Reliable Fact-Checking & Editing: Skills Only Human Translators Can Provide

One of the many benefits of hiring an experienced translator (as opposed to using an unreliable AI translation) is that they can catch errors that have slipped into your text. On numerous occasions, I have been able to help clients fix mistakes in their source text, which is especially important when it is being used as a basis for translations into multiple languages. Sometimes these errors have been minor spelling or grammar mistakes, but in other instances they have been major inaccuracies that could affect their credibility as a business.

For example, a few years ago I was tasked with translating some facts about countries to be used in an educational game for children. The company, based in Latin America, had prepared the facts in Spanish, which I would translate into English. My work would then be used as the basis for translations into many other languages. As I worked, I came across several obvious issues, such as the inclusion of several facts about the “country” of Hawaii. I was able to inform the client that Hawaii is not a country, but a state, so that they could remove the incorrect “facts”. Perhaps the error would have gone unnoticed in the game, but it’s also possible that a parent playing the country trivia with their child might have seen it and wondered why they should be paying for an educational game that had such glaring errors in it. Thankfully, this risk to the company’s reputation was prevented because of my attention to detail.

Research: An Essential Part of the Translation Process

There is a common misconception that translating is a simple, straightforward task. If you’re proficient in two languages, you should be able to instantly convert text from one to the other, right? Not really! I may know a lot of Spanish after studying it nearly my entire life, but that doesn’t mean I know every word and its intricacies. That’s why translation work almost always requires research.

I recently translated a document that primarily focused on business matters, but it also contained some medical and legal terminology. As a result, the translation required quite a bit of research. Aside from the usual need to look up unfamiliar terms and verify definitions or usage, I also had to do more in-depth research when it came to specialized medical and legal terms.   

For example, when I came across the name of a medical condition that I was unfamiliar with, I turned to WordReference (my favorite online dictionary) and Wikipedia (in both languages) for translation assistance and a basic understanding of the condition. Once I had what I thought was the appropriate English translation, I also did a quick Google search for the term and checked citations by reputable medical sources like national health agencies to verify the term’s accuracy and usage.

The text also referred to specific international legal agreements, so I found the official documents online for additional context and to ensure that the terminology I used in the translation matched the agreements when necessary.

If I hadn’t taken the time to do this research, the quality of the translation would have suffered. You can only ensure the accuracy of a translation if you’re willing to do the extra work required to fully understand the text.

The Dangers of Relying on AI Transcription in Translation Projects

I recently worked on a translation project that was a great example of the pitfalls of AI. I was hired by an agency to translate transcripts of interviews that had been conducted in Spanish. When I initially skimmed the documents they had received from their client, it seemed like a straightforward task. However, once I got started, it became clear that the transcription had been generated by AI, which the agency had not been told.

How did I know it was transcribed by AI? The transcripts were a mess, riddled with the types of errors a human would not make. For example:

• When the interviewers introduced themselves, their common female names (which were referenced elsewhere in the document) were changed to somewhat similar male names (think Jane > James or Anna > Andrew). Default male bias, perhaps?

• At one point a university with an unusual name was referenced. The AI simply invented a word based on the pronunciation (which produced no search results on Google), but I was able to correct it with an educated guess based on context.

• Every time uno or dos was said, the transcription cited the numbers “1” or “2”. However, in most instances the speakers were using terms like cada uno or los dos.

• Worst of all, text was repeatedly attributed to the wrong speaker. I didn’t have access to the original audio recording, but the issues were obvious. The interviewer would ask a question and the interviewee would start to answer, but then the transcript would switch randomly between speakers, as if the interviewer had the power to read the interviewee’s mind about their personal experiences.

In the end, this translation took much longer than it should have because the source text was generated by AI. Since it was for an agency that I have a great relationship with and the transcription issues were not their fault, I took the time to find and correct as many errors as possible, as well as sending them a list of the issues I had discovered so that they could pass it along to their client. I doubt I’ll ever hear what comes of it, but my hope is that the client might rethink their use of AI given the serious inaccuracies that were introduced into their transcripts.

The Secret Sauce of Translation

As machine translation post-editing has become increasingly popular with clients wanting to save time and money, some seem to have difficulty understanding why I decline such projects, despite my best attempts to explain all of the work that goes into a translation.  

So instead, let’s imagine that I’m a chef at your favorite restaurant, where you always order pasta with my homemade tomato sauce. Making the sauce requires a variety of time-honed skills and knowledge: developing a recipe, sourcing the ingredients and knowing how to adapt when their flavor varies, knowing how to use and cook the ingredients, monitoring cooking times and kitchen safety, and so on. 

You’ve always been happy with the service I provide and you love my sauce, but one day you decide that you should be able to get the sauce cheaper and faster. You walk in with a jar of the cheapest tomato sauce at the grocery store and ask me to improve it so that it tastes just like my homemade sauce. Surely it won’t take nearly as much time as cooking it from scratch, and using the jarred sauce instead of starting with fresh ingredients should decrease the cost as well. So you have a proposition: you’ll give me the jarred sauce to start with, and in exchange, you’ll pay me a fraction of the price once I’ve successfully turned it into my homemade sauce. You say it will be a great deal for me because the time saved will translate into increased output, and I’ll be able to get rich selling my delicious sauce in bulk. 

The whole idea is ridiculous, isn’t it? You obviously can’t just hand a chef a jar of store-bought sauce and expect them to magically transform it into their special recipe. The cheap store-bought sauce surely contains preservatives, plus any number of mysterious ingredients and additives that impact its flavor. It may contain lots of rosemary, while the chef’s recipe uses none. It would require considerable time and skill for the chef to refine the store-bought sauce so that it met their standards, but even then, it could never be the same as theirs. So many unknowns were introduced into the process by starting with the jarred sauce that they have no way of knowing if they were able to correct for them. For that matter, they cannot even guarantee that the sauce is safe for everyone who consumes it, since they don’t know all of the ingredients or how they were prepared. 

That is what it feels like when clients provide a translation generated by AI and ask for it to be “refined” so that it achieves the same high quality as a professional translation done by a human. It is excruciatingly frustrating work that generally takes much more time and effort than translating the text on your own. In exchange, you are offered considerably less money and the knowledge that you are furthering the demise of your industry, sacrificing quality and human ingenuity in favor of making a handful of companies richer. No thanks!

How Watching TV Can Improve Your Language Skills

One of the joys of being a translator is that there is always more to learn when it comes to language. Since my work primarily involves formal Spanish in business contexts, it doesn’t expose me to much slang or new linguistic quirks. I don’t translate much audio either, so I rarely get the opportunity to use my listening skills while working. To remedy that, I like to watch television shows in Spanish in my free time, which lets me improve my language skills while having fun.

I’ve learned so much from Spanish-language television shows over the years. When I lived in Spain before becoming a translator, my friends and I used to watch a mystery series named El Barco together every week, which resulted in me learning a bunch of nautical vocabulary since it was set on a ship. It’s always a thrill on the rare occasion that I come across zarpar or other terms I learned from the show.

More recently, I’ve seen how Spanish is adapting in terms of gender-inclusive language, with new terms like the pronoun elles showing up in shows. By watching shows from Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Spain, I’ve learned about cultural and linguistic differences between some of the many Spanish-speaking countries in the world.

I’ve also learned tons of new vocabulary, often pausing to look up a word in the dictionary. My favorite recent example is the word tiquismiquis. The second I heard it, I paused the show and was delighted to discover that it means “fussy” or “picky”. I may never come across the term again, but throughout my career I’ve been surprised countless times to find that something I learned while watching TV has been applicable to my work. You never know what you’ll encounter as a translator, so it’s always helpful to keep learning! 

How Translation Pricing Works

One of the most important matters to discuss when hiring a translator is pricing. While clients often assume that translation is the type of service that would be billed hourly, most translators charge per source word instead. In my experience, this is beneficial to both the translator and the client.

For clients, having a fixed price from the beginning helps to avoid unpleasant surprises at billing time. Translation work requires research and editing, and the amount of time required to provide a quality translation can vary greatly. Hiring a translator at an hourly rate without fully understanding the translation process or the complexity of your text could result in a final bill that is much higher than expected.

As a translator, I also find that working for a fixed price allows me to focus on doing a good job by the deadline without worrying about exactly how many minutes I’m spending on the translation. On the few occasions early in my career when I worked at an hourly rate, I felt pressured to work faster so that the client wouldn’t think I was overcharging them for my services. High-quality writing takes time and thought, and so does a high-quality translation.

When potential clients reach out to me for a price quote, I tell them my standard rate so that they can determine whether my pricing is within their budget range. At the same time, I note that I charge more for complex texts with specialized terminology and ask to review the text that they want to have translated so that I can give them an exact estimate. This transparency allows us to agree on a fair price in advance and start our business relationship with trust.

What to Expect When You Hire a Translator

Hiring a translator for the first time? Here’s a guide to what you can expect before, during and after a project if you hire me:

First, I’ll ask for a copy of the source text to be translated so that I can assess difficulty and estimate how much time will be required, as well as provide a quote (usually based on a per-word rate). If the text cannot be provided in advance, I’ll need a detailed description with information such as the text type (financial, medical, literary, etc.), word count and any special instructions.

Once we’ve agreed on a price and deadline, I’ll get to work! During the translation process, I may contact you with questions about the text. Typically, questions involve ambiguities, inconsistencies or inaccuracies I have encountered while translating. In the past, this attention to detail has helped clients not only receive an accurate translation, but also correct issues in their original text.

Depending on the size of the project, I may also provide progress updates. I strive to always meet deadlines, but in the rare circumstance that an extension is needed, I communicate it as soon as possible.

After I’ve finished the translation and carefully reviewed it for accuracy and consistency, I’ll send it to you along with any notes relevant to the translation. If you have any questions or concerns, I’ll be happy to address them. Finally, I’ll request payment as per the terms agreed to, and follow up if there are any delays.

How Translation Is Like A Puzzle

Just over a year ago, I wrote a post about why I believe translation is a fascinating career. In it, I primarily focused on how my translation career has given me the opportunity to constantly learn about new topics that I never would have learned about otherwise, as well as add diverse terminology to my personal lexicon, related to everything from Mediterranean fish species to industrial machinery.

Last week, I suddenly realized another reason I love translating: sometimes, it's like doing a puzzle! I've always been a puzzle fanatic, from jigsaw puzzles to crossword puzzles. There's something so satisfying about taking different pieces and fitting them together to create a new whole.

In many situations, translations are straightforward, and choosing the right words to convey the source text in the target language is quite simple. However, in some cases, such as a large translation I worked on last week, they can be a bit of a puzzle.

There are many reasons why the translation I was working on last week felt like a puzzle. First of all, the document I was translating was for a translation agency instead of the actual client. While you can often rely on getting additional context from a direct client, it's much more difficult when working through an agency. In this particular case, there was no way for me or the agency to reach out to the document's writer for more information, so I had to do a bit of detective work during the translation process.

As I've mentioned in the past, sometimes the little things can be the most difficult in translation, including grammatical aspects like gender. In this case, I was dealing with a report that referred to people either by their last names or by simply using third-person singular verb conjugations. This posed an issue because Spanish doesn't require the use of the words él and ella ("he" and "she") before conjugated verbs.

While I could have used the neutral singular "they" instead, it would have made the report much harder to read. In some cases, I found a stray él or ella with a name that allowed me to determine whether the person was female or male, so I could use phrases like "she said" and "he noticed" instead of using the singular "they". In other circumstances, the person's full name would be mentioned, but then I'd have to figure out what gender corresponded to their name.

Luckily, Spanish naming customs are helpful in that respect. Not only do Spanish speakers tend to choose from a much narrower list of names than English speakers, but they are also fairly gender-specific. From a translator's standpoint, that's incredibly helpful, as you can feel fairly confident it's accurate to refer to someone named María as "she", and José as "he". However, there were still a few stray names that I had to research online in order to determine the correct gender pronoun to use.

Another thing that made this translation like a puzzle was the fact that since I couldn't contact the original writer, I had to try to put myself in their place and see things from their perspective. In a sense, I was acting like a detective, trying to decipher their meaning. Certain sections of the report were clearly written for an audience with far more context than me, so I had to simply do my best by filling in a tentative translation while guessing their meaning. Luckily, as I worked my way through the document, additional details filled in the contextual gaps, so I was able to go back and make those tentative translations more accurate.

In the end, after a week's worth of detective work searching for the right words and the right meanings, I was able to fit all the pieces together. While the topic wasn't exactly fascinating, I still found it fun because it was a challenge, just like a good jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes when you do a translation, you might have to accept that a few pieces will be missing from the final product, but hopefully you'll manage to get enough of them together to convey the full picture.

What's the Difference Between a Translator and an Interpreter?

One of the most misunderstood things about the translation industry is the fact that translators and interpreters do two very different things. Obviously the two are connected since they both involve converting information from one language to another, but the mechanics behind both are quite different.

When meeting new people, conversations often revolve around what people do for a living. One thing I've noticed about being a translator is the fact that I have to spend much more time explaining my job than other people do, because most people simply don't know what a translator does. However, they think they do, which always leads to interesting conversations.

Quite often when I mention that I'm a translator, the person I'm talking to will launch into an explanation of how their company hires "translators" for meetings with foreign clients, or how their school has a "translator" for communicating with students who don't speak English. Naturally, this puts me in the slightly awkward position of having to explain that those "translators" are actually interpreters, who do something quite different from what I do.

So what is the difference between a translator and an interpreter?

Translators are people who translate written content from one language to another. For example, clients send me things like blog posts, articles, and documents in Spanish. I then sit at my computer and work on converting the information they contain from Spanish into English. There's generally no rush, so I have plenty of time to consult dictionaries and other linguistic resources, as well as contemplate whether or not what I've written sounds natural. I can go back and change a word or phrase as many times as I like, or even rewrite entire sections upon uncovering new information that helps explain something I've already translated.

Interpreters, on the other hand, are people who interpret speech from one language to another. In most cases (unless they're providing their services over the phone), interpreters work wherever the multilingual conversation they're interpreting is being held. For example, you'll find medical interpreters working alongside doctors in hospitals, military interpreters working alongside military units in war zones, and court interpreters working alongside lawyers and judges in courtrooms.

While translators have plenty of time to sit and ponder their word choice, interpreters are expected to communicate ideas between languages almost immediately. If they're lucky, they'll receive some information regarding the topics of discussion in advance so that they can look up key terms that might come in handy. However, much of interpreting comes down to paraphrasing what is being said, since the key is to convey the message in a timely manner. On the other hand, since translation is written, much more emphasis is placed on how individual words and phrases are translated.

As you can see, translators focus on written language, while interpreters focus on spoken language. Although both professions require good knowledge of at least two languages and share some techniques and resources, they also involve very different skills. There are undoubtedly some people out there who are both translators and interpreters, but they're quite rare.

For my part, I love translating, but found simultaneous interpreting to be completely overwhelming when I tried it out in a class session as part of my translation degree. Having to listen to speech in one language, convert it into English in my head, and then say it out loud, all at the same time, made me feel like my head was going to explode. I'm much happier sticking to the written word, just as I'm sure there are interpreters out there who are quite happy they never have to deal with written translations.

Why Isn't The Word "Internaut" More Popular?

Did you know that there's actually an English word that you can use instead of saying "internet users" or "people online"? That word is internaut, a portmanteau of "Internet" and "astronaut" which the Oxford Dictionaries define as "a user of the Internet, especially a habitual or skilled one".

However, despite the fact that this 1990s creation would be very handy in everyday use, it seems not to have gained popularity in the English language. In fact, I've never heard anyone use the word internaut in English, be it in writing or in spoken language. I only learned of its existence today because I was thinking about the Spanish word internauta, which I recently encountered in a translation.

I first learned the word internauta when I studied abroad in Spain in college. Despite never having seen the word before, it was immediately obvious what it meant, and I remember wondering at the time why we didn't have an English equivalent. It wasn't an obscure word either, as it was frequently used on television to encourage people to visit a program's website, vote for a performer in a competition, and do any number of other online activities. It also wasn't uncommon to hear a TV host say that they were going to answer questions from internautas throughout the show.

When I recently encountered the word again in a translation, I ended up just using "internet users", but I wished there was a better equivalent in English. While internaut may have made it into the dictionary, I definitely don't think it's used often enough to make it an acceptable choice in most translations.

One alternative would be the slang word surfer, although it doesn't seem to be nearly as popular as it once was. There's also the added problem that the word's standard definition refers to someone who surfs waves, not the internet.

In any case, if you ever need to say "internet users" in Spanish or Portuguese, keep in mind that you can always use the word internautas! A few other Romance languages use equivalents of this word as well, including internautes in French and Catalan, and internauti in Italian.