I am an ATA certified Spanish translator. The ATA certification exam counts errors. It allows 17 error points in a 300 word text, and on point 18... you are out. Why? Back in the ‘80s I was a secretary in Argentina. I worked with a typewriter. When I typed a bid, a business letter or a [...]
Many documents that are submitted to U.S. Government agencies must be submitted along with a statement indicating that the translator is skilled to perform their task. This can be called a translator’s statement, statement of accuracy, certification, translator’s declaration, etc. I’ll call it a “translator’s statement” here as I dive into the requirements that you [...]
Certified Spanish translators often discuss translation tools. Should we work with machine translation, CAT tools, or something in between? We use our professional judgment to make these decisions. Machine translation The most commonly known machine translation tool is Google Translate, which in fact powers some web pages. I have seen "click here for x language" [...]
Perceptual scales are exponential. Light, sound and earthquakes follow this pattern. For sound, for example, 20 db is twice as loud as 10 db, and 30 db is twice as loud as 20 db. This is why a scale of how much impact an error has on a translation should also be exponential. The [...]
ATA lists the explanations of error categories for the certification exam in alphabetical order. Here we have organized it and provided simple explanations with some examples from Spanish, the language we work with at Gaucha Translations. They are marked SP (spelling), GR (grammar), TR (translation, transferring the message from one language to another), and WR [...]
Translation is teamwork. In the United States, I am often asked if my translations will be understandable by people from different Spanish-speaking countries. I tell them my practice is that teams include people of different nationalities. Why? In the US Spanish-speaking community, speakers are familiar with a variety of registers and variants of the language. [...]
There is a new dictionary of colloquial Spanish in the United States published by the Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University: Diccionario de anglicismos del español estadounidense. What does it say about itself, and what is my response? The prologue states that the terms come from oral Spanish. I believe Facebook and Twitter could be viewed [...]
When an interpreter or translator is certified, you can trust them to deliver quality. If you want to ask if a driver is qualified, you ask for a driver's license. Realtors are certified for their work. You don't just hire them because they say they are good. CPAs go through a credentialing process. In Oregon, we [...]
Whether we provide a translation or a transcreation, at Gaucha Translations we always keep the end users of the translation in mind. Will this document be useful to them? Will it be useful to the people they interact with? Will it cause misunderstandings along the way? I, Helen Eby always ask clients questions based on [...]
Certification is key to quality language access. It includes both interpreting and translation. Poor quality translations and interpreting events lead to serious risks. When patients leave a doctor’s office, if they don’t understand the information they took home, they run serious risks. If a parent does not understand the Individualized Educational Plan for a student, [...]
