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Quick List for Selecting a Translation Service

• Select your translation service with as much care as you use in the choice of your legal counsel, your accountants or your advertising agency. Ask them about their translation resource database and their communications facilities.
  
• Develop a working relationship: Your project manager soon becomes familiar with the terminology characteristics of a client's business, and takes a very helpful part in delivering the best possible work, consistent with your own corporate style, at the most economical cost.
  
• Questions may arise when there is more than one plausible way to render a crucial section. A personal follow-up discussion with the translator who did your work should be available if you have questions on meaning or interpretation.
  
• Translators are bound by a strict and specific code of professional ethics concerning security. Discuss steps they take to prevent disclosure of proprietary material.
  
• Typesetting and printing: If you have a sales brochure, or any document with a formatted combination of text and graphics, most translation firms offer typesetting and printing facilities that provide a turnkey solution to the demand for professionally finished material, with the entire project supervised by professionals.

Continue reading below for a more thorough study of the translation service selection process.

Managing the Translation Resource

We certainly know how to murder other people's languages.
By Greg Bathon
Reprinted from an article in Export Today

If you've been doing business overseas for long, you're guaranteed to have a collection stories, mostly funny, and probably mostly apocryphal, about how words - misinterpreted, mistranslated, misused - can get people into trouble.

I have a whole portfolio of knee-slappers after twenty five years in international business, living in South America, Asia and Europe. We certainly know how to murder other people's languages.

The one about the launch of Chevy Nova - in Venezuela, was it? - where "no va" means "doesn't go". We've all heard that one. It's a classic. It doesn't happen to be true, of course, but it was too good not to pass on. And besides, there are plenty that are true. Honest mistakes. Dumb mistakes. Expensive mistakes.

Of course, there are lots of zingers coming back the other way. Our overseas counterparts often make hilarious mistakes in English. Somewhere, right now, someone is putting together the latest collection for an article. Sign on Delhi antique shop: "Here are found strange objects from the backside of India." Package copy for a Spanish doll with a device that makes the doll laugh when you toss it in the air: "Laughs when you throw up." And the one...

Stop me before I tell more. I can't help myself. Someday, I'll offer the world access to my personal collection of cross-cultural malapropisms, selected from many years in international business. But right now I want to say something serious about the serious business of saying what you want to say correctly.

Professional translators in America know that their role in the economic life of the nation has traditionally not been as important as that of their colleagues in Europe. The reasons for this are not obscure. Many Europeans speak at least one additional language and most European business people are polyglot. They speak English, of course, but most have reasonable fluency in at least one other language, and are perhaps able to read one or two more. Language capability is important, and respected, where it is an economic necessity.

But look at a list of the Dow industrial and marketing powerhouses, our international giants. Look at the top twenty. How many of their chief executives can speak the languages of any of their major foreign customers? There are American business leaders who are capable of conducting negotiations - or a conversation, or of making a speech - in another language. At the moment I can think of one or two.

The attitude of speakers of English toward other languages goes back a long way, reinforced by the historic power of our language and the dominance of the national economies first of England, then of the U.S. The Latin root for "translation" is traducere (French traduire, Spanish traducir), which we use in English to mean "to defame or slander." Translation in America has been a quaint niche occupied by a species of academic elf in green eye shades - while outside this country it is a recognized and well respected profession.

There is first-hand evidence that this perception in Americas changing quickly. Whatever the politics or policies of the office holders, our country is committed to increasing its share of world trade in tough competition with others. And that commitment has meant recognition by business leaders that American enterprise extends to speaking the language of our customers, wherever they are.

When Raytheon sold the Patriot missile to Taiwan, it had to provide many hundreds of pages of Chinese-language engineering and operating documentation to its customers, in addition to all the legal and contractual boiler plate. Raytheon needed help from a team who 1) were native speakers of Chinese; 2) were professional engineers or lawyers; and 3) were skilled users of word-processing software and computer modem communications.

Some companies - International Harvester is one example - have so much work translating manuals that they have invested heavily in machine translation. While this speeds up the process it still requires plenty of human intervention and supervision. If you think foreigners write funny English, wait till you see what event the most advanced machines on the market can come up with.

There are more and more defense contractors, consultants, biomedical and high tech companies that are focusing, many for the first time, on markets outside the U.S. And there are forty thousand other American companies that look overseas for sales. That's why translation is today a much more important ancillary service to American enterprises doing business overseas. And while the translation process, as a business and as a craft, has changed dramatically in response to this new demand, many end users still don't know how these changes affect their ability to get superior work at a competitive cost. Let's take a look at the process.

It makes good business sense, and it's good manners, for you as the originator of a document - sales brochure, legal brief, whatever - to provide a translation into the customer's or "target" language. But do you just ask anyone - a co-worker, for instance, who speaks the foreign language - to translate your work? Consider that there are native speakers of English in your company who can't write what you write. Just growing up speaking Spanish doesn't guarantee competency in writing the language at a level suitable for customer contact.

Do you look in the yellow pages? Maybe - if that's where you would look for legal counsel for your company, for an accountant or your advertising agency. Far better to have an established relationship with someone you trust. Writing is an extraordinarily demanding craft in itself and a good translation is the re-creation of good writing in another language. It speaks for you. Even if its style is not brilliant, it had better at least be clear and authentic.

Another vital consideration is the industrial or professional expertise of the translator. A lawyer will translate a legal brief better than a chemist or an engineer. You want a document not only to be grammatically correct but technically and culturally authentic. If it is a financial prospectus, you want its foreign language version to read like a financial prospectus, not like a sales brochure or a medical report.

The American Translators Association lists 115 occupational fields in which accredited translators work. Most first line translation firms work with associates who are accredited members of the ATA. These translators work only in their native languages, but their selection by a translation firm for an assignment is based on many additional factors: education level, degrees received, professional memberships and publications, as well as experience and reliability.

A translator's qualifications should be as close as possible to those of the original writer. What should you pay for high quality translation? Cost is a function of demand and is higher for unusual or highly technical occupational fields, or uncommon languages. Multiple language versions of the same documents can be done more inexpensively at the same time. You can expect discounts on longer projects. Selection, scheduling, and editing generally bring the cost to between three and five hundred dollars per thousand words.

A small investment that returns enormous dividends. How long should it take? A project manager, who supervises each assignment from start to finish, will calculate completion time based on technicality, and formatting requirements. A faxed one-page sample of your document is normally enough for a prompt and reliable estimate. As a rough guide, a competent translator can complete about a page and a half of text an hour. With typing and editing, a five page report takes about one business day. Millions - literally millions - of translation resources worldwide are now available directly to your translation service: translators, editors, checkers, experts in every conceivable industry or service.

You should be able to access your service through e-mail, as well as fax or overnight mail, allowing 24-hour system entry from any computer or any telephone, anywhere. It's for this reason that location is generally a secondary consideration. The test of your translation firm's value lies in its ability to provide a translator who knows your language fluently, is a native of the target language, knows the subject and has a computer. For example, you might e-mail or fax a request for a translation into Russian of an engineering document needed in Moscow.

The service accesses its database to find a Russian translator/engineer - maybe in Russia, but where is immaterial, except for timing - and forwards the document electronically. The translation will be reviewed for completeness, clarity and accuracy by another Russian engineer - perhaps in California. It's possible for a translated, edited version to be on your desk within 24 hours, if you and your firm can work the time zone differentials.

For a long project that is not yet complete in the original version, it makes good sense to get started on a section. Sometimes there are issues of format, style or nomenclature that need resolution. Your service's project manager may have to assemble a team, and the best-qualified translators for your work will have to be scheduled as far in advance as possible. How can you be sure you're getting a first rate translation if you can't read it yourself? You can't - but if you know more about the process, you can make the decisions that will make a quality result more likely.