SFM Traduction: Blogging about the business of language and the language of business — A blog about translation, copywriting, presentations, and multilingual communication

The translation crowdsourcing debate…again

October 31, 2009

Translation crowdsourcing just keeps on cropping up on the blogosphere and in translation industry news these days.
The American Translators Association recently took an official stance against crowdsourcing by LinkedIn and many individual translators have jumped on the bandwagon, forming a group on LinkedIn (Translators Against Crowdsourcing) and talking up the issue in the blogosphere. Here [...]

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Marketing translations: dealing with features and benefits

October 27, 2009

Over at Marcomments today, a post about transforming product/service features into customer benefits in your copywriting, a policy that I would say also applies to marketing translations. I would even go so far as to argue that, as a marketing translator, part of my job is to help customers make the shift from features to [...]

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Translating mission statements: writing one that isn’t dumb is the first step

October 25, 2009

The mere thought of a corporate mission statement coming across my desk for translation is enough to make me cringe. This month’s issue of Fast Company (Nancy Lublin’s “Do something” column) talks about why most mission statements are “dumb” and what can be done about it.
According to Lublin, it all comes down to having a [...]

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Translators working with French: new blog to help you boost your business

October 21, 2009

Here’s a new blog that’s been simmering for a while. It’s not quite cooked through yet, but is ready for tasting.

Hope to see you there soon!

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Translating English IT neologisms into French can be as long a process as aging a bottle of fine Burgundy

October 15, 2009

In the Wall Street Journal today, this article on how English IT neologisms get “officially” translated into French, a process that can take upwards of 18 months!
The article explains how a task force recently spent 18 months on the term “cloud computing” — coming up with “informatique en nuage” and going back to the drawing [...]

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Translating brochures: proceed with caution

October 7, 2009

Over at MarComments, the Harding Marketing marketing communication blog, this post about avoiding a world of trouble when translating brochures and other marketing materials, with which I couldn’t agree more.
I would also add the following tips:

Simple, concrete, active sentences are not only easier to translate, they often read better, too. I refer back to The [...]

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Quality: It’s in the details

September 23, 2009

Creating a consistent image is one of the best ways to ensure that your message is clearly understood by customers, business partners, and other stakeholders. And consistency often boils down to attention to detail.
A couple of interesting cases have come across my desk recently — two examples of lack of attention to detail and one [...]

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Collaborative websites, why they’re hard to translate, and what you should do about it

September 18, 2009

Collaborative websites, open authoring, content management systems, wikis…the number of organizations I work with that have multi-authored collaborative websites has exploded over the past two years. Now all stakeholders within an organization are capable of maintaining and updating their own web pages without going through a corporate webmaster. Sounds great, doesnt’ it?
Well, it is…but there’s [...]

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In search of the perfect homepage: the headline

September 9, 2009

Over on Copyblogger this morning, a little headline inspiration — just what the doctor ordered for my case of acute writer’s block (the homepage, remember?). So I thought I’d try some of the suggestions to see if I can get my creative juices flowing…
Inspiration source 1 — the Digg front page (Incidentally, I am not [...]

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In search of the perfect homepage

September 3, 2009

I am trying to write the homepage copy for the English version of my new Website, and I’m grappling with a serious case of writer’s block.
Maybe I am putting too much pressure on myself to write something so brilliant and irresistible that every single potential client that stumbles upon my homepage will magically be converted [...]

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