translation

Tight deadlines for translating tenders

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.

Read more about our translation services.

By SanTranslate.com|2019-09-03T21:27:23+01:00March 23rd, 2010|Blog|0 Comments

Multilingual translation for a TV company

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.

By SanTranslate.com|2019-09-03T21:27:23+01:00March 22nd, 2010|Blog|0 Comments

Will machine translation replace the human translator?

The Association of Translation Companies will be represented in a six hour live debate hosted by BBC World Service, SuperPower Nation. Geoffrey Bowden, General Secretary of the ATC has been invited to participate to represent the views of translation companies.

This unique experiment will explore whether technology alone can bring together the speakers of many languages in the digital world.

The BBC will be using Google Translate to translate the contributions from around the globe in Arabic, Chinese, English, Persian, Indonesian, Portuguese and Spanish. Which could give rise to some amusing results.

At SanTranslate, we’re of the opinion that a human translator is still vital for any important translation work. If it’s important that your translation accurately reflects technical terms and industry jargon, that it conveys the contextual meaning of your words, and that it expresses the personality and emotional content of your writing, it’s unlikely that a machine will capture the fine detail and subtle nuances you need.

Technology provides some great tools for translators – our partnership with SDL Trados provides great benefits to us and our clients – but we’ve yet to be convinced that it can provide a complete substitute for a qualified and experienced human translator.

SuperPower Nation will be running live on the BBC World Service site from 13:00GMT, today, 18^th March. You can take part, follow the conversation or watch video streams live from the event in London. Just follow this link for further information:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/2010/03/100223_superpowernation.shtml

By SanTranslate.com|2019-09-03T21:27:23+01:00March 18th, 2010|Blog|0 Comments