Professional Translation Service for Top Corporations
Why Top Corporations Use a Professional Translation Service Company
By: C. Coffee 01/19/2010
In today’s complex international business environment (when foreign languages are involved) written communication and binding agreements must be clear, accurate, and covey your true intent in order to protect you from professional embarrassment, legal complications and disastrous transactional outcomes. That is why all successful international business executives use a professional translation service company to assist in the translation of all important written communication, and more importantly, all legal materials.
Proper international and intercultural communication is increasingly important for all corporations. From general business letters, marketing materials, all the way to the most complex legal, technical, marketing, and financial documentation, there is an on-going need to make sense of the foreign communications that is constantly being presented at any level of any given organization. Large multi-national companies also need internal and external documents translated for subsidiary offices, and many medium and even small-sized companies have expanded to outside markets and require most of their documentation to be translated. Not every company has the luxury of having competent translation professionals as part of their organization and that is why they must resort to a professional translation service company to satisfy this important part of the international business operations.
Don’t be fooled by the everyday bilingual staff member who tells you that he or she can translate the company’s internal documents very easily or that a free translation software program is available online…. Translation is a complex process involving a variety of crucial steps and specific capabilities. Poorly translated documents or inaccurate interpretation can significantly alter a document’s meaning, which will injure a company’s international reputation or elicit lawsuits. Your company’s reputation is literally in your foreign language translator’s hands — and an unqualified foreign language translator can bring disastrous results. Not all document translators are capable of providing accurate document translations. For instance, a translator not familiar with finance and accounting may translate the term “écart d’acquisition” literally as “acquisition difference” rather than the correct term “goodwill”, or the term “résultat” literally as “result” instead of the correct technical term of “income” or “earnings”. An inexperienced translator may translate “résultat courant” as “current income” instead of “income before exceptional items and tax.”
That is why you should use a Professional Translation Service Company that only recruits the best and most experienced translators. In fact, you should also look for a professional translation service company that can provide accredited professional translators with experience in your specific industry and expertise in the subject matter of the materials to be translated. Remember, there are many ways to get your business communications and materials translated but getting it done without the use of a professional translation service company will expose you and your company to potential embarrassment, legal complications and disastrous transactional outcomes.
A professional translation service company like ASTA-USA Translation Services (www.asta-usa.com) and its legal division Legal Translation Solutions (www.legaltranslationsolutions.com) can assist companies with international operations in improving their overall foreign language communications and document translation needs.
http://www.languagetranslationservice.info/
Professional Translation Services: Scalability Matters
Is it possible to provide professional translation services at an industrial scale?
One of the most revolutionary aspects of the Industrial Revolution was the achievement of scale. Scale is one of the most effective ways to reduce the price per unit. The bigger the scale of production, the less expensive the product or service.
Here’s an interesting question which I am sure has occurred to you before. Is it possible to provide professional translation services at an industrial scale? Is a professional translation services operation scalable without significant loss of quality? This is no doubt related to the question whether translation of documents from one language to another is an art or a professional activity (or both).
I worked for almost ten years for the world’s second largest software company. I started in the early 90s as a lowly document translator, progressed to Team Leader, Language Translation Specialist and finally Senior Language Translation Specialist.
The company translated hundreds of thousands of words (sometimes over a million) per software version to some 19 languages (from Spanish – European and Latin American – to Korean and from Catalan to Arabic). Language Translation Specialists were responsible for all linguistic aspects of the localization to the target language (localization involves customizing software and documentation for a particular country; it includes the translation of such things as fields, menus, forms, reports, etc. as well as changes to accommodate different alphabets, cultures and legal systems). My group was in charge for translation involving Latin American (LA) Spanish.
Now, LA Spanish may look very nice in a budget estimate, but let me assure you from the onset that it is not a real language. LA Spanish is an abstraction, it simply does not exist. There are very important stylistic and terminology differences among the Spanish speaking countries in the region.
Language translation specialists for each of the target languages were responsible for all linguistic aspects and worked closely with translation services vendors in the target countries.
It goes without saying that the only way to successfully translate hundreds of thousands of words to 19 different languages in a matter of months is to approach the whole exercise as an industrial process. There’s very little room for the “translation as art” school of thought.
The fact that we dealt with a very specific and limited field and that up to a certain extent we could control the source material was a huge advantage. Some of the key success factors were the provision of very clear and comprehensive glossaries and style guides to the translation services vendors and having in place a very efficient QA process for all translation projects. In a way, we had to limit the natural creativity of the professional translators working for us. We had to aim at having a unique translation per English term so as to minimize the possibility of error.
After all, language is convention.
But the single most important factor, the key to our success, was working with professional translation services companies.
Our professional translation services vendors had to be able to provide scalability. They had to have the capacity to simultaneously translate hundreds of thousands of words into some 19 languages – such as Japanese, Korean, Thai, Arabic, Greek, Hungarian, Finish, Hebrew and Chinese – in a matter of months.
It is simply impossible to achieve that level of professional translation services working with a few uncoordinated independent translators or small single-language translation vendors.
Mission critical means that a professional translation service company has to be able to deliver the highest quality according to schedule, even if a translator gets ill, the systems crash or the building is affected by an earthquake. Scalability means that they have to be able to do it working with a 40,000 word project, or a 400,000 word project, or even a 4 million word project.
To the best of my knowledge, there are very few professional translation services companies in the world able to provide that level of professional translation services. During the course of my professional translation career, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a vast number of professional translation service providers and I can tell you that not all translation service providers can provide scale and quality simultaneously. Two years ago, I began work with ASTA-USA Translation Services (www.asta-usa.com) and their legal division Legal Translation Solutions (www.legaltranslationsolutions.com) and I can tell you that I feel very fortunate to be associated with a professional translation services provider that can put scale and quality together so seamlessly.
By: L. Amado 01/12/2010
