Services
Dilettante banalities
Quality production in linguistic services is directly proportional to the status of professional culture present on the market.
That is why the EUROLOGOS Group never ceases to divulge translatological and graphics knowledge specific to its activities: multilingual editing and multimedia publishing.
Quality production is also the result of the active partnership between EUROLOGOS-translators and CLIENT-revisers.
Here are four "critical" clichés to avoid that are unfortunately still all too frequent.
The text has been translated by a non-native speaker
Not at EUROLOGOS! All our offices have been created (and others will follow) to "translate the language where it is spoken", ergo, not only by native speakers, but also by speakers living on location: the target market.
It is true that a large part of the translation market is still made up of exclusively local so-called "letterbox" micro-companies, which cannot always (necessarily) guarantee that their freelancers are native speakers.
Literal translations
Beware: a literal translation is not a word-for-word translation or an exact copy. The greatest translatologists even assert that a non-literal translation, i.e., morphologically removed from the source text, is not a true translation!
It is true that a translated text should not reek of transposition. The translation should be like a "dancer in chains", stylistically beautiful like a dancer, but chained to the source text (literalness).
The vocabulary is not rich and the style is elementary
A translation should not be a rewritten text conjured away into the target language: it must be faithful to the source text, even from a stylistic and idiomatic point of view (hence the necessity to sometimes rewrite the source texts well).
One should not claim that a translation is better than the original text (the translator's ethical humility does not allow it!). An exception may be when it is decided in advance to pay the price for the ensuing restyling of the translation.
The terms are not precise: the translator is useless
The problem of terminology is at the core of the quality of the translation. The creation and validation of (terminotic) glossaries is the one and only way to ensure the creation of sector or company technolects (translation memories for technical language appropriate through the validation of glossaries, client by client).
The deception that "we have thousands of specialist translators", offered shamelessly by exclusively local so-called "letterbox" translation agencies, must be nipped in the bud. Modern linguistic engineering of technical translation memories has really solved this great and unavoidable terminology problem. The rest is nothing but deceptive overclaim by unlikely all-knowing translators, who are always inevitably fallible.
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