Translation Tips

This page was written for our translators to give them tips how to translate. Translations can be a rewarding profession, because you can learn interesting things while translating interesting documents, learn how many companies, products and services operate while translating documents about them, and you often have the freedom to work when you want and in your own environment.

I am slowly migrating all these contents to another site, but will keep the table of contents here.

And speaking of cutting corners, there are many programs out there to help you translate and speed up your work. Whether you speed up your work by learning how to type properly, memorise shortcut keys, modify your toolbars, or use software to help you with your translations, every little corner that you cut to make your work faster will, yes, TRANSLATE into money, money, money! And translation memory (TM) tools can save/make you a lot of money indeed. But only if you find yourself repeating yourself a lot, such as with contract, legal documents, or specific technical documentation. Imagine finding yourself translating a similar phrase over and over again, like "lessor agrees to pay lessee by the end of the month". But imagine translating this phrase ONCE, and every time you come across the phrase in the future, the program already offers it for you, so you do not have to type it. And imagine that 80% of a 100 page document is already translated for you, so that you get paid the full price but only have to translate 20% of it, with some extra work to connect the loose ends and pretranslated phrases? So this all depends on the type of work you regularly get, and if your customer has not clued in on TM yet. There are many TM tools out there and I will try to give a description about them later. They can get pretty pricey, but can pay off. So you should consider this as an option, and because they can get pretty pricey, weigh and research this issue carefully.
Here you will find our very own instructions how to work with Transit.
 

And if you do plan to use a translation memory tool, you will definitely also want a good OCR program. Which can prove quite useful even if you are not using a translation memory tool. For example, you get a large .pdf file which has a lot of tables and graphs in it. One option is to have that file open in one program and visible in the top half of your computer monitor, as explained above < , while typing into a blank Word file in the bottom half of your computer monitor. With this approach, you will have to create the tables, possibly punch all the numbers in manually, and possibly resort to some fiddly approach concerning the graphics.

But what a good OCR program does is it scans the original document (you can use a scanner for paper documents, or simply open the file in the OCR program if it is an electronic document), creates the tables for you, punches in all the numbers, then converts the text into actual text in a Word document, or any other format that you request it to. So you can go right away and just type over the text as explained later < and not have to worry or waste your time with creating tables and punching in numbers.

Or you can take this new electronic version of the original document and import it into your translation memory software, so that repeating phrases are automatically translated for you, and you do not have to worry about formatting at all, exporting your translation into the original format once you are completed. Isn’t that wonderful?

There are many OCR programs but the best seems to be FineReader. It can recognise many languages too, and the latest versions are very good at the most complicated formatting, and can import from many different types of programs.
 

Once you have accepted the work, you should take a little bit of time to examine it. You might be surprised to find entire sections which repeat or are very similar in content. In such as a case, there are several ways how you can deal with this, explained later < .

If the document has a lot of tables and graphs, you might consider OCRing. If it has a lot of text which looks like you have translated in the past, you can pump it into your translation memory software and reap the juicy rewards.

It might be easiest to just prepare it from scratch in an empty Word file, but for this you will need to know how to format in Word, explained in the next section.

And the last option could be to type directly in the document, whether it was sent to you in electronic format, or you converted it into that with your OCR program.

One option is to get an upgraded version of Adobe Acrobat (to which you can find a link on our Download Translation Programs pages) which would allow you to type directly in the .pdf file.

A lot of times your customer might want the translation delivered in Word, so that they can use it for their internal needs and because their secretaries and other staff are not readily equipped with a fancy program like you have and which allows you to edit .pdf files. In this case, the OCR program can convert the format to Word.

Once in Word, there are a few simple tips to keep in mind: … <

A more extensive section. Please refer to the Formatting in Microsoft Word webpage.

This subject has already been covered in our Translator Information page.

Besides those tips, obviously one very important aspect of translations is the choice of terminology. For this it is highly advisable to get yourself a good computer translation dictionary. When I first started translating I had an impressive library of translation dictionaries, but once I finally migrated to a computer dictionary, I marveled at the amount of time I used to spend leafing through endless pages looking up words. Not to mention that I often had to look for the same word seven times over before it sunk into my head. And not to mention that I'd often have to leaf through several dictionaries before finding the term I was happy with. The advantage of a computer based translation dictionary is that you can add terms to it. So if you do have a fancy library of dictionaries and occasionally need to refer to it, it is no problem to add your research to custom develop your dictionary. A single dictionary you can refer to, which instantly accesses your term for you by simply typing in (or copying) the word and pressing ENTER. MUCH faster. I have to admit that, when previously referring to my paper dictionaries only, I'd often rather guess than waste another minute leafing through endless pages, so you can expect your quality to improve as well.
Custom developing your dictionary also applies to any research you might perform on the internet. There are a lot of online dictionaries to be found, and we have added a lot of them (and hope to continue with this endeavor) to our translation resources pages.
When using your computer dictionary, you obviously want to develop proficiency in the old ALT TAB, which allows you to switch quickly between different software open on your computer. Or if you are translating from a source file on your computer (such as a .pdf file as opposed to from a printed document), you may already have two programs running for your translation needs, in which case using ALT TAB for a third program could get annoying and complicated. In this case I press Escape to minimise the dictionary after use, and the mouse to summon it back.

But even with your library of paper dictionaries, robust and customised computer dictionaries, and the world of on-line dictionaries, you may still run into times when you simply do not find a clear term. In such cases, or when I am trying to decide between several possible terms, you might try searching the term on google. The term with the most results (number of pages out there containing the word) would probably be a better choice, as it is obviously being used more frequently.
Or for very specific terminology, you might try surfing for the source term, in case one of the pages mentions the translation (useful when translating into English).

Or tell your customer that you are not certain of these terms, that you can accept the same price but that you will have to guess the translation of those terms. Sometimes a customer is willing to accept this, but communicate on this matter and make sure your customer is aware and agrees. A poor option would be to just guess and hope that your customer will not notice. Remember, if you customer catches you once, it will not trust you and probably never again want to use your services. So consider this point carefully. Customers do not fall from trees like apples in fall. Anyway, once you do spend the time making sure that you produce a good translation, not only will you be able to sleep with a happy conscience at night, not only will you gain greater respect from your customer and lead possibly lead to other customers through them, but you will learn something yourself, become more professional, and have the option to add these terms to your dictionary. So make sure to use all resources at your disposal to make a good job, and do not take shoddy shortcuts with quality. The little bit of time you save now could mean lots of lost work and idle days in the future, when you will regret that you did not spend the extra time to make sure you did a job well done.

What to Charge for a Translation Job

This section has been answered in greater detail on a translator or translation rates, charges and prices page.
 

Getting Paid for Translation Work

This section has been answered in greater detail in the getting paid for translation work page.
For information on getting paid by us, refer to the information for translators page.
 

Staying in Touch

One of the most important aspects of being a professional translator is to stay in touch, be easily reachable and to respond quickly to enquiries. Nowadays many translation companies will send out emails to several verified translators enquiring of their availability. The first to respond to such an enquiry can often be the one chosen to take the project. Hence it is within your interest to know when an email comes in and to respond quickly to it. One good way how to accomplish this is to divert all your emails as a text message to your mobile phone. Or pay for a service, such as mobilem.cz (works all over the world, unfortunately not in English), which will divert messages sent to a special email address to your mobile phone. Usually you can set up your regular email address to forward a copy of incoming emails to your special email to mobile text message address.
    Even basic mobile phones can be used to respond to incoming emails, the details of which you should find out from your mobile signal provider (not the phone in terms of hardware but the company you pay for your mobile signal).
    Or you can get extra fancy and buy a mobile phone ppc/pda, some of which come with their own popout keyboards. For more details on setting up such an email system you can refer to our perfect email solution pages (where you will also find useful information how to knock out spam, if you are receiving a lot). You can also refer to the Internet Connection While Traveling pages for different ways how to hook up to the internet when on the road, or how to send (and receive) translated files from your laptop to your customer through your mobile phone (and other ways).
    Other ways you can get fancy, for example if you do a lot of traveling and often change sim cards, is by getting a SkypeIn account, buying a telephone number(s) from a large selection of countries and diverting the incoming calls, through the internet, to any local number of your choice.

If a customer will grow to trust that you will always respond quickly to their emails, they will have a greater tendency to depend on you and send you more work.

But using fancy gadgets and systems to respond quickly to customer enquiries is only one ingredient in keeping your customer happy and ensuring a constant supply of work for yourself. Obviously performing a good job, as explained in some sections above, is important, but overall pleasant communication is also very important. Translators can be an odd lot who spend much of their time glued to a computer screen, by themselves on their own little island, and communicating with them can sometimes get antsy, which can sour relations and lead to a loss of some customers. If there is a problem, such as slow payment or a slow response to your emails, you should exercise patience. If you are angry about something, it is good to first flush out your anger by writing them a fuming letter in your mind. Always make sure you are fully sober whenever writing out of passion, and try to maintain as professional and kind tone as possible. If you do not have a solid contract with them as explained in the getting paid for translation work section, screaming and ranting with capital letters and explanation marks wont necessarily help you at all. Being kind and appealing to their sympathy often works much better. Do not let yourself get arrogant and think you are the best translator in world that your customer could never do without but always strive to create as pleasant an atmosphere as possible. If you do that while always providing timely delivered and quality translations, you can secure for yourself as much work as you can handle. If you start to receive more work than you can handle, maintain your professional attitude and consider slowly raising the price of your valuable services, as explained in the translation rates, charges and prices section.
 

Spellcheckers

If you do not have a version of Word in your own language, or need a spellchecker in a language you do not have, you can purchase one or a package of languages from Mircrosoft itself. Just go to their website and you should be able to find where you can purchase this. Or order it through your local computer shop.
Another option is to use OpenOffice.org. This is a freely downloadable set of programs which can open and work with Microsoft Office programs like Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and has free spellchecking dictionaries as well (refer to one and two), which may possibly be usable in Word by going to Tools > Options > Spelling & Grammar tab. There you can choose or add dictionaries through the Dictionaries icon. You can probably use several dictionaries at one time.
For later versions of Word, select your text (for example CTRL A), and go to Tools > Language > Set Language. Words not found in the dictionaries you have installed/chosen will have a red squiggly line under it. Press those words with your right mouse button, which should generate a drop down menu of closely spelt words from the dictionary. You can also add words to the dictionary, or just have them ignored in that particular document. For this function to work properly, you need to have that language dictionary installed as explained in this section above.

Keyboards

There are many different types of keyboard layouts. When you buy a new external keyboard, it might come with an install disk, or your operating system may automatically recognise it. This aspect concerns the positioning of the individual keys themselves, as different keyboards have keys positioned in slightly different locations or ways. If you are having problems in this area, you might try adding keyboards according to the instructions directly below, or you can try right mouse clicking on My Computer, choose Properties, Hardware tab, and click on the Device Manager icon. Open up Keyboards and right click on your keyboard, and play around in that area. You can look on the internet for a driver (search on google for the word driver plus the model or serial number of your keyboard, or other relevant information) and try installing or updating to a new keyboard driver. Or uninstall it and reinstall it, or let Windows find it itself after uninstalling it. Before tampering too wildly with in this area, you should create a System Restore Point as explained in our Computer Tips section.
Once you have your keyboard layout set up properly, you may want different languages attached to that keyboard. For example, a German to Polish translator will want at least two language keyboards installed on their computer, in case they will want to type in some German words (such as names etc.) while they are translating into Polish. To add more languages to your keyboards, in Windows XP (follow similar logic with other Windows or other operating systems) go to Control Panel > Regional and Language Options. Click on the Languages tab and then Details. Here you can add or remove various languages to your keyboard, and choose the keyboard layout as well. With the Key Settings tab you can assign a particular shortcut key to jump from one language to another (I prefer to use ALT SHIFT, because I often use CTRL SHIFT to select text with the arrow keys), which is quicker than having to use your mouse and the language bar if shown in your system tray at the bottom of your screen (notice the Language Bar icon in this keyboard layout window you are presently in).
And finally, once you have everything set up, you may want to view your keyboard layout. Or you might like a program CharMap (character map) when selecting special characters. When using the charmap program, notice the shortcut key for each character (such as ALT 0169 for the Copyright symbol - you hold down the ALT key while punching in the number 0169 on the number pad, and then let go of the ALT key. For laptops you need to switch a portion of your keyboard to the number pad, usually by holding down the blue Function (Fn) key at the bottom left of the keyboard and then pressing the key NumLk (number lock)). This ALT shortcut key should work on any keyboard, so it is good to know in an emergency. Or for crazy characters you might occasionally need. You can download the keyboard viewer and the character map programs from out translation programs website.
Another option is to buy an external keyboard for your laptop. They are not expensive.

Translating outside with your laptop

Although you may have made a perfect and beautiful translation environment for yourself according to the tips above, sometimes its nice to have a change of your working environment, such as outside in a park or on the beach. But then you run into the problem of sunlight making it difficult to see your screen properly. For this purpose I have created a special Theme in my Windows setup where my background is light grey and my text is coloured black. On your keyboard or laptop you should be able to find a brightness and a contrast key/button. Adjust those as well. You may also want to zoom in on the text more, or temporarily increase the font sizes, if possible. Then you will want to wear a baseball cap to shade your eyes. Don't forget to chew bubble gum so you look like a cool American. And lastly, you will want to be genius like me and manufacture the super cool portable laptop sunscreen. You will find a picture below, and at some point I will try to add to these pages a detailed schematic of its construction, but for its basic construction instructions, read here:
Have one or two pliers with which to bend the hard wire. You can get hard wire at any electrical shop. Get a nice thick one which does not bend easily, or use your logic. Get a wire with a plastic coating so that you do not scratch your laptop. One wire is for around your lcd monitor, resting on the top and secure at the bottom. At the top you have extra for the hinge mechanism. The second wire loops into the hinge mechanism so that, when opened, it juts out the top of the computer monitor towards you. The reason I have devised this hinge mechanism is so that I can fold it when not using it and stick it into the outer sleeve of my laptop case. Otherwise, some permanently fixed jutting out structure will make it inconvenient to carry around or store.
Once you have the wire mechanism set up properly (the hardest part, for which I will try to upload the schematic at some point), you sow over top of the top wire part some thin black textile, to keep out the light. You want some extra material for the sides of the monitor, to keep out light coming in from the sides, which you can then fasten to the back of the monitor using velcro (I have velcro attached to black cloth sown around the wire frame which clamps onto the monitor itself).
And lastly, from the textile shop you can also get some textile elastic (used around the waste for underwear and for supporting other garments), and sow that onto the dangling side textiles, near the bottom end and connecting the two sides, so that you can slide this elastic fabric under the computer, hence holding them in place so that the wind does not blow them all over the place. Genius eh? But that is just one of the great benefits of being a freelancer, so take advantage of your freedom and improve the quality of your life!

Once you have that set up, you don't want your laptop to overheat, so you might want to work under a big umbrella, or at least put a white t-shirt or white fabric draped over the back, to bounce off the hot sunlight. With your hand occasionally check the heat coming out the fan exhaust of your laptop to make sure it is not much hotter than it usually is, or does not feel excessively hot, otherwise it will wear down some component within it and greatly shorten the life of your laptop, if maintained hot like this over longer periods. It may also be hot if your processor is working hard. For example, with very large Word files, I sometimes find the processor working at 100%, which heats up the components, and starts the fan running at full speed, jetting out hot air. You can find what programs are using a lot of processor speed through the Task Manager (CTRL ALT DELETE) and stop those programs from running, if possible. Keep your laptop running as cool as possible. If it is Word that is forcing the processor to run at full speed and which you might need for translating (hence you cannot simply turn off this program), consider breaking up your file into smaller parts, or Save As into other formats. You can always paste it back together (or Insert File) at the end. More detailed tips on processor speeds through our Computer Tips webpages.

And lastly, be careful when working on the beach. Be careful about sand getting or blowing into your keyboard, and about damp salty air drawn into the air intake on your fan system. Damp salty air circulating through the interior of your laptop can do lots and lots of damage, and even clog up your fan. If your fan gets clogged up and can't spin, I found that blowing hard into the exhaust area forced the fan to spin at high speeds and help loosen it up. You laptop might not even start (a security measure) if your fan won't start spinning, so blowing inside like this is a quick solution. Otherwise, get yourself a tiny screw driver kit, and if you feel bold enough and have steady and surgical hands, you can take apart your laptop and clean the insides with a q-tip (those little sticks with cotton on the ends you use to clean your ears with). You can dip those into a little bit of clean water, possibly rubbing alcohol, to clean your motherboard and all other parts which look like they have a thin layer of salt on it. Such a thin later will eat away at your electronics, and if thick enough, will eventually become conductive, meaning it will short out your circuits, possibly leading to permanent damage.
So be careful. The heaviest and dampest salty air you will find at an elevation closest to the sea water, and at a location closest to the sea. So you may just have to suffer and work higher up and farther away from the sea. You can't have everything y'know. Generally I find I can feel the saltiness and dampness in the air (your skin gets sticky quickly). On a windy day, you will have to go away farther, or just go inside.

You will notice the laptop with white t-shirt shield sitting on the lawnchair.

Translation Agency  |  Email US  |  Translation Resources  |  Introduction to PHP
Translation Jobs  |  Translation Agencies  |  World Languages  |  Translation Services

Link Exchangep align="left">More translation tips:

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/log/transtip.htm - by Peter Suber, Philosophy Department, Earlham College - "In this hand-out I treat the notation of truth-functional propositional logic and first-order predicate logic as a language, and give guidance on translating from English into this foreign language. In general, "logical" issues, such as methods for making use of the expressions once translated, are omitted here."
http://www.twigg.de/tips.htm tips by a German translator.
http://www.jb-translator.com/spanish-translation-tips.htm - Translation tips for when translating in Spanish.
http://www.languagealliance.com/legal-translation-tips/ - Legal translations and interpretation translation tips.
http://www.translatortips.com/ - a detailed book of translation tips that you can buy, with other useful resources for translators.
http://www.linguabase.com/tips.asp - some useful translation tips, and a 111 page e-book on translation tips that you can buy.

Enter your search termsput type="text" name="q" size="31" maxlength="255" value id="sbi"> style="display: none">Submit search form

French to English Translations Translator

Copyright © KENAX, Copyright © KENAX, by Karel Kosman - All Rights Reserved Worldwide.