Marketing Your Services to Translation Agencies

Note: This is a blog post by Global Language Service Ltd. on www.nakedtranslations.com.
          The source is referenced at the end.


Does approaching translation agencies give you the fear? Are you not sure how to present yourself? Does ‘marketing’ sound like something you’re just not ready for?
This blog is about how you can make yourself known, and make a ‘helluva’ first impression in the world of translation and interpretation.

#1 Set up your own website

Are you already considering skipping step 1 because you don’t think you can build your own website? Relax, it doesn’t have to be hard. Actually, you can make a brilliant site without knowing one single piece of coding.
Having a website can be incredibly beneficial when applying for jobs and when you’re trying to establish yourself as a freelance translator. Make it easy for people to find out who you are, and why they should hire you.
There are loads of platforms out there, that can help you build your own website. Two of the most popular sites are Wix.com and WordPress. Have a look around and choose one that fits you and your technical abilities.

#2 Make sure your LinkedIn is on point

LinkedIn is one of the fastest growing networks for professionals. If you’ve not got a profile already, then we suggest you schedule a day off and set up an account.
When looking through applications, agencies and other employers often google your name. This is to see what the internet has to say about you – and what you’ve had to say for yourself on the internet. LinkedIn has a lot of credibility, and your account is likely show up on one of the first pages of Google when someone searches for your name.
LinkedIn gives a clear overview of your employment history, your education and your qualifications. Think of LinkedIn as an extended CV. Make sure it’s up to date and looking fresh.

#3 Build a translation portfolio

It’s easier to believe something you can see, than something you’ve been told. You can either say ‘I’ve done lots of great translations for y’ or you can show some of the great work you’ve done.
Your portfolio can contain things you’ve translated, your qualifications, a copy of your CV, associations you’re a member of, personal information, and whatever else you think might be relevant.
Depending on where your skills lie, and what you think suits you – you can either make a hard copy portfolio, add it onto your website, or make a second website/ blog for it. Have in mind that creating all these sites and social media accounts can be time consuming. Pick a few, stick to them, and update them regularly.

#4 Business Cards, should they stay or should they go?

In a increasingly digital world, some industries and some people are ditching business cards. Whether you want to splash the cash or not, is up to yourself. If you think you can make a first impression and give people you meet something to remember you by (and your contact details), then we say go for it.
However, when we are at exhibitions and networking events, we meet A LOT of people. As much as we want to remember everyone, and their email address, it’s very hard! Hand us your business card, and we’ll be able to give you a call or send you an email if we’re interested.

#5 Blog what’s on your mind

If you’re a passionate translator, let the industry know what you’re working on, what you’re thinking about, and what is going on in your part of the translation world. Having your own blog is an indication that you’re passionate about your job and that you’re a thinker.
Start a blog, share posts on LinkedIn, or simply add your thoughts to your website. We know it can be time consuming to keep a blog, but when you reflect on your role as a translator and what’s going on in the world and industry, you often learn new things.

#6 Contact agencies

We all know that one person that complains night and day that they can’t find their dream job, but doesn’t do anything about it. Don’t be that person.
Get out there, contact us if you’re interested. Contact us if you want a chat about what life is like in our agency.
We like initiative!

#7 The application and the CV

When you send your application and your CV make sure it’s good. We don’t want a standard letter that goes out to 50 different places.
Your CV should be up to date, and your application personal. We want to know why you want to work for us. When agencies can see that you’ve put an effort into your application, and gone the extra mile, you’re in the spotlight.

#8 The dreaded networking

We know that networking is stressful and not always very fun, but believe us it really pays off! It’s hard to make a proper good impression over email, or 140 characters. Sometimes, just showing up puts you ahead of the curve.
In a world where there are way more job applicants than jobs, you’ve got to stand out!

#9 What now?

We (Global Language Services Ltd.) obviously can’t speak on behalf of all agencies in the world. But we think that if you follow our steps above, you’ll do great and agencies WILL pay attention to you. We’ve got nothing else to say except: ‘go get em’ tiger!’

About GLS

Hi there, we’re Global Language Service Ltd, and we are a translation and interpretation agency. Though based in Scotland, our reach goes way beyond the northern UK. We are always looking for new talent, so if you’re on the job hunt feel free to get in touch.

Source: https://www.nakedtranslations.com/en/2017/marketing-services-translation-agencies/

Conducting a Multilingual Market Research

The world has evolved over the years and with each passing year we have been blessed with tools which are making our lives that little bit easier. When the future was talked about in the 80’s and the 90’s flying cars was often envisaged by the sheer mention of the 2010 and beyond.

Although we do not have our cars floating in the air just yet the world has evolved a lot over the last few years – and all for the better I would say. The world is a lot more educated than it ever has been and the biggest influence of this trend is down to the Internet.

The Internet is the speedway for information and data is always passing through it to all corners of the globe we live in. Tim May has been quoted as saying “National borders aren’t even speed bumps on the information superhighway.” The world is connected by the Internet which has made tools like the fax machine absolutely obsolete. The speed in which people converse with one another is at an instant and with the odd censorship’s administered by various governments the Internet still is the bedrock for people to have their individual voices aired.

The Emergence of the Internet
Businesses have traditionally run by being reliant on a customer base that is within reach in terms of geographical locality. Brick and mortar businesses have always been setting up shop near the presence of customers or where there is a hub of activity, i.e. shopping centres or markets.

When the internet was introduced in the 90’s it was at first only consumed by the education institutions and the large business corporation. However, as hardware prices got lower at the close of the 90’s and the cost of an internet connection being more affordable the consumption of the Internet rapidly increased.

The Internet was further enhanced as a result of the evolution of businesses. When more and more businesses had success on the Internet it led to social networking sites being setup which formed as the catalyst for more people becoming aware of the Internet and having a desire to have an Internet connection simply just to use these online services, for example MySpace.

Now that they were on Facebook and had an internet connection they began to use the Internet for other things as well which included shopping online.

Using the Internet for International Growth
The lure of the internet is too much for anyone to ignore and is generally the ideal way for small businesses or start-up businesses to get a foothold in more countries than just the country they reside in.

However before beginning to trade all over the world the starting point should be to conduct market research. Expensive, I hear you say. Well market research in foreign countries does not actually mean you have to spend millions with an international marketing company who does the research for you.

First of all create a list of 15 keywords which best describe your product so people in your country can find your website in UK. A simple spread sheet will serve well in this instance which you can use to note all the various sections of your marketing strategy.

Once you have the keywords then make a list of all the countries you think your product can be popular in. Now is the time to go into the next step of the research, by using a language translator tool like Google Translate. The tool can be used to translate all the keywords into the language of the first country you are going to look in.

After all the keywords are translated then it is the stage to use the Google Keyword tool. The Google Keyword tool can be used to evaluate, by selecting the specific country and the language which will give a search volume indication as to how many people in that country are typing in terms which are related to your product. Make a note of these numbers and then type them in the respective Google search engines specific to the countries. This will help a user to evaluate the competition and the amount of opportunity there is for a specific product.

Repeat this process for as many countries as possible and you will generally get an idea of which country is best to invest in to market a certain product. Market research can quickly be done but you can further cement your opinions by contacting the locals in those countries but the Internet will always be the most cost effective way to conduct business, especially as the boundaries are squashed as low as they currently are.

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Author: Rehan keenly
Source: translationblog.co.uk

5 Tips To Successfully Launch Your Website In A Foreign Market

Launching your website or promoting an existing one in a new market can be very easy… if you know how to do so and if you have the resources for it!

Here are 5 easy steps to consider prior to launching your website into a new market. It is extremely important to get it right from the beginning as having a website which is country/culture tailor-made will naturally help your ranking and SEO work will help you push your website further higher.

1. Search: Legal issues in the countries you are targeting.
2. Understand: Keyword Research conducted by native speakers.
3. Assess: Know your competitors.
4. Convert: Turn your website into a local website.
5. Adapt: Search engine opportunities.

1. Search: Legal issues in the countries you are targeting

It is extremely important to check this one first as it can save you a lot of money and troubles. Often it can be boiled down to two different cases;

1. The country’s law does not accept your product/service/website.
2. The country you are targeting is not “Internet friendly” and opportunities there are extremely limited or, at best, challenging to overcome.

No need to have a gambling website in order to be banned from the Internet in some countries. It can be more complicated than it appears. First of all, a product or a service can be disapproved in a state and perfectly allowed in another. Some services can be allowed but strictly controlled by a government. Some status can be very unclear: a product can be allowed by EU law, for example, but still forbidden on the country-level.

Some countries can also be very challenging when it comes to accepting foreign businesses in general, especially if they don’t have a physical office in the targeted country. It is the case for China, for example.

Finally, as a general note, some countries are not Internet friendly and promoting your website becomes utterly challenging or nearly impossible. RWB published the Internet Enemies Report 2012 where the list of countries can be found.

In short, it is always better to double check in order to avoid expenses and to focus on unrealistic goals.

2. Understand: Keyword research conducted by native speakers

Conducting market research has become fairly straightforward with the different Keyword Research tools available these days. It might not give you a deep insight of the market you are targeting, but it will surely point to the right direction.

First of all, it is important to define who your target audience is – sex, age, profession, interests etc. Once done, you will be able to define which search engine(s), social networking sites and other digital platforms you want to target and then choose the right keywords you need to consider.

As a general tip, I would advise to define categories prior to conducting the keyword research but also not to pre-expect any results and try to keep your mind as open as you can as you might find that the audience you are currently targeting is behaving/searching differently than what you initially thought.

Secondly, forget direct translation! It will only give you an idea of a topic priority within your own language boundaries. By doing a keyword research directly in the target language for a target country, most popular terms and ideas should be found. Last but not least, ask a native speaker to conduct the keyword research. Native speakers not only can speak the language but also carry with them the culture they grew up in, conceptions and traditions. They will naturally include keywords which carry the right meaning and concept.

Finally, it becomes more and more important to consider mobile platforms and therefore to collect data for those platforms. Search behaviour can vary dramatically from desktop to mobile. Different keywords can/should therefore be targeted for the two different platforms.

3. Assess: Know your online competitors

You might have an idea of who your direct competitors are, but it is highly likely that these will vary substantially across markets. Knowing your competitors and keeping this list updated will give you a good idea of what strategy you need to consider and what goals are achievable or not. By knowing exactly who you are going to compete against gives you a better understanding of what steps you need to take and forces you to understand how those competitors are currently achieving their position. This step is extremely important, especially when you want to define a link building strategy.

4. Convert: Turn your website into a local website

It is utterly important that your website means something to the audience you are targeting. Please bear in mind that interests may, again, differ dramatically from country to another – even for target demographic segments where age, gender, affluence etc. are similar.
So by doing a direct translation of a website you might find that even if that website is highly popular in your own country, it might not get as much traction in the other country you are targeting. In this case, the primary reason will often be a lack of adaptation and local trust anchors.

Trust anchors are extremely important. At one glance, it is really easy for an Internet user to decide whether they can trust your website or not. It could be through flags, colour schemes, payment facilities and symbols. This step is absolutely essential if an action is to be expected from the user, such as registration/signup or payment.

5. Adapt: Search engine opportunities

Prior to defining your strategy, an easy way to ensure an effective presence in search engines is to check what kind of features different search engines offer. A good example is Naver; you can see that the interface of South Korea’s most popular search engine is really different from any other search engine and has been tailored to fit the needs of Korean users. It displays features which are very popular amongst Korean users and even Google decided to follow more or less the same layout for its google.co.kr platform in an acknowledgement that its traditional approach simply wouldn’t cut it.

It might become a bit trickier on Google when you target different countries, but native speakers can help you define what the most important features are from their point of view. After identifying what features targeted Internet users are using the most, you will be able to put a strategy together and aim for what your targeted audience is actually looking for.

Wrapping it up

Successfully launching your website in various markets is possible as long as you are able to be flexible in terms of content and to focus more on what the internet user wants than on what you would like them to see. Expanding online into a new market is essentially not that difficult, however succeeding is.

Anyone can convey a message, but conveying the right message often takes time and effort. Remember that local players are already doing most of these things by default, and it will almost always be those guys you will have to compete against.

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Author: Benjamin Lefebvre
Source: http://www.multilingual-search.com

Cost Saving Tips on Translation Costs

Think outsourcing your e-commerce website’s translation and localization project is too cost prohibitive? Think again. Here are some scenarios in which a translation and localization partner can actually present opportunities for cost savings.

How to save $100 on language-related spending

For the company that wants to offer a few English-language documents in, for example, Spanish, it can be tempting to turn to a bilingual employee for help. However, relying on your Spanish-speaking accountant to translate your content has hidden costs. While a professional translator might charge $200 and finish the project in 30 minutes, an inexperienced individual might need three hours to do the same amount of work, creating a lost productivity cost.


How to save $1,000 on language-related spending

Outsource your multilingual typesetting services rather than leaning on your internal designers. Asian and other character languages can be difficult to work with, but it’s just as important to employ professional typesetting services for French, German, Spanish, and other languages, which carry their own challenges, including font considerations, line and word breaks, text expansion, accent marks and umlauts, and dropped text. A typesetting project that costs $800 to outsource would likely require five to 10 hours of internal typesetter time, including the requirement to purchase the necessary fonts.


How to save $10,000 on language-related spending

If you’re spending $100k or more annually on translation, find one or two providers that can handle all your projects, and then leverage vendor loyalty to get a better price. Even if you only have a couple of big translation jobs per year, a volume-negotiated savings of 1 cent per word adds up fast.


How to save $100,000 on language-related spending

If your multinational business is spending up to $500,000 on translation, cut costs with translation management technologies such as project and workflow management platforms, translation memory (TM) tools, terminology management glossaries, file exchange portals, and collaborative solutions for reviews and approvals.
While TM tools alone have the potential to save your organization nearly $100,000 in hard costs alone, workflow management systems for project submission, pre-flighting, tracking, review, and delivery drive soft-cost savings by reducing internal project management burdens.


How to save $1 million on language-related spending

If your company has a multi-million-dollar annual translation budget, maximize savings by identifying and centralizing translation services to a single or small group of reliable providers. Once you consolidate, negotiate for better per-word costs, turnaround times and rush premiums. Finally, innovate with server-based translation memory and workflow improvements. A company with a $5 million translation budget can likely cut:

• $80,000 by consolidating vendors
• $175,000 by negotiating better per-word rates
• $765,000 by innovating with translation technology

While every translation and localization budget differs, almost any internationally focused business can reduce its translation costs, improve efficiency and consistency in the short term, and maximize translation spending in the long term by working with a language translation service provider. With consolidation, negotiation, and innovation, businesses can capture significant savings.

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Source: Business2community
Author: Liz Elting 

What is the most difficult language to learn - and why?

There are numerous rankings of “difficult” (and “easy”) languages to learn (note that we are talking about second-language learning here, not acquiring one’s native tongue). Some such rankings are unofficial, like the Accreditedonlinecolleges.com ranking or the ranking at MyLanguages.org; others are official, for example the classification by DLI based on the number of hours needed to achieve a certain level.

The top spot in all these ranking is given to Chinese: Accreditedonlinecolleges.com lists Mandarin and Cantonese separately, as #1 and #2; MyLanguages.org lists Chinese at the top spot and the DLI classification includes un-specified “Chinese” in the most difficult group IV, together with Arabic, Japanese and Korean. But what are the main perceived difficulties in learning Chinese (whether Mandarin, Cantonese or another Chinese variety)? In addition to the general themes of an unfamiliar writing system and dialectal variation (expected of a language with about a billion speakers, like Mandarin, or even “smaller” Chinese languages: Cantonese with 52 million speakers; Shanghainese with over 77 million speakers; Taiwanese with over 25 million speakers), Chinese is difficult to learn because of the “exotic” sounds it has and especially its tone system. There are four tones in Mandarin and six tones in Cantonese.

What about learning other East Asian languages, like Japanese or Korean? These too are typically listed at the top of the difficulty ranking. Among the most difficult aspects of Japanese (in addition to its three-part writing system, including kanji, hiragana and katakana) are “an agglutinative vocabulary” and “rigid hierarchical structure of honorifics inextricably tied to Japanese society and culture”. I agree that the rich system of honorifics — markers of esteem or respect when used in addressing or referring to a person — can be difficult to learn because of the cultural knowledge that one needs in order to be able to use these grammatical forms correctly. You will run into this difficulty if you attempt to learn Japanese, Korean or Thai.

But I am not quite sure what the problem is supposed to be about the “agglutinative vocabulary”. In fact, the term “agglutinative” typically refers not to vocabulary but to the morphological system of a language. In an agglutinative language, each affix attached to the root typically expresses one grammatical property, such as gender, number or case, but not all three at once (as would be the case in a fusional language; see below). Multiple affixes can be attached to the root, and when it happens, affixes do not have much effect on each other’s pronunciation or meaning. Other examples of languages that are agglutinative and are thus said to be difficult to learn include Basque, Korean and Hungarian.

Some, though not all, agglutinative languages also have rich systems of case markers, that are used not only to mark such grammatical functions as the subject, object, indirect object, possessor, etc. but also to indicate spatial relations. While some “difficulty rankings” will scare you with statements like “Basque’s complexities … lay in its 24 cases” or “anyone hoping to pick up Hungarian must also completely conquer its whopping 35 cases”, some of these statements overexagerate. The consensus among linguists is that Basque has only 12 cases and Hungarian has only 21 cases. Two of Hungarian’s cousins — Finnish and Estonian — have somewhat “poorer” cases systems (14 cases in Estonian, 15 cases in Finnish), while others have even richer case systems: for example, certain dialects of Komi have up to 27 cases. By the record-holder in terms of the number of cases is a Dagestanian language Tabasaran with its 46 cases!

While it may appear daunting to learn so many cases, in Finno-Ugric languages, such as Finnish or Hungarian, the form of the case morpheme is the same regardless of what noun it attaches to. The situation is quite different in Slavic languages like Russian or Polish, which have fewer cases (for instance, Russian has “mere” six cases), but the forms of the case morphemes differ depending on what noun you attach the case morpheme to (these different types of nouns are known as “declension patterns”, and they are closely related to but not exactly the same as “genders”). For example, the dative (singular) in Russian is -e if it attaches to knig- ‘book’, -u if it attaches to stol- ‘table’ or -i if it attaches to mater- ‘mother’. Thus, instead of learning one set of 15 case affixes in Finnish, for Russian you need to learn three sets of six (i.e., 18) case affixes, as well as to know which affixes to attach to which nouns. Besides, to master the Russian case system you will need to learn the various exceptions, which too are more common in fusional languages like Russian than in agglutinative languages like Finnish. My conclusion: agglutinative languages may be somewhat easier to learn (at least, in terms of the memory load) than fusional languages; the only truly scary thing about agglutinative languages is the term itself!

And what of Arabic? One of chief reasons it lands in one of the top spots in the “difficulty ranking” is the script, which uses different shapes of letters word-initially, -medially and -finally, but has no letters to record vowels. Another difficulty often listed is the dialectal problem; however, most students of Arabic as a foreign language will be learning Modern Standard Arabic rather than one of the 40 or so colloquial varieties, spoken from Morocco to Egypt, from Syria to Iraq and the Persian/Arabic Gulf. Grammatical difficulties one should be prepared to face include the unfamiliar Verb-Subject-Object order (vs. the English Subject-Verb-Object order), dual number (in addition to the familiar singular and plural), three cases and two genders (which, all in all, should be much easier to learn than the Hungarian or Russian case+gender systems) and multiple verbal forms. A really unusual phenomenon that Arabic shares with Hebrew is its non-concatenative morphology. In a non-concatenative language, unlike in more familiar languages such as English, Spanish or Russian, grammatical meaning -– for example, plural number on nouns or past tense on verbs -– is expressed not through adding a suffix to the nominal or verbal root/stem, but through changing the vowels in the stem. Typically, the consonants are part of the noun or verb root, while vowels -– and where they are placed in relation to the consonants of the root -– constitute the “template” (hence, non-concatenative morphology is also known as “root-and-template morphology”).

Finally, one other language that I found in one of those lists of “difficult to learn languages” — to my great surprise — was Icelandic. It is certainly true that “many Icelandic phonemes don’t have exact English equivalents” — remember the difficulties that many American journalists had with that Eyjafjallajökull volcano?! Other perceived difficulties of Icelandic include “its archaic vocabulary” and “complex grammar”. Really? It is true that Icelandic is one of the most conservative North Germanic (i.e., Scandinavian) languages that has kept the old noun declension and verb conjugations, but it is undoubtedly much closer to English and much more similar to it than, say, Chinese, Arabic or Hungarian, which makes it rather easier for an English speaker to learn.

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Source: Languages of the World

Author: Asya Pereltsvaig

Skills To Become a Freelance Translator

Language: Command over the 'source' language as well as the 'destination' language is essential to a translator. Knowledge of grammar and syntax is also essential. Idioms and phrases in one language often do not have a direct parallel in another language. The translator therefore requires sufficient knowledge to be able to use substitute phrases that will still convey the meaning and intent of the original work.

Technical Knowledge: This is essential for domain or technical literature. Often technical terms in one language do not have an equivalent in another language. Most notable in this area are computer terms that are in English or legal terms that appear in Latin. Domain knowledge will help the translator to explain a concept or term in a precise manner without compromising on its meaning.

To Become a Successful Freelance Translator

Practical/Work experience in a translation firm will give you valuable experience in the kind of work that may come your way. In a translation firm, your work is likely to be supervised by an experienced translator who will be responsible for any minor mistakes you may make. This will also give you confidence in your ability.
Working for a professional translation firm will also help you gauge your level of expertise against what is in demand. The experience will give you insight into the kind of jobs that are available (the remuneration offered for a professional job, the time frames demanded, the level of acceptable quality).

It will also help you establish a reputation in the translation business and help you establish contacts among those who require translations. Working for a short while as a volunteer trainee or an intern may also be a viable option in case you are not able to get a paid 'traineeship'. Just look at it as an extension of your translation course.

Sign a Part-Time Contract: Once you have gained a little practical translation experience, you may want to sign a part-time contract. A number of translation agencies prefer this route, as they do not have a guaranteed regular volume of translation work that comes in. Working on a part-time basis also gives you a minimum income and at the same time also leaves you free to search for your own translation contracts that you do on your own terms.
Identify Translation Agencies: These agencies will give you 'quality' translations to do and will also be regular about paying you and honoring your other employment terms. Most translation agencies receive translation assignments for different languages. Therefore, they prefer to pay a retainer to different translators with different language and technical skills so that the are able to meet the requirements of their customers.
Surf the Net: The Internet has shrunk the size of the world leveled the playing field. Identify multinational firms that are likely to have translation requirements for which you have the requisite skills and experience.

Try and approach them directly on the Internet, as the translation fee you earn as a direct translator will be much higher than what you would earn on retainer or through a translation firm. However, be sure to deal only with companies with a sound reputation, or you could easily end up not receiving payment at all. Before you take on the assignment, try and sign a legally enforceable agreement with them so that your interests are safeguarded.

A career as a translator is not easy to establish, but once established it is an ideal career to use for freelance work. Time spent on an internship and time spent building up your reputation and your clientele will pay off in the long run.
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Source: Become a Translator.com
Author: Tony Jacowski

Top 7 Questions Clients Ask While Hiring A Translator

1. What are the languages you work with?
2. How fast can you complete a translation project?
3. How much do you charge for a translation work?
4. Can you translate legal and technical documents?
5. Can you provide a certified translation?
6. Can you assure the contents of my documents will remain confidential and private?
7. Do you use any translation software? Is it reliable?

These answers can be very helpful when applying for a translation job.


1. What are the languages you work with?

Translators around the world will usually be translating the most common and usual languages paired with English. For a more specific and accurate translation result, look for the translators who are actually specialized in their language pairs according to their geographic location. Keep in mind that there is a considerable variation on the same language spoken between two different countries.


2. How fast can a translation job be done?

This should be determined by the subject matter to be translated, language, the length and complexity of a document, and the capability of a translator to provide a fast job without compromising its integrity. A translator will usually take about 3 to 4 days to translate between 10 - 20 pages into any of the most common languages. A professional translator, will also do his best to accommodate a client’s wish of a fast translation delivery according to both; the client and the translator’s schedule.

3. How much do you charge for a translation work?

Translation works is commonly charged by word counting, number of pages to be translated, or even have a flat rate for small translation projects. If a determined translation job requires special attention or additional research, these charges will also be included in the amount of time used to complete the translation.

4. Can you translate legal and technical documents?

Only officially authorized translators have the right of performing legal documents translation and bureaucratic related documents such as scholarly writings and other regulations. A legal or technical translator must be familiar with the language and functions of the U.S. judicial system, as well as other countries' legal systems, so make sure you’re hiring a governmental recognized professional translator to provide such job.

5. Can you provide a certified translation?

Most professional and certified translators can provide a qualified translation. They will also be able to provide their professional information at the bottom of the document and you will need to get it notarized in order to validate its contents. Legal and technical translations can only be done by a legally recognized translator.

6. Can you assure the contents of my documents will remain confidential and private?

Translator’s privacy and client’s confidentiality comes first. They should make the effort to keep all documents and personal information from being disclosed to a third party. A privacy agreement will demonstrate to the client a complete respect and professionalism in keeping the privacy and discretion of any document available to the public, unless otherwise advised.

7. Do you use any translation software? Is it reliable?

Translators for the most part are not affectionate of post-editing machine translation. It can make their work even harder and time consuming than translating directly from an original text. It could also be considered partially reliable. It’s always best if a professional translator that uses this method combines his human translation to the process for a more accurate result.

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Source: Become a Translator.com
Author: Vanessa Greenway, CTP Associate

Subtitling and Dubbing Dialogues for Foreign Films

Subtitling and dubbing dialogue are vital skills. Get them wrong and you could mangle a classic scene.

Not even a dub could save The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from falling prey to one of Hollywood's raids on foreign language films. Just as Insomnia, The Ring and even True Lies were respun with English-speaking actors, so the Swedish-language film version of Stieg Larsson's novel is being repackaged for a worldwide audience as movie-makers hope to better the US gross of $10.1m and the paltry £1.5m it made in the UK.

The English-language remake has already caused something of a stir, with fans believing Neils Arden Oplev's original to be a definitive screen adaptation. They say giving English speakers the option of watching with either subtitles or dubbing has made the film accessible enough.

Certainly dubbing is rather unusual. UK and US audiences tend to be shown foreign films with subtitles and dubbing is generally left for movies and television series aimed at children. The reason being that, as audiences grow older, they prefer to hear a film's original language which gives a sense of place and adds to the atmosphere of a film.

There have been notable exceptions – spaghetti Westerns had international casts that would act in their own languages so studios would dub Italian voices into English and vice versa – but even when English-language dubbing is available, such as with the Mandarin film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, movies tend to be subtitled when shown in cinemas or broadcast on television in the UK.

"There is clearly an established market for subtitled foreign-language films, and research by theatrical distributors has concluded that the audience responds better to films in their original language," says Sue Deeks, head of programme acquisition at the BBC, who has brought foreign-language hits such as The Killing and Spiral to UK audiences.

"If a film is released commercially in a dubbed format we would certainly consider transmitting it in that version, but in our experience, while dubbing has undoubtedly improved over the years, audiences still prefer to experience the authentic voice and language of the actors and the real flavour of the culture or country they are from."

Although the number of dubbed foreign productions in the UK is low, the reverse is the case in some other countries. In Italy, France, Spain, Turkey, Hungary, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Slovakia, China, Iran, Russian-speaking countries and Francophones in Quebec, dubbing is so commonplace that some voice artists are even assigned to specific actors.

Dominique Paturel has replaced Michael Caine's London twang with French in 40 of his films, starting with The Ipcress File in 1965, and he is well-known in his own right.

Some want greater recognition. German voice artist Marcus Off, who regularly dubs actors such as Ralph Fiennes, Sean Penn and Michael Sheen, felt so under-appreciated in his work dubbing Johnny Depp in the German release of Pirates of the Caribbean that he sued Disney. Off wanted €180,000 – 10 times what he was paid for the work, claiming that his voice had been key to the film's success in Germany.

"Often the production companies retain the same voice talent to ensure continuity unless the talent is sick or demands more remuneration," says voice actor Mohd Sheikh, who works for the dubbing company Media Movers. "Dubbing is a tricky art. Emoting with more focus on matching the lips can be an arduous task."

The decision over whether to dub or subtitle sometimes goes beyond creative preferences. Foreign languages were banned in Mussolini's fascist Italy so films were dubbed into Italian. Since the early 1960s, foreign language films have been prevented from being dubbed into the Kannada language in India to protect the domestic film industry.

Dubbing was also prohibited in Portugal in 1948, again for protection, but subtitling was allowed. Films were also censored so that some sensitive words – such as communism or colonialism – were replaced.

Dubbing does not always follow take original dialogue and translating it literally into another language as with Japan's cult television hit Monkey, for instance. Actor Eric Thompson took the French animation The Magic Roundabout (Le Manège enchanté) and narrated it using the visuals alone, discarding Serge Danot's original scripts, which would have cost the BBC more money.

This is common in Germany, which has more foreign movie dubbing studios than anywhere else in the world. The Persuaders television series added humorous elements to the original English version and it is not unusual for sexually explicit gags to make their way into German dubs.

"Germany has a lot of such readaptions," says Sameer Bhardwaj, a foreign language dubbing consultant. "Intellectuals tend to go on internet forums saying how the jokes are badly translated or the entire story and concept has changed but most viewers never knew about the original language, joke or concept and them it's always a new dish to be tried and appreciated."

There are many examples of bad dubs and not necessarily regarding foreign language conversions. Films re-dubbed for television often have swear-words removed ("That guy's a serious asshole" in Robocop was replaced with the softer "airhead"). The characters of Honey Rider, Blofeld, Goldfinger and Marc-Ange Draco in the James Bond movies were dubbed by British actors.

Some dubs are performed to make them more attractive in particular countries. In Shrek 2, Doris, the ugly stepsister, was voiced by Jonathan Ross in the UK and Larry King in America. Miramax, the distributors of Trainspotting, feared that American audiences would find the Edinburgh vernacular incomprehensible, so asked its British producers to dub parts of it.

"Dubbing in general is a regional thing," says Jane Crowther, acting editor of Total Film. "While we don't have a history of it in the UK, other regions systematically dub English language films, television and games into their native tongue, making celebrities of the voice actors who exclusively dub the stars and tweaking the material to reflect the sense of humour and culture of the country. It's expected and accepted."

Hollywood movies are dubbed for around 90 per cent of non-English-language territories, according to Variety. It has put pressure on the thriving dubbing studios especially given blockbuster films are dubbed into more than 30 languages. In India alone, a film such as Spider-Man 3 can be dubbed into as many as four languages: Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Bhojpuri. Constant production tweaks to movies and late shipping puts causes greater stress.

How much work is involved depends on the type of dub. "Some prefer voice-over dubbing instead of lip-sync dubbing," says Ken Lorber, CEO of dubbing studio The Kitchen. "This where the original dialogue is lowered but still maintained under the voiced over dialogue. Others prefer a lector approach whereby a narrator describes what is being said in a story description, spoken over the original dialogue. This is common in Russia and some eastern European countries."

Studios have increasingly turned to technology. Media Movers and The Kitchen have software which can automatically sync dubbed tracks. "At best, dubbing is an imperfect art," says Lorber. "Regardless of the efforts, transferring dialogue from one language to another will always yield lip sync issues, as different languages require different lip movements to form each word. What is critical is that when an actor on screen begins to speak, the dubbed words begin to be spoken."

Christoph Bregler, associate professor of Computer Science at New York University, has worked on a system called Video Rewrite which hopes to solve the lip-movement issues. It changes the on-screen lip and facial movements of actors depending on the dub. The original actor looks as if they are saying the dubbed version.

"I grew up in Germany and was used to seeing all the Woody Allen movies in German," says Bregler. "When I moved to the US 21 years ago, I was surprised how Woody Allen really spoke. Video Rewrite aims to have a more perfect dubbing so it has wider acceptance."

Human intervention is still vital. "Lip syncing is difficult and time consuming," says Nikolay Ivanov, CEO of Bulgaria-based Graffiti Studios. "There are software programs that semi-automate the process but the final touch is always human. A bad dub is able to ruin even the greatest content. Bad translation, bad casting, poor quality control – these all lead to a bad dub.

"Things are changing, though. Although offering both subtitling and dubbing is double expensive, modern technology is enabling that to become cheaper." The message from the dubbers is clear, read our lips, we're only getting better.

How dubbing works

Typically a dubbing studio will view an entire film. A project manager will review the material, the translation department will find the best translator and the artistic director will be made responsible for the production process.

Once the script has been written – it is adapted and timed for the recording process – auditions are held for dubbing actors. Studios like The Kitchen uses technology to record each actor individually with the artists viewing the original video on screen and listening to the foreign dialogue via headphones ("Sometimes the dubbed lines need to be rewritten in order to achieve this in a session if the timing is off," says voice actor Trish Basanyi).

The artists are able to see and hear the dialogue surrounding their segment in order to get into character and once the recordings have been made, they are sent to be lip synced and reviewed. Care has to be taken to create the ambiances of the voice quality too, ensuring, for example, that a character in a gym sounds doesn't sound as if he's in a small office.

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Author: David Crookes

Source: The Independent

How Google Translate Works

Using software originally developed in the 1980s by researchers at IBM, Google has created an automatic translation tool that is unlike all others. It is not based on the intellectual presuppositions of early machine translation efforts – it isn't an algorithm designed only to extract the meaning of an expression from its syntax and vocabulary.

In fact, at bottom, it doesn't deal with meaning at all. Instead of taking a linguistic expression as something that requires decoding, Google Translate (GT) takes it as something that has probably been said before.

It uses vast computing power to scour the internet in the blink of an eye, looking for the expression in some text that exists alongside its paired translation.

The corpus it can scan includes all the paper put out since 1957 by the EU in two dozen languages, everything the UN and its agencies have ever done in writing in six official languages, and huge amounts of other material, from the records of international tribunals to company reports and all the articles and books in bilingual form that have been put up on the web by individuals, libraries, booksellers, authors and academic departments.

Drawing on the already established patterns of matches between these millions of paired documents, Google Translate uses statistical methods to pick out the most probable acceptable version of what's been submitted to it.

Much of the time, it works. It's quite stunning. And it is largely responsible for the new mood of optimism about the prospects for "fully automated high-quality machine translation".

Google Translate could not work without a very large pre-existing corpus of translations. It is built upon the millions of hours of labour of human translators who produced the texts that GT scours.

Google's own promotional video doesn't dwell on this at all. At present it offers two-way translation between 58 languages, that is 3,306 separate translation services, more than have ever existed in all human history to date.

Most of these translation relations – Icelandic to Farsi, Yiddish to Vietnamese, and dozens more – are the newborn offspring of Google Translate: there is no history of translation between them, and therefore no paired texts, on the web or anywhere else. Google's presentation of its service points out that given the huge variations between languages in the amount of material its program can scan to find solutions, translation quality varies according to the language pair involved.

What it does not highlight is that GT is as much the prisoner of global flows in translation as we all are. Its admirably smart probabilistic computational system can only offer 3,306 translation directions by using the same device as has always assisted intercultural communication: pivots, or intermediary languages.

It's not because Google is based in California that English is the main pivot. If you use statistical methods to compute the most likely match between languages that have never been matched directly before, you must use the pivot that can provide matches with both target and source.

A good number of English-language detective novels, for example, have probably been translated into both Icelandic and Farsi. They thus provide ample material for finding matches between sentences in the two foreign languages; whereas Persian classics translated into Icelandic are surely far fewer, even including those works that have themselves made the journey by way of a pivot such as French or German. This means that John Grisham makes a bigger contribution to the quality of GT's Icelandic-Farsi translation device than Rumi or Halldór Laxness ever will. And the real wizardry of Harry Potter may well lie in his hidden power to support translation from Hebrew into Chinese. GT-generated translations themselves go up on the web and become part of the corpus that GT scans, producing a feedback loop that reinforces the probability that the original GT translation was acceptable. But it also feeds on human translators, since it always asks users to suggest a better translation than the one it provides – a loop pulling in the opposite direction, towards greater refinement. It's an extraordinarily clever device. I've used it myself to check I had understood a Swedish sentence more or less correctly, for example, and it is used automatically as a webpage translator whenever you use a search engine.

Of course, it may also produce nonsense. However, the kind of nonsense a translation machine produces is usually less dangerous than human-sourced bloopers. You can usually see instantly when GT has failed to get it right, because the output makes no sense, and so you disregard it. (This is why you should never use GT to translate into a language you do not know very well. Use it only to translate into a language in which you are sure you can recognise nonsense.)

Human translators, on the other hand, produce characteristically fluent and meaningful output, and you really can't tell if they are wrong unless you also understand the source – in which case you don't need the translation at all.

If you remain attached to the idea that a language really does consist of words and rules and that meaning has a computable relationship to them (a fantasy that many philosophers still cling to), then GT is not a translation device. It's just a trick performed by an electronic bulldozer allowed to steal other people's work. But if you have a more open mind, GT suggests something else.

Conference interpreters can often guess ahead of what a speaker is saying because speakers at international conferences repeatedly use the same formulaic expressions. Similarly, an experienced translator working in a familiar domain knows without thinking that certain chunks of text have standard translations that he or she can slot in.

Translators don't reinvent hot water every day. They behave more like GT – scanning their own memories in double-quick time for the most probable solution to the issue at hand. GT's basic mode of operation is much more like professional translation than is the slow descent into the "great basement" of pure meaning that early mechanical translation developers imagined.

GT is also a splendidly cheeky response to one of the great myths of modern language studies. It was claimed, and for decades it was barely disputed, that what was so special about a natural language was that its underlying structure allowed an infinite number of different sentences to be generated by a finite set of words and rules.

A few wits pointed out that this was no different from a British motor car plant, capable of producing an infinite number of vehicles each one of which had something different wrong with it – but the objection didn't make much impact outside Oxford.

GT deals with translation on the basis not that every sentence is different, but that anything submitted to it has probably been said before. Whatever a language may be in principle, in practice it is used most commonly to say the same things over and over again. There is a good reason for that. In the great basement that is the foundation of all human activities, including language behaviour, we find not anything as abstract as "pure meaning", but common human needs and desires.

All languages serve those same needs, and serve them equally well. If we do say the same things over and over again, it is because we encounter the same needs, feel the same fears, desires and sensations at every turn. The skills of translators and the basic design of GT are, in their different ways, parallel reflections of our common humanity.

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Author: David Bellos

Source: The Independent

How Foreign-Language Internet Strategies Boost Sales

Social media, lead generation, PPC campaigns -- it seems digital marketing has turned into the be-all and end-all of B2C communication and brand awareness. Companies have openly embraced digital marketing solutions in a mad race to reach, win and -- most important -- keep costumers in the highly competitive arena of e-commerce.
 
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But how about the challenges in trying to reach that coveted top Google search spot? Although English has long been the lingua franca of the Web, it has now reached a point of saturation. It is becoming incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to compete with those billions of optimized Web pages vying for consumer attention.
 
While businesses are engaging on all e-marketing fronts, there's a largely untapped opportunity that the vast majority have failed to embrace: foreign-language Internet. Due to less competition for keywords and domain names, and less content overall, the multilingual Web offers unparalleled opportunities to bolster sales in overseas markets easily and affordably.
 
With the exponential rise of non-English searches and the massive growth of emerging economies, savvy businesses could reap significant benefits by targeting far-flung markets in a linguistically and culturally sensitive way.
 
Companies shrewd enough to tap into this opportunity have experienced significant ROIs. Such has been American restaurant consulting and hospitality management company OnSite Consulting, which launched six language versions of their site in late 2010 and experienced significant foreign market growth: 20% of their revenue now comes from abroad.
 
Facts that substantiate the need for companies to address consumers in their mother tongue keep emerging, and hammer home the point that the road to better sales runs through the foreign-language Internet:

• 82% of European consumers are less likely to buy online if the site is not in their native tongue (Eurobarometer survey).
• 72.4% of global consumers are more likely to buy a product if the information is available in their own language (Common Sense Advisory).
• The English language currently only accounts for 31% of all online use, and more than half of all searches are in languages other than English.
• Today, 42% of all Internet users are in Asia, while almost one-quarter are in Europe and just over 10% are in Latin America.
• Foreign languages have experienced exponential growth in online usage in the past decade -- with Chinese now officially the second-most-prominent-language on the Web. Arabic has increased by a whopping 2500%, while English has only risen by 204%

The recession holding Europe and North America in its grip may be a bad time for business expansion at home. But not if you dare to look far enough. There are flourishing markets unscathed by the crisis. It's no secret that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are experiencing a spending boom, with consumerism growing at a rapid pace. What is more, an estimated billion people in the BRIC countries will be using computers by 2015 -- another reason why businesses should consider focusing their foreign digital marketing efforts on these countries.

Other emerging markets where there's less competition on the Web include the CIVETS countries -- Columbia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa. But beware -- as more and more businesses are realizing the potential of BRIC and CIVETS markets, competition for keywords and online presence is likely to grow.

After all, recession needn't be an obstacle to business expansion. As the semantics of the Chinese word for crisis (meaning both danger and opportunity) aptly demonstrates, businesses should overcome the fear of breaking into new markets and realize the only way to reap the benefits presented by the emerging markets is to fearlessly dip their toes in the multilingual Internet.

Source: MediaPost Communications
Author: Christian Arno

The Rise of the Virtual Office

As the definition of the workplace changes, dramatic increases in productivity could be ahead

The idea that the office is a specific place where our professional lives "happen" is becoming less universal, and less important. These days many knowledge workers can be productive anywhere, thanks to smarter, more numerous mobile devices, faster network access, and a growing number of online collaboration tools. Telecommuting is no longer merely something that the phone company is trying to sell you. And wherever "the office" may be, wider and better use of social networks, data analytics, and smart technologies such as voice recognition could be poised to increase productivity dramatically—meaning that both real and virtual offices may have fewer people in them.

But while the physical office is changing, certain connotations of the word "office" are not. I can think of two others —"hierarchical organization" and "place for human interaction"—and there's no indication that these are becoming any less important. Even the most progressive high-tech companies retain many of the organizational trappings of their industrial-age predecessors: full-time managers, org charts, job descriptions, and so on. And since humans remain social animals, conventional gathering places will remain important in business. These spaces—whether they be conventional offices, temporary ones, or conference facilities—must be made conducive to collaboration. They must also become physically healthy places to spend hours of time, since sedentary work has emerged as a significant health threat.

As the office expands beyond its conventional boundaries, key challenges must be met, including the privacy and security issues posed by a distributed global workforce of people who work digitally and use multiple devices. New tools like cloud-based office productivity apps must be made not only user-friendly but resistant to attacks and data loss. And workers will need better tools—including improved voice-recognition software, e-mail-organizing technologies, and intelligent agents that help handle complex tasks once reserved for specialists—to streamline work processes, make sense of the overwhelming volumes of data besieging them, and improve productivity.

To date, IT-driven productivity gains within the office have been somewhat modest, at least compared with those seen in manufacturing. In 1989 the U.S. manufacturing sector employed 18 million people; by 2009 that figure had declined to 11.8 million. But though the workforce shrank 34 percent, the value added by U.S. manufacturers—that is, the value of their output minus the cost of raw materials purchased—surged 75 percent, to 1.78 trillion.  We've definitely observed white-collar productivity improvement as well, especially since the mid-1990s, but it hasn't been as big.

That may soon change. Consider that people already routinely deal with computers rather than office workers when they make an airline reservation, buy products and arrange for delivery, or troubleshoot a problem with a product they own. If a task involves simple and predictable forms of communication without much nuance or emotion, computers can do just fine, leaving humans to handle an ever-dwindling number of exceptions to the usual procedures or questions.

More far-out advances in artificial intelligence could push productivity even further. Voice recognition, speech synthesis, and automatic translation have improved significantly. And we've seen that computers can now accurately understand and reply to questions: IBM's Watson supercomputer beat human competitors at Jeopardy! earlier this year. Skeptics will point out that futurists have been promising an AI-driven revolution in knowledge work for decades. But by now even the skeptics are finding phone numbers with the help of computer-based operators. When the productivity enhancements from these innovations are tallied, I predict that they will be striking.

On top of this, software and social tools can boost the productivity of the remaining human office workers. For example, a customer-service rep who deals with technical questions can work with just one customer at a time on the phone, but it's easy to handle two or more customers simultaneously if the medium is instant messaging. Whole office-based industries may become vastly more efficient; the legal profession, for one, may be in the early stages of a deep transformation, especially since the prices clients are willing to pay are going through the floor. A new breed of legal outsourcing offers much cheaper ways to accomplish certain tasks: contract lawyers and digital tools scan documents during discovery processes, for example. Intelligent software will only get better at finding associations in those documents and mining meaning from it all.

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Source: Technology Review
Author: Andrew Mcafee

Recognizing voices depends on language ability

Study finds that for people with dyslexia, it’s much harder to identify who is speaking

Distinguishing between other people's voices may seem like a trivial task. However, if those people are speaking a language you don't understand, it becomes much harder. That's because you rely on individuals' differences in pronunciation to help identify them. If you don't understand the words they are saying, you don't pick up on those differences.

That ability to process the relationship between sounds and their meanings, also known as phonology, is believed to be impaired in people with dyslexia. Therefore, neuroscientists at MIT theorized that people with dyslexia would find it much more difficult to identify speakers of their native language than non-dyslexic people.

In a study appearing in Science on July 29, the researchers found just that. People with dyslexia had a much harder time recognizing voices than non-dyslexics. In fact, they fared just as poorly as they (and non-dyslexics) did when listening to speakers of a foreign language.

The finding bolsters the theory that impaired phonology processing is a critical aspect of dyslexia, and sheds light on how human voice recognition differs from that of other animals, says John Gabrieli, MIT's Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Cognitive Neuroscience and senior author of the Science paper.

"Recognizing one person from another, in humans, seems to be very dependent on human language capability," says Gabrieli, who is part of MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and also a principal investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Verbal cues

The lead author of the study, MIT graduate student Tyler Perrachione, earned his undergraduate and master's degrees at Northwestern University, where he was involved in studies showing that it is easier to recognize voices of people speaking your own language.

"Everybody's speech is a little bit different, and that's a big cue to who you are," he says. "When you're listening to somebody talk, it's not just properties of their vocal cords or how sound resonates in their oral cavity that distinguishes them, but also the way they pronounce the words."

After Perrachione arrived at MIT, he and Gabrieli decided to try to link this research with evidence showing that phonological processing is impaired in people with dyslexia. They tested subjects in identifying people speaking their native language (English), then Chinese.

When listening to English, the non-dyslexic subjects were correct nearly 70 percent of the time, but performed at only 50 percent when trying to distinguish Chinese speakers. Dyslexic individuals performed at 50 percent for both English and Chinese speakers.

"It's a beautiful study, in the sense that it's so simple," says Shirley Fecteau, a visiting assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and research chair in cognitive neuroplasticity at Laval University in Quebec. "It really seems like a very clear effect on voice recognition in people with dyslexia."

The finding suggests that people with dyslexia may have even more trouble following a speaker than they may realize, Gabrieli says. This adds to the growing evidence that dyslexia is not simply a visual disorder.

"There was a big shift in the 1980s from understanding dyslexia as a visual problem to understanding it as a language problem," Gabrieli says. "Dyslexia may not be one thing. It may be a variety of ways in which you end up struggling to learn to read. But the single best understood one is a weakness in the processing of language sounds."

Friend versus foe

Recognizing other members of one's species by their voices is critical for humans and other social animals. "You want to know who is a friend and who is a foe, you want to know who your partner is," Perrachione says. "If you're cooperating with someone for food, you want to know who that person is."

However, it appears that humans and animals perform that task in different ways. Animals can identify other members of their own species by the sounds they make, but that ability is innate and based on the sounds themselves, rather than the meaning of those sounds.

"We notice individual differences in this learned feature of our communication, which is the words that we use, and that's what really distinguishes human communication from animal communication," Perrachione says.

The researchers believe their work may also offer insight into the performance of computerized voice-recognition systems. Voice-recognition programs with access to dictionary meanings of words might do a better job of understanding different speakers than systems that only identify sounds, Perrachione says.

The researchers are now using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine which parts of the brain are most active in dyslexics and non-dyslexics as they try to identify voices.

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Source: MIT News
Author: Anne Trafton