Blog

2017 is already 2 months old, so what’s going on in the language service industry this year? Here are four key trends for the remainder of this year.
* No shortage in demand for the translation industry
* Machine translation gets better but nowhere does it replace human translation
* More performance tracking for professional translators
* Asia will continue to be the highest growth area for translation services

When emojis first came out, it was hoped that they would become a universal language, with the capability to transcend both cultural differences and borders.

Recently, researchers have discovered that some emojis are interpreted quite differently. This has meant that miscommunication takes place when they are used. Even professional marketing translators may not interpret emoji use the same way.
For example, it was found that when individuals receive an emoji showing a face expressing ... View More

Often, when sending a document to a technical translator on an Excel spreadsheet there is no context to help the translator. The lack of any context could end up in a mistranslation taking place and then you would have to ask the translator to have another go at the translation. One way of making it easier for the translator is to add screenshots showing where the translation is going to be used. Otherwise, you need ... View More

Creating a high quality video is a great achievement, especially if it is designed to effectively market your latest product. However, you now have to find ways to use this video so that it reaches a global audience. If it’s in English then you will need to reach out to a larger audience, as English is not as widely spoken as other global languages such as Chinese and Spanish.
You can translate your YouTube video ... View More

There was a time when real estate agents had to do a lot more work than they do today, especially getting the message across about properties they are responsible for selling. That all changed as the influence of the Internet spread worldwide and the growth in Internet listings that sell just about anything including real estate.

It’s not that real estate agents don’t have to spend time any more showing prospective buyers brick and ... View More

January is traditionally the time of year when those in business think about the year ahead and what might lie in store for them. The translation industry is no different. Here are some translation and localisation trends that seem to be appearing in the 2017 crystal ball.

There is no sign that the explosive growth in the number of apps is going to slow ... View More

Like most technology, translation memory (TM) technology is continually being updated, so if you want to get the most out of it you need to consider what you are using and whether you can improve on it.

Why TM anyway?

TM is most useful when it comes to big chunks of text in document translation that are very repetitive. By storing the best approved translations of these segments of text it ... View More

Christmas and the New Year are over, and with them the highest volume of online shopping, but this seasonal drop won’t mask the overall annual increase in internet buying which seems to just keep on rising. Online shopping, of course, is not confined to national borders. It has a global customer base, but that’s something which is intimately connected to effective localisation.
Localisation is still a term which isn’t understood very well by many businesses. ... View More

Poetry can be a powerful messenger. Many of the themes touched on by poets are universally human. If it wasn’t for translators, we would be confined to the poetry of poets who speak the same language as ourselves and would be denied the richness of those whose language is different. But translating poetry is a challenging task and poetry translators are a special breed. What makes it so difficult?

Rhyme is a ... View More

Marketing translation is a necessary part of a business’s expansion outside its own borders. With online sales growing every year, marketing translation becomes even more of a necessity. The contradiction is that many businesses are compromising their image and brand by not taking marketing translation seriously enough or treating it like any other translation task.

Marketing translation skills are different from other kinds of translation

Marketing translation is not as literal ... View More