A staff member at a client company is asked to review a delivered translation. The staff member has some language skills, although is not a professional linguist. What will happen? Guaranteed … they’ll make changes to the delivered translation. There are at least a couple factors at work: Making preferential (not essential) edits to a […]
We recently adopted the descriptive tagline ‘Practitioners in the Art of Language’ for our language services company. In so doing we make the case that translation can rightfully be considered as art and translators as artists. In author and marketer Seth Godin’s blog ‘A useful definition of art‘ he explains his view. Art is work […]
When it comes to translating videos there are usually two options: One is to add subtitles (written text that appears at the bottom of the video frame) and, Voiceovers (newly-recorded audio track in the target language over the original spoken language audio). Of the two methods the voiceover approach is somewhat higher in cost since […]
Translation of PowerPoint documents into virtually any target language is a commonly requested service. The most popular target languages are (in no particular order) Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Existing PowerPoint formatting can be retained when we perform translation projects using the original English version PowerPoint as the source […]
Occasionally we receive a request to certify a translation performed by a third party. The third party is sometimes the inquirer/prospective client, someone they know, or possibly even a machine translation output (possibly not identified as such). Generally speaking if our company certifies a translation it means that we have followed a process that involves […]
Why are perfect translation so hard to achieve? For starters what is a perfect translation anyway? It’s rare that two professional linguists will agree on a single best approach to translation of a body of text. There are typically options and multiple approaches to expressing equivalent meaning in any language. This is intuitively true even […]
