by Sara on December 16, 2010
Pour SFM Traduction, traduire les documents marketing de ses clients, c’est aussi dans la mesure du possible proposer d’en améliorer la rédaction. On trouve souvent dans les brochures une confusion entre les caractéristiques d’une offre et les bénéfices qui en découlent pour l’utilisateur. Voici un exemple récent tiré d’un projet de traduction. Il s’agissait d’une [...]
by Sara on December 8, 2009
Last week I attended a Grenoble Ecole de Management conference on the future of manufacturing. The high-level panel — top executives from major French corporations and a journalist from a leading economic daily — brought in quite a crowd, and the auditorium was jam packed. One nugget that grabbed the attention of a number of [...]
by Sara on November 23, 2009
Over on Copyblogger, a great reminder about getting back to basics by focusing on writing great paragraphs, something that also happens to make copy more translatable. In French to English translation, two of the things that can easily throw me off track are redundancies (which are often disguised in French by using a variety of [...]
by Sara on November 16, 2009
According to this article in the LA Times today, today’s translation and interpreting market is about more than just speaking two languages — increasingly, it is about speaking two languages and possessing expertise in a particular subject area. This results in high-demand niches like “German to English waste management” or “Russian to Farsi nuclear engineering” [...]
by Sara on November 6, 2009
The recent translation crowdsourcing debate has got me thinking about the many different segments on the translation market–which has made me realize more than ever what a jungle it is for buyers. Add to this an interesting discussion I had recently with a marketing executive from a multinational (dissatisfied with marketing translations purchased from some [...]
by Sara on 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. [...]
by Sara on 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 [...]
by Sara on 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 [...]
by Sara on 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 [...]
It looks like Areva might be getting ready to overhaul its branding as an employer. What looks like an excerpt from a creative agency brief has just been published in a translation job ad on a public website. Human resources policies are most likely a key pillar of any company’s post-crisis bounce-back strategy. And innovative [...]