When looking for translation services, as a company price is usually the first thing that is considered, but there’s much more to translating a document than one would imagine. Here’s some key things that the best translation companies take into consideration and best practices they enforce to keep translation service standards as high as possible.
Translation Services – The Creative Process
Translating from one language to another is never a direct, easy process, no matter what many translation software providers may tell you. Just look in the thesaurus – some languages huge numbers of synonyms for words, whilst others are more pared down. It’s up to a translator to keep the intended style of the completed document whilst staying true to the source language, by choosing the best, most appropriate words where possible.
Translation Services – Mother Tongues
Even for the best translators in the world, the language you write best in is always your mother tongue. Translators should only translate into their mother tongue language, but should also be fluent in the source language so as not to miscommunicate any of the intended messages. For instance, in English, double negatives often are used and if a translator were not familiar enough with English, they may wind up translating the opposite to what is intended.
Translation Services and Software
Translation software can be handy for translators to check the odd word or phrase that they are unfamiliar with, but should never be relied upon or used frequently. Software translations are always direct and word for word, but the way a person writes or speaks, they often use phrases that are never intended that way but rather carry another meaning in their language. A human translator will know to pick out the difference – a computer will not.
Translation, Transcription and Proofreading
For quality translation services, much like transcription services or even creative writing of any kind, proofreading is necessary of completed documents to ensure consistency and accuracy. This is ideally done by a third party who had not written the original translation, but can sometimes come for a small extra fee.
Translation Services – Flexibility
If you are having a document translated, you should receive it in a format that is easily adapted by you if need be. If you have a two page document that you translate from English into French, but no indication is made as to which lines correspond with which, it will be very difficult for you to make changes, additions or omit things as necessary if you don’t speak either the source or the final language. Time coding translations for audio are recommended, and using tables for document translations this make this easier for clients.
Translation Services and Formatting
As well as making sure translations can be broken down into small chunks, as we talked about above, it’s ideal to hire a translation company that can write up your documents, transcripts or interviews in a format that fits in with your house style or requirements, to save you time and money in any editing required later on.
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