When we think of translation, usually a very specific idea comes spontaneously to our minds. However, translation has many different aspects and specialization fields, often unknown for a majority of people and companies.
Here you will find the details of my translation services. I will also explain the reasons why, in my opinion, a professional translation is absolutely crucial in the business world.
general translation
I call «general translation» the translation service which input (source text) is a document on general topics, as opposed to documents about my specialized subject matters.
some formats:: books, generic documents, projects (dissertations, presentations, papers, etc.), letters, articles and posts, CVs, etc.
specialized translation
I call «specialized translation» the translation service that works on input documents dealing with information relative to my areas of knowledge and expertise as an engineer and consultant:
- business and business administration,
- marketing and digital marketing ,
- information systems and technologies (IS/IT), communications,
- software,
- engineering (industrial, telecommunications, electrical, electronics, mechanics, etc.),
- project management,
- business process improvement and management systems.
some formats: corporate and business presentations, product and service catalogs, business letters and communications, technical and economic proposals, project dossiers, engineering documents and drawings, technical specifications and design documents, test documents, user manuals, training manuals, operations manuals, service level agreements (SLAs), market research studies, papers, surveys, etc.
comic translation NEW!
I am very excited with this new specialization area, thanks to a French big global player in the publishing industry, who relied on me for the regular translation of comic books in one of their key teen magazines.
Despite the effort required to start working in a new field, it is being a real pleasure and a very refreshing experience for me. I am enjoying every bit of it! And I definitely want to keep growing in the comic translation field.
revision / translation quality control
that’s IT revision and quality control services work with texts and materials in the Spanish language (EN, FR, PT >ES), which is my mother tongue; they can include one or more of the following activities:
- revision: it consists in examining a translation for its suitability for purpose. Depending on each project specific requirements, it may involve the comparison between source and target texts for terminology, register and style consistency purposes.
- review: it consists in a monolingual review of a translated text to assess suitability for the agreed purpose and the recommendation (or application) of the appropriate corrective measures.
- proofreading: it consists in the monolingual grammatical, spelling and typographic review of a translation.
- final verification.
There are some key issues that clients often overlook when trying to solve their translation needs, usually due to their lack of knowledge of the translation field.
It is relatively frequent to find clients who believe when someone knows how to speak a language he or she is automatically able to translate from and into that language. This is why they often rely high responsibility and high business impact translation tasks to their own employees instead of translation professionals. In some cases they even rely on on-line automatic translation tools with a minimal human intervention.
Others would rather work with big translation agencies in the first place, since they often seem to play the roles of a global translator, potentially working in any language in the planet, and a hyperspecialized translator, supposedly gathering specialized knowledge in almost any field, and virtually available round the clock. These clients often ignore that some of these big agencies (not all, thank god!) rely on the freelance translators with the lowest rates instead of the true expert translators in the given field, in order to maximize their own profits and disregarding the quality of the translations as an essential characteristic.
There are many more examples I will be talking about in my blog (coming soon!). My objective is for the translation services potential clients to get to know the specifics of the translation industry, its key concepts, what to look for in a translation service, and the reasons why it is so important to look for specialized professional translators to do the job, as well as other issues I think can help you make the best choices based on your specific needs.
