Transhorsa

Every translation blog on our shrinking planet, our treasured home, our precious blue waterworld, possesses a living soul unique to itself and to its readers.

The uniqueness of each translation blog informs a substantial part of what we call “individual character” and, together with the obvious arrangement differences, plainly differentiates one language from another one.

Critical choices are available to everyone as the new century begins to unfold. Upon the wisdom of big power hangs the fate of all life on this planet. Mutual understanding is crucial and language, not only several major languages, but all languages, holds the key, .And translation blog offers an alternative choice for international communication.

Common interests, enticements and rewards of trade, technology and cultural exchange have brought the great societies into a smaller world now named Global Village. Inevitable that as the trade barriers began to fall, the language barriers would follow. Therefore, translation blog will be a pioneer bridge between languages.

Translation bloggers are destined to be major players in the affairs of Planet Earth during the twenty-first century. They form a symbiont circle: what happens to the one will bear directly on what happens to others, and, by extension, to the entire globe.

It is an optimistic beginning. Translators and interpreters have seized the initiative with determination and good will, beginning with the hot passion for language usage. With the Internet technology, translation bloggers are building a great bridge to link all languages whose role is more crucial than the Tower of Babel. As a Chinese, I am glad to see more “Confucius Institutes” are set up around the world, and Chinese language learning is booming followed by the English language fashion.

We are all the beneficiaries of the international program to teach every child and most adults foreign language. The approachable virtual technology can fulfil every desire for language learning and cultural communication. And more and more bilingual links are from translation blogs, which exemplifies the values, thinking patterns, imagination and cultural awareness of a nation. They provide visitors a window into a unique intangible cultural heritage as a result of its long history.

Many translators or interpreters are indulging in demonstrating their language abilities on their translation blogs, which boosts the language developments and international communications. In doing so, they have put forward a challenge and clarion call for us in China to join in.

At the dawning of a new century and a new millennium, our world is at a turning point. A golden dream of deliverance, a dream of global unity, prosperity and responsibility, looms before a planet wearied of terror, wars, and environmental devastation. It is a remarkable moment fraught with opportunity, but the hour is late, very late. The dream must be realized, otherwise we will be lost. Therefore, we translation bloggers in China should find ourselves in a unique position, feel privileged and honoured to be “in the right place at the right time”. We humbly accept the challenge to contribute, in whatever way, to the realization of this dream. 

Author Information:

Albert Lau 

Marketing Manager of  Transhorsa Translation Co.,LTD.,Shanghai

http://www.transhorsa.org

Native translator & proofreading

Global Business Strategy multilingual DTP services, multilingual manual translation, multilingual translation, professional translation team, translation blog, translation outsourcing

 Once translation is considered as a kind of business, the force of commercialization will show its prowess in many ways. Translation quality has now become a hot topic. In this paper we will first cast a sight on real problems that determine the translation quality in today’s translation industry. The ISO9000 and 14000 quality standards are recommended and regulation of the translation industry needs to be launched forcefully. Finally, some personal viewpoints are suggested to formulate guidelines for translation services.

English has always been the international language as an information vehicle despite the world language had been formulated for decades. Now the translation market is broadening its horizon at an amazing speed, bringing about more opportunities as well as generating more challenges like any other booming industry. At present, the gross global translation production has reached over $13 billion dollars annually. The translation industry therefore can be called one of the hottest industries in the world.

It is ideal for any customer that the price and the quality could go with a cost- effective principle and the translation process could be an automatic plug-in one in a shortest waiting time. But the human translation working is under such a high pressure that it becomes so dear resulting in high quality. Early in the 1990’s, Lixianlin, a linguistic master deemed the translation crises are caused by many reasons; one of the most important was the increasingly declined translation quality. It is undoubted that the translation quality is a problem that we can not obviate any more.

When a translation work piece appears below the normal standard, the first idea strikes our mind is the translator is lack of required certificate or the ability of understanding a foreign language instead of pondering over something deeper.

In the second, the inadequate sense of social responsibility makes the poor translation quality. The translator should place the customers’ benefit above anything else. For example the overseas market effects of the products to be introduced in a language which is popular in the target area are largely determined by the translation quality. This is what translators or translation houses should make clear. Furthermore, a few translation companies run their business under such a situation in which the project manager himself is a layman in translation supervision!

The translation industry guideline has not been imposed to be executed by all translation service body and some illegal behaviors such as deceiving and big quote difference are making wormy sores in this industry structure, which makes the industry standardization rushing. Some ratfinks assign the projects they get and have no mind to pay for their contemporarily employed translators’ work. Some translation companies quote the lowest one can’t imagine in order to grab large amount of deals. After getting

They either employ unqualified translators or dissect the whole manuscript into small paragraphs of hundreds of word and get the free translation from hundreds of different translators in the guise for a trial. At last the customer becomes the biggest victim.

Translation Trend legal document translation, multilingual DTP services, multilingual manual translation, multilingual translation, professional translation team, translation outsourcing

Let me suppose a little scenario for you: at a weekend, you and your family are waiting for the reserved dinner in an exotic restaurant. You wish a delicious well balanced family meal after a week’s hard working could be a good payoff, so you have informed the restaurant manager, a trustworthy looking man with courteous smile, to prepare it carefully and you have paid for the bill on Wednesday. However what happened in the hours coming annoyed you a lot for the delayed serving and watery flavor. It’s nothing but your fault judgment caused the waste of money and time. It may impair your enthusiasm on your following work.

Who is to blame in the case? It depends on how you look at things. Surely, we have thousands of words to decry the greedy manager who took the third rate material to muddle through the first rate price. The profit with the largest margin drives him to do the stupid thing! On the other hand, the head of the household really need to be interrogated: is it the right way to show you are generous?

It reminds me of some translation projects few of the world class companies bought recently (the news resource: Go Translators: www.gotranslators.com- blacklist). The blockbusters such as HONDA and HYUNDAI entrusted big translation projects of hundreds of thousand words to an Indian company named MORPHEUS TRAVEL & LANGUAGES Pvt. Lt with a reasonable price, as well as gave them ample time in order that they can get an ideal version. However, things went opposite direction. The reasonable price and the relative more flexible deadline were abused as an opportunity of their nasty cheat—— they never and will never allocate the translation tasks to the proper translators as they advertised, instead they sold the projects to another translation group to get a pile of commission. The best result under such a situation for the customer is the project stops being auctioned by now and the second hand company deploys the translation process immediately; I have met with such situation several times especially run into a few famous brands such as HP and Honda. The worst situation is their projects are always sold by brokers who will pay few for the assigned team work. What a pity! Is profit an over wrapped chocolate? We always have to strip it till the naked candy merges. It’s easy for anyone to imagine the translation quality the customer will obtain. That’s why big company is more likely to be the biggest victim of such ugly phenomenon.

An unwanted supper may cost you only few hundred dollars and few days upset but who can exactly tell me the unwanted translation costs what? The likewise situation urges us again: we are still bad at factoring in good and bad possibility in choosing dinner service as well as translation service. This isn’t whistleblowing we are talking about. It’s old-fashioned dealing for the same reason they deal, because they can obtain huge profits without even touching the translated text a minute, and the translator team couldn’t get even a penny for their effort on the huge projects of hundreds of thousands of words.

What is to be done with such fraudulence? Shall we forgo the next co-operation with them or to expose in the media or to be more prudent with next target?

I say yes. All of the above.  And immediately too.  

Industry News huge project translation, legal document translation, translation outsourcing

Like many industries, translation industry has its own bio-system, which usually consists of translation service buyers, translation service providers, translation assistance tools, translation trade associations and translation skill-training organizations. Technical translation is becoming an ever-important part of our hi-tech business world, taking up larger share of the translation market and developing at ever-increasing speed. Let us shed some light on the first two components: the translation service buyers and translation service providers:

1. Translation Service Buyers

According to information from LISA Asia Globalization Resources Survey (2002-2003), most companies employ their own technical experts such as engineers with only mid-level target language ability to translate their product documents and also act as their only overseas market liaison communicators. Such companies could be described as technically oriented and production-cost oriented. They impose a higher responsibility on their experts to provide secondary services (language translations and communication channels) at the detriment of their actual technical duties not to mention the increased time demand on them. And only one third of these companies will entrust a third party translation institution with the target language edition and translation. However, if both an affordable quotation and professional, precise & accurate multi-language translation services are available, 50% of the companies are most likely to buy a full packaged translation service.

As to the spending on translations, the majority of companies will allocate from 2 to 5% of their gross income on project/product localization and from this, only 80% of the fund is paid for direct translations and linguistic maintenance with the rest 20% spent on electronic business services, network promotions, etc.

In terms of international languages market segment, English and Chinese are the two topmost target languages with market shares of 53% and 14% respectively, followed by Japanese of 11%, Korean of 7%, German 4% and French 3%.

2. Translation Service Providers

Currently translation language service providers can be classified into three main types: domestic translation companies, international localization institutions along with their affiliates located in the developed regions of the world and freelancers registered in a whole mass of translation platforms. The first conspicuous feature for the domestic translation companies is that a legion, supported by putting some words into the other ones, is being formed. The second feature is that most of their permanent staff although bilingual, are limited in technical knowledge and most will in turn contact and engage freelancers when a service order comes in. Their main customers are native companies who pay a moderately high bill for such hand-over service. Their target language business includes English, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Korean and Russian and their service catalogue covers the fields of trade, legal, electronic, telecommunications, computers, machinery, the chemical industry, oil, auto industry, medicine, food, textiles and sports. As a result of strong competition and wide industries coverage, such companies are exposed to one another and the quotations they put in have a tendency to outbid one another and the corresponding service levels they provide also drop.

The total number of elite (field specific) experts who are engaged in project/product localization is not more than 1,500 persons and they are usually hired by some of the reputable language service companies such as MLV and RLV. The translators working in these companies must possess strong welding ability from source to the target language and have high level of technical knowledge with preferred career experiences in related fields. Such localization companies also rarely use freelancers. Freelancers enjoy their full scale of freedom from the price they charge to the way they work. Bypassing the language agencies, having no referrals, they are free from paying the commission but they cannot guarantee their work outputs would be professional and accurate. They seem more welcomed by those smaller firms who have limited budget allocation and one of type of work. However, it must be said that the freelancer group is flooding the market overwhelmingly at an incredible speed with little guarantee of quality and timeliness.

Industry News language translation service, multilingual DTP services, multilingual manual translation, multilingual translation, professional translation team, translation outsourcing