The Core
Why We Are Here => Web Development => Topic started by: ukgimp on November 10, 2010, 06:52:54 PM
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Thinking of getting a site of mine translated into spanish and Chinese.
Anyone got a good peson to suggest, clearly it has to be good.
Cheers
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Don't know anyone, but if you find someone please let me know.
Will be needing some content translated soonish, was planning on finding them on odesk.
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You need natives to translate into, cant be done well by a English person translating into Spanish. Well that was was I was told by a linguist I trust.
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I have used onehourtranslation.com with some good results.
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cantonese?
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Yes Jason. Lol.
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I have a friend from Spain who's asked if I know anyone who needs translation services... Shall I ask what her rates would be? I assume higher than 7¢ an hour, but it'd be top quality work.
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Yes please Teresa. Something o am looking to do in the next few weeks, so not an immediate thing.
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Just want to throw a spanner / wrench in to the works: if you're having a site translated and you expect the result to resonate with your target audience (human + bot), keep in mind:
1) Translation is hard. It needs to be done by a native speaker who is also extremely proficient in the source language. This will cost you real money; the best option is to find a person who knows what they are doing and is working free lance
2) Languages with a wide geographic reach have local nuances which need to be taken into consideration. Which geography do you want to reach? Try "Mi mate's ruck was nicked from the boot" in Los Angeles. If your accent isn't too strong, they'll have understood "was" and "from the"... How about sidewalk/pavement? Fanny & Fag? Spanish definite presents these types of problems as well. Chinese is actually multiple languages, with Mandarin & Cantonese being the most used. I'm not sure if the written language (symbols) is the same or if it changes...
Most of my translation contacts work with Italian / German / French / English, so I don't have specific names. There is an agency based in Milan which seems to have an extensive network of translators. They also have ties to Bruce Clay for what it is worth. http://www.agostiniassociati.it/ I'm not sure I can recommend them, but at least you could get a benchmark quote.
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We have good expriences with Tilti from Latvia.. we have worked with them in more then 20 languages and had checks done by other natives speakers afterward to check on quality. http://www.tilti.com/
From our experience it's good, fast and not expensive when compared to other translating agencies.
Their standard rates earlier this year were 14 euro cents/word (about $0.19) for Chinese (their highest rate) and 12 euro cents (about $0.165) for Spanish.
Other exotic languages like Russian and Eastern European languages cost 9 euro cents/word..
An effective system to manage translators may save a lot of time/costs.
Their translators usually work within our CMS, which has intuitive lists of things to do for every translator.
They just click the links in the list which lead to items to translate, translate it, click a button to submit it as translated and then they are returned to their list which became one item shorter. We do the word counts in our CMS and we pay per word.
If you'd like to try Tilti, my contact at Tilti is Olga Setinsone, Olga.Setinsone@tilti.com, she manages the translators.
If you contact them I'd appreciate it if you say hi from Damian Doyle ;)
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Damian, have tested their translations but having a native confirm the quality?
I remember a project we did for a client where the translation quality was important. We hired the same agency Dell uses in Europe. Then we send a Dutch text to Damian to have the quality confirmed and he was not impressed. So a big agency is not a guarantee for quality.
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>their translations but having a native confirm the quality
Yes. This was some years back when we first started working with them.. so for what it's worth.
Perhaps we did not check all 20 languages, but about a dozen. Among others Bill helped me to have somebody check on the Japanese ('no blatant errors in the translation, but perhaps stylistically a bit weak') and I asked Rumbas about the Danish ('I would say OK provided it was not too expensive and the original text was good.'). The Spanish checked out fine. We did not test Chinese. The conclusion overall was that it wasn't perfect but good enough.
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Yes please Teresa. Something o am looking to do in the next few weeks, so not an immediate thing.
Sent her a message today, will let you know as soon she gets back to me... :-) She's lived in the US for years now but visits Spain annually, so if you're looking for Spain-spanish (not Mexican-spanish), she's plenty fluent on both sides. :-)
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I would introduce some of the translation/copy-writing companies I use in Japan, but the Yen is super high now and they probably aren't competitive. There is a huge demand for Chinese translation in Japan these days (that's where all their manufacturing went.) and there are many native people here.
1) Translation is hard.
2) Languages with a wide geographic reach have local nuances which need to be taken into consideration.
Excellent points sean. I'm a real stickler for that sort of translation when localizing sites. It's rarely sufficient to simply get something translated. You need a native speaker to go over the translation and put some local copy-writing spin onto it as well. I let these guys rewrite things completely if they think it will work better in the local market.