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.