Looking for good translators? Look to a good university

Aston, City, Heriot Watt, Edinburgh, Imperial College, London Metropolitan, Middlesex, Roehampton, University College, Bath, Birmingham, Bristol, East Anglia, Essex, Exeter, Hull, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Portsmouth, Salford, Sheffield, Surrey, West of England, Wales, Warwick, Westminster.

Just some of the universities in the UK offering post-graduate (MA or MSc) degree courses in translation.

These universities offer translation PhD courses:

University of Edinburgh

Imperial College London

University College London

University of East Anglia

University of Manchester

University of Wales (Swansea)

Courses vary, obviously, but there is still quite a lot of overlap:

• Specialised translation with translation technology
• Principles and strategies of translation
• Translation project management
• Professional skills
• Business
• Business operations
• Researsh methodologies
• Approaches to translaiton
• Business translation
• Lexicography
• Terminology

Before we can start using a translator, we have to check their experience and background. Although the UNI EN 15038 translation standard requires this, we check a person’s CV for another reason – to avoid “churn”.

It’s a marvellous word isn’t it, “churn”.

Imagine this:

1. You ask a company to translate your text.
2. The translation comes back.
3. You send it to your offices in Japan to review.
4. They return the text with lots of corrections.
5. You send the text to the translation company.
6. They update it, send it back.
7. You send it back to Japan.
8. They send back more corrections.
9. And so on and so on.

This is churn. It’s wasting effort and time and money.

Before we start using a translator, we look at their education, we look at their experience and we ask them to do some test translations. We do this because we don’t like churn.

We prefer to work like this:

1. You ask a company to translate your text.
2. The translation comes back.
3. You send it to your offices in Japan to review.
4. They thank you.

That’s how we prefer to work. What about you?

source: http://www.lexicool.com/courses_uk.asp