Social Networking Experiment Update

After sticking my toe in the Facebook water a week ago, I'm pleased to report that it's going really well. In fact better than I expected.

From a standing start there are now over 300 members of the Applied Language Translation and Interpreting Group. If you are interested in being a translator or interpreter then I'd recommend signing up to the group and to our suppliers data base www.talkbase.net.

Should you be nervous on Facebook?

I've started using Facebook recently and I've set up a few groups for work. We're a Translation and Interpreting company so to get more linguists to register with us I set up a group. It's worked really well. If you're a linguist on Facebook please join.

While I was looking for other related groups I found this quite scary one for United States Intelligence Community. It's an open group so anyone can join. What I can't tell is if it's a spoof or not. It looks pretty official and if it is maybe you should be nervous.

The web is a really weird place sometimes!

BBC underestimate cost of translation

A recent report by the BBC into the cost of Translation by the UK Government estimated that they spend £100 Million per year.

The nation gasped, how could they spend all that. Well the nation don't know the half of it.

I work in translation and I recon that the cost is more like £500 Million! It's all hidden costs you see. Translation disappears into Marketing (yes me again), mysterious project costs and a million (500 to be exact) other things.

If only they bought it in a more sensible way and used Translation Memory and Telephone interpreting they'd save a huge amount.

As you'd expect, as Head of Marketing for Applied Language, I've done a bit of work on this already.

Here are the press releases for more information, oh yes and the podcast.

How not to Translate or Interpret

In my line of work you hear a lot of stories about how companies have someone who speaks french, or they have a relative who can write Chinese.

So they use these people to translate or interpret and they end up with a terrible job. But there are a few reasons why they might continue to use these friends, for translation.

1. They don't have any understanding of the languages so have no way to check the quality
2. They are too embarrassed to tell their friend/colleague that they are doing a bad job
3. They are too blinded by the cost of a professional translation or interpretation to pay for a professional

All three are really bad reasons. Would you trust an accountant to fix your car?

Then why trust one to translate for you?

Here's a great clip from the Catherine Tate show in the UK. It Illustrates my point perfectly.