I have had to deal with this for 25 years.

In the beginning I gave a job to Berlitz, but when the result came back I refused to pay and was able to explain why. I tried other service bureaus that did nothing but translation, but I never found one that I could just leave the job to and know that it would be "taken care of."

I found success when I used in-house staff who spoke the languages needed, in conjunction with careful management and checking of everything that didn't smell right.

Different skills you need (not necessarily all in one human being):
1. Understanding the language to be translated FROM really well. Few are capable.
2. Understanding the language to be translated TO really well, including connotation (potential additional/alternative reader interpretations) and annotation (what else a word or expression makes people think of). Even fewer are capable of this.
3. Understanding the subject and knowing the *current* terminology in your field.
4. Grammar, spelling and punctuation. Can easily be a different person who knows the target language well.

If somebody has a Ph.D. in English and is one of only 12 professional translators authorized by some government to translate official documents from their language to English, that should take care of it, right? Maybe. I asked one of those Ph.D. to write two pages in English as a test. After initially declining this as a gross personal insult, he relented.
Result: 12 errors. On two pages. DUH!

The next toughest job I ever did was a translation from English to mainland Chinese for a full page ad. I found people who knew mainland Chinese, but they didn't know the terminology.
I found other Chinese who knew the terminology, but they didn't know mainland Chinese (which uses a simplified character set). Finally, with the help of a third person who knew a little bit of both, I was able to develop the right language by asking all of them detailed questions about each character proposed, and the ad came out OK.

Recently I have had to translate nearly 400 pages of text for my courses to Spanish. I went through a LOT of professionals with degrees in Spanish and English, had to reject them all.
Finally I found a guy from Argentina who had a great feel for the language not only as used in his native country but also in the other Latin American countries and in the U.S. After he did his job, I only had to fix a few diacritics here and there and some punctuation. End result "A".

Here's an excerpt from the Vegas manual translated from Spanish:
"Start the Meadow and put your clippings in the newspaper basket.
To remove the video anywhere on the line of time, poke the scissors."

The Berlitz translation I got was worse than that.

We've always bid these kinds of things out to translation services. We have several locally (Miami) and there are many online as well.

Chienworks, for what it's worth I'll pass along some of what I've learned from my Girlfriend Unit, a simultaneous interpreter who freelances for the European Parliment and EU. Her native language is German and she interprets from English, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish. She gets by in French.

TRANSLATORS are not INTERPRETERS, though interpreters CAN work as translators. The difference is that interpreters usually work "live" and in "real time." This demands a lot of skill and concentration---as does translating. But generally there's much less time pressure involved when you merely translate, because it's usually from documents into non-time-pressure spoken word, or into another document.

Interpreters almost always interpret FROM the non-native languages they understand, INTO their native language. While many speak their secondary languages with as much skill as their native language, they're still much more comfortable working INTO their native language.

You don't say whether you just want translation so you can drop in subtitles, or if you want your work dubbed into the foreign language. If the latter, this presents extra problems in that the interpreter must 1) have the appropriate voice(s), and 2) probably also have some acting chops.

If the former, I think you'll have an easier and less expensive task ahead of you!

I have no idea what translators or competent interpreters charge here, but professional simultaneous interpreters in Europe will cost you an easy $1000 a day, often more. I would assume---and remember this is just an assumption----that the rates would more or less be the same here.

I'd be interested in knowing what you and the others learn about this...

It would not generally be a good idea to use a simultaneous interpreter for dubbing.

These people are incredible (I have used them for my own public speaking engagements in Japan and mainland China), but they should not be used for anything that is offline and permanent.

It requires a lot of thought to get a good translation for either dubbing or subtitles:
1. Right meaning
2. Right connotation and annotation
3. Right length (to fit the original dialog)

The translators who write for dubbing and subtitles for a living are very good at general drama material. For specialized fields, they need help.

Lots of good stuff to think about. Thanks!

Considering the technical nature of the information we're working with it's already become obvious that mechanical translation is completely unusable. We're getting in some quotes from a few service bureaus along with samples of their work, but so far it seems quite pricey.

A backup option i'm working on is to find a few trusted people who can read/write the target languages. We're hoping to find at least two for each language and have them both work on the translation, and then check each others' work. Of course, very few of the people we are finding know any of the technical terms, so we may have to do some research to supply those translations ourselves.

Fortunately we're working with mostly Roman-character languages ... so far.

PossibilityX, thanks for the info. Our needs are going to be entirely for written material of a technical nature, so it won't be very similar to overdubbing drama.

The initial quotes we've gotten in so far are running around $0.25 to $0.45 (US) per word, including translation and independant checking. The project is about 25,000 words into 4 target languages so the price adds up quickly. While we don't doubt the ability of the bureaus we've contacted so far, we're not sure if these prices are reasonable or not.

I'm not going to post any names of who we've contacted yet until we do some trimming and get deeper into the project. I don't want to scare anyone away from them simply because i don't know what's what yet. ;)

Long time ago I worked as a waiter at a Polish restaurant and a customer asked me if I wanted to make some money translating letters he was getting from his family in Poland. I did, made some money, but the best part is that few month later, the same guy came back and told me that he's starting a translation services company. Last time I heard, they are still in business. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that ethnic restaurants can sometimes provide a pool of native speakers, willing to do the job when nothing else is available.

Chienworks, I just got off the phone with the Girlfriend Unit, who makes the following points:

1) She suggests trying to find a translator who is working into his native language. So if you want a Spanish translation, try to find a person with Spanish as their native tongue.

2) If your translation involves specialized terminology (medicine, law, engineering, or a particular science) try hard to find someone familiar with the special verbiage used in that field. Good translators have a number of (expensive!) specialized dictionaries at their disposal but still, nuance and knowledge of usage comes into play, and that comes with experience working with that specialty.

3) Rates vary all over the map. For instance, in Vienna, she charges 1.5 Euros per line, and a line consists of 55 characters. Right now the dollar is at about 1.30 to 1 Euro. You do the math. She's unsure of what her colleagues who live elsewhere in Europe would charge, but she says doing translations of specialized stuff would bump the rates---she has done legal translations, which involves looking up (and independently checking) unfamiliar terms. She charges more for this because it's more of a headache.

4) But, she also says we here in the US have proximity to countries whose professional translators might charge lower fees...Mexico for Spanish and Canada's Quebec for French, if those languages are what you need.

5) She also says that if you go to an agency, as opposed to an individual, they must factor in their overhead. Let's say an agency would charge you $5000. The translator isn't gonna get the entire $5000. So if you can find a competent freelancer with little overhead, you might save $$$$.

6) Finally, check the website of The International Federation of Translators, at http://www.fit-ift.org/

She says the translators who are members of this organization are all probably pretty good, as they have to meet certain standards to be accepted as members.

Hope this helps. I get the feeling a lot of homework (and probably $$$$) will be neccesary.

---John

Good technical translation is very difficult. I'd worked in engineering for many years and probably the best thing I ever did for my employer was hire a chinese engineer who was very fluent in both her native language and English. But in her case the difference was she'd completed her degree in mainland China. Our other Chinese engineers had done their degrres in English which meant they'd never learnt the Chinese characters for a lot of technical stuff. I'd asked one of them to translate a Chinese technical manual into English and he coudln't, he had to fax it to a university in China to ge teh work done, the characters in question simply weren't in any Chinese dictionary.
Now I know this is only for Roman based languages so the task is a bit simpler however once it's technical stuff it gets very messy. We used to submit tenders in Spanish. We'd get a technical guy who could sort of speak Spanish to do the translation and then get a native Spanish speaker to correct it into good Spanish.
I'd strongly suggest doing the same double blind checking, get a technical guy to do the translation and then give it to another bilingual person to translate it back and correct the linguistic errors.

Also note that the Spanish spoken in Mexico is different from the Spanish spoken in Argentina and different from that in each of the other Latin American countries. It's even different from the language used today by Mexican immigrants to the U.S.

The Spanish in Spain comes in two flavors that are quite different (Castilian and Catalan), although in practice you would be more likely to need the Castilian which is the "national Spanish." Castilian is pronounced very differently from Latin American Spanish (the city of La Jolla in California is pronounced "la hoya" here, but a visiting Spaniard would say closer to "la chholya."

Canadian French and French French, well what do you think?

(It's not too bad actually, but there is a lot of different usage.)

Ditto in many other languages.

It's important to check with the people who are going to use the translation. With many languages you can't assume any kind of worldwide consistency.

Then there's also English vs. what we here in the western hemisphere speak, which for lack of a better term, i'll call "American". We have lots of rousing debates in my chatroom and forum between the North Americans and the British & Australians about what constitutes polite language vs. rude or obscene terms. Some things we say very politely are viscious insults over there, and vice versa.

He-he, as has been discovered by American tourists in England going into a store, er, shop, to ask for a "fanny pack."

Ditto for the British tourist in the U.S going into a shop, er, store, asking for what sounds like "a waste bag."

Same product of course.

Check a British-American Dictionary, such as this one.

I have been exposed extensively to all the major flavors of English, but I still got surprised when a visitor from Ireland wanted to help me find my car in a very dark parking structure, suggesting that I should use a torch (which would have been a flashlight here while a torch is a big stick with real flames). How easy one forgets.

From the dictionary link above:

In the US...

An English exchange student asks someone “do you have a rubber”. Taken aback, she says, “but I don’t even know you”. A bit confused, he assures her, “I’ll only be a minute. I’ll bring it right back”.

When I was in LAX I asked an attendant for the toilet. He indicated where a restroom was. After half an hour I finally went to the bathroom, which I had discovered whilst diligently searching for the room full of couches.

A lady from the UK went for breakfast upon arriving in the US. She ordered fried eggs and was asked "how would you like your eggs?" She was perplexed and suggested "cooked?"

A friend visiting me in California, after complaining about being deplaned instead of being allowed to disembark, saw a sign announcing ‘Happy hour 4-6 p.m.’ and said "Oh, everything here really is twice as big".

In the UK...

An American friend worked in an English pub one summer. A local ordered a light and bitter and my friend gave him a pint of bitter and some matches.

Another American friend was taken aback when she was invited to "go down to the bloody pub and get pissed."

In Piccadilly Circus, London, one of the dossers (a panhandler) asked an American tourist, "Can I pinch a fag, mate?"

An American, whose husband was stationed in England, got up early one morning to find out if the milkman could explain the small holes in the foil tops on the milk bottles, and the missing portions of cream. Without blinking, he suggested, "Must be yer tits, ma’am."

An American visiting English friends asked the missus how her new job was. He was very confused as she brightly told him "it’s a really good screw!"

An American lady on the side of the road became very concerned when the nice Englishman calls out from under her car, “I can’t quite see where the petrol’s leaking out. Would you hand me a torch.”
==========
I still don't understand the milk bottle and the new job???

Chienworks, I read you.

I know few Brits and only one Aussie (they're rare in Oklahoma, believe me) but I'm on pretty friendly terms with a certain Austrian, and through her, some of her friends. There really are differences in how people interact in conversations but more importantly, how differences in tone and words and (most particularly) subject matter are PERCIEVED (or mis-percieved, if you prefer).

I don't know enough about non-US cultures to offer any meaningful across-the-board observations EXCEPT that the Europeans seem to know a lot more about US people and ways than we know about them. Even then, there are misperceptions aplenty and a tendency to think things "are" a certain way among all people in a particular culture, which of course is an astoundingly absurd notion. My feeling is that many Americans are more guilty of it than citizens of certain other nations, mostly because so few of us have travelled or lived overseas AND are exposed to almost no literature, films, television programs, or music originating abroad.

For instance, who's the most popular Australian (or Danish, or Columbian, or Japanese) television star, author, or recording artist? I don't have any idea, but I'd be willing to bet these people are probably every bit as talented as our folks are.

To explore the art of different cultures requires a bit of research and homework, but I've found the results to be rewarding. I really like foreign films, NOT because they're "better" than US films, but because they're often different enough to be really fascinating. And, not knowing a lot of the actors, you can focus on the story and the construction of the film without thinking of the actors as being mis-cast or whatever.

Finally, this joke might help explain things:

If the definition of a polyglot is "a person who speaks many languages," what do you call someone who only speaks one language?

An American.

Hi there,

I'm from Spain and I do translations from English into Spanish. I am located in Los Angeles, CA, and as a freelancer I have translated "What lies beneath", "The Cell" and some other movies for theatrical release in Latin America.

I don't do them anymore, but if any of you are interested in an affordable, yet professional, solution, you can contact me at my email:

fvidal earthlink net

FWIW, we're in Utah. Language translation capital of the world. We farm it out, unless we happen to know someone very capable of technical terms in the language we need.
Did you know the LDS church broadcasts in nearly 50 languages live, simultaneously from SLC, Utah, every Sunday?
Otherwise, there are lots of localization companies around. FIGS is cheap. Going Asian is what gets the budget up there.