If you guys had to start a translation business, what name would you pick to appeal to the masses?

If you guys had to start a translation business, what name would you pick to appeal to the masses?

oppai international

Lost in Translation.

Not bad.... I wanted "Translation Station" but there is already one incorporated in Georgia.

I do top-top tier quality english-spanish translations btw... looking to establish a LLC and market my ability

i have no better idea so something about feather (goose one, for writing) and that glass botle for ink
that it's half baked marketing here

I wouldn't share good one actually, I guess

I have been considering the quill and ink. What I really like though is the image of a train. Like a train stays on its tracks, my translations stay on target and never get derailed. Something along those lines.

Intercontinental Translation Enterprises Co., Ltd.

Professional translator here, for seven different languages (including Spanish) to English. You don't need to start a company unless you're planning on hiring a bunch of other translators, in which case what you have on your hands is a translation agency. There are tons of them already out there though, and for Spanish, you will have a hard time getting jobs if you expect to be paid anything decent. There are already millions of native Spanish speakers in countries with weaker currencies that will accept shit rates per word, simply because it's decent pay to them.

what about that carriages famous from western movies? something with monk rings a bell too (a little)

ha, now u owe me, use Tower of Babilon

Metafrasi
greek sounds smrt

yeah maybe not directly but a reference to it

also make your logo a simplified symbol of it

it's a resume builder. I am fresh out of college and have a Finance degree and need things on the side to boost me as a candidate to decent firms. I have a bachelor's in spanish and am a grammar autist so I am extremely good at transcribing documents between english and spanish. I also have a degree in German but I am still not confident enough to start translating it professionally. It costs all of $50 to start a LLC in Georgia, and I want to use it to make money on the side and have a convenient institution to send all my invoices through.

You say it is tough finding work, but I have made $2000 in the last 3 days translating hospital brochures for a hospital in Colorado for 17 cents per word. I am about to translate their entire website and plan to make 2-3x as much.

Also, you overestimate native Spanish speakers' familiarity with grammar and syntax. Spanish, although easy to speak colloquially, does in fact have a pretty thorough grammar system that in many ways surpasses that of English. There is a demand for people who deeply understand it when it comes to professional documents.

Tower of Babylon is a great image that appeals to lots of Christians. I just wish it rhymed better.

>You say it is tough finding work, but I have made $2000 in the last 3 days translating hospital brochures for a hospital in Colorado for 17 cents per word. I am about to translate their entire website and plan to make 2-3x as much.

Luck, perhaps? Clients willing to pay that much are rare, especially if you're not a native speaker of the language you're translating to, which you should be (and maybe you are, there are plenty of native Spanish speakers in the US). I've seen jobs from people offering less than 2 cents per word, routinely.

>Spanish, although easy to speak colloquially, does in fact have a pretty thorough grammar system that in many ways surpasses that of English.

I speak Spanish. I know.

Babylon

How is the quality of your translations? How did you learn so many languages? Do you ever do interpreting?

I am not a native speaker (am standard white american guy), but I did get the gig through my family network. I took over the gig after a family friend got a job abroad, so yes I did fall into it and am thankful that I have the opportunity.

>I speak Spanish. I know.

Didn't mean to imply you didn't. I just get tired of people shitting on the Spanish language when they have no concept of a subjunctive tense or the pretty deep morphology of Spanish

>How is the quality of your translations?
I don't turn in shit, and it amazes me how many people do. I just proofread a job where the translator who did the initial work confused words that look similar in the source language and made a lot of other mistakes. They weren't examples of "well, this word could be better in another context" or "that's another meaning of this word, just not the best one here", they were flat-out wrong.

My clients tell me that my work is exceptional, but I just feel like I'm doing the job I'm being paid to do instead of half-assing it and taking shortcuts.

>How did you learn so many languages?

I have a degree in one of them, and I'm mostly self-taught in the others. I had a lot of free time on my hands for a few years, basically. I looked up everything I could find, found friends online to speak with, that sort of thing. I don't use textbooks and dislike language classes, generally. They're too focused on getting people to pass tests, hardly anybody walks out actually being able to speak the thing worth a damn.

>Do you ever do interpreting?

No.

>no concept of a subjunctive tense
Subjunctive mood, not tense. The subjunctive mood has three tenses: present, imperfect, and (fairly uncommon in modern Spanish) future. Get your facts straight before you claim to know so much about the "pretty thorough grammar system".

>I am not a native speaker
I already wouldn't hire you for any English-Spanish job without a native speaker to proofread your work.

>I did get the gig through my family network
Now it all makes sense.

I'm OP, can you share how many languages you feel comfortable translating professionally in? And how long you have been doing this for?

>how many languages you feel comfortable translating professionally in
I will translate all seven of the non-English ones to English. I generally don't bother offering to translate from English to anything else simply because English is my native language and I don't want to work with clueless clients (who should know they want a native speaker of the target language), but I'll offer to do it occasionally for certain kinds of clients.
>how long you have been doing this for?
Since 2013.

Lexicon International.

I've thought of doing this myself. Do you need tips?

I make a fuck load of money making people translate for me. By that I mean over $300 grand a year.

Thanks for the you, I'm looking into being a translator myself. I agree that language classes are useless - I think a month of diligent self-study is worth more than a semester of a class.

One more question, what's your preferred method to vocabulary building? Seems to me that 95% of learning a language, past the initial grammar hurdles, is just learning the damn words.

NO! You're going about it the wrong way.

"I'mma translut"

Come on, don't be so pedantic. Mood, tense, I just call it subjunctive. Don't be a hater man - I AM very good at this and my work attests to it.

I understand not wanting to translate from English to a different language. I specialize in Spanish since there are so many English idioms that get lost in translation. It's a challenge to work effectively around them and get the main ideas across eloquently.

>what's your preferred method to vocabulary building? Seems to me that 95% of learning a language, past the initial grammar hurdles, is just learning the damn words.
It absolutely is. Keep in mind, nobody really ever knows 100% of the words in a language. You can flip open an English dictionary (or one for whatever your native language is) and find a word you don't know without too much difficulty, and that doesn't make you any less fluent in it.

Ultimately, vocabulary building has to be a very individualized thing, which is why I feel that the lists you get in textbooks are such colossal wastes of time, generally. You need to be reading things that interest you and trying to write short texts in the language you're learning (or translating short texts into it)—yes, you'll make mistakes, and that's fine, you can have someone else correct them for you and you'll learn that way. But the really great thing about this is that it reveals the gaps in your vocabulary, when you go to write something and find that you don't know the word for it. You have to look it up, and you remember it more easily because it's actually useful to you for something beyond passing a test.

You gonna back that up with something, or did you just need to get some anger out of your system?

They're not the same. Use the correct terminology or don't expect to be taken seriously.

>I understand not wanting to translate from English to a different language. I specialize in Spanish since there are so many English idioms that get lost in translation.

It's not about not wanting to, it's about recognizing your own limitations. A native speaker of Spanish with the same skill level in English as you have in Spanish will still make a more natural-sounding translation than yours for all but the simplest texts.

(I should add, though, that you totally could, and should, be translating Spanish to English.)

Fair enough

>subjunctive = mood b/c explains feelings over action that has not taken place
>indicative = describes past/present/future

Not so complicated. And you have a good point on limitations. Translating for a hospital is easy because I am not using any idioms or colloquialisms - it is all medical terminology that has no or very few equivalents.

If it was translating middle eastern languages, Kebabel

I recently started translating software manuals from Finnish to English.

Currently charging $0.05 per word and I feel like I could be charging more but I was afraid to lose the client because I'm pretty much broke.

Could/should I charge more and if so, how much?

Thanks for the tips!

>Translating for a hospital is easy because I am not using any idioms or colloquialisms - it is all medical terminology that has no or very few equivalents.

You can use what's called a translation memory / CAT software (computer-assisted translation) that 'remembers' how you translate certain words, it's particularly effective for things like medical/legal documents. After a while, the software does half the work for you because it's just the same phrases over and over again. For literary translations, it can be useful within a project, but you won't find yourself reusing the TM files across projects—you don't really stand to gain anything from how you translated author A's work when it's time to translate author B's completely different work.

Also, both indicative and subjunctive are grammatical "moods". It's a linguistic term just like "tense", not something you only apply to the subjunctive because it has to do with feelings sometimes. "mood" as a grammatical term is related to "mode", and thus has a distinct origin from that of "mood" in the sense of feelings and attitudes.

Interestingly, opinions differ on whether the conditional of Romance languages (so Spanish, as well as others) is a mood or a tense. The traditional view that grammars written by native speakers of these languages take is that it is a tense of the indicative mood, and it usually gets a name like "futuro do pretérito" (the Portuguese name, "future of the past" since the action could take place in the future from a past point of view), putting it in opposition to "futuro do presente", the tense which everybody unambiguously describes as future. Some more recent grammars call it its own mood.

I am getting paid $0.17/word because the person who had this job before me was paid the same. I did not have to negotiate. The professional translator in this thread said he routinely sees offers of $0.02 cents/word for large projects, so do not discard $0.05/word as an unworthy wage.

I am pretty sure I get the compensation that I do because there is currently an enormous demand for spanish speakers in the USA that will only get bigger in the near future. Finnish is a pretty niche market that will only apply to people from Finland, so $0.05 is really not bad compensation.

Any time.

The going rate, on average, is about $0.11/word, but in today's market of people who don't know any better accepting contracts for $0.01/word (yes, really), it can be difficult to find clients who are willing to take that. I usually try to go for a compromise and charge somewhere around $0.08 on average.

I also make sure to emphasize to the client that the going rate is higher than what I'm charging. If I have an estimated word count, I'll show them what kind of savings my rate works out to compared to the going rate, and then finish up with a little spiel about how to some extent, you really do get what you pay for, and hiring someone who will take one of those stupid $0.01/word rates may leave the client with a text that's hardly better than Google Translate.

Let's say you have a 15,000 word job you're applying to:

"The going rate for these kinds of translations is generally about $0.11. For this job, I'd like to offer you a rate of just $0.07, which works out to $1050 for your job—that's $600 less than the $1650 that you'd otherwise be paying. Keep in mind: prices that look too good to be true usually are. If you find someone willing to do the job for something like $0.02/word, you'll likely end up with a low-quality translation that you could have made yourself with Google Translate."

$0.17 per word is very hard to come by these days, yes.

The way it works is actually a little bit different than you seem to expect, though—because there are also so many native Spanish speakers available to do this kind of work, many of them in countries where their currency is very weak compared to the dollar, it is harder to find good pay for a Spanish job. Mr. Suomalainen here may actually be able to charge more simply because a Finnish translator is harder to come by, so there is less competition. I'd be charging more than $0.05 per word if I were him.

Very interesting. I will have to look into this software now that I am getting more serious about this work. Up until now, I have kept a running doc with copy+paste passages like how to contact your doctor, website information, and basic passages like that to keep things moving faster.

Honestly, I have never been drilled hard on the difference between a tense and mood. Most of my professors really obsessed on explaining the subtle differences between a verb and its reflexive counterpart like ir/irse, morir/morirse, etc. and false cognates like "actual" which always trip up new speakers. I guess I have some more research of my own to do.

Conditional is interesting. What seems so trivial in English is pretty complex in Romance languages. The arguments go both ways, but I have not put enough thought into it to come a conclusion on my own. To me, the sentence "I would go to the casino if I had money" conveys an idea of the future happening in the present. You are presenting a future idea that could be happening right now if a certain condition were met. From my point of view, there is no emotion, opinion, or "mood" attached to the sentence. It is a statement of fact - if X happens, then Y follows. To me, it is indicative.

Thank you for your insight.

Another thing I wanted to ask about was if there's some software or plugin I could use with excel/openoffice to automate repeats?

I get my files in .xls with a source column and a target column. Any relatively simple way to set it up so that repeats are automatically suggested or filled in?

Those verb forms are also really important. See, this is the problem with language classes, they never actually give you everything you need to know unless you sit through 4+ years of them, and you can get it all yourself in less than half the time if you're dedicated to it. Language classes are, honestly, way too easy, but that's because (as I wrote somewhere else here, I think) it's more about getting students to pass tests and saying "we had X students pass AP Spanish this year" (or at the university level, "X students graduated with a minor in Spanish"). It is woefully inadequate, but the number of students passing would fall drastically, and the number of students dropping these classes a few weeks in would also increase drastically, if they were to be taught as intensively as they really need to be for students to make real progress. As someone who had to do it to get their degree, it's frustrating and discouraging, since you have to spend so much time doing pointless busy work that you don't want to spend any more time learning on your own.

The argument for the conditional to be a mood of its own comes from the fact that it describes an action that is uncertain. To the best of the speaker's knowledge, it's not happening now, it didn't happen in the past, and it may or may not happen in the future. The "future of the past" indicative mood idea makes just as much sense, though—"…pero sería mejor así." From a past perspective, a future situation (which is the present situation from a non-past perspective) _would be_ better (but isn't, because the past action that would have brought about that better situation didn't take place).

Funny, my "select the store fronts" captcha had a bunch of businesses with Spanish-language signage.

There is software that you can set up to replace strings of text with other ones when you type them—usually, the strings you type are called "abbreviations", because the assumption is that you'll type something short to have it replaced with something long, but you can use them for other things as well, like replacing a word or two ("uparrow", for example) with a symbol that's not convenient to type: ↑

Using this, you can set up a system where you type "shitman" and have it replaced with "of the ShittyWorks™ User Manual". When you want to write

More information on this toolbar can be found on page 5 of the ShittyWorks™ User Manual

you just type

More information can be found on page 5 shitman

and it takes care of it for you. I've used this when translating cookbooks to avoid having to memorize, copy and paste, or repeatedly calculate measurement conversions: I put together a set of these that would let me type the measurement without a space between the number and the unit and get a converted measurement, so if the cookbook says "250 mL" I type "250ml" and get "1 cup".

Just make a pun with one of the languages you will focus in your translation company

HolaTranslation

the speakeasy.
people will think its a bar