Common Sensor Advisory’s article “Clearing up the Top 10 Myths about Translation”, published on The Huffington Post, points out some facts that may be surprising to the laymen, and may help answer some of the questions we receive related to myths in the translation industry.

Common Sense advisory is a well- known company in the translation and interpretation world, focused on bringing insight to global market leaders through international business market research.

The article leads to the conclusion that translation is an ever-evolving profession, expanding and reaching new horizons through advances in technological. Technological elements, like machine translation and crowdsourcing, will not eliminate the professional human translator but rather enable translation providers to reach higher levels of service.

Among the myths of translation the author listed, we would like to highlight 3 important points that we have covered in previous posts:

Myth #1. An interpreter and a translator are the same thing. An interpreter works with oral language while a translator works with written language. Also, interpretation and translation require very specific and specialized skills germane to the task they perform.

Myth #2. A bilingual person is a translator. In the Spanish version of our translation blog we posted an article explaining that speaking and having proficiency in a language does not qualify a person as a translator.

Myth #3. The need for professional translation services is decreasing. Translation services generate new profits and forge new frontiers for companies seeking to compete and communicate in a global market place.

Follow the link to read the Top 10 Myths of Translation and feel free to comment and add any myths not covered in this article.

JR Language will be present at Memoq Fest 2012 in Budapest, Hungary from May 8^th to the 11th. Memoq Fest is the annual user group meeting for Memoq, the translation tool developed by Kilgray Technologies. Memoq is an integrated translation and localization environment that aids project managers, translators, and editors in their productivity and quality assurance tasks.

Memoq is a Computer Assisted Translation tool or CAT tool that helps interact with translation memories and terminology bases and is one of the products that JR Language has in its arsenal of resources to aid productivity and quality for translation projects.

Sergio and Michael from our company will participate in the Train the trainer course, in workshops and will attend the 2 days conference. They are both looking forward to visit Budapest for a week of fun and interaction with the Kilgray team and Memoq customer base from around the world.

The two day conference is starting with a keynote presentation with the The Impact of Machine Translation on the Language Services Industry, topic that is in line with the content and trend discussed in the Globalization and Localization Conference in April of this year.

Sergio and Michael are looking forward to Memoq Fest and excited about the opportunity to interact and discuss ideas with colleagues and connect with other users from around the globe.

In today’s digital era, the internet has rapidly become the single most popular medium for searching information. As a result, businesses involved in multicultural markets must now expand their website to meet the diverse linguistic needs of their entire client audience. This “expansion” is called website translation and localization, and is becoming a growing necessity in the world of commerce.

However, the motive behind this post is to shed the truth on a few misconceptions many people have on this topic of website translation and localization. Many tend to overlook the complex and time-consuming efforts required to accurately produce a translated website that will satisfy foreign clients from distant nations and attract their business.

Here are 3 basic misconceptions at a glance:

1. A translation agency can quote and perform the translation with just the URL of the website.

a. In reality, the structure of the site and the platform used to store the content must be taken into account. Agencies need to be able to extract content through different tools. It is different to receive .html files than to extract content from a dynamic site stored in a Content Management System (CMS).

2. Translating keywords into different languages will be effective SEO for my multilingual website.

a. Keywords almost never translate smoothly, and might not be the phrase of choice for searching in the target culture. One must recreate the keywords in the target language using experienced native speakers who understand the meaning behind the original keyword and have the experience to research for equivalent keywords.

3. Using machine translation will suffice when translating my website (or any document for that manner).

a. Using human translators is a must. Although, large providers like Google and Microsoft, have released free translation web tools, one should not rely on them. These machine translators often produce awkward grammar and phrasing that appear unattractive and unprofessional from a client’s perspective.

When advertising and marketing your company’s products and/or services in global markets, the best approach is to start plan in advance and devote enough time to determine your needs.  There are several elements to consider when expanding to a multilingual site from an existing site or when planning to develop an entire multilingual site. Those elements can be group into four main categories:

• Audience
• Budget
• Translation process
• Technical Considerations

Please read our following four posts, which elaborate on these important categories. These posts will explore: your audience, your budget, the translation process, and the technical aspects of website translation.

If you want to share your experience in website translation and localization, please leave us a comment, send us an email to info@jrlanguage.com or call us at 1-866-389-5036.