Translation Challenges Some people strongly believe that knowledge of two languages is enough for a person to be a translator; that it is easy to take a word or phrase and convert it to another language! We wish everything would be so simple. The history of translation proves that it is much more of a challenge than that. Sometimes a word is simply untranslatable in a target language. All translators can do in this case is give a descriptive translation that attempts to convey the meaning of the original text. Here is a list of some untranslatable words which always puzzle even the most experienced language professionals: Tingo (Pascuense) – to gradually steal all of the possessions out of a neighbour’s house by borrowing and not returning. I am pretty sure that all of us can find at home some things we have ‘tingo’ed from our friends or neighbours! What can be more romantic than waking up early in the morning with the purpose of going outside to hear the birds’ sing? Looks like it is a very common activity in Sweden as they have a corresponding word: Gökotta. Sometimes I am desperately looking for a word that means: a face badly in need of fist. Guess what! Germans actually have this word: Backpfeifengesicht. Maybe in your neighbourhood there lives a very interesting lady, usually old and lonely, and her biggest passion in life is to ‘collect’ cats. Italians call such ladies gattara. Do you know this wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but both don’t want to start? Everybody knows...
Translation to Spanish Spanish is the third-largest spoken language in the world; it is spoken by almost 420 million people. Because of this, translation from English to Spanish is very important for expanding business opportunities. We would like to share some important information regarding the translation from English to Spanish with you. The first point to note regarding translation from English to Spanish is the specific type of Spanish that is required. Translation from English to Spanish is not the same in every Spanish-speaking country. You may already know that Spanish is spoken in more than 20 countries as a native or official language, and each country has its own history, culture and social systems. Needless to say, Spanish in Spain is different from Spanish in Latin America, and furthermore, Latin American Spanish is different in each Latin American country. The word ‘T-shirt’ for example, is translated as ’remera’ in Argentina, ‘playera’ in Mexico, and ‘camiseta’ in Central America and other countries. If you have no clue which Spanish you should translate to, the safest option is to translate into a neutral Spanish that will be widely understood. In addition, translating from English to Spanish entails different levels of difficulty than translating from English to other languages. Which do you think is easier, translation from English to Spanish or translation from English to Japanese? Translation from English or other Western languages to Japanese is not easy, since Japanese has a very different grammatical structure, such as word order and syntax, and no similar words, letters or characters at all. Translation from English to Spanish, on the other hand, looks...
Degrees of Website Localization To make their services attractive for an international audience and encourage cross-cultural communication, companies have started translating and localizing their websites. Website localization is a complex, multi-layered process which must be performed by industry professionals who know how to modify information so that it appeals to the target culture. There are different degrees to which a website can be localized. A basic taxonomy proposes a distinction between monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual sites. Which option you choose depends on the language policy or marketing strategy that your company uses for business communication. Most often, the localization level depends on the importance or size of the local market or audience. Singh & Pereira (2005) suggest five degrees of localization: ‘standardized’ (one website for all countries), ‘semi-localized’ (one site gives information on many countries), ‘localized’ (a whole translated site for each country), ‘highly localized’ (translations and culture-specific adaptations), and ‘culturally customized’ (a new site completely adapted in the target culture). However, we can also find many intermediary stages between these five degrees. For example, general website information can be translated, but specific terminology remains in the source language. Such a concept is called a mode of ‘standardization’. How do organizations choose a particular option? In a market environment, decisions about localization degree highly depend on Return on Investment issues. It means that companies analyze whether the potential benefits of the localization process outweigh the initial investment needed for production of a localized version. What we observe today is that localization is in very high demand and quite profitable because organizations benefit greatly from localized websites effectively communicating their...
Project Management When you think about translators, what do you imagine? Do you see a linguist in a dusty library, huddling over a Latin manuscript, struggling to find a better equivalent to a certain word or phrase? On the one hand, you are right. This is one traditional side of a translator’s working environment. On the other hand, the past decade has seen translation moving far beyond the realm of printed documents into software, websites, databases, and multimedia content. The reason for such changes is the digital revolution, which has given rise to the concept and practice of localization. Today translation is not just a service but a whole industry based on team work, use of the corpus, and informational technologies. The translator needs to develop the skills of a project manager, a computer scientist, a documentalist, an evaluator, a localizer, and a technical writer. In our current international environment, translation agencies now work on massive, multilingual projects. This has made it essential to rely on project managers, who have become an integral part of the translation agency’s workflow as they coordinate the skills, needs, and expertise of multiple resources. Translators and other industry professionals have to work cross-culturally, and professional teams are often geographically distributed. Translators’ working process has to be somehow supervised, and this is where the project manager comes into play. Translation agencies do not perform translation; their main goal is to coordinate translators’ work and to make sure that that translation and localization projects awarded to them by clients are completed on time, within budget and according to the client’s requirements. The translation part of...
WEBSITE LOCALIZATION The Internet is widely considered to be the most revolutionary technology since the printing press. This era of electronic communication has opened up one of the fastest growing business areas: cross-cultural marketing. As we have discussed in previous posts, it is crucial to make sure your website is comprehensible to those in your target country in order for your company to succeed in both domestic and international markets. Thus, an important factor is translating it into the native languages of your target audiences. The Localization Process However, translation itself is only one part of a very complex concept called localization. To make the website appealing to your target cultures, we need to go beyond translation itself. Localization is a multi-layered process which requires both linguistic and cultural knowledge as well as programming skills. Linguistic and cultural knowledge encompasses language knowledge, expressions , cultural perceptions, senses of humor, and pop culture. In addition, there are numerous other factors to take into consideration when modifying the content of a website. These factors include date and time formats, currency formats, units of measure, paper sizes for print-outs, sound files, legal conventions, and many other details that a company has to adapt to the target culture. However, all of these factors are vital to connecting with your audience. Also important in website localization are design elements like images, symbols, and colours. For example, when adding pictures of personnel it is a good idea to tailor them in such a way that they will look appropriate for the target audience. Just like images, symbols can also result in misunderstandings because a particular...
Multilingual Website Translation Have you ever found a perfect website which contained the information or the product you have been looking for, but the website was in a language you can’t understand? So unfortunate! But here is some good news: multilingual website translation if a service offered by more and more companies. Nowadays most marketers have chosen to adapt the print and broadcasting media to language of their target audiences. However, this does not always happen with websites. More than 70% of Internet users speak languages other than English. Also, online shoppers prefer buying from sites that are in their native language. Nonetheless, translation of websites is not a common practice yet. Should translation of websites be a common practice? The answer is yes. Multilingual website translation will give your business the opportunity to communicate to a brand new international audience in their native language. This will result in creating awareness of your brand, service, or product, and ultimately, to financial success for your company. This is one of the most effective ways of drawing new clients’ attention, marketing your business and giving it international status. Website translation is not only important for the international market, but also the domestic one. Canada, for example, is a multicultural and multilingual country. According to the 2011 Census of Population, more than 200 languages were reported to be spoken as mother tongues by Canadian residents. Making your site multilingual demonstrates your companies’ respect and appreciation towards the entire population, regardless of language and cultural background. Furthermore, website translation removes boundaries and contributes to establishing a more inclusive business standard across the globe....
TRANSLATION MYTHS TRANSLATION MYTHS The world is full of preconceptions and the translation profession is not exempt from this inevitable fate. In fact, translators are always engaged in the never-ending battle of educating the customer. Today we want to try to debunk the most common translation myths. First and foremost we have: ‘Everyone who can speak two or more languages can be a translator’. If this was true, the world would be overflowing with translators. Luckily for the actual professionals, knowing two languages does not necessarily mean that a person can translate between those languages. There is so much more behind the mere knowledge of the language, despite the general skepticism of the public. The second fairly common misconception is that translating from one language to another is the same as translating in the reverse direction. In reality, translators should always translate into their own native language and not vice-versa, unless they are perfectly bilingual, which is rare. Third is the ‘translators can translate any subject matter’ belief. Unless they have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything due to extensive studies, translators tend to specialize in only a few key areas. In the same way that a cook or a painter probably wouldn’t be able to discuss the intricacies of engineering, a translator specialized in cuisine or art would unlikely be able to translate a technical engineering text. Another myth that is often the source of misunderstandings is the conviction that translators can deliver any translation within a very short turnaround time. Clients sending a translation request expecting the job done on the following day is a not unheard of. ...
SCIENTIFIC TEXTS Scientific texts are one of the most challenging materials when it comes to translation. A linguist has to consider a variety of aspects when dealing with them – the target text has to be more than just a literal translation. Besides the deep knowledge of specific terminology for particular scientific fields, this kind of translation involves quite a bit of localization: unless present in the source text, every ambiguity must be eliminated, measures correctly converted and comparisons often need to be adjusted. For instance, if a French text on glaciers compares the size of an ice field to the size of France, when translated into German, the comparison object may be changed to Germany to sound more familiar to the German audience. However, cross-cultural issues are by far not the only difficulty, nor the biggest difficulty in translating scientific sources. Modern sciences contain numerous fields and subfields; some of the studies deal with a range of highly specific material which may only be relevant for particular countries. For this reason many terms don’t have an existing equivalent in the target language. This is an especially problematic case for a translator, who then has to decide whether to leave the term in the source language and provide an explanation, or translate it and thus create a new scientific term in the target language. Both involve a high level of understanding the material. If the linguist chooses to translate the foreign term he/she has to be absolutely sure that he/she understood its meaning correctly and found a translation that conveys the sense of the word to 100% accuracy. To...
Handling a translation in Spanish? Follow our advice on different varieties of Spanish Translation in Spanish has always been tricky. Castilian Spanish (also known as neutral or universal Spanish) is the standard Spanish. However, it has to be distinguished from US Spanish and Latin American Spanish. The latter is also divided into subcategories such as Mexican Spanish, Bolivian Spanish and Amazon Spanish. There are also a few other dialects such as Catalan and Galician which can be found in Spain. This is why a good translation in Spanish requires more than just a theoretical mastery of the language. Of course, standard Spanish is understood by all, but linguistic differences shouldn’t be overlooked because the exact same word can have different meanings based on the region it is spoken in. Misunderstandings can be very damaging to your company’s reputation! It is interesting to note that Latin American Spanish resorts to many more English loanwords than neutral Spanish does. Do you know the translation in Spanish for the word computer? Well, it depends! In Latin America, a computer is commonly referred to as a computadora, while Spaniards would rather say ordenador. In a similar fashion, Latin Americans use the word email instead of correo electrónico, which is the standard term used in Spain. Here at LingoStar Language Services we offer a professional service for translation in Spanish. Do you have a translation in Spanish you need help with? LingoStar will be glad to provide you with quality services from beginning to end. We ensure that your translation is not only correct in terms of grammar, but it is also very culturally...
Medical Escort Interpreting Canada has 4.7 million residents who speak a language other than English or French at home. In a multilingual society misunderstandings regularly occur, and in many cases this is understandable and acceptable, but absolutely not in the case of medical care. Miscommunication between a doctor and patient can result in tragedy, that is why medical escort interpreting is a very important field which requires much accuracy and expertise. In January 1980, 18-year-old Willie Ramirez was rushed to a South Florida hospital in a comatose state. During the two days following his hospitalization he was treated for a drug overdose however the treatment showed no results. A routine neurological test ordered by doctors on the second day revealed an intracranial hemorrhage, the result of a burst artery which had been defective since birth – the true cause of the young man’s condition. Ramirez was then given emergency surgery to remove the blood clot. He survived the operation but was left quadriplegic, as the treatment came too late. At the heart of the misdiagnosis lay the language barrier – none of Ramirez’ Hispanic relatives spoke understandable English and the hospital was unable to provide an interpreter. The only clue to the young man’s condition was the Spanish word “intoxicado”, used by his girlfriend’s mother as she tried to convey the cause of Ramirez’ collapse to the paramedics. In Spanish, this word usually refers to food poisoning; the young man’s family believed he was sick because he had eaten an undercooked hamburger at a fast food restaurant earlier that day. Since the paramedics spoke no Spanish and no interpreter...
