Does high quality translation start before a single word is translated?

What should be discussed between client and translator to ensure the highest quality translation possible?  Surprisingly enough, there are often a lot of assumptions made between translator and client, particularly when a client is a new translation buyer. If one were to give a document to several different translators, one would receive back just as many different translations.  There is often...

Translators don’t like to be corrected, so we don’t tell them. Is this good policy?

I find that many translators do not like to be questioned or corrected.  Therefore, we do not question or correct them all that often.  Unlike most postings, I will ask my question early on in the post:  do all of you translators assume your work is NOT proofread if you don’t hear back from an agency on it? For example, at least at my company, we follow our TEP process carefully BUT, unless...

Calling all translators! Please take a moment to ponder my questions!

Today I felt a bit mean.  We were contacted by a client to clean up another company’s mistake (a local company we know), and I secretly felt a pang of glee.  I share the story of what the other company did with you all as a cautionary tale. Generally we don’t know what went wrong at another company, we just get the project as is and we get to work.  However, today’s customer wanted to...

Freelancers and formatting- Give Global2Local your advice, linguists!!

We all prefer the translation jobs that are word doc to word doc.  Simple, easy, everybody wins!! However, when the majority of your clients are businesses, those kinds of jobs are few and far between.  In fact, most recently, a local design firm handed me a folder backed with colorful brochures and marketing materials and said, “We would like these in Chinese and Indonesian please!”  (the...

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