In my previous job, there was a Dutch guy and a French woman (and me) and we were always called upon to do quick translations for our teams. The company we worked for was in that funny position where there wasn’t enough demand for there to be a full-time in-house translator, but the need for small or urgent translations still arose from time to time – for things like invoice queries, training materials, and certain emails.
On 7th March, I was invited to a translation round table at the University of Exeter, where I, along with two other translation professionals, took questions from the final-year Modern Languages students, who are currently in the middle of a translation business project.
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Translators are often the unsung heroes of many business sectors – after all, it’s said that you know that a text has been well translated when you can’t even tell that it’s a translation. So what ARE translators working on behind the scenes – and how are they benefitting millions of businesses and individuals?
Whenever someone asks me if I’m a sworn translator, or I get a request asking if I can do a certified translation, I find myself launching into a long-winded explanation about what this actually means – which is probably a bit alarming for those who were expecting a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.
I decided to write a bit more about this, because the idea of sworn translators is a misconception that continues to circulate around the UK. They sound cool, and they definitely sound like a legitimate example of a translator – after all, swearing is as official as you can get!
I wrote a guest blog post for the translation technology company SDL about the challenges of translating tourism content.
Although translating texts for the tourism industry can be very interesting, there is a lot more work to it than meets the eye, and it’s certainly not something that should be rushed – or left to chance.
Read an excerpt from my blog post below, and read the full article here.
Many translators would agree that there are two ways to translate something. While some of our clients appreciate that translations take time, require creativity and expertise, and may not word-for-word look like the original text, other clients may prefer a literal translation to be on the safe side, or may say something along the lines of “it doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect” or “as long as people can understand what it says”.
Last month, a friend of mine wanted a translation from English into Spanish, Italian and German, and while I recommended some of my trusted colleagues to her, she had mentioned that someone in her office had suggested they use Fiverr.
I shared my horror with my colleague and friend, Hannah Keet, and we bemoaned the fact that people seem to expect quality professional work, but are only willing to pay peanuts – but for peanuts, the quality will surely not be great. That’s when Hannah had the idea: why don’t we test this theory for ourselves through a “mystery shopping” exercise?
A friend of mine, Sarah, works for a media company that recently needed some transcribing and translation services, and it fell to her to locate some translators and take care of the project. Although this was her first time working with translators, her experience a) ends happily and b) might help others who may need a translator one day.
Google Translate, and other machine translation (MT) programs, have come along in leaps and bounds in the last few years. Not only can we download apps where we can just type in words and instantly get a result in another language, but you can take photos of signs and get a translation straight away, and even instantly translate voice and video calls with the likes of Skype Translator. With the magic of deep learning technology, computers are able to “learn” more and in theory, improve the quality of their output the more it is used.
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Today marks 151 years since Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published, so I thought I’d share with you a shortened (ish) version of what I wrote about during my Masters degree in Translation Studies, where I researched how on earth you would go about translating a fantasy, nonsense story, like Alice, into French.
Bellingua Translations 