Marketing translations can be tricky to deal with and if not worked upon by a professional translator with a high degree of expertise in the area can frequently result in translation errors ranging from embarrassing to disastrous.
Marketing translations have long been the object of debate and discussions in the translation industry. Opinions vary from whether marketing materials should be translated or the source material needs to be recreated in the target language.
In my experience of working in the area of marketing translations I have come to understand that marketing materials can certainly be translated but with a somewhat different approach. That is one need not be completely faithful to the original content and rather work on adapting it for the intended effect in the target language. Some people might find that unethical, but then that’s the best way to process marketing translations. One can however come across marketing materials which need to be worked upon from the scratch in the target language.
Translation buyers can play a significant role in the success of marketing translations by cooperating with their translation providers in adapting marketing materials for the target language. They should be ready to discuss areas of the original document which might contain puns, local idioms or be tied to the local culture and trends so intimately that translating them would not be feasible. In such cases the translation buyer should provide inputs to the provider and help him her create perfect alternatives in the target language.
Legal translation requirements have been on an increasing trend since the winds of globalization started spreading rapidly across the world. Globalization has also resulted in a significant increase in cross-cultural exchanges. Many activities - commercial and otherwise fostered by globalization require legal intervention and support. All this creates heavy requirements for legal translation.
However legal document translation is a very complex undertaking, legal documents apart from their sensitive nature use a unique style and terminology. Any deviations from the style and meaning of legal terms used in the source document while translating can result in errors with serious consequences, financial and otherwise.
Taking the above into account, legal translation should only be assigned to professional translation providers who specialize in the area of legal document translation and have the required qualifications and experience. Legal translation buyers should also make use of proofreading and quality assurance options offered by their translation services providers to absolutely ensure the accuracy of their translation projects.
Business translation requirements have grown exponentially with increasing number of companies opening their branches in foreign countries. Various companies have different motivations for working in foreign countries. Some would like to attract potential customers from new markets to increase their customer base and profitability; some outsource selected operations like customer support or manufacturing to countries offering friendly business policies and cheaper labor.
Moving business operations to a company where a different language is spoken creates requirements for document translation. For example, a company based in the United States opening a branch in France would require many documents to be translated from English to French to facilitate smooth operations, as well as to connect with French customers who are not conversant in the English Language.
The kind of business related content that most frequently require language translation services are technical and legal documents, manuals and policies, advertising and publicity materials and even websites.
All of the above content, though related to business would require variously specialized translators, if one requires high quality translations. For example a professional translator who works well on legal and technical translation would most probably not be able to do a good job in publicity materials translation. This is because both kinds of document have different styles and personalities. Technical and legal documents are filled with jargon, hard facts and figures, while publicity materials can be quite creative and tied to a specific culture, language and temperament. Hence both the types of documents require different skills other expertise in a given pair of languages.
Taking the above facts into account it is recommended that you should always take the services of a professional translation provider for your business translation requirements.
Trust the folks at Google to shake the world once in a while, and one can be sure keeping its past track records in mind that it going to be a pleasant jolt. This time it’s Google Wave announced recently by the company.
Google Wave is going to be one of the most ambitious projects from the company. It will serve as a web based computing platform which would bring e-mail, social networking, instant messaging, and wiki together. Other utilities offered by Google Wave would be enabling a high degree of collaboration across the web, a huge number of extensions and automatic translations between around 40 languages.
From the perspective of the translation industry I believe it would be very helpful if the folks at Google add human translation option to Google Wave’s arsenal, as we all know that however sophisticated it might become, machine translation would always be inferior and limited compared to language translation done by professional human translators. I can imagine dedicated teams of human translators spread out all over the world working with Google Wave.
You too can be a part of Google Wave’s development by signing up at https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup and also do check out the video of the developer preview at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ.
Did you hear about Bing. It’s the latest in search engine technology from Microsoft and this time the company means serious business. All you “snug with Google” users, do give it a try as it has some really cool and helpful new features.
For starters Microsoft has been promoting Bing as a “Decision Engine” that is Bing will go beyond your regular search engines lead by Google, and provide users with tools that would help them make informed decisions. Bing has been tailored to help you make decisions like those involving purchases, locating specific local businesses, planning a trip, and even researching for a health condition among others.
I can see many of you rolling up their eyes, but folks do give it a try. These are early days and it might take some time to come on its own, but unless you spend a reasonable amount of time learning to get the best out of Bing, it would be unfair to dismiss it. On my end I am playing around with various keywords related to language translation and getting some very interesting results. For one, I get to see snippets and meta data of search results as I hover my cursor over individual links, that saves a lot of time as I don’t have to leave the search page every time I need to check out a particular link.
From the perspective of the language translation services industry Bing might very well develop into a tool which would help translation buyers in selecting the perfect translation services provider for their project. In the case of professional translation providers, there might be a number of ways in which Bing could help – it could make research easier among other things. I have just started using Bing, and am still exploring its utilities… do give it a try and share your experiences and ideas with me.
It’s been a heady week for game translation providers working with Tomedes. What with the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo or E3 starting tomorrow at the Los Angeles Convention Center. It’s going to be bigger and better this time as the E3 is open to qualified computer and gaming audience including developers, retailers, business partners, and analysts from U.S. based and international media.
At Tomedes, work has been increasingly hectic as video game companies get ready to put their best foot forward. We have been working round the clock on consoles and games translation. We have translated manuals into a number of languages for those games that are being released in many countries.
The Expo itself is going to be very, very exciting with some highly anticipated releases from game industry biggies lined up. Avid gamers are looking forward to new releases from EA, Activision Ubisoft and Capcom among others. Get ready for EA’s mass Effect 2 and Brutal Legend, Activision’s Tony Hawk and Modern Warfare 2, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed 2 and Red Steel 2, and Capcom’s Lost Planet 2 and Dark Void.
Do check out http://e3insider.com for details while I go back to enjoy my game translation project.
