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Transliteration is the term used to describe the process of converting a language from one unique writing system to a different one. Many languages such as Russian and Bulgarian use the Cyrillic alphabet, while Japanese uses Kanji and Hindi and Nepali share a script called Devanagari. What transliteration does is covert these scripts into Latin letters. It doesn’t actually translate the meanings.

If you go into a Chinese restaurant ... View More

2019 has indicated some changes in the way countries wish to relate to one another with an increase in polarisation in ideas and politics. This, however, does not mean communication is not taking place. The growth of the internet has caused a surge in world communication as more and more people to get online and want to know what opportunities there are outside their own countries. Nationalist sentiments and xenophobia have not stopped global communication ... View More

Video dubbing, voice-overs and subtitling have always been used to spread ideas and
screen films in countries outside those where they were originally produced but in
recent years there has been a rapid growth in this sort of localisation using multimedia.
Live video streaming is the trend at the moment which is likely to develop further as the
year progresses.
The growth of multimedia has moved ahead rapidly because of the insatiable demand for it ... View More

International Translation Day is on 30th September. This was chosen as the date because it is the same day as the Feast of St. Jerome. St. Jerome went down in history as a key translator in early Christian days when he translated the Old Testament directly from Hebrew into Latin.

Today these are English, German, French, Italian and Russian.

Between 2000 and 2010 the most commonly translated languages for ... View More

The translation industry, like every other industry, changes from year to year. Most of this is due to the ever-increasing importance of machine translations which, even though they aren’t as sophisticated as the human brain, have still undergone huge improvements in their accuracy levels. This trend is set to continue into and through 2019. However, there is no expectation that this technology will cut out the need for human translators ... View More

An ordinary straightforward translation is a common way for a business to get its message across to an overseas audience. This is however not seen as the best way of attracting new customers but more importantly a business has to be a bit more creative and use transcreation instead. This is provided by a marketing translation service.

Transcreation goes one step further than a direct translation as it completely recreates a business’s message ... View More

There is no doubt that international markets are growing. The evidence of trade increases can be seen through the increase in internet sales. Consumers are looking for quality products at an affordable price and they aren’t concerned about where the goods come from. Recently, Pitney Bowes published a study that showed 70% of consumers had purchased a product through an overseas website. It has also been noted that 55% of customers will not purchase from ... View More

One of the facts in sign language use, as stated by the World Federation of the Deaf, is the estimate that about 70 million people use sign language in some form or another to help with communication around the world. In Britain, British Sign Language (BSL) is used by 87,000 people whose English ability is ranked as either a second or third language. Overall, one of the other facts about BSL is that approximately 151,000 ... View More

One of the more surprising translation trends for 2018, which is expected to accelerate in the coming 12 months, is the demand for e-learning programmes in order to learn new languages. E-learning facilitates flexible learning programmes so the translation of several top e-learning courses into many languages is becoming a trend these days.

There are other trends that are likely to accelerate in the near future and these include the following:

User generated feedback and content is more and more becoming evident on the web. If, for example, game users are requesting access to games in their own language the game company has to find the money to localise the game. More recently this has involved crowd sourcing initiatives as a way of trying to resolve the time consuming job of localising something so intricate as a video game. Video games, like all software products, have ... View More