How do translation professionals handle the customer who questions their expertise?

  A situation came up this past week that I would like to share and get some feedback on, especially because I saw the situation one way and the main translator on the project saw it another.  The situation involved not the translation process, but how far we would go to handle the client’s queries after that fact. In my experience, we generally have two types of translation clients. ...

Should Your Online Strategy Utilize “Free” Translation Tools?

The article below was sent to me by a client whose website we had just translated.  He was curious to know what we thought about this “strategy” of using free online tools rather than a professional translator.  Curiously enough, I also picked up another article today that demonstrates the folly of online translation tools, available at: ...

Deliberately changing the text of a translation

While poking around online last night, I found, as I often do, an article that lead to another article, that lead to another article. The first was a website regarding Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” Here is the paragraph that caught my attention: In a sense, no book written in the conceptual ancient Chinese can be completely translated into English prose sentences. The least of which is that...

An Interpreting Tale- How we all affect each other

While attending the small business matchmaker event in Dayton OH today, I got into a conversation with the representative of a large Ohio healthcare organization. After telling the woman what my company did and where we were from (Cincinnati), she said to me, “Are you from the company whose interpreters sleep on the job?” Of course I said “No, “ because I was not, but, after further...

How to Judge the Quality of a Translation

When you send a document out to be translated, how can you tell that the document you get back is a good one? This question is probably not asked too much among those of us who work in translations day in and day out, but it is a valid question from an outsider. I will never forget the call I got very early one morning at my first language services job, shortly after 9/11. A man called the office...