One Hour Translation Blog

Let’s say that your business sells its products both at the US and in Japan.
You translated all your website content to Japanese and put it online.
In doing so, you hope to attract more traffic from potential customers who live in Japan and search the Internet in their own language for products that your business sells.
My tip is: consider using a Japanese top-level domain (such as “your-company.jp“).
The reason for doing this is that search engines like Google use the domain name to order the search results according to the country where the search query came from.
Of course, this is … Continue Reading

Every day, our customers receive dozens of comments from our translators’ community regarding their business emails and letters.
The most frequent comments relate to the fact that the original text does not include important details, which the recipients expect to see and are common in their language and culture.
Here are few quick tips that will help you overcome cultural barriers when contacting foreigners:

1. Use the recipient’s correct title. In many countries – like France, Germany, Spain, China and Japan – you should use a proper polite title. Sometimes you should refer to the person using the third-person form. Use professional titles such … Continue Reading
   

Foreign Exchange is an industry that requires minds to work together on the international basis. If the trade relations amongst the countries would be good, good foreign exchange would flow in and the industry would flourish. For international trade, language is the biggest barrier. Where ever international relations are involved, language has to be a strong point if you want to progress. If we want our country to have good trade relations with more and more countries, linguistic translations are a must. ForEx translation is a must for international trading.

Crossing the language barrier would give our country, open access … Continue Reading

Language is said to be the vehicle of our ideas, thoughts and perspectives of our world. While translation, simply is carrying the meaning or the idea from one language to another. Yet it is difficult to find a corresponding word for every word in two languages. It thus becomes a duty of translator to keep the meaning of the target language same as of the source language. This is called equivalence and is defined as ‘same meaning conveyed by a different expression’

The importance of equivalence is realized by all scholars of translation and has always remained … Continue Reading

It’s important for professional translation companies and solo translation services to have the ability to discern which piece of information is essential enough to carry over a website when it’s being localized to a new market. After all, the main advantage human translation has over machine translation is its ability to discern what works and what doesn’t whenever original content is being translated into another language.

To be more specific, whenever translators are hired to do a professional translation of an English site, they must not assume that all information contained therein … Continue Reading

Although many other languages can presently take the claim of being international languages in their own right, English remains an influential and global tongue that spreads its influence across matters like politics, trade and commerce, and entertainment.

Then again, in contrast to what many westerners think, it’s not the world’s most widely spoken language any longer. Chinese, Arabic, French, and Spanish share the throne with English as languages that the majority of the planet understands.

On that note, in the world of commerce, it has become a prerequisite to use business translators—professional translation experts that can do extensive … Continue Reading

Because of the dramatic evolution of the professional translation industry, there are currently new terms and words being used to describe translation service specializations that don’t fall under general categories like human translation or machine translation. This article intends to serve as a brief guide of sorts to some of the more common and basic of these recently coined expressions. Here are just some of them:

• General Translation: The simplest of translation types, a general translation allows a translator quite … Continue Reading
  

The usual advertising framework of many a multinational company—especially those originating from France—is mostly focused on marketing and communication strategies. More to the point, it’s not necessarily a given for a large enterprise to hire freelance translation services or professional translation agencies when preparing their international commercials and promotions. Some companies actually insist that localization isn’t necessarily the be-all, end-all answer to global advertising.

The Two Approaches to International Promotions

On that note, there are two approaches that a company can use to advertise in a foreign market: global standardization (promotes universal messages that can be understood by all creeds and cultures), … Continue Reading

As a translator who does professional translations for various client documents and other related translation services like speech interpretation and website localization, you must realize that you are a member of the global community, and as such have a responsibility to help solve the world’s communication problems and think about world affairs related to and outside the scope of your line of work.

This credo isn’t limited to diplomat translators or interpreters used by various foreign dignitaries either; anyone providing translation services in industries both political and commercial must realize that their linguistic … Continue Reading

Professional translation has been making waves in a lot of fields, especially in the global business industry. It is providing serious advantage to website owners and developers who are operating a business in the worldwide market. How professional translation works? Read on.

• A multilingual website helps expand a business. If you are currently operating only in your local market and you have intentions of gaining customers from around the world, using professional translation as a marketing tool is a wise move. Providing local versions of your website helps generate awareness and interest from your target audience … Continue Reading
  

The layman usually considers language and dialects as a literal and clear medium for precisely conveying concepts and views. On one hand, even when people use language in a literal manner, meanings may change and misunderstandings may unavoidably come to pass. Anyone can become unintentionally or intentionally ambiguous even without really trying.

On the other hand, most words can have connotations, denotations, double entendres, apparent meanings, implied or hidden messages, and so on that naturally obfuscate whatever message a person tries to convey.

Ambiguity and Translation

People often utilize words in a figurative manner in ordinary dialogue, even though it’s a type of … Continue Reading