SEPARATING GOOD TRANSLATION SERVICES FROM BAD ONES

Sep 23, 2014 | Blog, SEO

Translation Services The last thing you want to happen with your documents is that the message written gets lost in translation. Enlisting the expertise of a professional Canadian Document Translation Services agency can ensure that your written documents are translated into their appropriate language, in a tone and manner that is most relevant to your specific target market. The foundation of every quality translation is the translator. But how can you tell what makes a good translator? It’s almost always recommended for you to turn to an agency, rather than an independent contractor. The reason for this is that with an agency such as LingoStar you can check their credentials, previous job history, references, testimonials, etc. You can develop an educated assessment of their quality based upon their previous work, and you can have confidence when you proceed with them during each of your translation projects. A reputable Canadian Document Translation Services agency will work only with language professionals that are native speakers of your desired language pair. This gives the translator an in-depth knowledge of a language beyond what can be learned in classrooms and books, and will prevent you from getting a translator who may be able to speak the language fluently, but isn’t qualified to provide an extremely high quality translation by any means. High quality document translators are specialists, and a Canadian document translator will ensure that your document conveys exactly what you are trying to write in your desired target language. These days, working with a Canadian document translation services agency is easier than ever. Whether you’re in Alberta, Newfoundland, or even France or Germany, you have the same...

Are Language Barriers Affecting Your Business?

Sep 19, 2014 | Blog, SEO

Language Services In the modern world globalized by the internet many things can be reached by just a click of a mouse. In the field of business the competition is fierce, and an aspect just as important as service quality is its reachability. A company offering highly demanded services or goods on a market limited by country borders prevents itself from economic growth, since such a strategy only makes sense for firms selling very specific goods which only sell well in a particular region. If your company is not among them it is highly advisable to make your services globally available. To do so, you may want to start with translating your website into the language of the country where you would like to start offering your services. Global availability cannot be reached within a short period; it is established step by step. For instance, if your company is located in Germany, you might translate your website into French to expand your business, or have your software localized for French audience. With the expansion grows your client database, new clients inform others about your services, and the chain reaction starts to bring you profit. After a while you will have enough financial means to start expanding into the next country. Another thing worth considering is the fact that cross-cultural meetings can sometimes lead to misunderstandings, disappointments or awkward situations if the participants are not somewhat familiar with their partner’s cultural rituals, beliefs, languages or psychological features rooted in them. This can become an obstacle on your way to successful business development. Therefore, before expanding into a new country, you...

TEN QUALITIES OF A GOOD TRANSLATOR

Sep 16, 2014 | Blog, SEO

Good translator. Many people tend to think that a person who knows foreign languages is a good translator. However, that’s not necessarily true, as levels of knowledge of a language can vary. What are the qualities that characterize a good translator? Passion. A translator should be passionate about their translation job. They should use all their means and efforts to deliver every project in excellent shape, as if it was their baby. Translation Skills. A good translator must have a specific linguistic education. They should master not only the foreign language they work with, but also the skills of translation. Curiosity. A translator must be curious and motivated to keep on learning new words and expression. The learning process of a translator should be never-ending. Rich Vocabulary. A good translator must have a wide lexicon, not only in the foreign language but also in their mother tongue. This will make the translation process easier and the quality of the translation higher. It is also convenient for translators to acquire technical terms in specific fields, such as business, law, sciences, engineering, etc… Clarity. A good translator’s goal is to express the idea of the source text as clearly as possible, without ambiguity. They should avoid difficult structures when they can use simple ones. Translation Quality. A good translator should be obsessed with quality. Resources.  In order to achieve the aforementioned quality, a good translator should use all available resources at their disposal. Accuracy. A good translator should provide an exact transfer of information. Despite it being tempting sometimes, the translator should not correct the source text, trying to maintain its...

IT’S NOT AS EASY AS GOOGLING ‘TRANSLATION SERVICES’

Sep 12, 2014 | Blog, Translation

Translation Services Differ Company’s reputation and credibility: It is easy to google “translation services” or “document translation in Canada” but how can you really be sure you are working with an experienced and successful language services company? The first thing you can do is make sure to check the reviews of any company before you choose them. The last thing you want to do is book an interpreter for a huge presentation and then realize that the company has only received 3 reviews and they are all negative. Also, most reputable companies have a list of successful companies they have worked for before with testimonials. This is usually on the company website already, but can easily be provided by asking for references and testimonials. Any upstanding company will gladly oblige (like Lingo-Star). Does the company use native speakers: Upon a first glance, the pricing between different language service companies can vary greatly. However, what you need to be aware of before proceeding with a translation is that native speakers are the ones you want translating your documents. Just because somebody can speak Spanish, it doesn’t mean that they will be qualified to precisely translate your document unless they are native speakers. There are countless incidences where clients will opt for the cheaper more attractive route, only to be given a poor quality document that would be embarrassing to present in a meeting or on their website. We don’t want you to experience this so we highly suggest you switch to Lingo-Star and take advantage of the fact that every single one of our translators is an actual native speaker...

THE DANGERS OF GOOGLE TRANSLATE.

Sep 9, 2014 | Blog, SEO

Google translate. Why should I hire a translator when I can get Google Translate to do it for free? Sadly, this is not an uncommon question.  A few self-explanatory images available on the web would suffice to answer, but here is a more technical explanation of the dangers of using Google Translate. Google Translate is not 100% accurate. Google Translate will look for appropriate translations by searching for linguistic patterns within millions of documents already translated by human translators. However, if it has insufficient data, it can only guess based on what it does have, which can often be misleading or simply wrong. Google Translate produces unnatural translations. Even when it manages to produce grammatical sentences, they often are too literal and, as a consequence, sound awkward or funny to a native speaker of the target language. Google Translate doesn’t offer a quality check on its translations. As a result, users have no means to know whether the translation in the target language is good or not and they end up presenting weird translations to the public like the ones in the pictures above. These may manage to get a smile out of us, but the consequences of mistranslation can sometimes be quite serious. Let’s take the translation of food packaging as an example. If the translation of the ingredients on a package is not 100% accurate, it can cause severe problems for people with allergies or restrictive diets. In conclusion, language is just too complex for machines to understand all the grammar, context and nuances; Google Translate could never replace the work of a professional human translator.  ...

THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF MACHINE TRANSLATION

Sep 5, 2014 | Blog, SEO

Machine translation. Machine translation (MT) is automatic translation through a software program without human assistance. It has recently been at the center of controversies regarding reliability and quality, but few people know that there are actually different types of machine translation: statistical, rule-based, and hybrid. Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) SMT uses statistical models derived from the analysis of bilingual text corpora, usually finding a correspondence between one word and another. This is, for example, what Google Translate does. SMT tools might help you to understand the basic meaning of a text, but they will not produce good quality translation. Rule-based Machine Translation (RBMT) RBMT, as indicated by its name, is based on grammar rules. The system generates sentences in a target language after analyzing grammatically both the source and the target languages involved. This is, for example, what Systran does. These software programs usually require tedious proofreading, and as they need a lot of lexicons, they only become efficient after long term use. Hybrid Machine Translation Hybrid MT is a mix of SMT and RBMT that also includes a translation memory and thus produces translations of a better quality. This tool can be used by translators to avoid translating the exact same sentence twice. However, linguists still doubt that this tool can help achieve higher quality translations or gain time because of the long editing part. This is why translation needs are still addressed by translators. If you need a translation, call LingoStar today or send us an email for a free quote! Here we have qualified translators from all over the world able to work on any kind...