As seen on the... Google Art Project!

Bridging cultural gaps would not be possible without translation... in its multiple forms.

There are a few places where translation in the broader sense is a permanent and ongoing effort and necessity, the interpretation and contextualization of historical object is a "transitional" and layered process beyond aesthetics and form vs. function factor. Museums may be one of those space-time jinxes! Now put all that into perspective in an out-of-the-box experience right here on this screen... Nice to see some paintings, decorative arts and national treasures, but what's beyond the looks? What to tell about the route and history of an exotic piece? One of the last projects I found myself immersed into was the translation of the contents for the Google Art Project presence of the Dionísio Pinheiro and Alice Cardoso Pinheiro Foundation, based in Águeda, a small-to-medium-sized Portuguese city.

This almost unnoticed museum lodges a vast collection with unique pieces in Oriental ceramics, Portuguese and European paintings, pottery and silverware, not to mention French Boulle furniture from different periods and a "lost" collection of drawings by a Dutch master... and so on and so on... In case you are in Portugal or visiting check their Facebook page right here to check their events and timetable.

And it is good to mention it was the second Portuguese museum to be invited to feature a selection of pieces, 50, but more will follow. The museum's page on Google Art Project was made available on 25 September 2013.

FREE Translation of your Resume or CV!!!

With millions of people moving around the world and relocating, one of the most important tasks is having resume or curriculum vitae (CV) translation completed for job finding.

While many people can actually speak English, many do not speak it on a proficient level, or at least enough to properly translate their own resume or CV.

With just one resume translation from Portuguese to English, you can make as many copies as necessary to future needs.

It will only take one translation of a resume or CV to properly start a successful local or global job search.

We can translate your CV or resume for FREE between any of the following languages:
* English;
* Portuguese.

To get the FREE translation of your resume or CV (up to 3 pages; .doc filetype; 1,5 paragraph) you will only have to:
* Follow the blog;
* Follow us on Twitter;
* Follow us on Facebook;
* Share a positive Twitter post about our service (with blog address);
* Share a positive Facebook post about our service (with blog address);
* Promote the blog and our translation services in your favourite forum (we will validate as long as we can see it).

And the contact email is translationwithcolour@gmail.com

Are you ready to get global?

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Our cooperation with ICLEI

Here you have a 2011 project highlight: our cooperation with ICLEI for the revising of its Portuguese language leaflet translated from English. It followed our linguistic assistance with me as interpreter (English «» Portuguese) to the Director of the Strategic Services of this international organisation during the course of an international seminar during June 2011.

The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) is an international association of local governments and national and regional local government organizations that have made a commitment to sustainable development.

SEO those translations... please!

When we are dealing with the translation of marketing materials for the Web, such as press releases, features analysis, and usage tutorials, one of the prime priorities to bear in mind is the proper usage of particular keywords in text titles, subtitles, headers and associated tags. This is a legitimate and wise method to ensure the webpage in which the text will be included ranks high in particular websearch engines, such as the ravishing popular "word-magnet & SEO-nemesis" Google.

This is one of the strategies to bring value into the translation process and must be brought into different types of websearch optimization, consider, for instance, news search, local search, video search, and audio search. Translation for SEO must bear in mind the way search engines deploy their results and the search preferences of the target audience, which includes the words or terms used as well as the preferred search engines.

Careful and persistent work is always involved when dealing with a team of translators and designers so that no detail is forgotten while keeping content open for search engines. An example we like using is the huge void left inside PDF files, so many fields to add information which will help sort and rank your document, we are talking about fields, such as, base URL, title, author, subject, keywords, description, copyright status, and others, and all of these are accelerators for page views and website ranking...

In any case, keep an open and proactive approch towards search engine optimization while you translate or proofread texts and documents for the Web, even if there's no SEO manager to offer you guidelines and a sense of priorities for words...

Open publication - Free publishing - More from TwColour

Subtitling project: territorial marketing video for a Portuguese municipality

This is our most recent project for translation and subtitling, but we also intervened to some extent in the production of this documentary. In this case the video piece is over 28 minutes long and features a medium-sized Portuguese municipality (something like 50.000 inhabitants in 350 km2) in central Portugal. The original language is Portuguese.

Check it for yourself!

Translation with Colour® now available at Thumbtack.com

Making yourself seen in the midst of a crowd is not at all that easy. Try to etch in your mind a huge squre full with people - in this case translators or wannabe translators - all of them waving a sign telling the language pairs they work with. The client goes to a balcony equipped with binoculars watching out for the right person...  How to sort the right professional for that urgent translation in order to close the contract? Now imagine you try to go local with this type of search! It's the needle in the haystack...

The solution comes in the form of Thumbtack.com. This nifty website is the ultimate meeting point for people offering services and their clients. What's best Thumbtack is a free service!

The service provider can grant all the details about his/her work (such as description of services, rates, information about the trade, the "do-and-don'ts",...), telling how he/she stands out from the crowd of professionals, curious, and DIY translators around the block. Reviews, testimonials, links, and question and answers (like a FAQ) are included for added assurance on the transaction.

Consider Thumbtack.com for your service needs... locally!

We can tell in the beginning we were a bit skeptic, but after the first contacts by prospective customers requesting quotes and awarding jobs... Yes, after this you know Thumbtack.com works.


We take this opportunity to talk about Translation with Colour® and about the work we love to do, that is, translation! Now also at Thumbtack.com: Translation with Colour


We are on-schedule, ethical, reliable and cost-effective.

We translate the following language pairs and directions:
» Spanish to English,
» Spanish to Portuguese,
» Portuguese to French,
» Italian to Portuguese,
» Italian to English,
» Italian to French,
» French to Portuguese,
» Portuguese to English,
» English to Portuguese,
» English to French,
» French to English.

We have over 20 years' experience in translating corporate, business-to-business and institutional documents in 5 different languages. Job completion targets are based on method and discipline towards client’s needs. Corporate assignments are completed, keeping in mind the global market and the desired outcomes for the client, so that our services bring value to the organization from a cost-effective point of view.

Our translation experience encompasses documents such as operating agreements, company registration documents, contracts, import certificates, bank letters, resolutions, certificates of authority, government documents, bid applications for funding, and other legal and administrative documents. Our writing and translating activity is indeed very diverse, as it also includes software localization, audio transcription and translation, video subtitling (captions), contents production and localization, in text types such as press releases, reports, blog entries, text rewriting, and other.

Consider us for all your needs related with our working languages for translation, proofreading, subtitling, article (re)writing.

We are on-schedule, ethical, reliable and cost-effective.

Video subtitling project... electric cycling for a sustainable future!

 

This is our latest English-language subtitling project and once again we bring value into a sustainable development project, in this specific case it refers to electrical cycling along with dedicated pathways.The video runs for 1 minute and 55 seconds, but it will not take this time for you to understand it took less to finish the minute task... and this post!

Next entry will feature impressions on our most recent extended translation assignment on the role of institutions of higher-learning in the development of small to medium-sized cities, i.e. cities which want to run up ... stay tuned!

Translation of a Paper about Municipal Programmes for the Senior Population

This short assignment was completed an year ago; it was another translation of a Portuguese language paper into English for an international seminar in Spain.

The text deals with the experience of a Portuguese municipality in improving socialization and physical exercise programmes for the senior population in its vast and assymetric territory. Very interesting reading for ideas!

Open publication - Free publishing - More culture

Another research paper translated into the Portuguese language

Translation with Colour®'s involvement with academic research is not new and this assignment is another evidence of this trend. The original article was written in English and focused on the Triple Helix Model for development, which involves academic institutions and associated research units, companies and the business sector, and the (local) administrations.

About the article itself one must point out that the writing style is what one can expect from an advanced academic piece of writing: neither simple nor eloquent; the paragraphs are long but concepts and ideas are well articulated, with subordination and coordination following smoothly. Don't know if the final English text was reviewed by an (a native) English teacher at the university but the English language used was well above average, considering the variety of vocabulary, grammar flawlessness, word collocation, and overall text organisation and pragmatics of English language. One final note: the authors of the research paper are two Portuguese university teachers in the University of Aveiro.

Open publication - Free publishing - More development

Don't trip on acronyms!...

One of the best known traps in translation process is the treatment of acronyms: the way the language mediator interprets and manages a row of letters referring to a company, institution, technological process, entity, country, product, measuring units, etc, etc, etc. I'm telling nothing new here, of course, but the fact is that when you trade between languages, when you translate acronyms you can stumble upon fowl language or rather coarse slang in all possible shades...
One of the last assignments I had dealt with Private Institutions for Social Solidarity, which is the English counterpart for the Portuguese Instituições Particulares de Solidariedade Social (IPSS)... now figure the English acronym for this. But this is nothing compared to other "fine" examples I don't dare jot about here... exposure would be the best word to describe it...
So, keep an open eye for those naughty acronyms, if you don't want to get exposed.

How to improve translation time? An how-to guide containing 7 easy steps. [Part 1/3]

Time is one of the most precious assets a translator has. The professional translator knows what time means in his daily trade at the wordsmith workshop. The translator is in fact always fighting time as he/she knows that the deadline must be met at any cost. Time is one of the key factors either for many clients choosing their translators or for translation agencies assigning projects.

Translation agencies often have to coordinate projects dealing with different target languages which will certainly mean talking with language professionals in different time-zones. Also, translation is repeatedly not one of the first priorities to be addressed while preparing an internationalization strategy, therefore translation and proofreading of marketing materials and technical data are often relegated to the last stages of the project.

So what can be done in order to improve the speed of premium-quality translations? The best way to gain time for the translation process itself is the combination of a number of factors, which once properly concatenated will allow the trained professional translator to reap the fruits of his/her training, work and intellectual assets.


Step #1 :: Computer-Assisted Translation or Computer-Aided Translation (CAT) tools have been around for roughly a quarter of a century (TRADOS company was created in 1984). Despite the fact that major developments in related computer hardware and software came after the mid-1990’s, it doesn’t mean most professional translators are taking all the benefits from the technology. Nowadays, the advantages of such an investment are incommensurable as the time factor becomes a pre-requisite for most contracts. The state-of-the-art of most CAT tools nowadays allows time savings due to their extensive support to the translation process with tools, such as, translation memories, multilingual corpora, text alignment methods, and terminology management systems.

Step #2 :: ...
(Continues on next post...)

Crowdsourced Translations of TED conferences turn them global

TED is turning to the crowd for help in opening its popular talks to a broader audience.

The Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, which turned a Swedish academic into a rock star and introduced the world to Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight, has launched a new project to translate its celebrated video talks. And it wants your help.

The $6,000 invitation-only conference for the elite digerati set began posting free videos of its talks online a few years ago. Since then the videos have been viewed more than 100 million times. But until now they’ve only been available in English.

After receiving repeated pleas to translate the talks, the organization is doing just that.

The Open Translation Project, launched Wednesday, combines crowd sourcing with smart language markup to provide translated and transcribed videos in multiple languages that can be indexed and searched by key words. The cool part is that users can click on any phrase in the transcript of a talk, and jump to that point in the video.

Some 300 translations have already been completed in 40 languages — from Arabic to Urdu. A handful of talks were translated into 20 languages by professional translators. But most were done by more than 200 volunteers around the world. Another 450 translations are in the works. A drop-down menu on the main TED Talks page allows you to sort videos by available languages.

“The entire goal and inspiration of the project is to be truly global and spread talks beyond the English world,” said June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media.

The videos are all in English with subtitles. A drop-down menu lists subtitle languages from which to choose. Next to the video a window displays a full transcript of the video to allow viewers to follow along with the talk or find the most salient points and skip ahead. Click a phrase in the transcript — such as the point where director JJ Abrams discusses his grandfather’s mystery box — and the video immediately jumps to that spot. Users can search for key words in a specific video or among all of the translated videos.

The transcripts also mean that key words in each video can now be indexed by outside search engines. Type the term “green rooftops” into Google, and among the links in your results page will probably be one that takes you directly to the point in Majora Carter’s talk where she discusses a green roof project in the Bronx.

Anyone can sign up to translate a video. But at least two fluent translators are required to work on each video for quality control and to discourage mischief-makers who might want to introduce inappropriate material into the translation.

“The second translator’s role is the editor’s role,” Cohen says. “Proofreading, checking for typos and questions of style to prevent the use of regional terms that won’t be widely understood.”

TED matches translators to work with one another, or groups can volunteer to work together. All translators are credited on the site.

TED provides guidelines and a professionally generated English transcript of the talk to each translator to ensure that translators don’t misinterpret a speaker’s words and that every translation starts from the same master transcript.

Nokia has sponsored the subtitle project, and dotSUB provided the platform that translators use to create the marked up transcripts.

Cohen says they’ve had interest from other groups and web sites that are interested in launching similar translation projects.

“Our hope is to pave the way and to provide an example a proof of concept for where we think the web is heading – in terms of the accessibility of video content through subtitling and through interactive transcripts to make online video documents radically more accessible,” says Cohen. “There’s a lot of ways it can go wrong. So we’re hoping to provide the proof that this can actually work and it can work beautifully and on a really large scale.”

from TED Crowdsources Translation of Its Talks

The way it looks...

Spasibíssima / спасибиссимо: Russian-Portuguese crossover or how to make things a bit more "simple"

I've married on the first Sunday of May this year and for a very special particular we had guests coming in from Russia... To make a long story short it happens that they (three lively girls) found the Portuguese adjective Obrigadíssima [Thank you very much] rather amusing. Explaining in English what it meant I had to say it meant the same as Thank you very much or the Russian Bol´shoe spasibo [Большое спасибо].

As a final note I said it was the same as "spasibíssima / спасибиссимо", the reaction was a loud laugh and comments the rest of the trip. Afterwards it became a nice tag expression for group insiders and more than a week later it still pushes into conversation!!! And the fad is alive... at least over here...

Do know about any other linguistic pearls like this?

My Bajan "Days" as Translator/Interpreter

"Juvenes Translatores 2008" - National winners have received their awards

Twenty-seven "young translators" (one from each EU Member State) travelled to Brussels to receive the prizes of the first ever European translation contest for schools. The prizes for the "Juvenes Translatores" contest were handed in a special ceremony by Leonard Orban, Member of the EC in charge of Mulitilingualism.

The contest was organised by the Translation Directorate-General of the European Commission and took place simultaneously in all Member States under the supervision of the schools involved. Participants were given two hours to translate one of the 23 different original texts into any other official language of the EU.

Below we offer a scan from a local Portuguese newspaper about the national winner, Luís Costa.

Another good reason for choosing a professional translator...

... and then we can stop at 404 Server Error for a nice cup of tea! ;)

Investing in something else than machine translation is really the best option...

European Comission has selected the Best Young Portuguese Translator

The winner was Luís Filipe Machado Costa.

You can check his work right here.

Go here to know more about this initiative by the European Commission.

Localisation ventures in Portugal target the African market (and elsewhere!)

Diversify! That's the word of order and that means new market, and new markets often mean adapting to reality and local needs. This Portuguese software house has a growing presence in foreign markets, especially in Portuguese-speaking African countries, such as Angola. From the position they have in the regional market they can target new countries with the established partners. It doesn't take long to understand localisation is part of the process. In this case the software was worked into the French language so the French-speaking Sub-Saharan countries could be approached successfully.

Generally speaking the user prefers to deal with software in his/her native language, and quite frankly no one can blame people for escaping the intellectual exercise of living in-between languages, homeless in a off-the-hook lifestyle. Who has the time to endure academia and semantic discussions when the boss is waiting the monthly report?

So, whether you believe or not that your software solution is the best just localise it or no one will be there to let you know about the ups and downs of... the help file. How many times will have I have to say that help files are vital for the user? Don't be lame; do the help file or get the blame!

Saramago books sold out in Beijing / Livros de Saramago esgotados em Pequim

Get your own - Open publication

Saramago sells in Beijing for two euros. Who wouldn't buy a bargain?... Strangely enough the front page of the newspaper warns "Drug abuse is rampant"... Is it a coincidence?...

Interview with Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira (1 March 2006)

Get your own - Open publication

Interview with Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira, the decane of Classical Studies in Portugal. Renown "author of translations", she dislikes this trade and considers it a burden, a consequence of her field of research. One of the first translation exercises of this poliglot was the translation into Portuguese of Greek classics for a students' scenic group at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. Her work comprises more than 300 titles, such as translations, papers, books, and encyclopedia articles. Yet, her passion are Greek vases.