• General Translation: The simplest of translation types, a general translation allows a translator quite a lot of leeway because its source material mostly uses layman terms and ordinary, everyday speech. There’s no need to understand special terminologies, and most translation work fall into this particular type.

• Legal Translation: As one of the more complex and complicated professional translation types out there, legal translation is best described as the translation of treaties, contracts, and many other legal documents. A translation service is responsible for both understanding politico-legal and socio-cultural context behind a legal text and translating it in such a way that a target audience with a different cultural/political/societal background could readily understand.
  Only a human translation agency that knows both source and target cultures could pull a decent legal translation job off. Nevertheless, even specialists like those tend to use professional legal assistance as well, because one simple slipup or mistranslation of a contract’s passage could lead to disastrous consequences.

• Commercial Translation: Just like its legal counterpart, a commercial translation or business translation (not to be confused with advertising translation) requires a translator to have specialist translation skills and business jargon knowledge in order to translate a business’s every report, tender document, company account, and correspondence. There’s a bit of overlap between commercial translation and legal translation as well, in the sense that companies tend to handle legal paperwork alongside business paperwork.

• Administrative Translation: “Administrative” can mean many things, but in the context of translation, it merely refers to translating managerial texts used in different corporations, businesses, and organizations. This translation type also overlaps with commercial translation, but only in the sense that the vast majority of administrative translation can be considered commercial translation as well, but not all commercial translation is administrative in nature.

• Literary Translation: As its name suggests, literary translation refers to translation done for literature such as poems, plays, short stories, and novels. Just as general translation is the simplest form and legal translation is the most difficult form, many people in the industry consider literary translation as the highest form of translation.
  The reason behind this is because literary translation goes beyond mere translation of context; a literary translator must be proficient in translating humor, cultural nuances, feelings, emotions, and other subtle elements of a given work. Conversely, there are those who allege that literary translation is impossible, as with the case of translating poetry.

—

One Hour Translation is the world’s fastest professional translation service. One Hour Translation provides Fast, High Quality Professional Translation on a 24/7 basis thanks to a community of over 8000 certified translators from all over the world.

Machine translation is indeed a great promise. The temptation to save costs on professional translation services and address more audience is big. But make no mistake: it will take a lot of years until machine translation will be able to match human translation quality. The main reason is that machines cannot yet be programmed to overcome the context barrier. That complex thing can be done today by the human brain solely. Some dare to say computers will never be able to imitate how our brain perceives and processes language.

In the meanwhile, the technology should be used carefully – both by the content provider and by the end consumer.

Machine translation providers behave irresponsibly by not publishing in bold places severe warnings of possible negative outcomes that may result from using machine-based translation. This warning should also be made when machine translation is exhibited on websites, to protect the content consumer.
Content providers mustn’t assume that their content consumers know that machine translation was used to deliver their content, or even understand what machine translation is.

In many cases, content consumers simply think that the content is badly written and see the result as an insult. In this case, bad translation simply ruins the content provider brand – may it be e-commerce website, online newspaper or a personal blog.

While professional translators are a necessity companies cannot live without for many of their international operations – many often choose to do so anyway. Most translators spent years studying and perfecting their craft, honing their expertise and making a respectful living from it, it makes little sense that a machine can read and understand the small nuances of a language, the tone that comes through when words are put together. Many translators develop specializations and become experts in the areas of legal, medical, IT, or technical translations, and even then, some projects call for a secondary translator or editor who can examine the quality and standard of the work, restyle if necessary and assure there are no grammatical errors.
Translation services may be a little costly, but its money well spent when considering the importance of the text and messages you are trying to convey, and the brand and reputation of the company conveying them.

—

One Hour Translation is the world’s fastest professional human translation service. One Hour Translation provides Fast, High Quality Professional Translation on a 24/7 basis thanks to a community of over 8000 certified translators from all over the world.

There is no denying that human translation is preferred than machine translation due to its promise for quality and accuracy. With the bulk of jobs coming in, professional translation finds some help that’s being rooted from the tools now readily available. And that’s definitely good news not just for translators but to their clients as well. For translators, this means an easier way of carrying through their tasks. For their clients, this guarantees an even higher standard for quality of the translation service they can get.

Among the many tools available to aid a translation service is the Translation Memory or TM. Basically, TM is a database, which stores the segments of those previously translated projects. It piles up human translation of foreign words, phrases, and even sentences to be ready in case the translator comes across with them again.

To put it simply, the Translation Memory software splits the text that needs to be translated, looks for any matches that are already within the database, and supplies a candidate or a possible translation. It is up to the translator if he accepts the translation candidate or supplies another meaning to the text. In case of the latter, the fresh translation would be added back to the database for future reference.

But Translation Memory has its own benefits and drawbacks, advantages and disadvantages to human translation. For the benefits part, Translation Memory ensures quality, consistency, reduced translation time, and reduced cost.

A professional translation that is aided by a Translation Memory software makes it easier to achieve the standard level of quality required that make satisfied clients. It also helps ensure that no word or phrase in the document is left out, thus making human translation more accurate. Translation Memory also promises consistency. The same word is given the same meaning, for example, as it is already stored in the database. Under such a case, Translation Memory helps reduce the time needed to finish a project and in the end, the translator is able to save on costs. However, human translation only saves on time and costs if the very same project is given to them subsequently, which is very unlikely.

But that’s just about one of the disadvantages of a Translation Memory software. There also lies the fact that huge effort, adjustments, and other special tools are required to fully enjoy its benefits in human translation. Most Translation Memory software also requires enormous manpower to keep it as usable. Maintenance is required if you want your Translation Memory software to keep working as it should be.

Translation Memory makes for a nice little help in carrying over professional translation. However, users of it must be particular of what is required of them to make it truly useful to enjoy its benefits of quality and time and cost savings.