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What to consider when choosing a translation service

Feb 05, 2015

An unequivocal mistake for any business looking to move into an international market would, of course, to be to use Google translate. Though the service has its merit, and is extremely useful for lost travellers, it has no place in business. Too often online businesses look to Google to translate their website, and the results are almost comical. On a site I once came across, it read “thank here pay please.” The need to use a professional translation service is unmistakable, and with so many at hand, how do you know which service is the best for you? Simple, you look at the reputation, experience and communication or, R.E.C.

Reputation

First and foremost, you must look for a translation service that you can trust. After all, if you are already investing the money, you want to make sure it is done right. It is important to look at both the company and its service.

When looking at the company, some important factors to consider include: company size, how long they have been in business, and do they have any translation certifications. Additionally, the surest way to evaluate the quality of service is by looking at customer reviews. After all, who would be better to tell you about a service than someone who has used it previously?

Experience

Now that you have identified a company that offers quality translation services, you need to determine if they can provide specifically the type of translation that you need. Say, for example, that you want your graphic design website to be translated from French to English, you would want to maintain the integrity and personality through translation. What sets apart the leading translation providers is the ability to appreciate the nuances of both the languages, as well as the industry itself. After all its not just the text that is being translated, it’s your message also.

Communication

Communication is crucial in any outsourcing relationship. A good indication of how invested the service provider will be in your project would be though their communication channels. Take a look if the provider goes the extra mile in enabling their customers to be heard. This could be anything from a dedicated advisor appointed to oversee projects, right through to a helpline or live chat on their website for an immediate response. The more channels you see, the more you are going to feel that you will be heard.

It all really comes down to doing your homework. By researching these three areas, you are sure to find a premium service for your needs.

Resources / Blog

5 Steps to Ensure a Successful Translation

Jun 26, 2014

When you’re planning an entry into a new market, translating your documents may seem like the least of your concerns. Yet, a poorly translated project can harm your company’s perceived professionalism, negatively impact the message they are trying to get across and handicap an otherwise brilliant new market strategy.

Here are 5 steps you can take to ensure your translation process runs smoothly.

1.       Provide Enough Time

Time is everything, and whether you are tackling document translation, patent translation, medical translation, or website localization, it is important to give yourself enough time to perfect it. You want to make sure that the translator or translation company has enough time to thoroughly research the subject matter, prepare the translation, and revise and proofread until the final draft is perfect.

The Project Manager at Morningside, says that “Collaboration is key, the more time you have with your translator the more likely you’ll be on the same page. Effective teamwork and communication is one of the keys to localization and translation success.”

Tip: If you know that you will need a translation done and you want to reach out to a professional translation company, speak with them as early as possible so that they can build a custom workflow for your project and find the ideal translator for your project.

2.       Create a translation glossary and style guide.

A translation glossary and style guide are helpful cheat sheets for linguists to better understand your company.  A translation glossary includes the companies “lingo”, words that should stay consistent throughout, and words that should not be translated such as product names. A style guide describes how a company should be presented visually and textually and the overall style and tone of the company. In short, it identifies those branding elements that must remain, no matter the locale. Providing both a translation glossary and style guide to linguists can help ensure consistency. Without this, words and phrases can be translated in multiple ways across different languages meaning more time spent revising translations to create consistency. A Glossary and style guide can not only help with consistency, but it can also reduce the length of time it takes to complete each document translation and cut costs.

3.       Don’t use Multiple Linguists

You might think that using many linguists for large projects will speed up the process, but it could have a negative impact on the overall quality and cohesion of the project. Why is that? The more linguists involved, the more prone you’ll be to inconsistencies in the translation. Beyond the specific style and tone of each linguist, many words have multiple translations that could fit in a given language and consistency is key when delivering a message and building a brand. This is especially true if you want to keep with a specific and notable brand image or content style used in the past. The same also applies to your proofreader – give one person enough time as opposed to forcing the issue with multiple people.

The caveat to this idea is getting a fresh set of eyes on a longer project. Once you’ve completed a translation, give one person with fresh eyes the chance to look it over and check for mistakes.

4.       Provide as much detail as possible.

The more information you can provide to your translator or translation company, the better. Besides including more details in the translation, it gives the translation service a more accurate ability to choose a translator that has the expertise in that specific field.

5.       Translation memory tools.

Translation memory tools are able to store segments, such as sentences, titles, headings, and phrases and create a database for future projects. This helps save time and money for any updates that need to be done to a project, or for translating any new content. It enforces consistency throughout all versions of any projects and also cuts time because the linguists don’t have to spend time re-translating the same thing time and time again. Morningside Translations currently works with both MemoQ and SDL Trados Studio which has helped reduce client costs tremendously.

A high-quality translation is a key part of bringing your product or service to a new market, and a poorly executed translation can cost you business. By following the above tips, you can improve the quality of your translation, lower costs  and help make your entry into new markets an easier process.

Resources / Blog

Reviewing a Translation

Jan 20, 2010

When choosing a translation service, it is important to find out which translation company can provide you with the quality legal translation or technical translation you require in order to ensure top quality.

Morningside is a translation service which delivers top quality translations since we are a translation company that insists on reviewing each and every single legal translation or technical translation that is delivered to our clients.

Reviewing a technical translation or a legal translation requires not only a cursory review of the completed language translation, but also requires further layers of review.  As a translation company, we strive to ensure the review of the technical translation, legal translation, or patent translation that our client receives includes layers of review.

These layers of review include but are not limited to, review of language, review of specific terminology to ensure consistency, review of dialect, and review of spelling.  While there are other areas of review which we take care of, at the end of the day all of these measures are what makes Morningside your choice for a translation service or translation company.

Whether your needs include a document translation, legal translation, technical translation, patent translation, or document review, Morningside can assist you and provide you with a top quality translation and we ensure that the following time you are seeking a translation service or translation company, you will look to Morningside for their translation and review expertise.

Resources / Blog

Machine Translations

Dec 30, 2009

Machine translations are also often referred to as automatic translations or non-human translations, which are produced by a translation service. A Machine translation can loosely be defined as a translation conducted by a computer, as opposed to a human translation, which is conducted by a translator. A machine translation will produce a document translation that is very different from a human translation produced by a translation service.

Often times, we hear the term machine translation used in the legal translation industry in reference to document translation. We are called upon to discuss the validity of a machine translation and to compare it to the translation service that a human may provide. Machines, or computers being referred to as machines, cannot possibly absorb all of the nuances and specialty knowledge base that is required for most legal translation matters.

To be sure, machines have revolutionized the world in a way that would not have been possible with humans alone. It is impossible to argue with the assertion that a machine can assemble car parts or portions of cereal more quickly and effectively than a human can. However, mechanical operations are precisely that and nothing more. Adding a precise and measured portion of cereal into a bag is all about measurements, a scientific measurement.

Translation, on the other hand, has very little to do with scientific measurement. Legal translation revolves around language and the attention to meaning and intention perceived in such language. A machine cannot possibly pick up on the difference between “like” and “as” and “such as”, for example. Ultimately, the use of machine translations to make a legal case is too risky an endeavor when considering the document translation at hand requires extreme care. As many legal cases rely on the meaning and understanding of one single word or phrase, a human translation is required to ensure that the sensitivity to that word or phrase is picked up on and adhered to.

Resources / Blog

Professional Translations

Dec 23, 2009

The translation of consumer products labeling and instructions is no simple task. For pharmaceuticals and other medical translations, an incorrect or unclear translation can have serious repercussions. Cultural sensitivity is also paramount: words and phrases that are catchy in English can fall flat or even offend your target audience.

One thing you should certainly not do is use machine or Internet translations. These translations are not nearly accurate enough. For example, the washing instructions on a child’s sweater in Germany were translated as “washing from the left side,” which obviously makes no sense. What the label was trying to say is “wash inside out.” This error was due to a literal translation of the German instructions, and a literal translation is rarely an accurate one.

Here is another example of a faulty translation, though this one was apparently the result of human error. You would probably think twice about purchasing the Tehao Rechargeable Shaver (made in China) that included these instructions in English: “Smuggle the razor blade (reference value around 400 g) on your muscle vertically, then drag your skin and shave back slowly. Too much strength on muscle may cause quick wear and tear, poor shaving feeling and outer razor blade’s tear.” This is probably not the work of a professional translator.

One way to avoid obvious translation errors that are laughable as well as those that can offend is to use a translation company that relies on translators in the target country, or who are at the very least native speakers of the target language and familiar with cultural sensitivities and proper idiom. Trying to save money by relying on machine translations or a translation service that offers rock-bottom prices (and inevitably quality as well) could end up making your product the butt of jokes.

Resources / Blog

It Takes a Patent Lawyer

Dec 10, 2009

Given the current state of the global economy, few companies can afford not to consider cost-cutting measures regarding their intellectual property procurement and patent translations.

Whether you are the Chief Patent Counsel for a Fortune 500 biotech company, or a patent attorney representing clients with a very limited patent portfolio, evaluating your patent translation costs related to overseas patent prosecution could make a significant difference in your–or your client’s–bottom line.

Chances are you or your outside counsel currently relies on foreign associates to handle both the translation and the national phase filing of the application. Many patent groups have never seriously considered the possibility of “unbundling” these services and using a separate vendor for the patent translation. Certainly there are a number of advantages to the status quo approach. For law firms, reciprocity is important, and providing your foreign associates with more business—including translation business—helps your firm get more business in return. For busy and often under-staffed in-house patent groups, dealing with one foreign patent firm as a “one-stop-shop” for both translating and filing a patent in a given country appears easier and more convenient. For the foreign associates, the status quo is also ideal, since the high fees they charge for translating the patent is an important revenue stream.

But this convenience could be far more expensive than you realize. Given limited patent budgets, cuts that are not made in translation costs could lead to other reductions that are far riskier: the outsourcing of patent drafting work, a reduction in the number of countries you file in, or the use of less accurate machine translations to translate prior arts that are critical in understanding the patentability of an application that is being drafted.

There are several options for companies that want to reduce their patent translation costs related to filing. The most obvious option—one that is becoming far more common—is filing your patent only in countries where the filing language is English. That means filing in the United States, Canada, India, Australia, Israel, and the EPO (though claims need to be translated into French and German), and several other important markets without incurring any translation costs at all. Certainly, this strategy will significantly reduce the overall cost of filing a specific patent. But of course it also means that your or your client’s invention will not be protected in several major world economies and economic blocs: Brazil, China, Japan, Russia, Latin America, and the Gulf States, to name but a few.

Another option to reducing patent translation costs is focusing on regional blocs where one translation will cover multiple countries. For example, translating your patent into Arabic will allow you to file with the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council), which includes Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE. That same Arabic translation (with minor modifications) can also be used to file in Egypt.

Finally, another strategy that is worth considering is turning to a patent translation firm—like Morningside—with proven expertise in translating patent applications. Once the patent translation is completed and returned, you can submit it directly to your foreign associates for filing. Depending on the number of countries where you file, the savings can be very substantial. For example, one of our clients estimated that they would save over $500,000 a year on their filings by using our services for the translation work, and relying on their foreign associates for the filing work only. By saving on translations, they have been able to avoid other cuts in their patent budget and improve their overall bottom line.

We will have more to say about the process of switching from foreign associates for patent translation work in a future posting.

But first a quick note about translation firms. While most American firms employ experienced, certified translators, only a small number of these firms specialize in patent translations. And even fewer utilize native language translators in the target countries with the technical and linguistic background to handle a complex nanotech or biological patent.

But even that is not sufficient. Even the best translators, editors, and project managers probably do not have the necessary legal and technical knowledge to guarantee the most accurate translation possible. It takes a patent lawyer with significant expertise in his country’s patent laws and a grasp of legal nuances related to a patent’s claims. That is why Morningside partners with patent firms in the target countries and relies on native language patent attorneys to oversee the translation process, and carefully edit and proofread the translated application. We believe that it takes a patent lawyer, and most of the patent lawyers that we are pleased to count among our clients believe it does too.

Compromising on patent translation costs should not entail compromising on quality. And one aspect of quality you should absolutely not compromise on is ensuring that your translated applications are carefully reviewed by a patent attorney in the target country before they are filed.