Translation Blog

When you spend money on a localization project, you expect a level of translation quality that matches your investment. Clients have every right to be upset when their agency delivers what appears to be sub-standard work. When things go wrong, the natural impulse is to assume incompetence and blame the translator. But this isn’t always the case. [...]

Machine translation (MT) has brought rapid change to the localization industry. Formerly labor-intensive translation projects can now be largely automated, greatly reducing the time and cost involved. MT technology has become much more sophisticated in the last decade, and we can expect this trend to continue. This raises an ominous question for translation agencies: Is [...]

While English is commonly accepted as a standard means of international communications, research has shown that most people prefer to use software in their native language. Therefore, if you are planning to enter the European market you should include localization-ready code into the functional scope of your solution. With more and more companies focusing on user experience [...]

If there’s one lesson translation agencies can take from the financial turmoil of recent times, it’s that that the economic center of gravity is shifting, and fast. Europe is crippled by a severe debt crisis, and growth remains sluggish in the United States. Meanwhile, business is booming in emerging markets around the world, none of which [...]

If you study the most successful and dynamic companies in the world, you’ll notice a common characteristic: they’re all very good at localization. Consider the Greek language version of Apple’s website  for example, or perhaps Facebook in Vietnamese. These are two instances where companies have successfully repackaged their products and services for foreign markets, while preserving their [...]

In the world of translation, defining ‘good quality translation’ is often the subject of heated debates and discussions, often causes controversy and many times sees 2 sides pitted against each other in a David and Goliath struggle. Much of this has been covered on the translation portal Proz. On one side sit the translators, the purveyors of quality translation. A [...]

Linguistic services cover pretty much everything language related that isn’t translation, and there’s more to this than you might at first think. If you’ve already developed a robust localization strategy for your company then the linguistic services we’ll look at probably aren’t new. However, for some, services like Transcreation or translation certification might be new, [...]

There are countless languages in the world, most of which have many thousands and some even billions of monolingual or bilingual speakers. The laws of statistics would seem to dictate, that any attempt to set up a translation business is futile, if only because the number of potential competitors is overwhelming. However, once you enter [...]

Global trade has necessitated translation to and from many of the most common languages spoken across the globe. An intricate process, owning to variations in syntax and grammatical rules, translation requires a careful selection of both translator and reviewer. If you don’t speak the target language and can’t review the quality of a translation, you [...]

If you’re in the business of selling products or services internationally you need the services of a professional translation agency. Many companies start managing translation on an ad hoc basis, delegating translation to bilingual staff, using nothing more advanced than Microsoft Word and a couple of spread sheets.  At this point, approaching a professional translation [...]