. Deadlines have to be met and clients must be kept happy with both quantity and quality of any translation project whether big or small. Each translator should be kept up to date on client satisfaction so that any necessary adjustments can be made.

Translation projects are the product of human interaction with possibly a variety of different languages so each product should be suited to the audience that the customer wishes to focus on so this means the project manager must ensure that all the translators understand the client and his or her customers.

A Bad Translation Can be a Downfall for a Website

Businesses have increasingly been using the Internet as a tool to market their products in different places around the world and to different cultures and language groups. One of the most useful tools is translation services as they are able to market and present product information through the business’s website by translating it into key languages around the world. These website translation services come in different forms such as machine translators such as Google translate and real life human translators. Many businesses prefer to copy their website content into Google translate and then copy and paste the translated product back into their website.

Unfortunately, this word-for-word way of translating is not always the best way to get a good translation and market your company’s products to the global market. A good example of a mistranslation recently was Kentucky Fried Chicken’s “Finger Lickin’ Good” catch phrase which when translated to Chinese emerged as “We’ll Eat Your Fingers Off!”

Making mistakes like the KFC one can cause problems but there are other translation mistakes that are not so easy to pick up such as understanding the way different cultures act towards certain products and the way the translations have to be adapted to suit any cultural influences. For example, the way Spanish is spoken by Spaniards differs from the way Colombians use the language so if words are mistranslated not allowing for these differences the reader will be confused and if it’s a website will not return to that page. This is where human input is important because a good Spanish translator for a Colombian audience will check for different word usages and ensure there are no ambiguities in the translation.

To save all the worry of providing a poor translation of your product information and making your website look bad you should ensure a human translator has contributed to the translation. Most human translators may well use machine translators to get the bare bones of the translation but then they will tweak the final translation by ensuring the language fits the likely readers of the website. When a marketing translation company takes on a website translation job it will ensure the right translator is matched with the job who is familiar with the nuances of the language that the translation is for.

What is Technical Translation?

Technical translation is a specialized translation task that involves translating documents that have been written by technical writers related to a particular subject area that is technical in nature. Often, this involves writing technical manuals for products or written descriptions how a product works and how it should be repaired if it has ceased to work. Overall, to provide an accurate document about a product a technical writer would be very conversant with the sorts of products he or she is writing about so that there is a certainty the end-product is as accurate as possible.

As long as the technical writer is consistent in language use the technical translator will more easily be able to perform a good translation of the document. The use of computer-assisted translation along with terminology databases and translation memories has enabled translation services to provide translations at a much faster rate and with improved accuracy than has been in the past.

This means that language speakers from around the world are able to benefit from better translations of technical manuals than has previously been possible because of the time and cost of manually translating technical texts.

A technical translator working for translation services even when using the tools of computer based translation should still have a specialized background in the field they intend to work in and many familiarize and learn the language and orientation of limited areas such as medical or automotive language.  This means they can quickly work through translations using their two specialist languages and come up with an appropriate technical translation.

A technical translation also requires good knowledge of technological skills when using machine translation (MT) and computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools. This technology is not used when the client wants more creativity applied to the document translation, so the document translation service has to be sensitive to the needs of the client when choosing a suitable technical translator. 

Hot Tips for Budding Scientific Translators

Are scientific translators professional linguists who have developed a good understanding of scientific terms and ideas or scientists who have developed linguistic and translation skills? The answer is that they can be either as long as they do develop an understanding of both disciplines. In fact, scientists are normally quite specialised, so they may have a particularly deep understanding of some branch of science but little of any other. Unless they stick to translating a narrow range of scientific texts, they still have to learn about other areas of science if they are to become scientific translators.

So what are the best tips for anyone setting out on the career path of a scientific translator?

Tip #1: Clarity and conciseness are key to scientific translation success

A knowledge of scientific terminology is vital for scientific translation services. Scientific terms are very precise and there is a potential for complete misunderstanding if the wrong terms are used. Literary translation is quite different as it can be ambiguous or unclear without having too much effect on the text being translated. Being familiar with the scientific terms and their meanings in both the original and the target language takes time and it is often difficult to use the correct terms without appearing too repetitious, but that is important for the translator to attempt to master, too.

Tip #2:  Proofread as you translate

It's common for the translator to come across small inconsistencies in the document they are translating. It's best to correct these as you translate them rather than leave them as they are. These small errors in the original document include things like numbers, references to tables and diagrams, wrong symbols etc. It is best for document translation service providers to correct these at the point of translation, rather than have any misunderstandings later on.

Tip #3: Pay attention to symbols, numbers, formulas and units

Most, but not all scientific documents tend to have a large number of these things scattered throughout amongst the text together with graphs and diagrams. Most symbols, numbers, formulas and units tend to be the same whatever the language, which makes translation issues easy, but this is not always the case and particularly translators may have to adapt units from metric to imperial or vice versa depending on the target readership for the documents. More importantly, there has to be absolute consistency with all these components of a scientific document - another example of the scientific translator having to be as much proofreader as translator.

Is Back Translation a Waste of Time and Money?

The short answer to that question is that it depends on how extensive and complex the original translation is. In many cases, where short simple translations such as are commonly handled by document translation services, like driving license and marriage certificate translations, back translation is probably unnecessary. However, for important projects like medical or legal document translations using a back translation as part of the whole translation process may be justified.

But what exactly is back translation and what does it involve? Back translation is usually the last stage in a translation and is most likely to take place after editing and proofreading. For example. imagine that a document has been translated from English into Chinese (or vice versa). Once the main translation has been completed, a back translation would involve the text being translated back again into the original language, so in the example just given it would mean translating back from Chines into English. The back translation, like proofreading is most effective when it is done by a translator who is not the same person who did the forward translation.

Why complete a back translation?

At first sight, it seems unnecessary to double the workload if a translation service provider has been chosen to do the original translation who is competent and experienced. However, it is amazing how back translation can reveal errors in meaning which never show up with proof reading, so it is something which is definitely worth doing if accuracy is paramount.

The sorts of documents that benefit from back translation are things like instruction manuals, technical documents, legal documents of all types and medical instrumentation information and dosage instructions. The list could be expanded to include any sort of translation which requires extreme accuracy and where errors in meaning could end up being costly mistakes or even result in harm.

If your business depends on translation but you are unsure about the accuracy of a translation service provider you are using for the first time, performing a back translation with another translator will serve to illustrate just how good the original translation was. This might be a lot cheaper than losing valuable clients or even being involved in a lawsuit because of an inaccuracy in a translation!

The Main Reasons Why Consumers Unsubscribe From Marketing Emails

Business owners and their marketers use their websites to spend a considerable amount of time getting customers to subscribe to their newsletters, latest product information, special offers and other bits of information that may be of use to consumers. There are times when the consumer finds little use for the information that they have subscribed too and decide to unsubscribe.