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.

What should be the Priority for Legal Document Translation?

Legal firms that do business overseas usually find that they have to make use of legal document translation services quite often. Like many businesses, there is a constant push to reduce the cost of running the business, but there is that awareness that quality counts, too and there must be a trade-off between the accuracy of a translated document and how much it cost to produce it.