Archive for September, 2008

6 Tips On How To Get A Good Translation: English To Russian

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

When you need a written translation done, it is an entirely different proposition from using an interpreter in a face to face situation.  While an interpreter must think and translate on the spot, there is generally a lot more leeway and time to think and consider a text when translating a document.  Your translator can think things through, consult a dictionary, specialist or colleague and consider the overall implications of different variations in the translation.  Balanced against these obvious advantages are the fact that a written translation, when complete, should be very close to perfect, both in its conveyance in meaning of the original document and in its grammar and presentation in the translated to language.  It should not be possible to tell that the document was originally written in a different language.  The following tips will help your translator to complete the job to a suitable standard.

Tip One:  Focus On Meaning Not Words.

This is where machine translations fail horribly.  Words are used to convey meaning, but directly substituting words will often lose the original meaning.  Translation is not a matter of simply replacing a word in one language with its counterpart in another, but is about translating the spirit and meaning of a document as accurately as possible too.

Tip Two:  Be Aware Of Your Abilities

Some translators are better than others.  Choosing a translator is often an exercise in weighing accuracy against cost.  If a bad translation was good enough then everyone would use software translations.  Because these will often come out horribly (as pointed out in Tip One), a human translation is needed.  You can choose a fast translation by someone who has experience in both tongues or progressively better by someone who has spent a lot of time developing their language in both English and Russian.

Tip Three:  Be Aware of Timeframes.

One thing that is often forgotten, when a good translation is needed fast, is the working location of the translator you are hiring.  Choosing someone in the same time zone as you may seem like a good idea initially, but they will most likely be working the same hours as you and sleeping at the same hours too.  If you find a translator in a reciprocal time zone, you will find yourself in the fantastic position of being able to give them work at the end of your day and have your completed translations ready, when you begin work again in the morning.

Tip Four:  Be Aware Of The Local Way Of Doing Things.

Just as understanding different languages is more than being able to swap words in and out, so is understanding regional conventions.  The perfect example of this is how different countries expect documents to be ordered in different ways.  Where a document is going to be used in an official capacity, it is a good idea to choose a translator who knows the conventions of writing in the specific area your document is aimed at.

Tip Five:  Don’t Rush A Translation

If there is an opportunity for you to take longer over a translation, then you should do it.  The more pressure is put on for a fast translation, the more likely little errors are to creep in.  Be aware, that translation is a specialist task and requires time and concentration.

Tip Six : Let Us Do It!

To make sure you can spend all your time on your core business and still have your translations done professionally, let us do the translation English to Russian for you. Please CLICK HERE for any information you need

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Where To Get A Translation: English To Russian

Saturday, September 13th, 2008

There are a number of different ways that you can go about translating English to Russian and which one is best suited to you is going to depend entirely on your situation and resources. For instance, if you want to set up a meeting time and place or pass on some simple information to a Russian speaker, then you will be able to use a different resource than, if you have a book or journal you are seeking to publish to the Russian market. In other words – your purpose will define your means of translation.

When you are thinking about where to get a translation from English to Russian, there are three basic possibilities. The first is to use any of the websites that offer machine translation online. Alternatively, you can get software to use offline that provides quality machine translation, including software to run on your own computer or specially designed hand held translation devices. Finally, and for the best quality translation you can get a human translation, either as a direct interpreter for speech or to work on a manuscript. Each method has advantages and disadvantages.

Using an online website has become much easier in recent years, and there are now a number of places that will offer a machine translation from English text to Cyrillic (Russian). This was previously the exclusive domain of Babelfish (a website named after the special fish invented in the Douglas Adams novel, Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, which allowed anyone to understand any language they heard), a website now run by AltaVista. More recently a number of sites have begun offering this service, amongst the best of which is not surprisingly Internet Giant Google. The main advantage of machine translation is that it is instant and (usually) free. The main disadvantage is that it is mostly a direct word for word swap which ignores grammar and context. For simple translations this is fine, but for more advanced concepts the meaning of a passage is very quickly lost. Google has tried to combat this through pure brute force, feeding its translation device billions and billions of pages of text in all languages to try and teach it grammar. The result is reasonably impressive but still nowhere near the quality of a human translation. Simple typing a few sentences into an online translator and translating to Russian and then back to English will show you how much variation there is in a machine translation.

Offline translation software and devices suffer from basically the same disadvantages without having the ‘free’ advantage thrown in. They do have their place, of course, and this is usually in a situation where people are meeting face to face and trying to communicate. The recent idea of traveling to Russia to find a bride, for instance, has been made much easier by the ability to buy a cheapish hand held translator for $150-$500.

The disadvantage of a human translation is obviously that humans don’t run on autopilot and so need payment. However, if you want to present a professional face then you simply cannot trust anything short of a human translation. When heads of state meet and do not share a mutual language, no-one would dream of attempting to let them talk through a computer – a human interpreter is used. They results of such talks are simply too important to entrust to a machine, which cannot understand context and convention in speech. In translating text the same level of trust needs to be established, because a misunderstanding in a translation cannot be explained away – it is recorded for ever.

So, the method you use is going to depend on exactly how exact you want your translation to be. Where superficial understanding is acceptable, a machine translation – either online or offline – will suffice, but where you require a high quality translation you can contact us to do the translation English to Russian for you.

Tags: Translation English to Russian
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