Source

We live in a digitally advanced world. The introduction of new technology may result in less human capital requirement in some industries. However, the translation industry always requires human capital for accurate translation. Translation bots are never considered to be accurate. Comparing machine and human translators, human translators are preferred by businesses, hence, there is a lot of demand for human translators.

Machine translations like google translate are available for free but when it comes to the accuracy they do not match up with humans. A human translator will always be able to choose the appropriate word required while machine translation will not be able to do that. There are few myths about online translation services. Let’s have a look at them.

#1 Online translation services don’t have a big market

Our world has become digital. Many say that the online translation service has a small market but that’s not true. Online translation service can be used by all businesses from anywhere. The need for online translation services is increasing day by day. Companies are taking their brands abroad and this is possible only because of online translation services. As we know customers prefer to buy the products only if it is in their native language. That means all the product labels, brochures, documents, etc. have to be translated into the target language. With the help of online translation services, businesses reach the target customers without any hassle. 

#2 Anyone can become a translator

A person who knows two languages can be a translator -this is one of the biggest myths. Just knowing two languages will not make them a translator. Becoming a good translator is not an easy task. They should have the required qualification/degree to become one. Translators have to practice, read a lot and spend time talking to the target language speakers so that they will be able to understand the slang they use. The person has to be strong in two languages including spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. When translating in the target language they should be able to choose the correct word for the context. 

#3 Translators can translate anything

People think that a translator will be able to translate all types of documents. It is not true. Language translation is different compared to business translation. Similarly, only a person who is strong in a particular field/industry will be able to translate appropriately in that field/industry. For example, only a person who holds a degree related to medicine will be able to translate medical documents and you cannot expect a person from the legal industry to translate the medical document.

#4 Online translation is easy and is done by machines

When it comes to online translation people think it is an easy job and done by machines that can be completed quickly. This in not true either. Online translations are done by humans only. Online translation cannot be done quickly, just like other translations this takes time as well. The advantage of online translation is that you just have to submit the documents from anywhere in the world. For example, you may need translation for the movie and all you have to do is submit all your files online to the translation service provider. A movie may have a run time of an hour but translating it will take more than an hour. Remember, a translator has to hear the audio and translate it word by word and must convey the same meaning as in the film.

#5 No need for translators

People may think that there is no need for translators anymore because almost everyone speaks English these days. It is true that English is the universally accepted mode of communication and most of the world population can understand the language. But, out of 195 countries in the world, only 67 nations have English as their official language. The remaining still accept official documents in their respective native languages only. Hence, translation services are inevitable. 

Ref: People vector created by stories – www.freepik.com

The Flowering of The Online Translation Agency

According to the report “The Langauge Services Market 2018” by Common sense advisory (CSA) the market will increase to $56.18 billion by the year 2021. Due to the ever-growing need and presence of translation in businesses, medico-legal, and educational industries, online language service provides (LSPs) have mushroomed. As such one should show a bit of tenacity and a bit of veracity when choosing an online translation service. 

This article is aimed to provide pointers on how to choose a translation service. Let’s look at some criterion that will help you in deciding the Best Translation Company:

1. Accuracy promised: Certified translation agency usually promise accuracy close to the coveted 100%. However, several factors play a role in determining the accuracy of the end-translation. First, native translators – native translators help ensure that the translation will incorporate slang, colloquialism, and cultural references. Secondly, expertise – helps ensure the translation is performed quickly and without any errors. Thirdly, quality management standards in place – which provides advice on handling consumer relations and translation undertakings, choosing human resources, and managing project terms with the client.
2. Expert translators: It goes without saying expert translators provide the best translation. A native expert translator is what you should be looking for to acquire the best translation. A “niche translation”, be it medical, legal, or financial translation, should be provided by medical, legal, and financial native translators respectively. These translations can be a little costlier but in case of legal, medical, or financial cases accuracy should never be compromised with the cost. Expert translators call online professional translation company their homes and help in providing the best translation. A general-purpose translation is usually cheaper than those requiring experts.
3. Convenience: Translation requiring effort on your side is undesirable. Online language translation agency helps in achieving translation anytime, and anywhere. The online process is the epitome of convenience. The documents requiring translations are uploaded to a secure server, a quote is provided and once payment is done, the completed translation is delivered back to you in the delineated timeline. Begin translating conveniently today by searching ” professional translation services near me”.
4. Language support: Since translation is performed remotely translation services should provide support for a multitude of languages. From major languages of the world like English, Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian, and German to more esoteric languages – like Marshallese, Tigrinya, and Basque – online services have got you covered. Translation company in USA can provide support to 100+ global languages and you will be able to get the translation from any part of the world.
5. Cost: Traditionally translations have been expensive. Factor in time spent in translating, shipping, time spent traveling, acquiring a certificate of accuracy, and notary – the cost becomes mountainous. Online translation services that provide transparent and nominal fees are to be chosen. This can usually be seen through reviews – those translation services that unnecessarily hike prices receive a bad review. Also, some of the language translation companies provide a price-matching policy thus enabling you to acquire the best translation at the best possible rates.
   
6. Turnaround Time (TAT): Online translations have streamlined the process and invariably helped in reducing the costs. Sometimes if the translation is urgent use of multiple translators might be warranted – and professional translation services got you covered there as well. Online certified translation services with the help of remote translators and multiple translators to help you achieve translation for hundreds of pages of a book or a critical piece of scientific literature in the required time.  
7. Review and work samples: Customer review and work samples usually front lined in the websites of any major LSPs. When reviewing work samples be on the lookout for whether the translation meets the expectations in terms of quality. Another thing to be on the lookout for is consumer review – this acts as a litmus test of the points summarized above. As mentioned consumer review will help you in knowing how good the translation is, how quick the process is, and how transparent the pricing is.
8. Confidentiality: Translation services should provide confidence to their client. There are various protocols that translation services employ to help clients achieve confidentiality. It can include non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), HIPAA privacy compliance, the ability for the client to delete files from the server, ISO/IEC 27701 compliance, view-per-work policy, and end-to-end encryption. This information is included in the language translation services website and obviously helps in ensuring confidentiality.
9. Content types supported:  Some examples of document translation services include –
   1. Financial: Product descriptions, User reviews, Websites, Marketing collateral, Marketing & advertising, Customer support, Branding materials
   2. Legal: Contracts, Licenses & permits, Terms & Conditions, Service agreements, Trademarks & copyrights, Patents
   3. Media: Social media content, Mobile apps and games, Hard / soft news articles, Questions and answers
   4. Technology & Software: Documentation, Customer support, Websites, and apps, Training manuals
   5. Medical translation: Medical and pharmaceutical products, Medical devices, Documents for clinical trials including physician manuals, consent forms, and case report form, medical device manuals (IFU/DFU), hospital documentation, and medical reports
      

Summary

Choosing a proper online certified translation company will help guarantee accuracy, low rates, the meeting of deadlines, and confidentiality thus boosting your confidence.  

Certified Translation Services vs Notarized Translation Services

There are various confusions floating around notarized translation services and certified translation services. The biggest misconception is that both are fundamentally the same. However, the fact says that there is a massive difference between the two. Both are completely different from normal document translation services. Discussed below are various aspects based on which both the services can be distinguished.

What Is Certified Translation?

A certified translation service primarily means that the concerned translator or the language service provider issues a declaration stating that the translation done is a flawless and accurate representation of the original document. These services are often required while dealing with legal affairs, involving legal documents.

The legal documents stated above include marriage and birth/death certificates, immigration certificates, bonds made for adoption affairs, business agreements, and service agreements. Those are not written in the official language of the concerned nation; it has to be submitted at.

Who Is Certified Translator?

One should not confuse the certified translator and translation as well. A professional translator, when clears a test and acknowledged by the American Translators Association, then he/she becomes a certified translator. Talking about certified translation, it is basically a work (of translation) certified by an LSP to ensure that the work is the exact translation of the concerned document.

Not just in case of legal document translation, every kind of certified translation work including birth certificate translation services comes along with a legal record. In fact, this is the reason that the governments often ask for the certified translations only, during the legal proceedings. It can be claimed that certified translation is very much essential for a whole range of legal documentation.

Immigration translation services are among the most prominent domains, where the importance of certified translation services is felt. While applying for a provisional visa in a foreign nation, the concern nation demands the entire personal details to be deposited in the official language of it. Similarly, students pursuing higher education at a university of a foreign nation also have to submit certified translations.

Essential Aspects Of Certified Translations

Certified translations are essential to contain the original documents; those must have been thoroughly translated, including the signatures, signs, stamps, dashes, and seals. It is the responsibility of the concerned translator to highlight the sections in the original that don’t possess clarity as per the “not legible” norm in English translation. The translation made should be visually equivalent to that of the original document. Most importantly, the positioning of seals, signs, and other symbols should be accurate in the translation, as it is in the original document.

Notarized Translation – Its Usage, And Difference From A Certified Translation

A notary public is the one that is acknowledged by the government of the concerned nation to authenticate and checkout the needful legal procedures, which includes a notarized translation. These notarized translations are done for the documents often demanded by institutions while submitting foreign documents like diploma certificate obtained from a foreign institution, transcripts of a high school from a foreign nation, etc. Unlike certified translation services, here flawlessness or quality aspects are not the big aspects. It’s moreover like fulfilling the formalities asked by the concerned institution or university.

Any professional translator can go for submitting the documents containing translated works to the assigned notary public. However, the notary public asks the translator to take an oath regarding the accuracy of the translation done in the document. In fact, the concerned translator has to sign an affidavit as well, containing the authentic seal and sign of the notary public prior to its authentication. However, the notary public doesn’t often go for checking out the quality of the translation works. Rather, more importance is given towards the identification of the concerned translator.

English is the most spoken language worldwide. Owing to the ever-increasing demographics of “English users” there are some languages which they might find easy or difficult to learn. For example, the whole of the Anglophone community will agree that Chinese is one of the hardest languages to learn in the world, but is the hardest? – Interesting proposition. In this article we will list out some of the most difficult languages to learn especially for English speakers.

Top Hardest Languages To Learn

1. Cantonese/Mandarin
2. Polish
3. Arabic
4. Japanese
5. Russian
6. Korean
7. Turkish

#1 Cantonese/Mandarin

Speaking Mandarin to a Cantonese speaker is like, as the saying goes, “a chicken talking to a duck”. However, Cantonese is harder to learn than Mandarin – not discounting the fact that for an English speaker both of them are going to be pretty difficult. Cantonese has from 6 to 9 tones, each of which signifies different things. Mandarin only has 4 tones. The grammatical system, the writing system – and the whole logographic aspect of it, and the tonal nature of these both languages place them as the foremost hardest language to learn.

Chinese, however, is also a culturally and politically relevant language, opening the door to numerous career in translation and interpretation.

#2 Polish

Polish uses Latin script but has 9 additional letters (ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż). It also has seven diagraphs ch, cz, dz, dź, dż, rz, and sz. There are eight vowel sounds, but nine graphemes (a, ą, e, ę, i, o, ó, u, y). There are five genders: masculine, feminine, masculine inanimate, masculine animate, and neuter. Compared to English, which is considered to have no gender at all! There are seven cases: nominative, genitive, instrumental, accusative, dative, locative, and vocative. Compared to the English language, it is a very different scheme to produce sound – making it the second most hardest language to learn for English speakers .

#3 Arabic

Arabic is a very distant language from English with virtually no similarity. Speaking, writing, and the syntactical structure of Arabic is very different from English. Also, the dialectical dissimilarity of Arabic in the Middle East is big. Also, the diacritical marks present in Arabic writing can change the meaning of a word into another completely unrelated word. Hence, Arabic language overall is very difficult to learn for an English speaker. Another trivial fact, Arabic because of its guttural sound is the hardest language to learn for Chinese speakers.

#4 Japanese

First, there are the feared three systems of writing – the 2 kanas (Katakana and Hiragana), and traditional Chinese (Kanji). The Katakana and Hiragana are sound-based scripts used in day to day communication. Katakana is the basis for neologism (borrowed words). Modern Japanese is written with a combination of all the three scripts (sometimes the boundary is unclear) and to makes matters more confusing written sentences are written often with limited use of Latin alphabets. As such Japanese is one of the tough language to learn for English speakers.

#5 Russian

The case and gender system of the Russian language are very different from English – it has nominative, accusative, dative, prepositional genitive, and instrumental cases combined with three genders. This makes it tricky to learn Russian. Russian verbs have two versions, called perfective and imperfective. These are actually two different verbs used for each version, which does not equate to different forms of the same verb. So, for every Russian verb you learn, you need to learn two. Also, the actual words – they are long, a lot, and requiring loads of learning with various unfamiliar words in between.

#6 Korean

The Korean writing system, unlike Japanese and Chinese, is easy to learn – there are 24 basic letters and 27 complex letters that can be learned within days. In terms of speaking as Korean isn’t as tonal as Chinese – making matters a little easier. However, Korean still offers various difficulties in terms of speaking, the syntactical structure, and the vocabularies as a whole. Never mind the possibility of a combination of all of these instances is going to make learning Korean language is a tough job.

#7 Turkish

Turkish is an agglutinative language – which means expressions are made up of several suffixes. As such pronunciations for various words are going change according to contexts and the person who uses it. Turkish also has complex grammar. Turkish has a lot of cool features, written Turkish follows a Subject-Object-Verb pattern whereas English follows a Subject-Verb-Object pattern. There are order differences such as ‘prepositions’ following the noun in Turkish, main verbs preceding modal verbs, and relative clauses. These variations often make Turkish the hardest language to learn for an English speaker.

What groups all of these languages together, in terms of their difficulty, is their relative lack of connection (geographical distance) to the English language. Mastering any one of them is going to require grit and hard work. All of the languages listed here require at least 45 weeks and more of learning time to gain competence and often requires years of learning to gain mastery. Learning any one of these languages in combination with English places one in the highest-earning brackets in terms of translation jobs because of the difficulty in learning these.