Monday, 7 January 2013

About Translation Jobs

By Alex Alwo


Community translation encompasses all translating (and interpreting) carried out to facilitate inter-community relations within a given country where diverse linguistic (and cultural) communities cohabit. It is worth mentioning only as the daily activity of community translators-interpreters whose numbers are sharply on the increase in multilingual countries.

So-called Internet translation is the (immediate) translation of online material: e-mail messages or mailing list contents or the information posted on forums - a type of translation that is sometimes automated or done using translation engines.

In the most common variant, the translator gains access to the client's material through an ID and a password and translates the segments (usually sentences or menu options) that are displayed on screen in a table. The translator types the translation in a box opposite or below the text, moving from one box to the next as the segments follow each other. The terminology is usually already embedded or, if not, available online too. In the most extreme cases, the system does not display the next segment until the one in hand has been translated (and has disappeared from the screen together with its translation). As a rule, translators dislike this setup as it leaves them absolutely no leeway, is a serious obstacle to cohesion and coherence, and allows no checking or editing once the translation has been keyed in.

The situation where the translator retrieves the client's material on an FTP server or by any other form of downloading is not, properly speaking, on-line translation: it is simply a different way of downloading and uploading files before and after translating. The translating is carried out off-line.

Instant Web site translation is something that is exclusively done by machine translation systems - with more and more Web site servers identifying the connected computer as belonging to a particular locale and imposing the corresponding language on the user regardless of his actual language or the language he wants the information in. And that means being bombarded with automatic translation. Human Internet translation is only used when the information flow is bi-directional and interactive, machine translation systems simply cannot deal with the material or or because machine translation is not yet available for the language combination required;

Internet translation is likely to develop rapidly in environments where the in-house translator needs to work in permanent contact with the work provider and more specifically, when (for whatever reason) a translator is seconded to the work provider's premises.

In officially bilingual or multilingual countries and organisations, one can identify a special category of'institutional translation', meaning any translation carried out in the name, on behalf of, and for the benefit of institutions.

The organisations and institutions concerned include national and Community Parliaments, International Courts of Justice, European institutions, Ministries, United Nations or OECD institutions, NATO, the IMF, Central Banks, and many others. In fact, such institutions and organisations do have translations carried out in almost all possible domains and for all types of documents. Yet, if the sub-category encompasses an almost infinite variety of documents and materials, the conditions and style of institutional translation are so distinctive that the sub-categorization is fully justified.

Institutional translation is partly carried out in-house (by official translators who often are civil servants) and partly externalized (usually to subcontracting agencies). Whatever is confidential or secret or critical will be dealt with in-house.

Although subcontracted translations are deemed to be non-critical, confidentiality is of the essence and no one can translate important institutional documents without prior security screening.




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