betterlanguages.com translation company is delighted to announce that we have achieved ISO 9001 certification. As the major international standard for quality assurance, we have been working towards certification over the last 18 months, having identified achievement of the standard as a key business aim. We are also looking at the Environmental Standard ISO14001, and are working on implementation over the next 12 months.

One of the issues for a translation company with QA is the wide range of projects that we work on. These range from complex multilingual website translations, to single language certificate translations for private clients. Much of our work is for retail, but even two apparently similar clients can have significantly different needs. Some languages can give compatibility issues for instance, and we often need to typeset artwork in the Middle Eastern version of Illustrator for right to left languages such as Arabic and Farsi.

Mike Hunter, CEO of betterlanguages.com had this to say about the achievement of ISO 9001: “we are delighted to have achieved ISO9001 certification, we were always clear that the system was more than just a badge, but rather a tool for ongoing improve of  management systems and oparations.”

We are pleased to announce the appointment of a new Translation Manager, Sion Radsma starts with us next week. Sion is Welsh, from Cardiff and holds a Masters Degree in Translation, with a first degree in languages. Sion’s interests include rugby, he is new to the Nottingham area, and we wish him well as he settles in.

Andy Moxon has just finished work with us, after 2 years working part time as our Finance Manager. Andy runs his own business as an Independent Financial Advisor, and as his business is growing he needs to devote his time to it. We wish him every success. Julie Page is joining us in a similar role, and we look forward to working with her.

BBC news today reported that the Government is considering changes to food labelling requirements in the UK. Specifically the “Best before” date requirements are under discussion, the argument being that it can be confusing to customers who often do not distinguish between “Use by” dates, and “best before”. As we specialise in food label translation, this debate is clearly of interest to better languages.

Mike Hunter our CEO had this to say: “as a translation company, our greatest concern with food labelling is for harmonisation across the EU. Any move to improve information for consumers is to be welcomed, but with moves towards major legislative changes in food labelling within the EU, we feel that UK consumers would be better served by the UK Government lobbying for the best possible outcome when new EU wide regulation is introduced.”

Current EU thinking appears to suggest that much more information will be legally required on pack, rather than less, as the UK Government appears to be suggesting. The problem with this, is that it is contrary to the aim of sustainable packaging, and reducing packaging waste. It will also make multilingual packaging much harder to produce. Our view is that there has to be a better way of providing high quality information to consumers, specifically a move towards information being available online – rather than all printed on pack, would help the sustainability issue, and allow more and clearer information to be available to consumers.

Read almost any translation industry website and you will read claims about translation quality. Many translation companies (us included) have an ISO9001 based quality assurance system. So what differentiates us as a quality translation services provider?

1. Getting it right first time: we pay a lot of attention to using the best translators. Its always easier to tweak a good piece of work than it is to rectify errors. We are doing a proofreading job at the moment which is proving a bit of a nightmare, the underlying issue is that the original work (not ours) is not of good quality. Despite our proofreader having substantial sector specific experience, it is proving very difficult to eradicate all the previous mistakes. Some translation companies start with poor translation, or even machine generated translation in the hope that the process will be speeded up, and there will be a quality outcome if the proofreader is good enough. There are several fundamental flaws with this premise: It is always easier to improve a good text and sometimes it is quicker and easier to start again than to work through a long error list. Things like word order can be a nightmare, a machine will follow the source language word order more often than not, there will be wrong translation, often with comical errors which a human translator would never make. This can give a proofreader much more work to sort out the mess, than if they were undertaking a new translation.
2. Perfection: unfortunately, despite claims to the contrary by some of our competitors, translation is not a science, and perfection does not exist. Even with supposedly consistent wording like a legal hazard warning, two translators working independently could produce a different result. Some areas of translation are much more prone to this, for example marketing texts can have style and tone of voice issues where there could be quite a diversity of “good” translation, and matching the client’s preferred style and tone can take a lot of work.
3. Translation errors: all translators make mistakes, even with work which has been checked a multiple number of times the occasional error can slip through. We don’t claim that translations are completely error free, what we do claim, is that translators will exercise due diligence in doing a professional job, and if things go wrong, we will work very hard to put them right.
4. Teamwork: the more we understand our clients, and the closer we work together, the better the translation result will be. Don’t be surprised if we ask for clarification of issues regarding the source text, if the text is unclear in the original language the translation won’t be better. Often product pictures or illustrations, or other background information can be invaluable to the translation team.
5. Client preference: sometimes clients want preferential changes to a document, the translation isn’t “wrong” as such, but the client prefers particular terminology, style or choice of words. When proofreading ourselves, we always ask proofreaders not to make preferential changes, their task is to look for errors in the translation, but if the client has particular preferences, we would want these respected and included. The danger here is that you can get into a game of “guess”. A new client sends a piece of work without any background or reference material, the translation company takes the job in good faith, delivers the work, and then the client comes back with lots of preferential changes. If there is existing work, or reference material, or even a style guide for the specific target language, it makes this process much easier for both parties.

Summary: quality is a big issue with translation, our approach is to work closely with clients, to understand their products and services, and to deliver quality translation. We choose the best translators to lead on a project with the view that it is always easier to tweak something of quality, than to improve something which is poor. As one of our multi-national clients put it “betterlanguages.com aren’t just a middle-man, they are a service, and that it the kind of translation company we need”.

Like everyone in the UK this morning watching the news from Japan we have been quite shocked by the earthquake and tsunami. Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone caught up with this terrible event. As a translation company, we obviously have links with Japan, as we translate between Japanese and English on a regular basis. As far as we are aware at the moment none of our translators are directly affected.

Russian Translation Services have been a speciality of betterlanguages.com right from the early 1980s. Russian continues to be one of our most translated languages.

In the early days of the internet, Russian could be a real pain to deal with, not because of any issues with translation, but because of font compatibility problems. We still occasionally come across small design houses who don’t have the capability to typeset Russian fonts, but these days there is very good Unicode compliance, allowing us to supply most Russian translation in a word format. Translating into Russian can cause layout problems for artworkers, because Russian is particularly long relative to English, and indeed longer than most other languages we work with regularly. When translating legal contracts where the wording is side by side with English and Russian together, it is quite often necessary to use a smaller font size for the Russian, or you end up with loads of blank space between paragraphs in the English.

We translate both ways, Russian to English, and English to Russian. Translators and proofreaders are always native of the target language, and of relevant specialism. With Russian care label translation, we have translators who have worked with us for over twenty years. Care labelling can be very tricky in Russian for two reasons, one is the space issue alluded to before, and the other is that Russia has very strict regulation with regards to fibre compositions and care labelling. It is therefore particularly important to use a specialist Russian translator.

Contact betterlanguages.com today to discuss your requirements for Russian Translation

Translating food labels is an important part of our translation work. As you would expect, there are important legal issues with food label translation. Legal names and ingredients lists have to be correctly translated, there are also often important stylistic issues, for example designers often like to see consistency in the way that text is laid out. When dealing with a language, or several languages with which they are not familiar, this can cause problems. It can be difficult enough to spot errors in your own language, but things like accent errors, special characters not displaying correctly, or even inserting the wrong language, are easily made. For this reason we offer an artwork proofing service, where the original translators check the final artwork against their original translation. Food label law varies from country to country, and we have access to legal specialists if clients require this kind of service. Even localising labels between the UK and US markets is not straightforward, as the FDA have quite different requirements than the European Union. This is an introduction to a complex topic, more information can be found on our food label translation page, we also have pages about typesetting services, and translation and branding.

Chinese Translation is an important part of our work. Many of our regular clients require translation into Simplified Chinese, or Traditional Chinese. Need Chinese Translation? Ask better languages for a quote.

Chinese Translators:

We always use professional translators, who are native of the target language. With Chinese it is also particularly important that the translator has a good understanding not only of English language, but also of English culture, so that they can most accurately reflect the source language within the translation. Much of our work is translating documents for retail, this can include product packaging, food labelling, care label translations, as well as translating product guides and user manuals.

Unsure about which Chinese Character Set you require?

Clients are often unsure of which character set is required. As a general guide, the difference between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese refers to the two character sets used when writing Chinese, the Simplified character set is the official written language of the Peoples Republic of China, whilst the Traditional character set is used mainly in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

How do I know that the Characters are displaying correctly?

There is good font compatibility with Chinese these days, with most Chinese fonts being Unicode compliant. You do however need to have the fonts loaded on your computer to be able to see the characters. When we provide Chinese translations in a word format, we always provide a complimentary pdf copy, this allows you to verify what you should be seeing on screen.

Typesetting Chinese:

We offer a typesetting service in Chinese with either character set. Most major design programmes work well with Chinese characters providing your designer has the necessary fonts. They can be expensive to buy, so if you aren’t dealing with Chinese regularly it is probably better to use our typesetting service. Layout in Chinese is a designers dream! As each character represents a word, either variant of Chinese is always shorter than an English equivalent text. It is also possible to line break at any point without losing sense.

Like many industries, the translation industry has a lot of specialist jargon. Translators, and translation companies love spouting it, and sometimes forget that it can be confusing. Here are a few favourites, and our explanation, some of the definitions shouldn’t be taken too seriously:

Machine Translation (can be abbreviated as MT): this is when the machine does the work. Essentially two databases of words are matched, and the original language replaced by the new language. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple, as you can tell if you have ever tried to “translate” a webpage using a free tool like Google. The problem is that you get drivel out. It may be OK, if you just want to get some general gist, but no more. If a translation agency says that they use machine translation, you should run a mile.

Computer Assisted Translation (or CAT). Though it sounds the same as machine translation, this is quite different. The translator works with a programme which commits phrases to memory as they work, if they then work with the same or a very similar text again, they are prompted by matches from the memory. Unlike machine translation, this matches larger units, such as complete sentences. It helps the translator, as they can build a glossary and ensure they use consistent terminology. For documents with a high level of repetition, it means that they can focus on the new text, and simply proofread the matching sections. This gives productivity gains for the translator, and is cheaper for the client. The very important difference from machine translation, is that the text is always human authored and edited. There are current moves in the industry to integrate machine translation into CAT, we are concerned by this, as the underlying philosophy, that the machine produces text which is then improved by a human proofreader, is fundamentally unsound. It is always harder to improve a poor text, than to take a well written one and tweak it. Some MT is so bad, that it really wouldn’t be any use at all.

Localisation: this is the process of adapting a text for a local audience, usually in a different country. Some localisation issues are very obvious, for example if your text includes a phone number is it in the correct format for the target country? The aim being that someone can read the document, and use the phone number in the target country. A result may be that you get phone calls that you can’t deal with. Will your switchboard in London be able to respond to phone enquiries in Spanish or Russian? Localisation should also take account of culture. An example might be a translator being asked to translate a food product containing alcohol for an Islamic country, if they simply translate the text,they aren’t helping their client, as the product will be stopped at port, the client needs to be aware of the potential problem. Here correct localisation, may mean selling a different product range.

Interpreting: this is the spoken task of expressing the meaning of one language in a second language. Interpreting is quite a different skill to written translation, and requires the interpreter to be able to listen in one language, and express in the other. This can be simultaneous (i.e. delivered as the other person is speaking), or consecutive (delivered after the original speaker has spoken).

Transcreation: this is the new buzz word in the industry, the concept being that an original text might need major alteration to be presented in a new language. A good example might be a marketing text, where the translator is looking to reflect a correct writing style in the target language, and therefore has to do more than just reproduce the original text in the target language. The problem with this is that there is an extent to which all good translators do this, as they aren’t giving a literal word for word translation into the target language, but should actually be thinking about how the text reads and sounds in the target language.

betterlanguages.com translation agency wishes all our customers, suppliers and website readers a very Happy New Year!

2010 has been a very challenging year for us. A year of big changes, we moved premises in March, and appointed a new Translation Manager. We’ve found trading conditions to be tough as clients have still been adjusting to changing global conditions. Despite this, we have widened our customer base, continued to build our reputation as a quality translation services company, and introduced an ISO 9001 and 14001 based quality assurance and environmental management system, for which we are awaiting formal accreditation.

2011 promises to be a year of new opportunities, we already have exciting translation projects in progress for January and February delivery, and are awaiting decisions on other major pieces of work.

We look forward to collaboration with suppliers and customers in 2011 and wish everyone a very Happy New Year.