Technical manuals have a purely functional purpose and do not form part of what we would call great literature.
However, it must be acknowledged that they are essential in today's world of devices, intelligent systems and software. Moreover, they also have a legal purpose.
Although the discipline is relatively young, for a long time video game translation (or localisation in industry jargon) was entrusted to players rather than professional translators.
Nowadays, video game localisers are increasingly specialised in their field, and some even work in a translation agency that receives direct commissions from game publishers.
If your company has already been looking for a translator to revise/edit a text that was translated in-house, you may have some experience of how difficult it can be to find one.
Without having official statistics, I would say that most translators, if given the choice between doing a translation job or an editing job (revision), they would choose translation.
For any reputable translation agency, quotes are an important contractual document that requires special attention. In fact, it is difficult to back out once the quote is accepted, as it commits the agency to perform the work at the estimated price.
There is no doubt that free online translation tools are making great strides and are regularly used for understanding texts in unknown languages.
Unfortunately, for translations that are to be published or sent to third parties in a professional context, it is better to think twice.
Here are 3 good reasons to avoid free online translation, which I have chosen among many others.
One of the principles taught in translation faculties is that you should always translate from the original text. This is a reasonable idea , because in general nothing is more accurate than the original.
On occasion, I have faced this tricky question from a potential client as to why we charged more for translation from Spanish to English than from Spanish to Portuguese. After working in the same field for so many years, one loses perspective of things. I suppose that this is what they call “discontinuing education”.
When that potential client told me “how can I trust a translation that needs to be revised?”, I was caught up in his reasoning: Even I thought he was right! It's been a long time since that day, but I still remember as if it happened yesterday.
Translators specialized in economics are professionals with various hats. Although some have reached this stage without following the traditional curriculum, the typical profile continues to require a strong background in translation as well as finance.
The blog part of your website is of crucial importance for SEO. It is a section that is updated often and that search engines visit regularly.
If you have a bilingual website, or even more languages, the thorny question of the blog arises.
Even if it costs more time and money, translating your blog posts has important advantages with the consequent return on investment.
