Do they have the necessary IT tools? - As long as your LSP is using up-to-date computer-aided tools (CAT) and is properly trained in them, it shouldn´t make any difference at all. One important difference to look out for is whether your LSP can handle the interface between CAT tools and desktop publishing (DTP) tools (Office, web formats, professional editing packages, etc.).

Can they ensure quality? – Quality is a key issue in the corporate translation world, but it doesn´t always mean the same thing to all people in all projects. To ensure “quality”, you need to combine the best translators, software and processes and have a clear understanding of your own requirements. Whereas LSPs will have more resources in all these areas, you won´t necessarily get better quality just because you´re working with a large company. Click here for more about quality in corporate translation.

Do they have professional internal processes? – Small companies can be less process-oriented than large ones, but will have less bureaucracy and are often nimbler and more agile. You can get an indication of how well a company operates from its sales process: if an LSP takes 3 days to reply to a quote request, chances are its internal organisation is not as well-oiled as it could be. A clear indicator of efficient and effective processes is the ISO 9001:2000 certification.

Are large LSPs cheaper or more expensive than small- and medium-sized LSPs? – Although there is no direct relationship between size of the LSP and price, large companies tend to have greater overheads (nice offices, support personnel, etc.), and smaller suppliers can often beat their prices.

Many companies rely on their independent distributors to handle translation. Usually, the thinking goes something like this: “We’ll let our distributor in country X translate our product data-sheet there; they are fluent, and letting them do it will save us time and money.” Unfortunately, too often the opposite result occurs and companies end up spending more time and money---for an inferior translation---than they would have if they had used a full-service, professional translation provider. Why? The following are a few reasons.

1. Quality: While it is true that a distributor in Germany, for example, will have people who are fluent German speakers, this doesn’t mean that they can perform a quality translation from English. What level of command do they have of the English language? What kind of linguistic background do they have? How will they handle tough idiomatic challenges or English words/phrases that simply do not make sense in German? Finally, who will review their work? (see our blog entry on "The role of client reviewers in corporate translation projects")

2. Time: Handing translation work off to distributors can create a nightmare in terms of coordination and efficiency. If a company has a product datasheet that it wants translated into 7 languages, how much time will pass before all 7 distributors get round to doing the work? Surprisingly enough, although the distributor is the most interested party in getting the materials translated, this work often takes several weeks or even months...!!!

3. Cost: Naturally, if you spend a lot of time trying to chase down distributors for a translation project, you are not able to perform other responsibilities and are therefore not concentrating on your core business. There is a huge opportunity cost associated with this approach.

4. Risk: This approach has several potential risks:

• the risk of getting a poor translation that fails to accurately capture a marketing message or technical details
• the risk of ending up with different messages in different markets, therefore losing brand consistency and image
• the risk of mis-translating product warnings and other legal content which is simply too important to hand over to non-professional translators.

By Shang Er-na, Quicksilver Translation (Shanghai)

压力式泡沫比例混合装置（foam system）

笔者今天来谈谈压力式泡沫比例混合装置。

压力式泡沫比例混合装置即压力式泡沫罐(concentrated tank)，是用来储存泡沫液，并通过PHY压力比例混合器(proportioning mixer)，利用由泵供给的压力水，将泡沫液按一定比例置换出来后与压力水混合成混合液的装置，由于胶囊将泡沫液与水隔开，泡沫液一次未用完，下次可继续使用，而且混合精度稳定、可靠。

当压力水流经过该装置的比例混合器(proportioning mixer)时，能使水与泡沫按 6%或3%的比例进行自动混合。输出的泡沫液供泡沫产生的喷射设备(泡沫产生器、泡沫 枪、泡沫炮)产生空气泡沫灭火。该装置广泛用于油库、化工厂、机库、油田、燃油 锅炉、地下车库等场所。体积1－15立方米，流量（L/S）32－96。 该装置适用流量压力范围大，压力损失小，在各种高、中、低倍数泡沫灭火系统中均得到了广泛应用。

La rapidesa és un punt clau dins el món de la traducció. Les dates d’entrega són cada dia més i més ajustades degut a la lluita contra la competència, i el nivell de qualitat requerit segueix sent el més alt. Combinar aquestes dues característiques no és sempre fàcil però sí que és primordial si volem que la nostra feina sigui valorada i els clients ens donin la seva confiança.

Avui m’agradaria fer notar la necessitat d’actuar amb rapidesa en una de les fases que tenen lloc ben al principi d’un projecte de traducció. Tal com he esmentat abans, una comunicació fluida entre l’agència de traducció i el client és un fet diferencial, però aquest no podria existir sense la completa confiança per part de l’agència en un grup de traductors freelance que consideren aquesta promptitud una característica crucial de la comunicació amb l’agència. En aquest món on cada dia més i més projectes es tanquen sense que hi hagi una comunicació personal amb els proveïdors, totes les parts involucrades  coincideixen a destacar que allò que fa inclinar la balança en una o altra banda, en primera instància, és la capacitat de donar una imatge professional i àgil. El servei en la seva totalitat serà examinat tan bon punt es faci l’entrega de la documentació, però el primer sedàs que s’ha de passar és el de provar un servei ràpid al client i una comunicació sempre alerta i disponible.

El traductor amb feina és aquell que sap respondre ràpidament i mostra, no tan sols una competència i coneixements excel·lents (veure "Quality in Translation - the translator's view"), sinó també un alt nivell de comunicació, àgil i expedit.

Although large companies will always mention size as their main advantage, does it really matter in translation? If size is such an advantage, why is the translation market so fragmented, with thousands of freelance translators and small Language Service Providers (LSPs) serving corporate clients? Surely what matters to users of translation services is that their LSP can handle volume and deadlines, and that the translations delivered are top quality! What you want is a supplier which can handle all your needs, but which is not a bureaucratic monster and can therefore provide an exceptional service.

These are some of the things you should look out for:

How important am I to the LSP? - Just like in other services, the smaller the supplier the more important I am as a client to him. During the sales process, large LSPs will send a senior VP to make you feel warm and fluffy, but you might never speak to anyone senior again. With small LSPs, there is a bigger chance that you will get to discuss linguistic and technical issues directly with the President/Senior Project Manager, etc.

How well do they know my business? – While it may take a lifetime to become a subject matter expert (SME), it does not take long to become an expert in your company’s technical vocabulary. An LSP with the right expertise can use past glossaries and translation memories (TMs) to get up to scratch and produce translations which are consistent with previous translations.

Can they handle our volume and deadlines? – The internet has opened many opportunities for even small LSPs, and getting several translators to work in parallel on a large document is no longer the challenge it used to be. While all LSPs will claim that they have "never missed a deadline", this is not only untrue, it’s also not enough. The issue is not just to deliver on time, it is to deliver on time and ensure quality and consistency too. Only experience will tell you whether your chosen LSP can do this or not.

see the second part of this blog entry here

The first and toughest decision companies have to make when seeking translations is “Who do I turn to?”. For most companies, taking this step is like entering into the unknown. It is a sector they are not familiar with and, since it is not part of their core business, there is rarely any internal expertise in this area. A simple search on the internet brings up hundreds of translation agencies and language service providers. But how do you sift through all of these offerings without knowing exactly what you’re looking for? This is particularly difficult when all potential suppliers claim to offer fast, accurate and competitively-priced translations. The trial and error approach is one solution, albeit an ill-advised and possibly costly one.

And what happens when the choice has been made? What if you can’t evaluate the translation(s) internally? You have to rely on the expertise of the translation agency and hope that the quality of the translation is acceptable. How can companies obtain peace of mind over an issue that they really know very little about?

The answer to these questions may lie in ISO 9001:2000 certification. This is not the only differentiating factor, but it’s certainly one worth considering. But why is this so?

The fundamental difficulty in qualifying translations is that it is a very subjective field. Certain aspects of a translation - such as industry-specific terminology – are often just plain wrong. However, it is generally true that if you provide ten translators with a substantial sentence to translate, you will receive ten different translations. Therefore how do you measure quality and how can you be sure you're getting it in an area which is so difficult to qualify objectively?

ISO 9001:2000 is a well-defined method which offers assurance to customers that they are obtaining services from a company that can deliver quality consistently. ISO 9001 is a set of international standards establishing quality management and quality assurance systems in organisations. As a third-party certification, it authenticates a supplier’s adherence to a well-identified, well-defined, well-documented set of quality procedures which facilitate the delivery of products and services. In other words, ISO 9001:2000 examines everything a company does to deliver its professional service or business product. Applied to the world of translation, it is important to note that ISO 9001:2000 cannot guarantee the quality or accuracy of a specific translation. However, it guarantees that you will receive a high-quality, professional service, managed and measured in an objective manner.

The primary purpose of the ISO 9001:2000 standard is to assure the customer that the translation agency in question has documented and maintained a quality system which ensures the highest possible quality of its product . ISO 9001:2000 certification is impossible unless a company’s processes conform to specified international standards, by which a company and its employees focus their attention on quality, correcting mistakes, and preventing error recurrence. For example, the ISO 9001:2000 standard requires that some form of measuring customer satisfaction is directly incorporated into the company’s core processes, as well as procedures for dealing with customer feedback. Also, the quality of the suppliers (in this case the translators who carry out the work for the agency) must be objectively measured on a regular basis.

Therefore, although an ISO 9001:2000 certified translation agency cannot always guarantee the quality of a particular translation, it can guarantee the quality of its service and that procedures are set in place that help provide an environment which encourages a high-quality product. In such a subjective industry, this is as objective as it gets. Providing this kind of peace of mind is what differentiates an ISO certified company from the rest.

Spanish has three words for "computer". Spain uses "ordenador", probably modelled on the French "ordinateur", meaning something like a "sorting machine". Most of Latin America uses either "computadora" (feminine) or "computador" (masculine), modelled on the English and meaning "calculating machine".

(The English word "computer" was used in the early 20th century to describe people whose job was to carry out calculations, in the days before machines could do it for them. Then along came "electronic computers" to replace them.)

A quick Google search gives the following relative usage:

"el ordenador": 7 million hits
"el computador" 0.5 million hits
"la computadora" 4 million hits

This is quite a dilemma when translating into "universal" or "neutral" Spanish, i.e. Spanish which should feel as natural as possible to the target audience of the translation. "Ordenador" for Spain and "computadora" for Mexico, but what do you use when you want to satisfy everybody?

The other day we had to translate "computer room", which could be

"sala de ordenadores" 105K hits
"sala de computadoras" 19K hits
"sala de cómputo" 96K hits

Sometimes it's best to avoid the problem by thinking "out of the box". We eventually came up with "sala de informática" (literally computer science room) which not only satisfies all Spanish speakers but got almost 600 thousand Google hits.

Why do we write Don Quixote with an x when in Spanish it's written "don Quijote"? And why is it "Don Quichotte" in France and "Don Chisciotte" in Italy?

When Cervantes wrote the novel in the early 17th century, he wrote "Don Quixote de la Mancha", pronounced kish'ote where the -x- was like the first phoneme in the English words sheet and shame (and sure and sugar).

The first English translations took the Spanish spelling and prounounced it the English way, Don kwiks@t (the @ represents the neutral English vowel which replaces just about any vowel in unstressed position), and have done so ever since. We still have the adjective "quixotic" (kwiksotik).

The Italians took the Spanish pronunciation and rewrote the name so that it sounded right in their own language - Don Chisciotte, doubling the t. The French did the same with Quichotte, except that the final -e is mute. Portuguese has "Dom Quixote" with the -x- still pronounced -sh-.

Meanwhile, Spanish pronunciation was changing and the old -sh- sound shifted backwards to become a velar fricative, rather like the German and Scottish final -ch (Bach, loch) and the Russian x (usually transliterated as -kh, as in Khrushchev). To distinguish this new sound from other pronunciations of x - it's pronounced -ks- in words like "exacto" but like -kh- in "ejemplo" (example), the spelling was changed to j in all cases where x had been used before (with one exception - see below).

So, while Spain change both the pronunciation and the spelling of Cervantes's hero into Quijote, everybody else continued to use the original. One of the problems with spelling reforms is that old books get reprinted with new spelling - which the author would not have recognised - and give new generations a wrong idea of the original. Why can't they just leave them alone?

Now for the exception.

When the Spanish arrived in the Aztec capital 1519 they wrote the name of the city as "México" (the accent indicates the tonic stress), using the -sh- sound they heard the locals say. The original meaning is believed to be "in the navel of the Moon". When the Spanish sound and spelling changed, it became Méjico, pronounced -kh-. That's the way it's still pronounded today (except that the Mexian pronunciation of -j- is less fricative, somewhat closer to a aspriated English aitch (h)). For a long time the Mexicans continued to write México while Spain wrote Méjico. Eventually, in the late 20th century, Spain gave in and now everyone writes México. Hence the single exception to the spelling rule.

In Anlehnung an Bastian Sicks Kolumnensammlung „Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod“ (2004), in dem er seine wöchentlich erscheinenden Anekdoten zum deutschen Sprachgebrauch preisgibt, ist dieser Blogeintrag dem Zusammenwachsen der Sprachen, insbesondere der Deutschen und der Englischen gewidmet. Bastian Sick behandelt Zweifelsfälle der deutschen Grammatik, Syntax und Etymologie. Diese Anekdoten spiegeln auf amüsante Weise Trends und Variationen der deutschen Sprache wieder.

Seit den Anfängen der Kommunikation entwickeln sich Sprachen stetig weiter. Neue soziale Umfelder und Umstände verlangen nach Neuschöpfungen. So entwickelte sich die deutsche Sprache aus dem Indogermanischen ins Germanische, ins Westgermanische bis sie in der Gegenwart über ein großes Spektrum an Vokabular und über ein ausgefeiltes Grammatiksystem verfügt. Aber auch unsere heutige Sprache weist nicht das Ende auf. Die Evolution der Sprache setzt sich weiterhin fort.

Ein sehr bekanntes und immer wieder auftretendes Phänomen ist der Anglizismus. Vorallem in der Jugendsprache vorkommend, bezeichnet es den wachsenden Einfluss der englischen Wörter auf die deutsche Sprache. Die wirklich „coolen Trends“ kommen aus Amerika. Der Blick über den großen Teich wird durch das Internet und die Globalisierung vereinfacht. Dies ist der Ausgangspunkt, um englische Wörter einzubürgern. Dies kann mehrere Formen annehmen: Das Üblichste und wohl Bekannteste ist die Wortentlehnung, bei der englische Wörter in das deutsche Vokabular eingeführt werden und unterschiedlich stark an die deutsche Sprachkultur angepasst werden. Die Medien fördern diesen Zustand, indem sie Werbeslogans mit wirkungsvollen Anglizismen spicken wie z.B in „Romantisch relaxen“ (Tuifly), „Bleib cool“ (Nestea) oder „ Chatten ohne Ende“ (ICQ). Die englischen Wörter „to relax“, „cool“ und „to chat“ unterliefen dem Prozess der angewandten deutschen Grammatik: Man nehme ein englisches Wort und konjugiere es nach deutschen Regeln. So entsteht ein neuer Sprachgebrauch des Wortes.

Ein weiteres nur allzubekanntes  Phänomen sind neue Wortschöpfungen. Für viele Menschen ist es schwer die Herkunft der Wörter zu bestimmen. Manche Ausdrücke hören sich klar Englisch an, obwohl sie ganz und gar keinen englischen Hintergrund aufweisen können. Obwohl sie sich ähneln, bedeuten sie etwas völlig unterschiedliches. Diese Scheinanglizismen sind weit geläufig. Ein jedem bekanntes Beispiel stellt das Wort „Handy“ dar. Ein guter Freund vieler Menschen, aber dennoch ein „false friend“. „Handy“ mit englischem Hintergrund bedeutet „griffig, handlich“, welches von „hand“ abgeleitet wird. Das deutsche „Handy“ dagegen nennt man „cell oder mobile phone“.

Genauso wie in früheren Zeiten, als italienische Wörter die Musik beinflussten und französische die Kochkunst, fließen heutzutage englische Begriffe in unsere Sprache ein. Das von vielen befürchtete „Denglisch“ bedeutet jedoch keine Verkümmerung der deutschen Sprache, sondern lediglich eine weitere Anpassung an soziale Lebensräume in der Evolution der Sprache.

Sandra Stader
QuickSilver Translations

 

One interesting way to consider the art of the translator is to compare it to that of a poet. Both attempt to express ideas in writing within some very specific constraints. The poet constrains his own work by setting rules such as metre and rhyme within which to work. Translators work within the overriding constraint of faithfulness to the original text, but this may be expressed in terms of literal accuracy, style, register, appropriateness for a particular audience, conversion for a particular target culture, and occasionally additional constraints such as sentence or document length.

Some writers of prose set themselves demanding constraints too. In 1969 French writer Georges Perec wrote the novel La Disparition, without warning readers that what was missing was any use of the letter e, the most common letter in the French language. The idea was copied by Earnest Vincent Wright in a story called Gadsby.

Lucie Aiken (1781-1864), writing as Mary Godolphin, thought it would be fun to rewrite Defoe's Robinson Crusoe using only words of one syllable. This exercise can almost be considered to be a translation, from the original English into a specially constrained new sort. I find it amazing how well it reads. English is possibly the only European language which would allow this to be done. It has a huge number of synonyms, especially older words of Germanic origin and, crucially, it has virtually no inflectional endings for either verbs or nouns.

Chinese (in its various forms) is often believed to be exclusively "monosyllabic", but this is not really true. All morphemes are monosyllabic, but there is a large number of bi-syllabic words, as there needs to be in a language which boasts a little over 400 syllables (admittedly with 4 available tones) compared with over 8000 for English.

Here is the opening of Godolphins's Crusoe:

Robinson Crusoe
In Words of one Syllable.

I was born at York on the first of March in the sixth year of the reign of King Charles the First. Form the time when I was quite a young child, I had felt a great wish to spend my life at sea, and as I grew, so did this taste grow more and more strong; till at last I broke loose from my school and home, and found my way on foot to Hull, where I soon got a place on board a ship.

When we had set sail but a few days, a squall of wind came on, and on the fifth night we sprang a leak. All hands were sent to the pumps, but we felt the ship groan in all her planks, and her beams quake from stem to stern; so that it was soon quite clear there was no hope for her, and that all we could do was to save our lives.

The first thing was to fire off guns, to show that we were in need of help, and at length a ship, which lay not far from us, sent a boat to our aid. But the sea was too rough for it to lie near our ship’s side, so we threw out a rope, which the men in the boat caught, and made fast, and by this means we all got in. Still in so wild a sea it was in vain to try to get on board the ship which had sent out the men, or to use our oars in the boat, and all we could do was to let it drive to shore.

In the space of half an hour our own ship struck on to a rock and went down, and we saw her no more. We made but slow way to the land, which we caught sight of now and then when the boat rose to the top of some high wave, and there we saw men who ran in crowds, to and fro, all bent on one thing, and that was to save us.

 

For more entries on Translations, click here.