If you know anything about the STAR Group and its history, you’ll know that one of our earliest customer partnerships was formed with the car giant BMW for automotive translation, way back in the 1980s.
Our first Asian subsidiary was formed in Japan in order to support BMW and Mercedes with automotive translations into Japanese.
Now, I don’t say any of these to brag, though I think they are impressive. I say this because I want to highlight that these translations are a key part of the work we do here at STAR.
Our Middle East office based in Cairo works almost exclusively on automotive translations for customers such as Renault and Daimler.
It’s in our DNA, if you will.
Today I wanted to look at the range of automotive translation projects that we work on for various clients and highlight some areas that you might not have thought about.
The obvious one – technical manuals
Automotive translation = car manuals, right?!
In a way, yes. Automotive translation and car manuals are an obvious pairing. It is a legal requirement that car manufacturers provide translations of car manuals and other safety information to protect drivers and third parties.
Today, many large car manufacturers use machine translation engines and human post-editing to for these automotive translations. Car manuals often use simpler language and are highly similar to previous versions. Because of this they are the ideal material for machine translation.
Slightly less obvious – training materials for mechanics
Hopefully this is not completely out of left field when it comes to automotive translations. Anyone that works on cars in any capacity will need to be familiar with the systems that they use.
As an example, in recent years, the rise in popularity of hybrid and electric vehicles has led to a corresponding increase in training manuals.
Christiani, a technical vocational training specialist based in Germany, chose STAR to work on the translations for their training materials on the subject of alternative drive systems and high-voltage batteries.
Similarly, if you are launching your brand into a new geographical area, you need to make sure that the workshops that support your dealerships are familiar with your cars and their workings.
Rolls-Royce, who really need to no other introduction, chose STAR for their automotive translation project to localise materials for new markets in Russia, China and Japan.
Sometimes over looked – Original Equipment Manufacturers
It’s easy to rattle off a list of car manufacturers. Their logos are actually everywhere and we can’t escape from their marketing efforts. They are on billboards, on the television and even on the roads as we drive past others.
Yet, these names do not manufacture every component in their cars. This is where the OE manufacturers come in.
Components like spark plugs, shock absorbers, batteries and brake pads are often supplied by other manufacturers. And unsurprisingly, they also need automotive translations.
STAR has worked with TRW aftermarket and ZF on automotive translations for their website and marketing campaigns.
Not super obvious, yet hugely visible – marketing translations
Marketing materials that require automotive translations are a large part of the work that we carry out for our customers.
Content creation is a buzzword in marketing nowadays and the automotive industry is no different.
Translation suppliers often offer marketing translations in a separate category. However, in my opinion, there are few cases where marketing translations do not require some kind of specialist knowledge.
Yes, marketing translations require creative flair but they also require accurate terminology and an understanding of the technologies involved.
We have worked on the automotive translations for regular press releases. Also point-of-sale collateral, Google adverts and YouTube videos among other things.
The one you might not have considered – HMI
HMI stands for Human Machine Interface, and I have to confess, this is my favourite one of the five.
If you’ve read any of my previous blogs, you’ll know that I have a thing for engineering and technology. I love the fact that this job gives me an insight into how certain things work.
These automotive translations are slightly unusual as they usually take the form of software strings.
If you have a newer car, you are probably familiar with on-board sat nav systems. Also interactive sound systems, or you might even be able to sync your phone and your car.
Our translators have had to consider which voice commands you might use to interact with your car. They also need to consider all of the other options that you might use. It’s an automotive translation task that takes two translators several hours a week. It has also resulted in a few informal office polls for what we might say in a similar situation!
Have you ever spotted an automotive translation?
As the end user, you probably haven’t noticed automotive translations, and that’s how it should be. If you notice that a text is a translation, something has gone wrong somewhere.
Companies spend billions worldwide on automotive translations. One of the main aims is that every text sounds like it was created in that language. Aside from the cost of poor translations that cause delays, there are safety implications to documents containing terminology or factual mistakes.
Companies in the automotive industry need a translation supplier that they can trust. They need one that has the global expertise to support wherever and whenever you need it.
If you have an upcoming automotive translation project, speak to one of our team about how one of our bespoke translation workflows can help you. Alternatively, fill in the form below and we’ll be in touch.
When it comes to buying translations, a key consideration is your choice of supplier.
Should you entrust your project to a freelancer? Should you choose a larger agency with locations all over the world, or a smaller company that has very narrow specialisms?
There’s no correct answer to this.
In the same way that I can’t give a translation quote over the phone because I haven’t fully analysed the source texts, I can’t give a definitive answer to that question.
The only thing I can say? It depends!
What do our customers need from us?
Aside from blog writing, my role at STAR UK is varied. Lots of it relates to supporting colleagues, but my main focus is on our customers.
I’ve been pondering this question a lot recently, and my answer is not as simple as “words in another language”.
Our customers need us to help them communicate. We’re not selling words on a page; we’re selling a means of sharing information.
Helping our customers define what result they want from their translated content is the first step in delivering top-quality translations.
The same is true when it comes to choosing a translation supplier. Freelancers, small agencies and global corporations all have different benefits and each one will be the correct choice for certain types of customers and projects.
Let’s look at each of the options and what they offer the translation buyer.
Why choose a freelancer?
For many businesses, working with a freelancer is the perfect way to source your translations. In many ways, they offer the best of both worlds.
You are working closely with one supplier who learns all about your company, becoming almost as familiar with your product offering as your other employees, but is not salaried and therefore only invoices for the work they complete.
Freelancers are usually a cheaper option because they have smaller overheads and are often able to be flexible and offer evening or weekend work to accommodate urgent requests.
However, one freelancer can only deliver a certain volume of translation, and in one, perhaps two, language combinations. In addition, you have to find the freelancer yourself, and it can be difficult to judge quality when you don’t speak the language.
If you find that your translation requirements are growing, working with an agency might be the next logical step.
Why choose a small agency?
With a small agency, you still retain the ability to develop personal relationships. Most agencies will offer you a dedicated project manager who will become familiar with your translation orders and any specific requirements that you have.
Smaller agencies are often specialised in a certain industry or language area so have become experts in their field. They also develop close relationships with their freelancers and will try to ensure that the same resources work on your projects.
However, smaller agencies are simply not equipped to deal with very large scope projects, such as those that require localisation to many, many world languages, or those that include millions of words a year.
Why choose a global corporation?
Global corporations can offer scalability for projects – they already have solutions in place for customers ordering millions of words of translation, and they often have a network of locations around the globe, allowing them to offer the majority of world languages.
They are able to offer a 24/7 service and can more easily deal with tight turnarounds or unusual requests.
However, in such companies, the volumes involved with certain translation projects can require increased levels of automation leading to that personal touch being diminished or lost. In some cases, corporate processes can get in the way of flexibility.
Which is right for you?
Each one of the three options listed above is the perfect choice for a different kind of customer and hopefully this article will be useful to help in making this decision.
Here at STAR UK, we fit somewhere between small agency and global corporation. We have a team of 4 full-time project managers and we pride ourselves on the personal relationships that we develop with our customers.
Yet as part of the STAR Group, we belong to a network of over 40 offices with nearly 1000 employees. We work with some of the biggest names and can handle your project, whether it is one tagline for a new product, or a technical manual to be translated into 20 languages.
If you have a potential translation project and you’d like to see if we’re the supplier for you, please chat to one of our team.
Today, we’re continuing with our self-appointed mission to help translation buyers and we’re working through some of the main FAQs that we see across the internet. Let’s start with the fundamentals.
What is a translation?
When looking at any translation services definition, it’s important to state first off that translation relates to written content. When it comes to spoken language, interpreting is the service that is required. However, let’s avoid tangents and get back to a specific translation services definition.
You may (or may not) be aware that there is an internationally recognised standard for delivering translation services (ISO 17100). It provides the following translation services definition:
“Intangible product that is the result of an interaction between a client and a Translation Services Provider”.
So. That’s clear, right? In case you’re still feeling a bit confused, I humbly suggest the below definition:
Translation is the process of rendering written content from one language into another language.
Although not a necessary part of the definition of translation, I would also add one key point. It is important that the aforementioned translation is completed by a qualified and experienced translator. Unfortunately, using any old French speaker or someone with a long-neglected O Level probably won’t be sufficient for business purposes.
How are translation services priced?
We’ve already looked at pricing for translation services in our Ultimate Guide to Translation, and we have also looked at per-word pricing in greater depth. If asked how much translation costs, it’s near impossible to give an exact figure when placed on the spot – language combination and text type will affect the price.
What we can say though is that when it comes to pricing for any service, the key is transparency. Everyone involved in the transaction wants to be sure that they know what work is required and how much money will be charged. Prices for translation services in the UK are no exception to this.
For this reason, the majority of prices for translation services in the UK are based on an analysis of the source text.
For Western languages, analysis is usually carried out per source word, though other units include per line or per page. It’s easy to see why – words are easily countable, so both purchaser and supplier can be certain what the cost of a project will be with no nasty surprises. For Asian languages, characters is the preferred unit. One glyph in Chinese is equivalent to a word (roughly), so again transparency of effort vs. cost can be achieved.
An alternative to source analysis is the target count price. The basic principle behind this strategy to work out prices for translation services in the UK is to consider the “work” done by a translator, and again it provides an unequivocal measure of work completed, leading to a transparent cost. However, when translating from one language to another, the amount of words used will change, sometimes dramatically. French to English word counts often decrease; whereas German to English increases in word count. This adds complexity to a quotation – target analysis quotations can only ever give you an estimate of how many words might be in your target text so the final price will be different.
When comparing prices for translation services in the UK, it can be difficult to know which is cheapest if they are using different means of analyses. However, it is worth bearing in mind that rates are usually adapted to account for word count increases or decreases, thus leading to a roughly equivalent end cost. To give an example: For a German source text, a translator may have to type significantly more words when translating to English, and a target word price will be adapted accordingly.
The main situation where a target count is agreed upon is in the case of a non-editable file. If the only copy of a source text is a PDF scan, it is a long and arduous task to count each word. Yet if a target price is agreed upon, billing is based upon the end result and both client and translator can be sure of a transparent price.
Why do we need translation?
As I reach the third section of this blog, I wonder if I should have put this question front and centre at the top of the page. Here I am, writing copy to explain the various facets of language translation services, but I didn’t start with the ultimate question. Do we even need translation? We sometimes ignore the fact that not everyone is convinced that translation is actually necessary to start with.
So. Let’s lay out the facts:
The world as we know it is shrinking every day. The process of globalisation has led to the world being increasingly interconnected thanks to trade and cultural exchange.
Thanks to the internet (among other things), we can purchase goods from and communicate with China just as easily as if they were down the road from us.
Language translation services might not be responsible for the technological advancements that make that happen, yet they are paramount to its success.
In order to buy a product from China, we need to understand the product description and price. Similarly, in order to sell a product to China, the consumer will need to understand your own product information to be sure of what they are buying.
Leaving aside the widely published statistics about customers preferring to purchase in their own language, a customer cannot buy a product if they do not have any knowledge of the language. Language translation services therefore facilitate global trade.
What is a certified translation?
A certified translation is a translation that has been completed by a certified translator or that has been certified by a registered company. Certified translations are often required for translations of identity documents that will be submitted to governmental bodies.
Each country has a different system for certified or sworn translations. Many countries have a recognised program and accreditation to be completed, thus allowing the translator to claim the status of “sworn translator” or “certified translator”.
There is no equivalent in this country, therefore translation services in the UK have to use a slightly different process if they are selling translations into English. There is currently no official system in the UK for assessing and registering certified translators.
Instead, the translation supplier provides a form of certification that attests to the accuracy and quality of the translation.
There are several official bodies for translation in the UK; the ITI, CIOL and ATC. You can learn more about each one in our Ultimate Guide to Translation.
What are the types of translation?
This is quite a tricky question to answer as it could have several different answers.
When it comes to pricing for translations, there are two main price differentiators (aside from the language combination). The first is the purpose of the translation; whether it is needed for information only or whether it will be published.
For translations that are required for information only, accuracy is important, but there is not the same focus on the text as in cases where the final text will be published.
The second price differentiator for translations is the text type. For example, legal translation services or technical translation services.
Legal translations can be more expensive than other types. Translators have often completed additional qualifications to support them with their translations and prices reflect this. Legal translations often include contracts, terms and conditions and certain company policies.
Technical translation services relate to the translation of technical documentation such as technical sheets, specifications, manuals and safety information. Certain technical specialisms command higher prices as they are so highly specialised and require such in-depth research skills.
What makes a good translator?
Buying translation services can be a confusing process. In many cases, the buyer may not be very familiar with the service that they are buying. Added to this, it can be very difficult to judge the quality of a translation if you are not experienced in translation and have knowledge of both languages.
If you cannot judge the quality of the output, you want to know that the supplier is qualified and experienced. For this reason, the concept of a certified translator can be reassuring; someone else has tested and approved them previously!
However, it is important to be aware that the UK does not have an official system of certified translators. Never fear though, there are other ways to judge whether someone is a good translator.
The ISO 17100 standard for translation considers suppliers to be qualified if they have an MA in Translation or similar, or a BA in Translation or a foreign language plus three years’ full-time translation experience.
In addition, there are official bodies such as the ITI (Institute of Translation and Interpreting) and CIOL (Chartered Institute of Linguists). Both of these organisations offer assessment programs for translators. Possessing MITI status or the DipTrans qualification can go some way to assuaging a customer’s worries about potential output quality.
Yet perhaps this doesn’t get to the core of the question. In my experience, qualifications and experience are a good basis for judging whether a translator is good or not. They show that they have the theory and knowledge to deliver a good translator. However, to be a good translator, you also need a few additional attributes.
You need to have creative flair in your target language, you need excellent attention to detail, and you need to be able to research terminology and concepts in depth.
Only when you can claim to combine qualifications with these skills, can you claim to be a good translator. In my opinion, at least!
Can I translate my own documents?
For the average Joe (or Josephine) on the street, their only contact with the translation industry is when they require a translation for some of their official documents. They might have moved to the UK from abroad and need translations for their identification documents, or perhaps they are planning a move and want to make sure that their new host country will accept their proof of identity.
I’ll make a generalisation that often, such people are bilingual to some degree, and the temptation is there to save costs and to translate their own documents for submission to official bodies.
Unfortunately, in these cases, certified translation services are required, and a self-made translation will not be sufficient for their needs.
The term “certified translation services” refers to translations of official documents that undergo various levels of certification to guarantee that they are a true and accurate representation of the original source text.
These levels of certification vary between countries and languages. Each country has its own requirements for which quality guarantees are needed, as well as having their own systems for “sworn” or certified translators.
There is therefore no one size fits all definition of certified translation services, but there’s no need for panic. Translation agencies are used to dealing with these types of projects and will be able to advise on the specific requirements for an individual’s situation.
What makes a good translation?
A good translation is one that is an accurate rendering of the original text with no errors or omissions, as well as one that replicates the spirit and tone of the original in order to create the same effect on the reader as the original language version.
When you order professional translation services, you expect that your translation will have all of the characteristics above.
Every word in the original text should appear in the translation and it should be translated correctly for the context. Be wary of any “false friends” that look like they should be the correct translation yet have a completely different meaning in the target language.
Most important though, for good quality professional translation services the effect on the reader should be the same. If the original text is a powerful marketing piece, the translation should also use impactful and convincing language.
What qualities should a translator have?
STAR UK is a relative rarity among translation agencies, as we have an in-house team of translators working on our projects. We pride ourselves on delivering top translation services, and we find that this is the best way of ensuring we provide quality translations to our customers. For this reason, we know what we think are useful qualities for a translator.
For this question, I’m going to interpret qualities as soft skills, rather than personality attributes. I don’t believe that there is one personality type or a set of qualities that will make a translator good or bad. Our team is testament to the diverse world of translators and we think that every one of them helps us to provide top translation services to our customers.
While pondering this question, I actually came up with a very long list, so you can be sure that this topic will form a longer blog post in future weeks. Yet if I were forced to choose only three attributes, I think I would say that common sense, creative writing skills in the target language and the ability to work independently for at least part of the day.
Do I need to be certified to translate documents?
A quick Google search of document translation services will provide an array of results all claiming to offer “certified translations”. But what does this really mean? Do you need certification of your document translations?
Generally speaking, if your requirement for document translation services relates to proof of identity, you will require certified translations of your documents.
In the UK, we have no official system for certified translators, but it is considered best practise to have translations carried out by a registered agency or a translator that is a member of an official body such as the ITI or the CIOL. So, if you want to provide document translation services for birth, marriage or death certificates to give just a few examples, then you would need formal qualifications in translation or a language.
What skills do translators need?
I touched on this early in the article when I discussed what qualities a translator should have. To deliver high-quality professional human translation, there are a few important attributes that a translator must have.
Personally, I think that research skills are key to delivering good professional human translation. Translators have specialisms; a specialist subject if you like. Though even if a translator spends the majority of their time translating a tractor manual, there will still be occasions when they need to research a new component or technology that has just been developed.
Secondly, the key differentiator for machine translation versus professional human translation is the translator’s ability to manipulate language. Machine translation struggles to decipher and to replicate puns or word play and cannot appreciate the same nuances of language. For this reason, writing skills in the target language are also important.
Does Google translate cost?
Most people know that there are google translation services. It’s simple enough – enter source language content into one box, select the required target language and press go. It is a free-to-use service available to anyone with an internet connection. The short answer to the question is therefore no. Google Translate does not cost.
However, there are hidden drawbacks to google translation services that can actually make it costly for your business.
Google translation services use the vast amounts of data available to Google in order to generate translations. As the translations are provided by a machine, it cannot judge between the quality of two translations of a term and its output may be quite poor. For this reason, if a company uses Google instead of professional translation services, they might find that their translations do not deliver the required effect.
Another consideration is that Google Translate uses machine learning to continually improve its suggestions. Every request and corresponding translation is stored in its database so that it can learn from previous work. What this means in real terms is that document confidentiality is lost when Google Translate is used. Use of online translation services can violate non-disclosure agreements resulting in heavy fines and a potential loss of trust. Ouch.
What are the advantages of translation?
In a business context, translations allow you to communicate with potential buyers in new markets. It allows you to expand your brand awareness, increase engagement with your content and products and ultimately, make more sales.
Top translation service providers can help you tap into new markets and bring your products to new audiences.
If you are the expert in your products, you can consider top translation service providers as the experts in conveying your message in new languages.
However, this isn’t the only benefit. STAR UK is a proud sponsor of Translators Without Borders, a non-profit organisation that aims to close language gaps that hinder humanitarian efforts. For example, a TWB survey found that 33% of survivors of Hurricane Idai do not have information that they can understand. Survivors in Mozambique use local languages, rather than Portuguese; the official language of the country and the main language of the humanitarian communication. It is therefore important that translations are provided to these survivors.
Whose responsibility is translation memory management?
Translation memory management is one of those terms that is regularly thrown around by language industry professionals. It often appears on web pages in a list of benefits that your language service provider can offer you. We’re guilty of it ourselves…!
One of the themes of this blog is to decode some of the jargon and to help translation buyers make an informed decision about who they purchase translation services from. We published an Ultimate Guide to Translation with just this aim in mind. It alluded (very) briefly to the idea of reference management; a concept that will hopefully be fully explained today.
So. Let’s go back to basics and define a few of the key concepts involved in translation memory management:
What is translation memory?
Translation memory refers to a software database containing source language content and the corresponding target language translation. These existing translations can be leveraged for new translation projects in order to speed up the translation process and reduce costs.
How is translation memory stored?
Before you can look at translation memory management, it’s important to know exactly what it is that you might be managing! In the case of Transit NXT, the STAR Group proprietary tool, translation memory is stored as language pairs that can be opened and amended using Transit NXT. Other translation memory tools store translation memory in a database file, often in XLIFF or XML format.
I’m not going to lie – the above paragraphs still contain a fair amount of jargon, so to break down translation memory management even further, I would suggest the following definition.
Translation memory management ensures that any existing translations are of the highest quality possible so that you can gain the most amount of benefit from them.
There. Much better.
Formats for translation memory databases
Although I stated above that translation memory is usually stored as XML or XLIFF, this is not always true. It’s true that translation memory software uses these formats, but for companies or individuals working outside of a tool (Yes, they do still exist!), Excel spreadsheets or CSV files are also workable formats. In this case, translation memory management is therefore about manipulating text stored in columns and rows.
What does translation memory management involve?
As a term, translation memory management covers a few different processes to do with storing and updating translations.
For me, the most important consideration for translation memory management would be to look at the first part: storage.
Storing translation memory
Are you storing your translation memory in a format that can be easily leveraged? If you are still working with XLS or CSV files, these can become unwieldy very quickly and you might not be able to enjoy the benefits of fuzzy matches.
Are you storing your translation memory in a format that can be easily navigated? For example, in the case of Transit NXT language pairs, are you using a folder structure that has a logical hierarchy?
Managing translation memory on a large scale
Here at STAR UK HQ, we have working relationships with customers that span nearly the entire lifetime of the company (over twenty years at time of writing). As you can imagine, we’ve done many millions of words for them, and translation memory management is important because of the sheer volume of reference material available to our team.
We need to ensure that each translation can make use of every scrap of material that we have for that customer, but at the same time, we cannot send several gigabytes of data to our team for each project.
Should we organise translation memory by document types such as manuals, press releases and contracts? Should we organise chronologically? Should we organise by text types such as technical, marketing, legal and financial?
There’s no correct answer to that question. For us, translation memory management is about ensuring maximum leverage of existing material, so we organise by language, then chronologically.
For some customers, we further distinguish between text types, but a customer’s press release may still contain technical terminology so making the technical manual translations available as reference will be helpful for terminology.
So it’s just about a sensible folder structure?
Well, no, not really. Translation memory management is also about ensuring that your reference material is the best possible quality.
What does that mean in practise?
Terminology preferences
Many of our clients have strict terminology preferences. Sometimes these take the form of approved terminology lists that are sent before translation begins. However, sometimes preferences only come to light when signalled by a customer reviewer.
In these cases, it is important that any disallowed terms or preferred terms are updated throughout the existing reference material so that these are not used for any future translations.
A project manager responsible for translation memory management for that customer will comb through the reference material and will update the translations for every occurrence of the term.
Updating translations based on corrections
Translation memory management also involves correcting translations in the case of errors. Although a thankfully rare occurrence, I wouldn’t be doing my chosen topic justice if I omitted this one.
If an inaccurate translation is suggested as a fuzzy match, it is possible that the error will be included in the new translation and will propagate through the reference material. At this point, it is far harder to resolve as the error may appear in so many locations.
Customer corrections can also sometimes relate to preferential changes (a far more frequent occurrence). We understand this one well – your brand needs to be the same across languages and as the customer, you know it best.
In this case, we need to update the reference material so that we continue to learn what the customer likes and so that they don’t need to make the same correction twice.
Remove duplication
The final task that we class as translation memory management is to remove duplicate, or variant, translations from the database.
The principle of translation memory is that you only work on what is new. So, in other words, if a translation exists, you can use it in your text without needing to start again. However, sometimes the practicalities of the industry get in the way.
For certain customers, workflows and internal deadline pressures mean that certain translation projects need to run concurrently. Where there is any overlap between projects, it is possible that a duplicate translation will be created.
Translation memory management therefore involves finding these translation variants and choosing one translation to use for all future projects. This could sound like a needle-in-a-haystack task, though Transit NXT has a handy variant checker for just these occasions.
Who should be working on translation memory management?
Really, it’s THE question, isn’t it? All of the tasks listed above are important for ensuring that translations are high quality, but potentially they can fall through the gap of where responsibility lies.
Although the customer is best placed to make preferential and terminological changes to their material, they often do not have access to TM tools and the reference material.
In my humble opinion, translation memory management is therefore within the remit of your translation supplier.
Your translation supplier will often have tools at their disposal to simplify some of these tasks, as well as quality assurance checkers to make sure that every instance of a change has been made.
A project brief really can make a difference to your translation project
As my dedicated readership will no doubt know, I want this blog to serve as a resource for anyone out there who suddenly finds themselves needing to buy translation and needs help on where to start.
Over countless years, I’ve watched my husband’s eyes glaze over when I start dropping jargon into stories about my day. So I know that for industry outsiders, translation really isn’t as simple as “language A translated into language B”.
Recently, we’ve been discussing how to get the best results from your translation project, and part of the key to that is to prepare a project brief. A project brief would usually contain information about the audience of a text and what the customer wants to achieve with the text.
The answer to that question entirely depends on what you want to achieve with your translation. If it’s a simple case of needing to understand a document, then sure. Any accurate translation will do.
Yet, if your aim is to drive traffic to your website or to increase engagement on your social media profiles, perhaps there’s more to it than that.
So, on to the main point that I’m trying to make. If you send the same text to different translators, you’ll receive different translations back. Each one will be a faithful rendering of the original, but they will have a different effect on the reader.
To illustrate this point, I’m reposting an oldie, but a goodie – from 2013 to be exact.
Five translation requests, five translations
My colleague sent the following short passage from a French novel to 5 of my translator colleagues, and asked them for their translations:
“Le pigeon roula un oeil rond, s’envola et ne revint jamais plus. Il en avait trop vu. Il était si vieux. Il s’en alla mourir dans une tour de Notre-Dame”. (Paris au mois d’août, René Fallet, Editions Denoël, Folio, 1964).
Here are the results, in no particular order:
“Rolling his round eyes, the pigeon took flight, never to return. He had seen too much, aged too much. He would find his final resting place in one of the towers of Notre Dame.”
“The pigeon rolled a round eye and flew away, never to return again. He had seen too much. He was so old. He went away to die in a tower of Notre Dame.”
“The pigeon rolled a beady eye and flew off, never to return. It was so old, and had seen too much. It disappeared into one of Notre Dame’s towers for the last time.”
“The pigeon swivelled its beady eye and flew off, never to return. It was so old, and had seen more than enough. It fluttered into one of the towers of Notre Dame, there to end its days.”
“The pigeon rolled his eye back, flew off and never came back. He had seen too much and was too old. He went to die in one of Notre Dame’s towers.”
As you can see, and as predicted, no two translations are the same, even though some contain identical elements. Nor are any of them “right” or “wrong”; they’re just stylistically unique (and all perfectly accurate!). Each translator has found a subtly different solution to the same linguistic problems.
In-depth analysis
The reasoning behind the choice of words was influenced by the instructions they were given. This was a “free” translation with no guidance or restrictions. But let’s consider a couple of the translations in more depth.
The second translation is arguably closest to the original. It keeps the short sentences, the factual descriptions of the pigeon and its actions. To be critical, I would argue that it has the least impact of the five.
The fourth translation takes a less literal approach – it adds information with the “beady” eye of the pigeon, combines sentences to create more of a flow in the text, and creates a far more powerful image in its description of a pigeon that “flutters” into a tower, “there to end its days”.
Each translation has its merits and would fit with a different translation brief. Without any instructions, the results vary wildly and the translator must judge the best style from other factors.
In a way, therein lies the beauty of language and, by extension, translation. When it comes to matters of style, there’s a lovely mutability to the art of translation; it’s a constantly shifting process, depending on any number of factors which influence the lightning decisions being made and remade over and over again in the translator’s brain as it analyses the text.
And of course, it’s also highly individual. Each of the five translators would be able to explain the precise reasoning behind their choice of words, depending on the unique picture conjured in their mind as they were translating.
Personally, I’m not familiar with the original French novel. I couldn’t tell you whether the second or fourth translation is a “better” approximation of the writing style of the author in the rest of the text. It’s hard to judge anything on the short excerpt that we see here, and in a way, this is why the translations are so different.
It’s not actually about right or wrong
At a professional level, and in texts involving any degree of stylistic interpretation, we don’t often deal with “right or wrong”; more with shades of equivalence and nuances of meaning. As shown, each of the five translations is accurate and would pass through a second review with no changes.
Unless perhaps, there was a translation brief to follow.
Needless to say, in any commercial translation there are factors such as customer dictionaries and style guides that will all inform translation choices. However, one of the main factors will always be the type of text and its intended audience.
If we assume that this project was a literary translation, then the first, third and fourth translations are all well suited.
If we assume that the intention was actually to create a newspaper article (a slight stretch, but bear with me please…), then the second and fifth translations would be my choices.
Yet however fascinating that might be, these types of differences and the reasoning behind them largely belong in the realm of Translation Theory. Nice to read about in a blog post and to give a little insight into the profession, but less relevant to the modern translation industry.
Customers want to be sure that the translations they receive are optimised for their intended audience. A project brief is the best way to pass this information along.
In fact, it doesn’t need to be a long and arduous undertaking – it would be sufficient to provide a line or two detailing exactly who will be reading the text and what function the text has.
What do you think? Can you see the value in a translation brief?
Eagle-eyed readers, and dedicated STAR UK blog fans (I mean, there must be at least one of you out there, right?!) will have noticed that, recently, there’s been a whole lot more content appearing on this humble page.
We’re aiming to provide translation buyers with useful content that clarifies the potentially confusing world of translation. I’ll admit though, we don’t just want to be useful.
We want translation purchasers to contact us with potential projects. We want to talk to them about how STAR UK can help with their global strategy.
Except that it’s not really about what we can do. It’s about what they need.
In recent years, much of the translation purchasing process has become what you might call “transactional”. Clients want to buy translations in the same way as they buy their office supplies. Basically, with a pre-agreed price and with a minimum of interaction.
It sometimes feels like we sell our highly skilled professional service as a product, and not a particularly valuable one at that. Or perhaps “not sufficiently valued” would be a better way to put it.
However, that’s not really the client’s fault. If we present our service as a commodity to be bought by the unit (the word), then we can’t blame the customer for buying it in that way.
Is there another way?
There are clear and obvious reasons how we’ve ended up where are:
Clients want transparency
Per-word pricing allows for easy comparison between quotations
Per-word pricing makes translation an out-of-the-box solution
Transparent pricing
It would be lovely to charge by the hour like a solicitor, but that’s not where our industry is right now. Different translators will translate at different speeds, but does the quality of their output warrant the vast difference in pricing that this could lead to? Of course not.
In addition, there are considerations related to software tools. Translation technology, whether Translation Memory or Machine Translation, needs countable units to be effective. The value these tools add to the translation process, both in terms of accuracy and speed, especially for technical material, is too great for that genie to ever go back in the bottle.
Translators and translation agencies need to be able to agree a transparent price before translation work begins.
Have translations become a commodity?
Although I think that the commoditisation of the translation industry is a topic worthy of its own blog post, it is relevant to this discussion too.
Commoditisation occurs when consumers can buy the same product or service from multiple businesses and price is the only distinguishing factor. Translation quality is subjective and is not always distinguishable at a glance, so it makes sense that price is a far easier differentiator when looking to purchase translations.
Not very satisfying though, is it, selling translated words as though they were so many nuts and bolts?
What’s behind that quote request?
It’s so easy to perpetuate the narrative when presented with a quote request.
Select customer. Check. Select languages. Check. Enter the statistics. Check. Create Quotation. Boom. Job’s a good’un.
But is it?
While we accept that we’re not going to change the basic pricing model, and nor should we want to. We are increasingly asking ourselves and our clients what lies behind their request for 500 words in German and Spanish.
It shouldn’t be ground-breaking, but it is a mindset change. For all parties.
More than just words?
Translations are more than just words in another language. Translations are a way of communicating with people across the world.
We’ve been asking our clients what they hope to achieve with their translated documents. More leads and conversions? Increasing customer or staff engagement? Perhaps it is a new product launch, or you need to ensure compliance with regulations in your new markets?
For each of these intentions, there are subtle changes in how language is used. We might not notice it when we are working in our native tongue. We flit between marketing brochures and technical manuals and easily switch between using persuasive sales arguments and accurate technical terminology.
For a language service provider, these considerations affect the choice of supplier for your project, and on rare occasions, the price of translation itself.
However, this goes beyond just the choice of supplier.
More questions, more listening
We’re asking a lot more questions and doing a lot more listening, having longer conversations about things other than the immediate project. And by doing so, we’re finding new ways to help – structuring content to be more efficient for translation, assisting with the content creation itself, improving and maybe automating workflow processes, advising on local market requirements, or perhaps working on multilingual SEO.
You are the experts in your business
It seems to be a bit of an obvious one, but as the customer, you have the best knowledge of your products and your industry, but also the challenges you face.
While we can’t claim to know the minutiae of the technology in a combustion engine (though that might be a poor example, as our technical translators work on these kinds of texts all the time), we know a fair bit about our business, translation.
We’re the experts in translation
By this, I don’t just mean that we have qualified staff and we can understand at least two languages. I mean that we can add value to translation projects with points that a customer might not have considered.
We understand about optimising files for translation so that customers can keep their costs down and improve TM leverage.
We can help with advice on when a translation is required, and in which languages it might be needed.
We can even help you with the technical side of your multilingual website, potentially simplifying your processes.
Sometimes these are issues that the clients themselves hadn’t recognised. Sometimes, the client has just accepted the status quo without realising that there are better options out there. Perhaps they know the issue is there but are too busy to be able to remedy it themselves, or don’t have the requisite knowledge or skills.
We enjoy creating lightbulb moments when a client realises we can significantly reduce their costs, or dramatically speed up the turnaround times.
This is where we add value. Not just as translators, but as experts in multilingual communication with knowledge and training to be valued and shared.
As a translation buyer, you may be aware of the benefits of translation memory tools. But are you familiar with the advantages of automating your translation workflow?
Although it may sound intimidating at first, automating your translation workflow could be the answer to some of your localisation woes.
In recent years, technology has evolved in a myriad of ways. One of the most interesting developments is the massive strides that have been made in automating workflows. In this article, we consider how an automated translation workflow can solve certain translation workflow headaches.
What do we mean by automating your translation workflow?
When my colleagues in the office are asked why they enjoy their jobs, a recurring theme is that every day is different and presents new challenges. However, there is no denying that for translation project management, a majority of the workload comprises repetitive tasks.
These repetitive tasks include importing a file, checking project settings, selecting a translator, creating statistics reports and quotations as well as running quality checks on export of the file.
We are huge advocates for using human translators and for the added value that a project manager will bring to your team. So, it seems slightly counter-intuitive that we also advocate for automating your translation workflow. But, bear with me please.
By automating your workflow, you reduce the administrative burden on your team and free them up to work on other tasks.
Can automation really make that much of a difference?
The short answer to this is yes, and the long answer is yes, it definitely can.
A few years ago, we developed a new project management tool. We had found that our existing tool could no longer keep up with the increasingly complex projects from our customers. As part of this process, we incorporated certain aspects of customer and supplier invoicing into the tool. Although it is hard to quantify, we estimate that we saved approximately 20 hours each week by removing certain tasks from our team members.
We believe that similar, if not greater, time savings could be delivered by automating your translation workflow.
Which tasks can be automated?
At the risk of sounding trite, the world is your oyster when it comes to automated translation workflows.
An automated workflow takes repetitive tasks and applies the same actions in the same order. Using this logic, project set-up, file import, statistics generation, quality assurance checks and file export are all targets when you consider automating your translation workflow.
My projects are not standardised; can I still automate?
As a first point, it is worth adding that it is not all or nothing. It is perfectly possible to automate your translation workflow by only automating certain tasks. This can be useful in situations where you regularly translate into different languages, but always use the same statistics report.
Or perhaps you have a set of five core languages that you always translate into but on occasion, you translate your documents into twenty world languages. It is possible to create multiple processes when automating your translation workflow, so that you have two sets of automated workflows.
This same distinction also applies when you work with different file formats or have different terminology requirements for certain document types. At a glance, your projects may seem almost random, yet on closer inspection they follow a set of rules.
Here at STAR, we have experience with workflow automation tools, and we are happy to help you with guidance on automating your translation workflow. In fact, I would tentatively suggest that automating your translation workflow might be easier than you think.
We use multiple tools; can I still automate?
In 99% of cases, a project workflow is not created end-to-end in one go. Project workflows evolve slowly over time and adapt to the changing requirements of the business. This often leads to an interconnected web of software tools that make automating your translation workflow a daunting task.
It doesn’t need to be complicated. Many workflow automation tools on the market are designed to bridge the gap between software systems.
The arguments for automating your translation workflow should be even more compelling in this case. When using multiple tools, there are bound to be elements of crossover. Crossover of project information inevitably leads to duplication of tasks.
Automating your translation workflow can remove the element of human error
We know that everyone, even your best employee, can have an off day. By using a translation management system to automate your translation workflow, you can remove human error from the equation.
A translation management system (TMS) will not confuse the delivery date or times. It will not forget to change an important project setting. And it will always use the correct reference material and terminology lists. These are all elements that are programmed into the system as part of the work automating your translation workflow.
What other benefits are there to automating your translation workflow?
Every workflow tool on the market will offer different services and capabilities. For this reason, it is impossible to provide an exhaustive list of benefits to automating your translation workflow.
However, a commonly offered feature is an at-a-glance overview of orders, budgets and translator capacity. Most translation management systems offer an interlinked series of customer and supplier portals with customisable dashboards.
Once you have started to automise your translation workflow, these dashboards allow you to check on the status of an individual project and to review budgets and prices from within the same tool.
What does an automated translation workflow actually look like?
This is a difficult question to answer. In many ways, the best response is another question: What do YOU want it to look like?
The first step to automating your translation workflow is to audit your current process. Consider the different elements that go “into” the system, what happens to them during the process and which elements come “out” of the system. This will provide a basic overview of your workflow.
I can’t vouch for all the tools on the market, but I can comment on what the STAR Group tool can offer if you want to start automating your translation workflow. STAR CLM consists of a network of browser-based portals and task blocks that can be combined into a bespoke workflow automation tool.
Have I convinced you to start automating your translation workflow?
I’ll admit that I’m biased in this area. Of course I want you to automate your translation workflow. An automated translation workflow can deliver cost and time savings.
By automating your translation workflow, you ensure that translation is no longer a step in the process that you need to worry about. Your Marketing Manager can go back to creating engaging copy. Your Technical Writer can focus on writing clear documentation.
In short, when you automate your translation workflow, your team can play to their strengths.
As a translation company that does a lot of work on technical documentation, both for end clients and for agencies, a large proportion of the work we undertake falls under the requirements of the EU Machinery Directive, also known as Directive 2006/42/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 May 2006. In this article we take an in-depth look at the information required by the Machinery Directive and the Machinery Directive translation requirements.
Given the current focus of UK politics, you’ve probably heard of the European Union and have a vague idea of what it does. But in case you aren’t aware, the European Union is a political and economic union of 28 member states that produces policies aimed at facilitating the free movement of people, goods and services and capital within the internal market. A directive is a legal act of the European Union which requires member states to achieve a particular result without dictating the means by which this result is achieved.
One such directive is the Machinery Directive, whose main focus is to ensure a common safety level in machinery placed into the market or put in service in all EU member states and to ensure the freedom of movement of this machinery within the European Union. It applies to machinery, interchangeable equipment, safety components, lifting accessories, chains/ropes/webbing, removable mechanical transmission devices and partly completed machinery. It is worth noting that machinery covered by other more specific directives is excluded from this scope, such as motor vehicles and household appliances.
What information do I need to provide to comply with the Machinery Directive
The full list of information required by the Machinery Directive can be found in the document itself, which can be accessed in English here: 2006/42/EC Machinery Directive
Generally, you need to make sure that you provide:
Information and warnings on the machinery
Machine Instructions
Assembly instructions for partly completed machinery
EU Declaration of conformity of the machinery
Declaration of Incorporation of partly completed machinery
Section 1.7.1 clearly sets out the required formats for information on the machinery:
“Any written or verbal information and warnings must be expressed in an official Community language or languages, which may be determined in accordance with the Treaty by the Member State in which the machinery is placed on the market and/or put into service and may be accompanied, on request, by versions in any other official Community language or languages understood by the operators.”
These Machinery Directive translation requirements can be simplified into a requirement to translate your documents into the official language of each of your target markets. However, you must make sure that you are aware of any countries that have more than one official language.
What are the Machinery Directive translation requirements?
How do you know what to translate, and into which languages? The answer to this may be simpler than you think. It all depends on your product and your intended market.
You may recognise the CE mark, a conformity mark that acts as a declaration from the manufacturer that their product meets the necessary requirements of any applicable EC directives relating to that product. At STAR, we most commonly encounter this mark for products which meet the standards of the Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC, though there are countless other Directives which are part and parcel of the CE marking system.
Section 1.7.4. of the Machinery Directive reads as follows:
“All machinery must be accompanied by instructions in the Official Community language or languages of the Member State in which it is placed on the market and/or put into service.”
Put simply, you need to translate your documents into the official language of each of your target markets. However, make sure that you are aware of any countries that have more than one official language. It is best to do some research to find out which languages you need in order to comply with the Machinery Directive. For your reference, we’ve given a list of the official languages of EU countries, and some additional countries below.
* EFTA Country – European Free Trade Association Country
Do I really need to translate every single item of documentation?
This depends on the type of documentation and the target readership. The main rule is that all machinery should be accompanied by instructions and declarations of conformity, both of which should be available in the appropriate language. The instructions are needed so that the machinery can be operated correctly and safely – this cannot be guaranteed if the user does not fully understand the instructions.
However, the Directive does allow for an exception to that rule:
“By way of exception, the maintenance instructions intended for use by specialized personnel mandated by the manufacturer or his authorized representative may be supplied in only one Community language which the specialized personnel understand.” (Section 1.7.4)
Perhaps you have a German engineer who is located very close to the borders of the Netherlands and Belgium. You may wish to send him to service your machinery in each of those countries. The Machinery Directive allows you to only provide German translations of any maintenance instructions which are intended solely for this engineer – he understands German (one of the Community languages) and therefore you don’t have to also give him Dutch translations just because he’s going to work in Amsterdam.
Does the document need to say anything special to show that we’re working within the law?
One of the general principles for drafting instructions given within the Machinery Directive relates to the labelling of said instructions, specifically:
“The instructions accompanying the machinery must be either ‘Original instructions’ or a ‘Translation of the original instructions’, in which case the translation must be accompanied by the original instructions.” (Section 1.7.4)
The “Original Instructions” are those for which the manufacturer accepts liability and are to be supplied with every machine sold. They denote that the language version has been verified by the manufacturer or their authorised representative. Multiple language versions can be labelled as “Original Instructions” where the manufacturer accepts liability for the contents.
For any translations of these instructions, the text must be labelled as “Translation of the original instructions” or similar, so that any end users know that the original documents were not written in their native language.
How will these Machinery Directive translation requirements be affected by Brexit?
At the time of writing (September 2019), the spectre of a “No Deal Brexit” looms large and there is currently no consensus on exactly what will happen following the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union. However, we hope that we can provide some clarity (only as concerns the Machinery Directive translation requirements though… we’re just as confused as the rest of the population when it comes to the UK’s future with its EU trading partners!).
As we understand it, if you wish to trade with an EU member state, you are bound to comply with the regulations currently in force within that EU member state. For this reason, we would advise that the translation requirements as listed above will still apply post-Brexit. We hope to update this resource with regards to this issue as soon as any clarifications are available.
So, if you think you might require a translation, and you’d like to discuss it with us, talk to a member of our team. Alternatively, fill in the form below and we’ll be in touch.
Here at STAR UK, we have two teams of translators working from various languages into English, and a team of project managers looking after the project details and smoothing the path to translation brilliance. As a part of that PM team, I’m biased about the positive impact that we have on our day-to-day running, but recently, this was reinforced when we started introducing two of our newer PMs to the art of scheduling translations
To clarify, there are two very important schedules here at our Guildford office, keeping track of what everyone is working on and what’s coming up imminently. We have a team working mainly from French into English and a team that works primarily from German into English. On first consideration, scheduling a translation could be reduced to: Give it to someone with the ability and capacity to deliver by the deadline. However, defining ability and capacity is key. We’ll start with looking at whether someone has the capacity to deliver a translation by the requested deadline.
Timing is paramount
There’s no getting away from it, we all experience time pressure in our jobs and the translation industry is no different. Deadlines are set in stone and project schedules are planned to the minute. We know that, sometimes, a customer’s latest request really did need to be done yesterday. Often, we need to find a supplier who has some free space to complete a project on the very same day. Other times, we need to find someone with a big enough gap in their schedule to take on two weeks’ work at short notice. Being aware of resource capacity is instrumental in us delivering the best service and sometimes working a small miracle to have tricky translations delivered in no time at all while not compromising on quality.
Experience is everything
Next, let’s look at finding someone with the ability to translate our text. At a basic level, this means someone who is confident working in that language pair. But for us, it goes deeper than that. Every single one of our translators is a highly qualified linguist with extensive training in our TM tool, TransitNXT, but as individuals, they all bring something unique to the team, whether through personal interests or thanks to their on-the-job experience. We have our resident technical translation gurus, of course, but among our number, we can also count on horse riders, cycling enthusiasts and domestic goddesses. This knowledge can be invaluable for certain of our customers who know that we go the extra mile to ensure that their translation uses appropriate language and terminology.
Consistency is crucial
Don’t get me wrong, a speedy service is important, but our main focus is the quality that we deliver. Our customers spend a long time crafting the perfect marketing slogan, or creating a brand identity to maximise product sales. We have extensive translation style guides to ensure that this work is not in vain when it comes to your multi-lingual presence.
When scheduling a translation project, it is important to balance these three aspects. The schedule becomes an interlinking web of decisions that guarantee that we always deliver the best possible translations to our customers. When training my colleagues on the various considerations of translation planning, I was struck by the number of factors we take into account, some of which I didn’t list here. Translation projects are not assigned to the first available resource – we craft our translations with the same care our customers used to write the original content, and this means that only the best will do.
In fact, the Project Managers are often in the background, much like support crew at an event or the runners on a TV show, but this doesn’t negate our importance. Next time you send us a translation request, you can be sure that at least part of the success of your translation is due to a Project Manager working tirelessly behind the scenes.
China is a huge potential market for exports from the UK and many businesses are looking at taking the first steps towards selling their products to Chinese consumers, particularly in a post-Brexit world where we are told that the world is our oyster. For many, one of their first tasks will be to look at localising their marketing content and buying a website translation to Chinese.
What is the potential market for exporting to China?
According to the Department for International Trade, the UK exported over £23 billion of goods and services to China in 2018[1], providing a huge market for the UK. There is a huge focus on importing goods and services in order to support the domestic market – the growing Chinese middle class are on the lookout for safe, high-quality international products. With Chinese GDP growing at roughly 6% in the first half of 2019, and retail sales increasing at a rate of 8%[2], the numbers only serve to strengthen the case for making a move towards exporting to China.
So, you’ve decided to attempt to break into the Chinese market – what do you need to know? Here at STAR, I’ll admit that we’re not specialists in the business side of exporting, but we can provide support in a fairly key area: Translation.
Although admittedly an old statistic now, with the report having been initially published in 2014, the Common Sense Advisory Committee surveyed over 3000 consumers in ten countries testing the hypothesis that companies can increase sales by translating products and websites. The findings were conclusive, “the more local-language content throughout the customer experience leads to a greater likelihood of purchase.”[3]
Which variant of Chinese do you need?
There are many dialects spoken across mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, but the most common Chinese languages are Mandarin and Cantonese. To further complicate matters, Chinese can be written down using one of two scripts; either Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese. The STAR Group has offices in Taiwan, Beijing and Shanghai so we’re perfectly placed to advise on the variant needed for your target market. However, in most cases, the language needed is Mandarin Chinese, using Simplified Chinese script.
What do you need to consider before translation?
There is one main consideration for businesses looking to buy a website translation to Chinese: The Advertisement Law of the People’s Republic of China. It came into force on 1st September 2015, and a full English translation by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) can be found here https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/legislation/details/15654
What is the Advertisement Law and does it affect me?
In summary, the law aims to protect consumers and standardise advertising activities in China. Stiff penalties can be imposed for non-compliance with the new law (up to 2,000,000 RMB), and the minimum fine is 100,000 RMB. In terms of content, the most important thing to be aware of is the stipulation that advertisements “should be truthful and lawful” and “should not contain false or misleading content, or cheat or mislead consumers”. Generally, this is in line with many other advertising guidelines in the UK that we follow without realising; however, there are a few other clauses that you may need to be aware of:
The overt or covert use of national flag, anthem or emblem of People’s Republic of China or military flag, anthem or emblem is forbidden in advertisements.
The Chinese characters for “national-level” or “State-level”, “the most” or “highest-grade”, and “the best” (among others) must not be used in advertisements.
This last point has been understood as “no exaggerations allowed”, but you should be aware that there is no list of banned expressions, and that it falls to Chinese judges to rule on expressions which violate the Advertisement Law.
What does it mean for you?
The Advertisement Law states that it is the advertiser’s responsibility to check their content for compliance with this law.
Our translation team in China are aware of this Advertisement Law and all of its stipulations and can provide guidance on checking for compliance; however, we cannot assume any responsibility for the compliance of advertisements.
We advise that the best way to ensure the compliance of your advertisements in China is to make sure that your content creators are aware of the requirements. Avoiding exaggerations and forbidden expressions in your source text is a huge help for translators trying to create a compliant advertisement.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss a potential website translation to Chinese, please send us a message.
