Document translation is one of the most basic of all translation services, if not the most basic. This is not to say that document translation is simple, which is one of the big misconceptions that can lead to big losses for any business.

Twenty years ago, if you needed a document translated from English to Spanish, or vice versa, you would find someone who understood both languages reasonably well and ask them to translate the document. Not surprisingly, as long as you chose someone who was relatively competent, this worked pretty well. But twenty years ago, more than likely your business future was not dependent upon the quality of the translation; that is not necessarily the case today. The interconnectedness made possible by the Internet has resulted in tremendous growth in international markets and corresponding growth in competition for market share.

No matter how simple the document you need translated is, you need to make sure that you use professional translation services. The computer age brought us machine translation services. Machine translation is fairly easy thing to accomplish with a computer, actually, not really more complicated than copying and pasting. Google will do this for you with the click of a mouse, well, kind of. The results are sometimes just barely readable, and clearly not acceptable in any real business situation. If you are translating a document from English to a language you are not fluent in, can you afford to trust results generated by a machine? Read the rest of this entry »