Subtitling is one option whenever the source language (original narration) is in a language other than the target audience’s language.

Clients typically choose subtitling for media distribution and for broadcasting.

In the US, many times subtitling is used for national broadcasting to reach a broader audience.

First off, when deciding whether or not subtitling is suitable for programming, you must understand your audience.

In this regard, keep in mind that many countries prefer subtitles over dubbing.

If your client is creating a media disc for distribution, and you are already planning on doing voice dubbing, it is recommendable to also include subtitles in the menu, as many viewers prefer this option, especially the deaf and hard of hearing.

Your provider should have the capability to accurately translate and subtitle your programming, delivering the service in various languages directly to DVD and Blu-ray authoring systems, and even to NLE systems. This will secure an accurate delivery of your message to any audience around the world.

Trusted Translations, Inc. uses only the best translators and subtitlers available, who are always not only native speakers of the target language but also perfectly fluent in the source language.

It takes a lot longer to read than to listen, therefore each translation is carefully edited, providing a comfortable reading speed for the viewer while maintaining the meaning and impact of the video. Proper names, technical jargon, and industry terms are researched to ensure proper spelling and undertone.

Trusted Translations, Inc. has the aptitude to take personalized approach to you and your product and deliver a satisfactory final project.

There are a number of organizations who are advocates of the importance of language, localization, and global content. As frequent industry contributors, they organize events to promote quality standarization and help strengthen a community that spreads across the globe. Translation Manager, Localization Managers, Translation company owners and operators, among others, meet at such events to discuss the latest industry trends, ideas and insights from around the world. Below are a few of the conferences being held this year and early next year.

LISA Forum Europe: Building Quality, Building Customers

The program will feature tracks on defining localization quality, assessing quality, planning quality, and on the impacts of various technologies and development methodologies on localization quality.

The Multilingual Web: Where Are We?

The MultilingualWeb project, funded by the European Commission and coordinated by the W3C, is looking at best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the multilingual Web. The project will raise visibility of what’s available and identify gaps via a series of four events, over two years. This is the first event.

ATA 51st Annual Conference

The ATA Annual Conference is held each fall in a major city or popular resort area. This four-day event showcases panel discussions, expert presentations, training workshops, and scholarly papers. The conference also features a job marketplace, a vendor exhibit hall, certification testing, and networking sessions designed to build professional contacts for attendees.

GALA 2011: The Language of Business. The Business of Language.

GALA 2011 will bring together the community of professionals involved in global content delivery. This community consists of all parties charged with transforming original content (software code, website content, product information, technical documentation, marketing materials, and more) into translated and localized content for consumption by people around the world.

ITI Conference 2011

ITI Conference 2011 is the flagship conference of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, and marks ITI’s 25th anniversary. There will be plenary sessions, panel discussions, workshops and talks on practical aspects of interpreting and translation, such as technology for interpreters and translators, project management and running your business, as well as the training of interpreters and translators and professional development.

According to the 2000 census, over 21 million people in the United States have limited English proficiency (LEP). Nearly 28 percent of all Spanish speakers in the United State fall into this category. This language barrier can be a serious disadvantage in providing quality health care. It can affect an LEP patient’s access to services, their ability to give informed consent for medical treatment, and their compliance with drug regimens and follow-up. Patients who speak little or no English may be at greater risk of medical error or misdiagnosis if they are not provided with an interpreter, are less likely to use preventive care services, and more likely to use emergency rooms than English speakers. They also need more diagnostic tests, are less satisfied with the medical care they receive, and are often dissatisfied with the quality of the translated material they are given.

Addressing these concerns, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health has issued a number of guidelines which are primarily directed at health care organizations with the goal of providing meaningful access to LEP patients; however, individual providers are also encouraged to use the standards to make their practices more culturally and linguistically accessible. These guidelines are detailed in the Department’s National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health Care (CLAS). Most relevant for this article is Standard 7, which states that “an effective language assistance program ensures that written materials that are routinely provided in English to applicants, patients/consumers, and the public are available in commonly encountered languages other than English. It is important to translate materials that are essential to patients/consumers accessing and making educated decisions about health care”.

These guidelines discuss in great detail the importance of using qualified translators and the need for establishing procedures that will assure the quality of the translated materials given to the public:

The section ends with the injunction to “avoid ‘wildcat’ translations (e.g., the doctor’s sister who took Spanish in collage), however tempting the financial advantages”.

Spanish Translation US has teams of life science expert Spanish translators that can work on all life science related documentation from complex pharmaceutical manual to patient customer care documentation and forms.

For more information, visit: Spanish Life Science Translation

For more information about CLAS standards, visit:

Related News:

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) voted in favor of President Obama’s health care reform proposal. They belive it will greatly improve the quality of life for millions of Latinos. The measure is expected to expand coverage to 8.8 million Latinos, or 60%of the currently uninsured Hispanic community.

“This bill is important for all Americans, but it is particularly critical to our Latino communities which have the highest uninsured rate of any racial or ethnic group in the country. The bill provides access to affordable health care to the millions of uninsured Latinos in this country through Medicaid expansion, access to health insurance exchanges, and subsidies to help low and moderate income families,” said Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA), the Chair of the CHC Task Force on Health.

A press release from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus:

Congressional Hispanic Caucus Calls for Passage of Health Care Reform

I found this nice little comic strip at Mox’s blog, a site put up by a fellow translator.

I liked it because I feel like, to at least some extent, it shows what we translators go through at some point. When we are up to our eyes with work, an upcoming interview, when we can’t sleep and we have next to no contact with the outside world (not even through TV!), we’re in cruise control and can’t help but translate whatever we’re thinking. In other words, thinking itself has become a synonym for translating. We translate everything, out loud or in our heads, for ourselves and for others. Or we’ll speak in another language without realizing it or considering that Aunt So and S o doesn’t know the language and the dog doesn’t understand sentáte. But that doesn’t translate to what we think about life and death or what we’re planning to do next weekend.

As you can see, this post is not an attempt to solve anything. It’s just a reflection. We’ve made a few suggestions before about how to beat the exhaustion and stress when you’re in the middle of an important delivery (take a walk, eat an apple, call a friend on the phone). Exhaustion can lead to errors… For all the “craziness” that comes from too much translating… I don’t think there’s much we can do.

Several colleagues who spend day after day, week after week toiling as editors- that is, correcting translations day after day, week after week– and I have gotten together and after much discussion, we have set down this list of guidelines and suggestions that we feel will be very useful for translators, especially the newer ones… or maybe not.

1. Dictionaries don’t bite. Especially ones online. Do us and do yourself a favor and use them. If you’re not sure of a word’s meaning, look it up! If you are sure, double-check it!

2. Follow the instructions. If the client (or whoever gave you the job) tells you to use certain words or a style that you don’t particularly like, do it anyway! The client is always right. And the boss… (That goes without saying)

3. We are sorry to report that the translator cannot choose the project’s topic, type of file, inclusion or deletion of tables, images, etc., so translate what’s in front of you, don’t turn in the project that you wish you had been given. If there are tables, translate them. If there are images, include them. And if they have text… (Figure it out?) Translate it!

4. There are expressions that you love. Understandable, we all do. It’s like your worn out jeans that fit just right and we keep using despite the holes and the fact that they’re falling apart… Well, when you are writing your autobiography, use these expressions as much as you like. But while you’re translating, please use the correct expression, and try not to use your favorites ad nauseam. (There are times when something is just “about,” not “regarding,” not “concerning,” etc.)

5. There are some writers who are “ugly” editors, we know. Sometimes the source text even comes with errors. The translator’s task is not to improve on the original, but rather to provide a good translation. Seems obvious, but not everyone gets it. Just to make sure we’re clear: what you should do is TRANSLATE, not make the source text prettier in its new language…

6. To err is human and to edit some errors is not divine. Please, reread what you write: make sure it doesn’t say the opposite of what the author said. Make sure commas are where they should be, if one is missing, if an s got skimmed over, if a preposition got left out, if the verb is in the wrong tense… Ah! For those who haven’t yet heard, Word has a little tool called “spell check.” Use it! Although it doesn’t work miracles, it always helps.

7. To wrap things up, a small piece of advice. We know that it’s hard to do this while simultaneously doing all the other things that have to be done while working: checking email, chatting, texting, talking on the phone, keeping an eye on the TV (don’t deny it…). But please, pay attention to what you’re reading (and translating).

8. And last but not least: THINK. Use that wonderful thing known as a brain. And when all else fails (dictionaries, forums, glossaries, more clear-headed colleagues..) and you feel that there’s nothing you can do, that you’re on the edge of a breakdown, that you can’t go on another minute, please, for your sake and ours: QUIT! Quit using the computer, quit translating, QUIT!

Well, quit working for a while: go outside, have some tea, clear your mind and come back later.  And although this advice is valid, please don’t take the comments too seriously…

Cheap and fast are the first two words that go through most people’s minds when they start looking for a translation agency. But when they read over the first translation that they had done based solely on those two criteria, they’ll probably rethink the whole idea and realize that “quality” was actually what they were looking for. This is a little guide on how to avoid these situations when selecting who is going to do your English or Spanish translation.

Quality translations can be cheap and they can have good turnaround times, no doubt about it. The trick is finding these translation companies. There are essentially two key factors that will give you a top-notch translation: the skills of the translators and the translation process used at the company.

Try and find out how the company chooses its translation team and see if they have native English and Spanish speakers on staff. See if they have specialists in the medical, legal, engineering or whatever field you need. A lot of translation projects are doomed before they get started because an uncle’s friend is “fluent” and is asked to take the job instead of a professional translation agency.

A good translation is not a one-step process. Ideally, you will have native speakers translating, editing and proofreading your document or project. Read over the company’s process and see how they do things. If the company hasn’t listed this information on it’s company website, move on to the next.

There’s no getting around the price. It is extremely important. And the best translation companies do offer low price translations because they know what they’re doing and have the best translators following a quality translation process. So do a little homework on the English and Spanish translation company and you will see the results pay off ten-fold.

I don’t know if it happens in every country, but I feel like in most places people’s speaking and writing is getting worse and worse. And we, the translators, are people too; meaning that, living in this century, in this society, we are no different. We are well aware of the rules, but we don’t use them in our daily lives: because it would sound awkward, because one wants to “fit in,” because we don’t have time for everything.

We use “bad words” and borrowed words, and we don’t even pay attention to the correct forms or structures of how things should be said or written, even though we are well aware of what is correct. It is estimated that kids today have a vocabulary of roughly 200 words, while a middle aged adult (40 years old) normally uses about two thousand. Television, radio and newspapers are certainly not helping, because they’ve fallen into using the same deprived language. New forms of communication- chatting, e-mail, text messages- ironically make communicating easier, but also force us to use fewer words, abbreviations, and the shortest of phrases.
I believe that translators, both young and old, belong to a special group of people that loves language, takes care of it, studies it and has obtained a richer vocabulary. In our job, we watch the rules and force ourselves to edit properly. And we have an important task: to continue preserving our language, to continue forcing ourselves to use it as it should be used and not allowing it to become impoverished.  The advantage is that for us, this is not a job that we do reluctantly, but rather a duty that we fulfill with a satisfying dignity.