What Does A “Translation Company” Do?
Someone asks “what do you do for a living?” The quick response, “I work for a translation company.” The expression on the questioner’s face is then interesting to watch. Was the response informative? Do they know what a translation company does? Probably not.
What other responses to this question might be appropriate? Here are a few:
- We help people with different languages
- We’re in the language services business
- We support written communication between various languages
These are a few somewhat different ways of saying essentially the same thing, but they still don’t provide information about what exactly is done on a day-to-day basis. So listing example projects might be another way to describe what a translation company does, or at least what our company does.
Example Translation Company Projects
- An attorney contacted us today. He has 50 pages of documents in Hebrew and he wants them translated into English. We’re still waiting for the attorney to send us the 50 pages in Hebrew so we can assess the scope of work and provide a quote for this service. We don’t know the nature of the subject matter of the 50 pages in Hebrew. The attorney might hire us to do this project and if he does we’ll eventually know what the 50 pages say in English after translation.
- A video production company has prepared a five minute video that depicts a commercial agricultural operation in the state of California. There’s spoken narration throughout the four minute video, three different voices in total. The video production company is interested in having a Spanish voiceover prepared (three voices) so they can replace the current existing English audio content and replace it with Spanish language narration. If this project is approved we’ll provide transcription, translation, and voiceover production services to satisfy the customer’s requirement.
- We’re currently still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and today we’ll deliver to one of our regular clients a Spanish translation of a letter from the company’s chief executive about how employees can conduct themselves responsibly during this time in order to minimize further spread of the virus, and with it additional adverse impact on business activities.
These are some of the things a translation company like ours actually does.
