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October 25, 2014

Affinity Translation provides translation services for the entire country from our central location in Denver, Colorado. All translation business is efficiently handled via email, electronic file transfers, and occasionally the telephone. It’s an operational system that’s tried, tested, and works very well. Since we seldom have a chance to see our clients face-to-face, we thought a brief […]

Best File Formats For Translation Services

September 26, 2014

Affinity Translation can translate text received in files of almost any format (e.g., MS Word, PDF, image files, etc.). Still there are certain advantages, disadvantage, likes, and preferences about the type of file format we receive. Here’s a brief summary: 1) MS Word: Probably the best and most preferred file format is an editable text based file […]

Around the Affinity Translation Neighborhood

October 25, 2014

Best File Formats For Translation Services

September 26, 2014

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Around the Affinity Translation Neighborhood

October 25, 2014

Since we seldom have a chance to see our clients face-to-face, we thought a brief virtual tour of our neighborhood might be an interesting thing for our clients and associates to see.

Our office address is at 1624 Market Street. It’s an old, restored building in a part of town known as Lodo (lower downtown). We’ve always thought the building would be a good spot for a future episode of Ghost Adventures. Mind you we’ve never actually seen any ghosts here. It just strikes us as a good spot for a few to hang out.

Denver’s historic Union Station is just down the street from us. Dating back more than 100 years it serves as a transportation hub in the city. We love the glow of the illuminated orange sign at night. Amtrak’s California Zephyr is a train route that runs east to Chicago and west to San Francisco. The scenery going west into the Colorado Rockies is spectacular.

Here’s Sliceworks just one bock northwest of us on 17th Street. We go to Sliceworks sometimes for, that’s right you guessed it, a slice.

Just a 5 minute walk away there’s Coor’s Field, home field for the Colorado Rockies baseball team (oh the optimism of April versus the reality of September). Still there’s never really a bad day at the ball park.

Hope you enjoyed the tour!

Best File Formats For Translation Services

September 26, 2014

1) MS Word: Probably the best and most preferred file format is an editable text based file such as MS Word. For one thing these documents are easier to quote (since quotes are calculated on a per word basis and editable file word counts can be determined precisely). When exact word counts aren’t known we estimate word counts, or price services based on the resulting word count known as project conclusion.

Some translators have a preference in working with MS Word files too since it’s possible to “work on top” of the existing source language text during the translation process.

Another advantage of translating from MS Word files is that the much of the original formatting is retained. Editable Excel and Powerpoint files also work well as source file formats and have similar properties to MS Word files.

2) PDFs: PDF files are another common type of file received for translation services. PDF files exported directly from a graphic design application such as InDesign allow efficient quoting because word counts can be extracted.

Usually translation deliverables from PDF files do not retain the original formatting and post-translation formatting in the target language must be performed after translation, either by the client or as an additional service from our company.

3) Image Files (e.g., jpegs, tiffs, pngs, etc.): We frequently receive many files in image formats, usually as scans from hard copy documents. Translators can work with them without problem although quotes based on word count are typically estimated since an exact count can’t be determined. Original formatting is not retained but translators attempt to approximate the original layout so that source-target word correlation can be inferred.

Other file formats we more occasionally work with include html, xml, and basic text files. Of course there are no bad file formats for translation companies … we’re happy to receive work in any way clients choose to provide it.

Half Sized Blog Element (Single Author Style)

Half Sized Blog Element (Multi Author Style)

Around the Affinity Translation Neighborhood

Best File Formats For Translation Services

Around the Affinity Translation Neighborhood

Best File Formats For Translation Services

Full Sized Blog Element (Big Preview Pic)

Around the Affinity Translation Neighborhood

Best File Formats For Translation Services

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