Comments for Tomedes Blog

Comment on Parting ways with translation clients by Oliver Lawrence

Oliver Lawrence — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 12:11:31 +0000

As you say, the key is professionalism and tact; not burning bridges and not giving the other person a pretext for bearing a grudge that could backfire on you (eg if they try to post unjustified negative feedback about you as a tit-for-tat).
I have had more than one client lament a rate increase only to come back a few weeks (or even years) later at the higher rate.

Comment on Crappy Translation Can Kill You by Sonia

Sonia — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:14:46 +0000

It is always necessary to rely on a professional provider of translation services, whether it is a single freelance translator or a translation agency. In both cases, there must be always a human person behind.

I believe that special care should be given to this particular field, as well as to other fields of specialisation. I can understand that in the field of business/financial translation there can be huge losses if the quality of the translation is not good enough, but in the same way if there are mistakes in interpreting correctly a patient’s symptoms, the loss would be by far greater.

In most translation agency confidentiality is central and can be taken for granted. Going to meet the staff directly, whenever possible, can give an overview on how work is carried out in the agency so that a good job from all parts can be assured.

Comment on Crappy Translation Can Kill You by Seth

Seth — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:23:43 +0000

How about when companies simply fail to translate, such as the Chevy Nova’s epic failure in Mexico? (In Spanish, No Va= Doesn’t Go)….what epic mono-culturalism do we have in situations like that???

Comment on A Business Epidemic: Neglect of Multilingual Website Translation by web content translat

web content translat — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 07:27:04 +0000

You have good share over here and it is essential to use website translators and proofreaders who are native speaking. They should have a degree in translation, accreditation and years of experience working in their source and target languages.

Comment on Measuring machine translation quality by Andrew Walker

Andrew Walker — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:06:34 +0000

Very well-written post, and may well be useful to my own research. Only comment I would like to make regards your final points: in the academic community it is (seems?) sensible to indeed focus on translation quality and worry about optimising productivity later. This point is weakened by the recent shift in emphasis in academia to support only more financially lucrative fields of study, but I do believe the principle remains. There is an expectation that the speed of producing translation outputs will inevitably increase (re: Moore’s law) so approaches that are slow now will -eventually- be tenable…

Comment on Why You Should Be Reading More Translated Fiction by Tanya

Tanya — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 02:03:57 +0000

Anybody know how the existing translated materials break down, genre-wise? IE, how much is poetry, how much is lit, how much is self-help, etc?

Comment on Why You Should Be Reading More Translated Fiction by Samantha

Samantha — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:57:37 +0000

What you are saying is absolutely worrying. The fact that translated literature in the US is represented by such a small percentage compared to the English-speaking publications, gives an idea of how different translation services are conceived from English/American countries and the rest of the world.

What amazes me more, is perhaps the fact that this is happening in the USA, where English is not anymore the most widely spoken language.

Comment on Why You Should Be Reading More Translated Fiction by Seth

Seth — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 23:47:47 +0000

I wonder what effect, if any, the popularity of Stieg Larsson’s “Millenium Trilogy” could have on the popularity of translated literature? The masses are currently reading Swedish literature like it was the latest Stephen King potboiler, and with the releases of the big budget Hollywood films on the horizon, the books stand to continue selling. I know Swedish and Finnish are certainly different, but maybe there is another Stieg Larsson out there somewhere….?

Comment on A 2-Stage process to ensure translation quality by Robert Translation

Robert Translation — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 20:18:00 +0000

I really like Josh’s comment that professional companies have two different teams perform each function. It’s easy to miss your own mistakes because you are familiar with the intent of the translation, so it’s better if the “writers” don’t do their own editing for translated documents. So maybe that should be a preface to these two steps? Otherwise people could technically complete both steps but not necessarily have the best quality.

Comment on The Top Translation Companies of 2011 by Translation Services

Translation Services — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 10:44:43 +0000

for translation services it dont require any large company or small if it requires we only need a good translator or interpreter which ever company he might belong to!