Thursday 31st July 2008

At some point, every one of us has sniggered righteously at an amusingly ill-informed translation whilst visiting a foreign land. With that in mind, consider this invitation: 'drop your pants here for best results.' No, it is not an invitation from one of Amsterdam's nocturnal working girls, rather a sign at a dry cleaning store in Tokyo: a sign, most probably, of nothing other than a misplacement of trust in Google Translate.

Such linguistic discrepancies are unlikely to affect the turnover of small independent retailers; at least they're making the effort to welcome outsiders, right? But that consumer mindset is likely to dissolve when it comes to assessing an online company and its products and services: the more valuable the item being bought, the more likely it is that the end-user will want to read about it in their own language.

Visitor confidence is the all important crutch when it comes to attracting as many clients as possible from non-native markets. It is for that reason that translations must be right in every way: From the terminology used, to the tone employed; from the accuracy of the spelling and grammar, to the relevance of the local references. But slow down, language alone is not enough. It is no good luring visitors to your site under the pretence of it being multilingual, only for the shopping cart and payment gateway to be in English.

Translation is an art and a long way from the idealized algorithms employed by machine automated translation tools. A word-for-word translation dodges context, grammar, syntactic conventions and idioms and so, for the best translations, interpretation and understanding must be constitutional.

Even so, given the fact that the world is currently at the nadir of its economic cycle, the purse strings are tight and so aspiring multilingual companies are sourcing the cheapest translations possible. In-country translators are being ignored in favour of those from countries with a lower cost of living; proofreading is being sidestepped and non specialist translators are left un-occupied...The end result is that poor translations are fiercely accumulating on the World Wide Web.

Ever conscientious, translators are increasingly perturbed by this dumbing down of their art form and have begun to contact Web-Translations on a regular basis to report sub-standard translations. Relying on the negative feedback of disgruntled clients is an illogical way to assess the quality of a translation, and so this intervention by professional freelancers may prove to be a saving grace for many companies who would otherwise be oblivious to the poor reception of their website.

It is the increased occurrence of such contact that was the catalyst in Web-Translations unveiling a project to fix the proliferation of perfunctory translations on the internet...the TransFix project.

Translators now have an ever accessible outlet for their frustrations in the shape of an online form. Upon completing it with an offending URL, errors and corrections for those errors, it is fired off to a Web-Translations Project Manger. The offending company is then contacted and offered the most efficient and cost effective way to scrutinize their multilingual web copy...a Translation Audit.

The Audit relies on professional translators reviewing the copy and highlighting things including errors in tone, grammar and terminology, and then grading the gravity of the error and providing a correction. The results are then written up as a report which includes suggestions as to how to best amend the copy, and is sent to the client for consideration.

Web-Translations helps companies trade internationally by improving, translating and promoting websites. Whether you are new to global trade or are already multinational, we combine language, technology and web experience for your profit. Our proven approach to international trade has paid off time and time again, with varied customers.

If you would like more information about any of our products and services, please contact a member of the Web-Translations team on +44 (0) 1924 360 460.