More important events coming up dear readers; those who are interested do mark out 28-31 October this year in your calendar for the 50th Annual Conference of American Translators Association which will be organized in New York City. I would urge everyone, especially freelance translators to make it a point to attend this conference because the event would provide excellent opportunities for career development.
The Annual Conference of American Translators Association involves many activities and features that would help the participants to network with more than 1800 translators and other language professionals. Though a large number of them would be coming from across the US, one can also get to meet professionals from across the world. In this way one of the greatest benefits of the ATA conference is that it provides a great occasion to network, advertise your services and market yourself.
Furthermore there will more than 150 educational sessions organized for the attendees. You can register for the conference from the month of July 2009. Please visit http://www.atanet.org/conf/2009/index.htm for details.
There is an interesting new translation site called Conyac. It is an online translation service which aspires to provide a new dimension to human translation. Conyac is based on an innovative concept; it allows its members to provide translation services to each other. If you need document translation, as a member of Anydor you can ask other members who are qualified to do the job, to do it for you. Of course in return you would have to pay a certain fee. The pricing can be decided by the members themselves.
Right now the site offers translations between 13 languages and it is adding to the number. Do check it out at http://www.conyac.cc/?locale=en and let me know what you think about it. While I might not be able to reply to comments due to various commitments which leave me with little time for anything else, I do look forward to them dear reader. 
Something aside from our usual stuff today. Many of you might be aware of the United Nations Environment Programme’s Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree campaign, for those who are not, it is one of the biggest worldwide campaigns for planting trees.
Under this campaign, people, communities, businesses and industries, as well as governments are encouraged to plant trees. The objective is planting at least a billion trees annually all over the world. The current year is significant since the UNEP has set a fresh objective of planting 7 billion trees by the end of the year.
Every individual can make a difference and if you are interested in supporting this noble effort, please visit the official web page of the campaign at http://www.unep.org/billiontreecampaign to understand it in detail. If each of us could contribute we might be able to even top the goal of seven billion trees.
Web site translation involves a number of aspects which if not taken care of can result in highly disappointing results for the translation buyer. If you are planning to get professional web site translation services, the following would help you ensure that you get high quality translation and an overall smooth experience.
You should get a clear and detailed picture of your requirements against your translation provider’s conditions. This would help you avoid annoyances like additional costs, delivery bottlenecks, wrong formatting and the like.
- What is the delivery mechanism? How are you going to deliver the source files to your translation provider and get back the completed translation? If you email is being used then do check out any limits that might be there on the maximum size of attachments that you can send. If FTP is being used you should make sure appropriate security measures are in place.
- What platform is being used by your translation provider? If you are working on a PC based platform and your translation provider works on a Mac based one then you might end up getting a translation that you cannot use readily. In the same lines, you should also clarify the format in which you want your translation to be delivered. Most of the times, you might require it to be same as the format in which you are delivering the source document.
- You should also check out the typeface used in the original translation and how it would be affected in translation. It might be possible that the target language does not contain the complete range of accented characters that you have used in the source document. Replacing one typeface with another might lead to other complications.
- How would your translation provider work on the text that is embedded in animation and images. Since you are getting a web site translation it would not make sense to skip any part. You should have discussion regarding this with your translator.
- Make a note about extra charges. Translation companies do levy extra charges on any changes requested after a specified level of work has been done. Make sure you are aware of that so that you don’t end up with unwanted charges added to your total translation cost.
Hi folks! The dates for the 12th International Conference on Translation has been announced. It would be held from 18th to the 20th of August, 2009 in Penang, Malaysia. For those who may not be aware of it, the International Conference is a biennial event. It was started by the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka and the Malaysian Translators Association and held for the first time in 1984.
Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka and the Malaysian Translators Association championed the cause of the conference out of the awareness that language translation is one of the most important mediums of communication and can play a significant role in the development of a country.
The International Conference on Translation has only grown in importance over time because interaction between different cultures and languages has been increasing exponentially in the recent years. The conference intends to serve as a platform which will encourage cooperation and facilitate the international exchange of knowledge, ideas and experience between translators, language experts, scholars, educators and students among many others. Check out http://www.usm.my/ppa12 for details.
Tomedes has always supported the development of multilingual websites, this is why we were excited when Google Analytic Blog was released in Spanish. You can check it out here http://central-de-conversiones.blogspot.com.
This is a new blog in the Spanish language which includes measurement tools by Google like Google Analytics, AdPlanner , Insights for Search and Website Optimizer among others. It will allow Spanish speaking users of Google as well as GAAC from Spain, Argentina and Mexico to share advanced web analytics techniques as well as basic tips as they help decision makers in integrating data gained from such tools for use in preparing effective business strategies.
Along with translating significant posts from the blog Central de Conversiones will also be involved in sharing case studies and creating content especially for Spanish markets.
It’s good to see initiatives like this, at Tomedes we have already been proving high quality web site translation services and have been consistently able to achieve results of which we are proud.
So Google’s at it again. It was only a few days back that I discussed Google’s wonderful new project - Google Wave where I pondered over the possibility of including human translation services. It was a wish fulfillment of sorts when I came to know about the Google Translator Toolkit.
Google Translator Toolkit is a promising new product for those who require translation services, as well as those who provide them. At present it supports translation from English to 43 other languages. Google Translator Toolkit differs from Google Translate in that it allows the use of WYSIWYG editor. One can also invite people for collaborating on translations, as well as use transliteration from English to up to 10 languages. It also allows people to develop and share their translation memories! So the more people use it the better it becomes.
Google Translator Toolkit integrates human translation skills with machine translations in an optimal manner taking the best of both to produce quality translations, saving on time and effort at the same time. It provides an efficient mix of crowd sourced translation and artificial intelligence. To know more head out right now to http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/translating-worlds-information-with.html.
Professional language translation providers frequently land up with inferior quality source document, most translators I know have had such experiences. By inferior quality source document I refer to original documents that are filled with typos, factual errors, ambiguities and poor writing among others.
This is a Catch-22 situation, what does a translator do? Should he or she correct the errors and improve upon the existing quality, keeping in mind that some errors and ambiguities might be on purpose. There is no sure shot solution to this problem. What I personally do is follow some strategies which might work for some and might not for others.
The first thing to do is to get in touch with the author of the source document. You can then discuss the questionable areas of the text. However this might not be always possible, for example in cases where you got the source document from someone other than the original author whose whereabouts are not known. You can try discussing it with the client but then he/she might be equally clueless about the matter if not more.
In my case I get in touch with my client and try to follow his/her instructions. In situations, where I am left entirely to myself, I try to take the safest path. Firstly I try to avoid going ahead with such translations. If that can’t be done, I generally leave the ambiguities as they are, and only change the most obvious or glaring factual errors, otherwise more or less I stay true to the text. However the solutions to this problem can vary according to varying language translation requirements and situation, do care to chip in with you thoughts.
In these competitive times it has become imperative for companies to have a web site in order to give themselves an edge over the competition. A web site is the easiest and least expensive way to tap a foreign market. However, there are certain issues that should be taken care of in the process of web site translation otherwise all the efforts put into the web site translation would turn out to be futile and may turn out to be injurious instead of being helpful.
Before getting a web site translation you should discuss with your professional translation provider about what could be the potential side effects of translating from the source language to the target language chosen by you. For example, it might happen that the target language occupies more space than the source language. In such cases the translated content might not fit into the fixed areas of your website. There are languages whose fonts are remarkably bigger compared to say English, then there are languages which are written without any space between words, like Lao and Thai. Languages like Chinese use symbols. Now translating from say English which uses letters and words, to Chinese might require quite a lot of other changes as well.
Your translation provider’s work is not done once the web site translation is completed. This is because a web site needs to be updated regularly according to the various events taking place in the targeted country, as well as in the company that owns the website. All these need to be updated and uploaded as and when the situation arises.
The content of your website should also be optimized for locally preferred search engines. Though Google, MSN and Yahoo are the most popular ones around the world, there are some countries like France and China whose residents use their native search engine. Consequently, if your website is targeting such a country you would need to get it optimized for the locally preferred search engines.
Lastly, when you maintain a web site in foreign language(s), you can expect to get query/ feedback mails in that language, which you would need to understand and reply.
To sum up getting a web site translation is a long term commitment and once you plunge into it, you should make it a point to satisfy all aspects and go the whole hog.
Language translation has bought about immeasurable benefits to the world, it continues to play a vital role in the progress of mankind from the ancient times to the present. Think about it, language translation has served as the bridge every time two languages and cultures have interacted with each other. People coming from different cultures have been able to share their knowledge and experience with the help of translation and interpretation.
Though at present a major portion of the translation work being done can be classified under technical and commercial translation, historically we are indebted to literary translation which has brought great works of literature, philosophy, science and others to people who might not have been able to derive benefits from these works had they not been translated in their native language.
The Bible is one book which is famous as one of the most translated books all over the world. But then there have been so many landmark books which have served as eye openers for several generations and whose influence would have been diminished had it not been for the efforts of those unsung heroes who translated them, gave them an enduring life and made them available for many generations to come.
