Certified, notarized translation, official, qualified translator…what does it all mean?!

Questions
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When it comes to having their official documents translated for governments and institutions – birth certificates for citizenship or immigration visas, transcripts for university admission and so on – one of the biggest hurdles my clients have to overcome is finding an eligible translator. While meeting these organization’s requirements is the client’s responsibility, I also see it as my responsibility as the translator, because if I know the requirements I can make their lives easier, and if I don’t know them and don’t provide my client with the appropriate form of translation, I could be contributing to their application being delayed, and in some cases rejected altogether.

Neither I nor anybody I have worked with in this regard finds it easy to understand the various terms used by organziations to describe the required translator or translation. Half the time I think the organization themselves aren’t sure what to say and just put together words that sound good!

In an effort to improve this situation, I am decanting all my findings on this topic into this blog post, so that if any of you ever needs to decide what type of translation or translator is required, this reference will be here for you to make this one hurdle a bit easier to hop over.

So, here we go…

Qualified – if the translator needs to be “qualified”, I would suggest they need to have a university level degree, or at least a diploma, in either general or specialized translation. I am not sure being bilingual, working as a translator for x years, or having passed a high school or continuing ed certificate in translation would be satisfactory in this case.

Official – now, this is tricky, as where I am from, there’s no such thing as an official translator. In other countries, there are bodies that grant this title to certain translators (see “Sworn” below). If that is the case for you, then congrats! You’re an official translator, please pass go and collect $200. For the rest of us, we have two choices – we can tell the client they must look to country x for an official translator and turn down the job, or we can say that we are a qualified and/or certified (see below!) translator and that for translation matters in our country, that must be good enough.

Sworn – some official translators are “sworn”, and usually sworn translators are “official”, but there’s not a 100% overlap. The one constant among sworn translators is that they have taken an oath in court that they are willing and able to provide translations. Some countries don’t have sworn translators, and of those that do, some require the translator to pass test of competence, and some don’t. But if you are in a country that has sworn translators and you are asked for an official translation, your best bet would be to head in their direction. Also note if you are dealing with the UK, they have such a thing as a sworn translation, which is a translation that has been sworn by the translator in front of a solicitor to be accurate and/or complete.

Certified – now when you see this word floating about, beware! Things are about to get murky. There’s a difference between a certified translator and a certified translation, for one. Then the definition of a certified translator varies from country to country.
First, the certified translation – according to the American Translators Association, to certify a translation a translator must sign a statement “attesting that the translation is accurate and complete to the best of the translator’s knowledge and ability”. (According to the ATA and the UK-based Institute of Translation and Interpreting, this statement must be notarized or sworn before a solicitor – see Notarized and Sworn respectively! – but in Canada at least, I have had no problem simply providing the statement without third party involvement.) So – no special knowledge, experience or certification is required of the translator here. And that is the difference between certified translations and certified translators.
Certified translators must have been granted certification from some regulating authority (such as the ATA in the US), usually with a requirement that translators pass a test of their translation competence, though in Canada you can become certified by showing evidence of having completed x number of words of professional translation work.
The last thing to bear in mind here is that just because a translator is a Member of a translation association doesn’t mean they are certified. Most associations have different levels of membership and only a translator who has passed specific certification requirements can call themselves certified.

Verified – who knows what people are getting at when they come up with this one? But in true translator fashion, I have looked the term up in my trusty dictionary. And the dictionary’s response is that the truth or correctness [of the translation] has been established by examination or demonstration, OR, in a legal sense, the translation is supported by testimony or proofs. So, the translator or the client would have to verify – see what I did there? – whether the translation in question requires general or legal verification. But either way, it seems clear that a third party needs to get involved here. I would suggest another translator with knowledge of both languages and the subject matter would need to review the document and the translation, and provide a statement that the translation appeared to be a true translation of the original. It could be argued that the original translator could examine and verify their own work, in which case “verified” would be synonymous with “certified”, but if in doubt, I would get a third party to help out.

Notarized – last (I hope!), but not least, is “notarized”. Seems fairly straightforward on the surface, and hopefully it is. This in North America is synonymous with the UK use of “sworn” (see above), and means that the translator has appeared before a notary public and signed an affidavit to the effect that they really are a translator for the relevant languages, and that the translation is complete and correct to the best of their knowledge. The notary public then signs and stamps the affidavit and attaches it to the translation. This lends authority to the translator’s statements and usually requires the notary public either to know the translator personally or have been shown evidence of their professional capacity or translation qualifications.
One small opportunity for hiccups here – at times the organization requesting the translation may want the notary public to in fact act as a verifier, and swear themselves that the translation is true. In which case the notary public would have to be a fluent speaker of both languages involved, so… good luck with that one! 😛

 

Okay, that brings us to the end of my not-so-quick-but-hopefully-handy reference guide to official translation terminology. Good luck to you all!
And if anyone has come across a term I haven’t included here, please do post it in the comments; I will gladly research it and provide an update to the above.

Online references for translators

Just a quickie this month, as the dust settles after a flooding/stampede/birthday extravaganza round our house. (That will mean little to those of you who aren’t members of my family or residents of Calgary, but suffice to say it’s been non-stop around here since the end of June).

In my last post I mentioned a number of online resources I use for work when I’m away from the “office”. I actually use many of them when I’m “in the office” too, as a complement to my paper dictionaries and reference books. I thought you might be interested to hear about ones I find particularly useful, in case they can be helpful to you too, so here they are (along with a couple other useful sites):

Monolingual language resources

www.merriam-webster.com (American English dictionary)

www.oxforddictionaries.com (British English dictionary)

www.thesaurus.com (self-explanatory!)

www.diccionarios.com (Spanish monolingual – as well as multilingual – dictionary. Limited number of searches allowed without an account)

British National Corpus  (Corpus of British English usage)

Corpus of Contemporary American English (the American English counterpart to the BNC)

Multilingual language resources

www.wordreference.com (dictionary for major European and Asian languages)

Proz Term Search (dictionary in the form of members’ contributions or answers to translation questions, in tons of languages!)

www.linguee.com (again collected from individuals’ translations; often unreliable, but useful for double-checking)

LEO (major European languages and Chinese into or out of German only)

And of course, our dear friend Google (don’t forget you can try Google.co.uk, Google.es, Google.com.mx etc. to get country-specific results, and Google Scholar is invaluable for academic and technical vocabulary)

[I was going to put the EU multilingual term base on here (IATE), but it likes to freeze my computer too much, so I can only say use with caution!]

File access and transfer

Dropbox I’m sure everyone’s heard of Dropbox by now. It’s amazingly easy to store files for use on other devices/computers, or to give other people access to several files or large files without filling up their inboxes.

Hightail (formerly yousendit, I used to use this before I got Dropbox. This is still useful to use with people who don’t have a Dropbox account.)

I’d love it if you would leave in the comments any websites you use that I haven’t mentioned here.

‘Til next time!

Creating a temporary home office

Back at the start of the year I was living in temporary rented accommodation for two months. I was still working but had to leave my computer, desk, chair, reference books and other office paraphernalia at home. So how to recreate a suitable work environment quickly and easily in a new spot?

First, pick a location. Our rented apartment had a living room, kitchen/dining area, two bedrooms and two bathrooms. One of the bedrooms actually had a desk area set up in it. Other than that the only chair/table combos were the dining table and the kitchen breakfast bar. Goldilocks-style, I ruled out the bedroom office setup (too removed from the living space, where my daughter would be playing), and the dining area (too close to the living space, which would make it hard to concentrate) and settled on the breakfast bar which had a view of the living room but was set back so I would have a chance to work in semi-peace (just right!).

Second, set up your computer. I was using my husband’s laptop with add-on mouse. Laptops aren’t great from an ergonomic point of view, but it was workable for the short period of time I required it. I also had the laptop on top of the breakfast bar, giving me both sitting and standing options. I had made sure to move all my current work files, templates and most frequently used reference materials from my home computer into Dropbox before leaving, so I was able to access them all on the laptop, courtesy of the cloud! And I brought along a simple notepad and pen to give myself a break from the computer/the opportunity to work outside (our laptop is a clunker with almost no battery life!).

Third, get yourself some internet. We had our landlord install a modem and then we were able to create a pay-as-you-go account so we only paid for the internet we used while we were living there. I deal with all my clients by email so this was all I needed (almost*). If you use the phone a lot in your business, I believe Skype and Google both provide call forwarding services which allow you to receive calls made to your home phone over the internet, so your clients wouldn’t have to make any changes to your contact info.

Last, reference materials. Sadly I had to leave my heavy dictionaries etc. at home, but I found the online resources I sometimes use at home did a great job filling in on a more full-time basis during the two months.

And that’s it! A nice little home-office-away-from-home. Hopefully this gives you some ideas on how you can make it work if you need (or want) to be away from home for an extended period and still work comfortably. If you have any ideas that you’d like to add, please tell me about them in the comments below!

* I’ve sneakily left out how to arrange receiving mail while you are away. In our case, we asked my sister to pick up our mail and deposit any checks for me. If anyone knows of any alternatives to this setup, I’d love it if you would let me know in the comments. 🙂

 

Translated fiction – where is it? Part 2

Okay, so in this second part of my translated fiction post, I will be looking at what publishers, agents and translators can do to bring foreign fiction to us English-speaking readers. Let’s hope it’s something, because things weren’t looking too good in part 1!

So, publishers. They are tricky because they are to be credited with publishing all the translations that are out there, but at the same time they are largely responsible for the lack of translations on the market. According to the Three Percent article I referenced in part 1, the real reason we don’t get foreign fiction in English is because foreign rights cost very little, which means publishers’ marketing departments don’t spend time or money on translations (as they need to focus their efforts and cash on the big fish), which means their translations don’t sell, which makes publishers reluctant to buy them in the first place. Do you see the vicious circle spiralling here?

Enter And Other Stories and a few other publishers who are focussing on publishing translations, which handily allows their marketing departments to focus on translations, leading to greater public awareness of foreign fiction. Translations published by And Other Stories have been recommended as best books of the year and shortlisted for prizes. I think the future of English translations is in good hands if these companies can keep doing what they are doing, and if we as readers can help by supporting them. That doesn’t just mean buying their books; readers can support And Other Stories, for example, by suggesting books for translation, or by reviewing books they are considering publishing.

Now how about those agents? As authors’ representatives, they sell book rights to publishers and should be perfectly placed to get their clients’ books translated. These guys may be fighting a losing battle giving the publishers’ mindset, but if they represent the translation rights, it is their job to get translations out there. I found one agent who charges a higher commission on foreign sales; if this is the norm it should be a reasonable incentive to agents to get their authors translated. I don’t know enough about the industry to understand where this process falls down, unless it’s simply that agents don’t have enough clout with publishers. A hopeful sign is new company Two Seas Agency. While not a traditional agency per se, Two Seas sells book rights and is helping connect translators, authors and publishers in order to boost publication of translations, particularly in the US market.

Lastly, there is the group with perhaps the most interest in getting translated fiction on the market, the translators themselves. Historically, translators have played a large role in publishing translations (aside from the obvious production of the translation itself), as they often suggest foreign books to English-speaking publishers, and sometimes provide reviews or sample translations to encourage publication. I think translators are well positioned to serve as ambassadors for foreign authors, but their ability to influence publishers may be quite limited. The rapid growth of self-publishing may help here, as translators can work directly with authors and publish translations themselves.

There you have it, my thoughts on the various players in the translated fiction arena and what each can do to help get more foreign authors to us English-speaking folks. Hopefully this gives you an idea of what you can do if you want to either publish or read translated work. However, I’m far from an expert on this subject and any corrections or points I may have missed are more than welcome. And if you fit into any of the categories discussed I would love to hear your view of the situation, so please leave a comment below!

Next time: how to work in a temporary/makeshift home office.

Translated fiction – where is it? Part 1

Back in November 2011, I wrote about the popularity of translations in English. In my next two posts, I’ll look in greater depth into whether they really are unpopular, and what can be done to increase the number of translations published in English. So…

Where is all the translated fiction? Well, the short answer is, it’s in non-English-speaking countries!

I’ve been reading a lot recently about the dearth of translated fiction in English-speaking countries. A recent article on the wonderful Publishing Perspectives website gave the following figures for percentage of books published that are translations in the respective countries*:

  • Poland 46%
  • Spain 24%
  • France 15%
  • Germany 12%
  • USA 3%
  • UK 2.5%

*The percentages given relate to all books, not just fiction.

So I’m curious to get to the bottom of this – what are the obstacles that need to be cleared away if we in the English-speaking world are going to get access to foreign books? How will I ever expand my reading horizons??

I love reading, but after university I pretty much stopped. I think maybe all the German and Spanish literature classes took a toll! Anyway, a few years ago I set out to change this. First I set myself a challenge to read 25 classics. Then I decided I’d like to read more foreign authors (if you are wondering, the 25 classics challenge is still ongoing, 3 years later!). Though I can read German and Spanish originals, it feels a little too much like work, so I wanted to read English translations. I also didn’t want to be limited only to German and Spanish authors. But I found that Isabel Allende is pretty much the extent of the foreign authors available in my local area.

I had always assumed this was because there was (almost) no market for translated books. I didn’t know why, but that seemed to be what the problem was. But lately I’ve read that the difficulty is that English-speaking publishers can’t read foreign languages, and so they can’t tell whether they should publish them or not. I’ve also read that publishing translations is too expensive. When I recovered from my laughing fit, I figured I must be missing something. Apparently not, although this post from Three Percent shows that the “expense” of translations is only part of the answer – actually all three of the above reasons contribute to the lack of foreign authors in British and North American bookstores.

So how might a foreign book turn into an English translation and get into an enthusiastic reader’s hands? There are several parties involved – the author, the publisher/editor, the agent, the translator, the bookseller and the reader.

I can’t see what the reader could do to obtain translations themselves. If you know of anything, please tell me, and I will go do it right now!

How about authors? My aunt is an author (check out her books for older kids/young adults here!), so I checked with her for an author’s point of view. She said typically authors do not retain the foreign language rights to their books. So while in theory it might be possible for them to negotiate for these rights and thus arrange for the publication of translations themselves, this probably isn’t too feasible in reality.

Booksellers would surely have the negotiating power to oblige publishers to put out translations, but would only use this power if there was something in it for them. If translations don’t sell well, there’s no incentive to stock them.

In part 2 I’ll look at what publishers, agents and translators can do to get more foreign authors translated, and reveal the real reason we can’t find any translated fiction in our English-speaking world. (If you can’t wait until next time, you can cheat by reading the Three Percent article linked above. It’s loooong though!)

Oh, and if I may do a double teaser, we just finished up an extended vacation in the Cayman Islands, so stay tuned as I will be posting about working with a temporary office setup soon!

As always, questions, opinions, or corrections are all very welcome. 🙂