According to the European Patents Office (EPO), translating patents is a juicy business for the translation industry. EPO estimates that the translation costs for a single patent (covering only 13 countries) currently averages € 14 000. If one correlates that with the 134 542 patents granted by EPO in 2009, it translates into a whooping € 1 883 588 000 cashed in by the translation industry in a single year.

The EU languages department is acutely aware of the dearth of qualified linguist and is so worried about it’s future supply of professional translators and interpreters that it is actually taking action to increase the pool of qualified translators.

Performing SEO is still a labor intensive, time-consuming hence expensive task. Yet, having your website optimized in English, you cannot simply have it translated without the repeating all that effort in foreign languages. It is sadly not possible to pre-optimize your Web copy before translation — it has to be re-optimized as part of the translation process.

At the end of August 2010, Google launched a new community based translation project, Health Speaks. The aim of the project is to open the information door to health related articles to Arabic, Hindi and Swahili speakers, as the large majority of health related articles available in English are inaccessible to non-English speakers.

A leaked internal e-mail revealed Mr. James opposition to the funding of the – legally mandatory – translators for people seeking assistance at the Department of Social Services (DSS) on the ground that most non-English speakers turning to the DSS for help are illegal immigrants, though he did not volunteer documented sources for that assertion.

As a client, your input is invaluable. You are the one who knows most about the original and intended context of the text to translate. Imagine that you work for a multinational that also produces alcohol and that your document is a warning against the dangers of alcohol.

The translation world is changing daily, with new technologies, new challenges, and new concepts, yet some parameters remain the same. This, however, does not mean that they are widely understood.

Moving from one country to another or doing cross-border business almost always implies handling official documents in different languages. These will have to be translated and, more often than not, one stamp or another is required to legitimate the translation.

The Hebrew calendar has 12 months plus a thirteen’s one that is added to the year every two or three years (see table below). This is to compensate for the fact the Hebrew calendar is a strictly lunar calendar. This means that, as there are approximately 12.4 lunar months in every solar year, a 12-month lunar calendar is about 11 days shorter than a solar year and a 13-month lunar is about 19 days longer than a solar year.

But first, you have to internationalize… Confused? You thought you knew the meaning of these three words: globalize, internationalize and localize? Well, you most certainly do, but these words take a more specific meaning when applied to the translation industry.