A Translation Company Directory to Help You Find The Best Providers
Quick news to let you know I found a great directory website where carefully selected translation agencies are listed: http://translation-helper.com
It can be hard to find the ideal company for your needs with so many language service providers on the market. But with a vetted list of language businesses covering various fields, you should be able to find the right category for you.
If you're a freelance translator, you can also add details about your services and improve your visibility online.
Finding a Good French Translation Provider
Let's start with starters. My name is Anthony. I am a professional French translator working from two languages: Japanese and English. Not the other way around, which is important as we will see just a little later.
You may have translation or localization needs, but aren't sure how to find a reliable partner. No shame here, it can be incredibly difficult, even for the most experienced project managers. Indeed, a lot of people in our industry unfortunately misrepresent themselves as professionals, when they sometimes aren't even native speakers of the languages they claim to translate into.
To ensure the success of your projects, follow the below tips:
- Look for native speakers: a lot of people claim they are bilingual or more, but very few actually are. Most translators have a dominant language, and it is that language they should be translating into. Be wary of translators who list too many language pairs, especially when several target ones are involved.
- Look for credibility: go for translators who have a professional profile. A verifiable identity on the Internet, ideally a personal website or some sort of online profile where they introduce they services. Make sure their claims are consistent. If any doubt, move on. There are a lot of impersonators in the translation industry.
- Look for specialists: jack of all trades, but master of none. A lot of freelance translators sadly think that, because they have a good general understanding of two languages, they can translate all types of texts between the two. Big mistake. A translator will most likely fail to get all the subtleties of the text if they don't have a long experience in the industry in question. For example, I am an IT graduate, and I know that even some very fine linguists who are new to the field won't be able to get some technical concepts, even with a good dictionary.
- Look for professionalism: if a translator contacts you with an email full of typos or simply doesn't seem to communicate in an educated manner, chances that their writing skills are poor to start with. Needless to say, you can do without such "linguists".
I hope it helped! There are so many people out there, so don't take chances and skip any freelancer who seems out of it. If you would like to read more about the language industry, you can follow my new blog. For a quote about my service, visit my website listed above!
Language Translation Needs On The Rise
Language translation services continue to proliferate and thrive on the Internet, and this also sees the range of specialised translation markets, such as game and software localization, expanding and delving into new commercial areas. Indeed, this rapid and ongoing development of niche translation service types has been a long time coming, with early Internet translators rightly drawing criticism for their neglect of individualistic translation needs.
Cross-language legal translation is one of the aforementioned niche services that requires a certain level of expertise and cross-discipline knowledge to provide a satisfactory service. Therefore, it shouldn’t be too surprising to see the online legal translation market experiencing perceptible growth. The nature of the European Union, with its active encouragement of inter-European business dealings, coupled with the fluidity of e-commerce and online company activity brings around a greater need for quick, reliable legal translation in a variety of European languages.
Naturally, the individual legal characteristics of European countries varies in terms of complexity and this results in translation services in the languages of nations with more layered and multifaceted business laws experiencing the most visible growth. Italy has a particular reputation, amongst businessmen and entrepreneurs, for its treacherous legal minefields – a reputation that has often hampered company expansion and commercial dealings across the nation’s borders. Therefore, gaming translation is unquestionably the individual niche market with the most growth potential as it represents the most vital of all legal translation services within the EU.
The immediacy offered by online software translation services is particularly crucial in the world of online commercial activity. If the old adage “time is money” was true in pre-Internet days then it has only proved to be more significant since the World Wide Web became an integral part of human existence. With the palpability of national borders almost appearing obsolete in the one-nation mentality of the e-commerce and online business market, the distinction between individual national laws is a telling bump in the road for those wishing to expand their business quickly and seamlessly throughout Europe.
As previously stated, expansion into nations with the most complex laws – such as Italy – offers the most obvious danger for companies who need to negotiate extensive trade regulations in a short amount of time. Therefore, the quickness of service that games and apps translation can provide, compared with the lengthy – and often costly – process of liaising with local lawyers, makes it a vital component in modern online business growth.
How Translating is like Programming
Another great localization article in my archives that was, unfortunately, not available anymore. For the benefit of all, I am sharing it here again. Thanks to Rachel for writting it in the first place :)
In my free time, I like to translate websites. I am currently working on a project to help an organization move its website into WordPress. Unlike designing a website from scratch, I have to recreate the existing design by using my knowledge of CSS, PHP, and Javascript.
This app localization process creates some real challenges, and I recently made a breakthrough. The design demanded code to deal with two issues: The front page has two columns that must be of equal height, and the rest of the pages have one column that needs to have at least the same height as a second column. Because the content in these columns is dynamic, I couldn’t just set a fixed height for any of them. I needed to find a solution that would automatically adjust the design when the content changed.
Luckily, I found a software solution to the first problem with a little research. Someone had already written Javascript code to set equal column heights:
<script type="text/javascript"> jQuery.noConflict(); function equalHeight(group) { tallest = 0; group.each(function() { thisHeight = jQuery(this).height(); if(thisHeight > tallest) { tallest = thisHeight; } }); group.height(tallest); } jQuery(document).ready(function() { equalHeight(jQuery("#container,#primary")); }); </script> |
The real problem came when I wanted to work with other pages. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a piece of code that successfully set a minimum column height based on the height of another column. So I took matters into my own hands—I modified the code above to fit my needs. Then I added an if/else statement so all of the code could be pasted into my theme’s functions.php file:
// script for column height function
function my_scripts() {
if (is_front_page()) { ?>
<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery.noConflict();
function equalHeight(group) {
tallest = 0;
group.each(function() {
thisHeight = jQuery(this).height();
if(thisHeight > tallest) {
tallest = thisHeight;
}
});
group.height(tallest);
}
jQuery(document).ready(function() {
equalHeight(jQuery("#container,#primary"));
});
</script>
<?php } else { ?>
<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery.noConflict();
function fixMinHeight(group) {
thisHeight = 0;
group.each(function() {
thisHeight = jQuery(this).height();
});
jQuery("#container").css("min-height", thisHeight+100);
}
jQuery(document).ready(function() {
fixMinHeight(jQuery("#secondary"));
});
</script>
<?php } }
add_action('wp_head','my_scripts');
|
The result? All the columns are translated as they should. Someone else may come up with a more elegant solution, but I solved the problem. I jumped around the living room for a good five minutes after I got that to work!
For me, this process is very similar to translating. Like coding an app with an existing design, localization requires me to write based on a source text. When a puzzling term or tricky bit of grammar arises, a little research can sometimes lead me to a solution. If, however, a solution doesn’t already exist, I have to rely on a bit of ingenuity to come up with my own.
