Translation - getting it right

What to look for when employing a translation company

Translation Companies

·         Should only place projects with fully qualified and experienced translators working into their mother-tongue

·         Should thoroughly vet and assess all translators before allowing them to work on your projects

·         Should have management systems to continually assess and reassess the quality of work delivered by translators, ensuring that strict performance criteria are met at all times in terms of accuracy, fluency and delivering work to agreed schedules

·         Should have management systems to track and update hundreds of files accurately for on-going projects

·         Should maintain client confidentiality at all times

·         Should have binding agreements governing non-disclosure and confidentiality of all documentation

·         Should make sure that all work is stored securely

·         Should be willing to be bound by specific terms of contract, subject to agreement

·         Should refuse a commission that they do not have the expertise to deliver

Translation Objectives

·         Translations should NOT read like translations

·         Work should read as if it had been written first-hand for the target market audience

·         All work should be fully localised so that it reflects current in-country style and terminology

·         Over a series of projects, the translation agency should work increasingly closely to each client’s preferred style, learning in-house preferences and vocabulary

Translators

·         Should ONLY work into their mother-tongue language

·         Should have internationally recognised academic and professional qualifications

·         Should ideally work in teams, where one translator translates and the second edits and proofs the work

·         Should have membership of one or more professional body, such as the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, Institute of Linguists, or mother-country equivalents

·         Should have specific subject experience for your industry field

·         Should preferably be living and working in their mother-tongue countries, giving you access to current language styles and current terminology

Translation Tips

·         If you are going to have your work checked by a regional office, make sure that they sign-off the source text before you send it for translation. Very often regional offices will want to say completely different things to their markets than you will want to say to yours, and they may well like a completely different style or tone to what you produce for your own needs. If you don't get the source copy approved, don't be surprised if the regional office then changes the text once they have seen the translation - they won't be criticising the translation, they will be rewriting the text so that it is different from the source file

·         Supply approved reference material and glossaries - especially to clarify in-house preferences and acronyms

·         Include any other related material that may help to clarify terminology

·         Tell the translation company if any words (usually product names) are to be left in English as internationally recognised terms or localised

·         Indicate whether conversions (e.g. miles to kilometres, or pounds to kilograms) are to be done by the translator

·         Tell the translation company who the material is aimed at (e.g. end-users, engineers, etc.) - this will help the translators to use the appropriate style. If you are producing work for a specific newspaper or magazine, let the agency know the name of the publication

·         Avoid puns - they never translate well and usually have completely different meanings in the target languages

§  EXAMPLE: an article about someone called Scott might have an English headline pun of "In the Scottlight" for "In the Spotlight", but this play on words is unlikely to work well, if at all, in other languages

·         Avoid proverbs - like puns, they never translate well and are often unparalleled in the target languages

§  EXAMPLE: in English we have the proverbial saying of "to kill two birds with one stone", but a cultural saying like this rarely exists in other languages - it might be something like "to kill two flies with one swat" - and a literal translation will make no sense in the target language text at all. If you've designed a marketing campaign with graphics around the two birds and one stone theme, you might well have wasted thousands of pounds in concept work as the idea just wouldn't be acceptable outside of the UK

·         Avoid humour – it hardly ever translates well

·         Avoid cultural bias – such as references to your national sport or literary/social clichés. Think internationally from the start

·         Most translators complete between 1,500 and 2,500 words of translation per day

·         An "average" A4 page has about 300 words of text: 30 lines x 10 words per line = 300 words. A translator will typically complete five to eight pages of text per day

·         Translators do not respond favourably to undue pressure to get a job translated quickly. Allow enough time for your job to be translated well and to be checked for accuracy

·         Allow lead-time in your scheduling. Translators are usually working on existing projects and so there might be a short time before a translator can commence work on your project

·         Most translators work in MS Word for PC as an industry standard. Work can be provided in other formats (Excel, PowerPoint, etc) but most translators will charge slightly higher rates for these formats, especially when they involve non-contiguous text

·         Translation out of English can expand by up to thirty percent so be sure to leave white space in any publishing design

·         If you are having work typeset, use a specialist foreign language typesetter. All languages are not the same and it is completely wrong to try and make them all fit English spacing/typographic rules

·         Fonts do not necessarily support all languages - check with the translation company before you design work around a specific font library

·         Check and confirm

§  Official names, etc carefully

§  How people spell their names: Sean/Shaun, Debby/Debbie, Gerry/Jerry, Tony/Toni, etc

§  If a person is male or female as some names can be either male or female names, e.g. Sam, Terry, Lee, Kim, etc 

·         Proof your own work thoroughly before you send it for translation - it avoids compound errors or mistranslation. Even a simple typo can lead to problems:

§  "We offer you piece of mind"

It should, of course, read:

§  "We offer you peace of mind"

·         Be prepared to invest in quality – it offers the best value for money in the long run. Buying a translation is like buying a car. If you want to make a good impression, you buy a top of the range model. If you buy too cheaply, you’ll end up with a heap making no impression at all. Better not to translate a text in the first place than to buy a cheap translation

·         Many translation companies routinely supply "for-information" translation as standard work, as opposed to "foreign language copy" or "adaptation". Make sure you know what you are buying

·         Beware of machine translations – only human beings know how to speak to each other. Machine translations are acceptable for gist understanding, but if you need a professional document to communicate your company’s message, use a human being

·         Build a long-term relationship with your translation company – they help you with translator selection and assessment, offer access to vast international resources, have project management skills, quality control procedures, the ability to run various file conversions, offer standardised document presentation, etc

·         Avoid agencies that have in-house teams of translators. The risk is for the project managers to give the in-house staff every job that comes in just to keep them busy, irrespective of whether they have the requisite skills or not. Look for agencies who work with freelance translators and who place work according to your needs (rather than with an eye on their own overheads)

·         Don’t do the translation work using your own company’s resources. Whilst your staff may be good at their day-to-day jobs, they aren’t trained translators and they may not even be that competent as linguists when writing in their mother-tongue

·         Don’t use a language teacher from your local school to translate a document. Translating is completely different to teaching. You wouldn’t expect the world’s leading violinist to be able to sing like Lucianno Pavarotti, and you can’t expect a teacher to know how to translate like a professional translator – different skills, so always use a specialist

·         Don’t use a language student to complete your translations. You wouldn’t let a student do a big new product launch for your company, so don’t let a student work on your company’s important documentation

§  A translation isn’t a completed text – it is a working document. Expect your regional office to want to make some changes. Even a perfect document can be changed. Try this out – give a “perfect” document that you have written to one of your colleagues and ask them to proof and edit it for you. The likelihood is that they will find some things that they want to change to reflect their own style or personal preferences

·         Only give the translation company final copy to translate. It doesn’t help to start translators off working with your draft files as it only leads to confusion and adds significantly to costs