SanTranslate has recently completed a court interpretation for a Chinese client.  What might have been a simple assignment for a small claim turned out to be more costly than expected when the defendant vigorously denied the charges.

It highlighted a couple of things that are worth bearing in mind should you find yourself on either side of such a situation.

Firstly, in this instance, although the defendant had a family member with good English who translated around 400 pages of statements for them, this could turn out to be a short-sighted approach.  Without a professional translation, there is a strong possibility that the judge could query the accuracy of the translation, causing delays in proceedings.  Additionally, should they win the court case, they might not have the translation costs reimbursed, adding to their inconvenience and costs of defending the case.

Secondly, we have had occasions in the past where we have turned up for an interpretation assignment only to find that the client has cancelled the appointment.  In these cases we have to levy our standard cancellation charge which is included in our terms and conditions.  We appreciate that sometimes clients’ plans change which is why we urge them to notify us of such changes as soon as possible – that way they can avoid the cancellation charge and we can conveniently re-schedule the assignment.

The recent news of Google’s withdrawal from China has caused discussion and debate around the world.  Naturally, China has its own view and, if you’re interested, these sites from Hong Kong and China tell us what’s being said.  If you’d like a translation of any that are in Chinese, contact us.

http://nextmedia.com

http://home.on.cc

http://singtao.com

www.mingpaonews.com

www.takungpao.com

http://881903.com

http://rthk.org.hk

www.isd.gov.hk

http://news.gov.hk

www.scmp.com/portal/

One of the more unusual translation assignments that we’ve been working on recently has been for a socio-economic consultancy working in Angola, translating a tender document for them for work in the field of city planning.

As is often the case with tendering work, the deadline was tight and our team of translators pulled out all the stops to ensure it was met.  And with the tender being so important for our client, it was essential that the translation was extremely accurate.

One of the challenges of this project was that Angola uses a Colonial form of Portuguese so particular attention had to be given to the back translation of documents from the Portuguese Embassy into English.  It was tricky job but our excellent team made a great success of it.

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A recent multilingual translation project for a TV company saw SanTranslate working with some of the more unusual languages – and made us very glad we have such experienced translators in these less commonly required languages.

The project required us to work in Bahasa Malay, Vietnamese, Thai, and, as the client expressed it, Cambodian.  In fact, the official term for the language of Cambodia is Khmer and, you might be surprised to know, it is the second most widely spoken of the Austroasiatic languages after Vietnamese.

The Khmer language influences and has been influenced by those of nearby countries, including Thai, Lao, Vietnamese and Cham (spoken in Vietnam and Cambodia).  As a spoken language, it is different from others in the South East Asian region in that it is not tonal.

The translation work we carried out for this project was on the legal contracts that needed to be completed and signed before filming commenced.  It was important to the client, of course, that the translation was completely accurate to ensure that no legal complications could arise from this that would jeopardise the project.

After a series of tough exams, a director of SanTranslate was headhunted by Washington-based interpretation company, LLE-inc.com.  After going through a telephone interview, live telephone interpreting examinations and training, she has qualified to provide instant telephone interpretation for work that involves 911 calls, as well as medical and legal calls.  The company had limited numbers of professional Cantonese interpreters making this a good match for both them and SanTranslate.