GOLANGUAGES LEADS THE UK IN SYNCHING WITH EUROPEAN TIME

Standard office hours in the UK are 9 to 5 with an hour for lunch.

Crazily, the UK is an hour behind Europe, which is difficult for a company like ours when 90 percent of projects involve European clients and/or translators.

To offer our clients an even better service, we have therefore decided to tweak our office opening hours so that we are more in time with our EU clients and our in-country EU translators … which will also help our UK clients as the early morning start will allow us to manage their European projects more efficiently.

From now on, our offices will be open from 8:30 am to 4 pm UK time for the acceptance of new projects. Projects received after 4 pm will be placed on the next working day. Staff will be made available to clients before 8:30 am and after 4 pm when necessary … such as when we are dealing with projects on behalf of clients in Asia or America.

Work time after 4 pm will primarily be used for staff training and development, again so that we can offer our clients improved levels of service.

We hope that the new working hours will prove successful. We will monitor the situation over the next few months before deciding whether to make the change permanent or not.

In a perfect world, for us, the UK would synchronise its clocks - and national holidays - with the rest of Europe.

This is just a step towards that perfect world.

For more information: http://www.golanguages.com/

What to look for when employing a translation company

Translation Companies

· Should only place projects with fully qualified and experienced translators working into their mother-tongue

· Should thoroughly vet and assess all translators before allowing them to work on your projects

· Should have management systems to continually assess and reassess the quality of work delivered by translators, ensuring that strict performance criteria are met at all times in terms of accuracy, fluency and delivering work to agreed schedules

· Should have management systems to track and update hundreds of files accurately for on-going projects

· Should maintain client confidentiality at all times

· Should have binding agreements governing non-disclosure and confidentiality of all documentation

· Should make sure that all work is stored securely

· Should be willing to be bound by specific terms of contract, subject to agreement

· Should refuse a commission that they do not have the expertise to deliver

Translation Objectives

· Translations should NOT read like translations

· Work should read as if it had been written first-hand for the target market audience

· All work should be fully localised so that it reflects current in-country style and terminology

· Over a series of projects, the translation agency should work increasingly closely to each client’s preferred style, learning in-house preferences and vocabulary

Translators

· Should ONLY work into their mother-tongue language

· Should have internationally recognised academic and professional qualifications

· Should ideally work in teams, where one translator translates and the second edits and proofs the work

· Should have membership of one or more professional body, such as the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, Institute of Linguists, or mother-country equivalents

· Should have specific subject experience for your industry field

· Should preferably be living and working in their mother-tongue countries, giving you access to current language styles and current terminology

Translation Tips

· If you are going to have your work checked by a regional office, make sure that they sign-off the source text before you send it for translation. Very often regional offices will want to say completely different things to their markets than you will want to say to yours, and they may well like a completely different style or tone to what you produce for your own needs. If you don't get the source copy approved, don't be surprised if the regional office then changes the text once they have seen the translation - they won't be criticising the translation, they will be rewriting the text so that it is different from the source file

· Supply approved reference material and glossaries - especially to clarify in-house preferences and acronyms

· Include any other related material that may help to clarify terminology

· Tell the translation company if any words (usually product names) are to be left in English as internationally recognised terms or localised

· Indicate whether conversions (e.g. miles to kilometres, or pounds to kilograms) are to be done by the translator

· Tell the translation company who the material is aimed at (e.g. end-users, engineers, etc.) - this will help the translators to use the appropriate style. If you are producing work for a specific newspaper or magazine, let the agency know the name of the publication

· Avoid puns - they never translate well and usually have completely different meanings in the target languages

§ EXAMPLE: an article about someone called Scott might have an English headline pun of "In the Scottlight" for "In the Spotlight", but this play on words is unlikely to work well, if at all, in other languages

· Avoid proverbs - like puns, they never translate well and are often unparalleled in the target languages

§ EXAMPLE: in English we have the proverbial saying of "to kill two birds with one stone", but a cultural saying like this rarely exists in other languages - it might be something like "to kill two flies with one swat" - and a literal translation will make no sense in the target language text at all. If you've designed a marketing campaign with graphics around the two birds and one stone theme, you might well have wasted thousands of pounds in concept work as the idea just wouldn't be acceptable outside of the UK

· Avoid humour – it hardly ever translates well

· Avoid cultural bias – such as references to your national sport or literary/social clichés. Think internationally from the start

· Most translators complete between 1,500 and 2,500 words of translation per day

· An "average" A4 page has about 300 words of text: 30 lines x 10 words per line = 300 words. A translator will typically complete five to eight pages of text per day

· Translators do not respond favourably to undue pressure to get a job translated quickly. Allow enough time for your job to be translated well and to be checked for accuracy

· Allow lead-time in your scheduling. Translators are usually working on existing projects and so there might be a short time before a translator can commence work on your project

· Most translators work in MS Word for PC as an industry standard. Work can be provided in other formats (Excel, PowerPoint, etc) but most translators will charge slightly higher rates for these formats, especially when they involve non-contiguous text

· Translation out of English can expand by up to thirty percent so be sure to leave white space in any publishing design

· If you are having work typeset, use a specialist foreign language typesetter. All languages are not the same and it is completely wrong to try and make them all fit English spacing/typographic rules

· Fonts do not necessarily support all languages - check with the translation company before you design work around a specific font library

· Check and confirm

§ Official names, etc carefully

§ How people spell their names: Sean/Shaun, Debby/Debbie, Gerry/Jerry, Tony/Toni, etc

§ If a person is male or female as some names can be either male or female names, e.g. Sam, Terry, Lee, Kim, etc

· Proof your own work thoroughly before you send it for translation - it avoids compound errors or mistranslation. Even a simple typo can lead to problems:

§ "We offer you piece of mind"

It should, of course, read:

§ "We offer you peace of mind"

· Be prepared to invest in quality – it offers the best value for money in the long run. Buying a translation is like buying a car. If you want to make a good impression, you buy a top of the range model. If you buy too cheaply, you’ll end up with a heap making no impression at all. Better not to translate a text in the first place than to buy a cheap translation

· Many translation companies routinely supply "for-information" translation as standard work, as opposed to "foreign language copy" or "adaptation". Make sure you know what you are buying

· Beware of machine translations – only human beings know how to speak to each other. Machine translations are acceptable for gist understanding, but if you need a professional document to communicate your company’s message, use a human being

· Build a long-term relationship with your translation company – they help you with translator selection and assessment, offer access to vast international resources, have project management skills, quality control procedures, the ability to run various file conversions, offer standardised document presentation, etc

· Avoid agencies that have in-house teams of translators. The risk is for the project managers to give the in-house staff every job that comes in just to keep them busy, irrespective of whether they have the requisite skills or not. Look for agencies who work with freelance translators and who place work according to your needs (rather than with an eye on their own overheads)

· Don’t do the translation work using your own company’s resources. Whilst your staff may be good at their day-to-day jobs, they aren’t trained translators and they may not even be that competent as linguists when writing in their mother-tongue

· Don’t use a language teacher from your local school to translate a document. Translating is completely different to teaching. You wouldn’t expect the world’s leading violinist to be able to sing like Lucianno Pavarotti, and you can’t expect a teacher to know how to translate like a professional translator – different skills, so always use a specialist

· Don’t use a language student to complete your translations. You wouldn’t let a student do a big new product launch for your company, so don’t let a student work on your company’s important documentation

§ A translation isn’t a completed text – it is a working document. Expect your regional office to want to make some changes. Even a perfect document can be changed. Try this out – give a “perfect” document that you have written to one of your colleagues and ask them to proof and edit it for you. The likelihood is that they will find some things that they want to change to reflect their own style or personal preferences

· Only give the translation company final copy to translate. It doesn’t help to start translators off working with your draft files as it only leads to confusion and adds significantly to costs

Choose GoLanguages.com. Reliable. Secure. Dependable.

We thought it would happen at some point this year and last night that thought turned into reality.

At 7 pm the mobile rang. Sara, who works for a media agency in London, is in a panic. She has a press release due for distribution today, but the agency she has placed the file with for translation into 2 languages has, without warning, stopped trading … leaving Sara without the documents she needs.

Can we help her?

Of course we can. The files will be delivered a little later on today.

If you’re placing work for translation (or proofreading) and you want to be sure that your translation agency will be available for you today and tomorrow, then choose us because we’ll always be here for you.

And if you have a friend who needs a reliable language service provider, please pass our details on … we’ll be happy to help.

For peace of mind, choose GoLanguages.com. Reliable. Secure. Dependable.

To contact us, click here.

Finding a GOOD Translation Agency

Finding a translation agency to serve your company is a big decision. At first, it looks easy - surf to Google, search for "Translation Agencies" and contact a few companies: they're bound to be all fairly similar, aren't they?

No. Definitely not. Not at all. Buying a translation service is not like buying stationery where all paper-clips are pretty much alike and you just spend your time looking for the cheapest supplier.

With translation, the correlation is more like employing a sportsman to play for your team. If you buy cheap, you'll end up with an amateur - which in translation terms means machine translation, non-native translation (like Italian bought from Indian speakers in India!), or using unqualified translators.

If you want your company to be a top class act in another language, then invest in quality work with a quality agency and get good value for money by making sure that your agency is using translators who are:

* Professionally qualified
* Professionally accredited
* Only translating into their mother-tongue language
* Preferably living and working in their mother-tongue country - giving you access to contemporary copy
* Experts in a limited number of subject fields - the last thing you want for your IT company is a generalist wrecking your expensive marketing collateral

On this link, we give you some background tips and advice and links to language companies and organisations around the world.

You can also download BOB - our FREE Guide to International Translation, just click here.

Linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing?

"A number of local councils in Britain have banned their staff from using Latin words, because they say they might confuse people.

Several local authorities have ruled that phrases like "vice versa", "pro rata", and even "via" should not be used, in speech or in writing."

For the full article, click here.

This seems like a rather odd bit of thinking: English is a magpie language that has repeatedly collected words from other languages and which will doubtless go on in the future 'harvesting' words from other languages. To single out a handful of Latin words is a sign of ignorance on the part of the councils.

Perhaps the councils would like to ban ...

bungalow?

carafe?

caravan?

curry?

motto?

yoghurt?

athlete?

actor?

atlas?

balcony?

studio?

etc?

No entry or out of office?

"When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.

Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated."

So that was what went up under the English version, barring lorries from a road near a supermarket."

To read the full article, click here.

To make sure you don't make the same mistake, click here.

Vowel Play?

Eunoia - with one constant and five vowels - is the shortest word in the English dictionary to contain all five vowels (A E I O U). It originates from Greek and means "well mind" or "beautiful thinking".

It is also the name of a rather eccentric 5-chapter-long book by Christian Bok, where in each chapter words containing only one of the five vowels is used.

This makes for rather fractured and stilted sentences that have a gimmick value but not a great deal else.

Still, this is a curiosity that will flower for a day and then be forgotten.

For the book and a peek at some extracts, click here.

End of British Summer Time

This is a note mainly for our overseas clients, translators and proofreaders to let you know that the clocks change in the UK this weekend (Sunday 26 October 2008) when they go back one hour.

Remember the old adage: Spring forward, Fall back.

Or should that be: Spring back, Fall forward? ;-)

Not all countries change on the same weekend as the UK – for times worldwide see:

http://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst2008.html

Translation Feedback

We've recently conducted a survey of clients to gather their opinions on our translation service. Here are some anonymous comments:

"Service we get from GoLanguages is second to none. Excellent"

"I have never had any issues with the service I've received from GoLanguages. More of the same please ...."

"[Your service] seems great to me."

"So far, I've been extremely happy with the service."

"I am very happy with the service"

"It already provides an excellent friendly service - I cannot think of anything else it needs to do."

"I am very happy with the service GoLanguages provides especially as our business is very deadline focussed and they are more often than not very tight deadlines."

Chinese Written Forms

Chinese Written Forms

- a guide by GoLanguages.com

When producing work in Chinese, it is important to know where it is going to be used as this will affect the written form that it will be produced in.

The spoken variants of Chinese are merely regional dialects and of these there are two main forms:

Mandarin: which comprises a wide range of localised dialects in the northern, central and western regions of China. North Mandarin, as spoken in Beijing, is the basis of modern standard Chinese and is the official dialect of China, Taiwan and Singapore.

Cantonese: which is mainly spoken in southern China (principally in the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi), Hong Kong, Macau and in overseas Chinese communities.

The main area of confusion arises from the fact that not only are there various spoken dialects but there are also two written forms of Chinese: Simplified and Traditional, both of which are written in the form of ideographs which consist of a number of strokes.

SIMPLIFIED Chinese is also known as Modern Chinese. It was developed from the Traditional form in the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the late 1950s in the hope of increasing literacy levels within the country. The use of the more complex Traditional form was limiting and it was only understood and used by about half of the population. Simplified Chinese was developed using two main methods.

1. Difficult and awkward characters were changed into much simpler characters.

2. One simple character was used to replace three or four Traditional characters.

By doing this, some 13,500 Traditional characters were replaced by approximately 7,000 Simplified characters.

When the People's Republic of China was recognised by the United Nations in 1971, Simplified Chinese became the official Chinese language used in China. In addition, Singapore also adopted it as the official Chinese state language. Elsewhere in the Chinese world, Traditional tends to be the norm.

TRADITIONAL Chinese is also called Complex Chinese. As indicated by its name, it is the traditional and more complex form of the written language and is used by all the Chinese communities outside mainland China, with the exception of Singapore. Traditional users tend to be proud of it and often consider it to be a more sophisticated form of Chinese. It is partly for this reason of superior sophistication that the Taiwanese refuse to use the Simplified form; another reason is that as claimants to being the true rulers of China, the Taiwanese could not endorse a system sanctioned by Mainland China.

ROMANISATION - the idea of writing Chinese characters phonetically - was introduced into the People's Republic of China during the 1950s and is called Pinyin. Originally, it was hoped that it would be the first step on the way to superseding Chinese characters, but this aim has virtually been abandoned. It is now widely used in Western countries as a common standard for Romanising Chinese names. Before this, the most widespread system in the English-speaking world was the Wade-Giles system, and this is still frequently used in the USA, although Pinyin is now becoming more popular. Wade-Giles is normally used for the Romanisation of Taiwanese names.

Chinese (Simplified or Traditional) can be read either in the traditional way of top to bottom, or right to left, or in the slightly more modern way of left to right in the same way that English and other Latin based languages are read. Commercial texts are commonly written from left to right.

On average there are 2.3 Chinese characters to one English word.

COUNTRY	MAIN DIALECT	WRITTEN FORM
China	Mandarin	Simplified
Singapore	Mandarin	Simplified
Hong Kong	Cantonese	Traditional
Macau	Cantonese	Traditional
Taiwan (ROC)	Mandarin	Traditional
UK/Overseas Communities	Cantonese	Traditional

GoLanguages New Brochure Launched

We have just launched our new brochure for 2008, which is available online from:


http://www.golanguages.com/bob/index.html

Automotive Translation

Over the years, our linguists have completed a range of projects for various automotive clients such as Jeep, McLaren Mercedes, Chrysler, Volvo and Renault, and for clients from associated industries such as Haynes Manuals and TRW Automotive.


We've also completed work for a number of oil companies such as Shell, BP and Statoil amongst others.

In recent years, it has been interesting to see how technology has changed and how many car manufacturers and oil companies are exploring alternative sources of fuel to power cars. It is already possible to buy hybrid cars and electric cars, and there are prototypes for hydrogen fuelled cars. Even cars run on methane.

It looks like there will be a diversity of ideas and solutions in the years ahead. It may even be possible for people to have hydrogen refuelling stations at home. CLICK HERE.

Whatever our automotive clients need in the future, we'll be here to help them.

Resetting a Language or Dictionary in MS Word

When working with a file in MS Word, it is often a good idea to reset the language/dictionary so that the file is "clean" and doesn't have any typos or errors which have been accidentally embedded and marked as "ignore". The following instructions relate to MS Word 2000, the syntax may vary in different OS versions.

To reset a dictionary:

1. CTRL + A to select all the text
2. Tools – Language – Set Language
3. Make sure the language you want is selected in the language box
4. Make sure the box which says “Do not check spelling or grammar” is NOT ticked. It if has a tick in a grey box, usually you can remove the tick by clicking with the mouse 2/3/4 times.
5. Click OK
   
   
6. Then go to Tools – Options – Spelling and Grammar
7. Click on “Check Document” or “Recheck Document” – the wording may vary.
8. Click OK

This should completely reset the file into the language you’ve selected: removing any embedded settings and giving you a clean file to check electronically.

Find us on Knol

As specialists, you can find our publications on Knol.

Just click here to find out more.

Apple maul MS

Take a look at this site and click on the pics of the students in the auditorium to enlarge them.

Go into any Apple store and you'll find it heaving with young people buying Macs.

If this is a generational thing, then the future for MS has got to look bleak.