What exactly is collective failure?

In any organization, we work as part of a team, whether it be for marketing, sales, production, IT, HR, etc.

We have objectives, monthly / quarterly goals, personal goals and achievements that we have to meet. We have to deliver individually as well as a team.

At Spanish Translation US our business model is based on a team comprised of an Account Manager, who essentially works to serve our clientele, and a Project Manager, who is the production interface working with our suppliers whether it be in-house resources or freelancers. They have to work in tandem and in the best interest of the client. A lot of times we work under a lot of stress and tight deadlines.

Collective failure occurs when critical deadlines are not met, projects are not completed within the desired budget or there is no collaboration between the account manager, the project manager and all the members of the team to get the desired outcome. This is where the blame game starts, but it is everyone’s loss.

An Account Manager should understand the challenges a Project Manager faces. So should the Project Manager appreciate the Account Manager’s “yes we can” attitude.

Financial success should not be the only objective; you have to take pride in your work and deliver the best product/service you can.

Even if you are selling a slice of pizza at the local mall, sell it with pride and conviction. Believe in yourself and your team.

Always remember, there is no “I” in team and our culture based on shared values should guide every decision we make, every interaction among our team members, every product or service we provide, every channel we operate, every customer interaction.

1. Salesforce: One of the best known online CRM tools, Salesforce was built with sales in mind.It provides features useful for a sales staff, like the ability to easily access contact information through an iPhone while you’re out of the office.
2. Sugar CRM: Sugar actually offers several different CRM tools, which happen to be open source. While Sugar CRM is not free, it’s extremely adaptable, allowing you to easily create custom modules as well as add external data.
3. Zoho CRM: CRM grew out of managing sales and marketing efforts and you’ll find the CRM tools necessary for large-scale efforts in Zoho CRM (e.g., integrated inventory management) so that you can quickly complete sales.

CRM systems are chosen based on these key features, versatility, quality, efficiency, enterprise agility, customer attention and cost.

CRM systems come with a set of challenges as well and may require extensive training of the sales staff. Interfaces that are difficult to navigate, hence, implementation can be fragmented and not entirely complete. It is also very important to understand how the CRM system being put into operation blends with the various software that are currently in use.

All being said, CRM systems are the key to success in today’s work environment. This is one investment that any professional organization cannot afford to neglect.

Obviously it is the responsibility of the Account Manager to fuel the relationship by keeping a fluid communication with a client either by e-mails or phone. In this regard, it is important to find out what your client actually prefers, whether it be phone call or e-mail, as some do not want to be called.

Besides following up on a regular basis (i.e. a planned Customer Service), it is also important to have your recurrent clients included in several e-mail campaigns that offer a certain discount. Make sure only to include recurrent clients that haven´t bought a translation project within at least the last quarter, as you do not want to offer a discount to a client that recently purchased one. These e-mail campaigns are typically executed by the Sales/Marketing and/or IT department. If the discount does not work as a trigger to buy, at least the campaign will help you feed your share-of-mind.

Another way of trying to recover customers, is to call them up directly and ask them if they have any translation needs in the near future. This method is a lot more personalized, however you might end up calling them several times, before actually getting in touch with them.

Online visibility nowadays has become a necessity and not only in one language, but your website should be available into several languages, in order to expand your market share. Obviously the website needs to have informative and competitive contents in order to get your leads to leave their information. However, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Adwords are a must when it comes to positioning your website correctly within the internet jungle. This are all tactics that need cooperation between the Marketing and IT Departments.

At the end of the day, it is important to stay positive and to never lose focus. Listen to your clients and make sure their needs are satisfied.

After graduating from college, I decided that I was going to explore the world. The day after graduation I was on an airplane to Amsterdam and have not looked back since. I have lived in over ten different countries over the past twelve years, and in every country I have tried to learn the native language. I failed miserably. I took class after class, went to private tutors, read books on grammar and vocabulary, but for some reason I simply could not seem to even get the basics down. I consider myself to be a fairly intellectual guy. I am a well educated, I am a fast learner, and I am even a certified teacher. So if I am as smart as I think I am, why haven’t I been able to pick up a new language to save my life?

About five years ago I moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina. This was the first Spanish speaking country I had ever lived in, and I decided to take a completely different approach to learning. I decided to learn like a baby. Take a second to remember how you learned your native language. You listened to your parents, you watched cartoons, and you were surrounded by people who spoke the language that you would one day grow to master. After pondering on this for a few days, I decided that I would throw my grammar books and private lessons out of the window and start from scratch .
I like to think learning a new language as a pyramid. The base of this pyramid is speaking and listening. Obviously this is the most important part of any language, and the first thing you learn as a child. The middle of this pyramid would be writing and spelling and the last part of the pyramid would be grammar, style and rules. Now, after taking numerous classes and reading countless books, I have noticed that for some strange reason when learning a second language the approach seems to be the exact opposite. Foreign language teachers want to cram your mind with rules, grammar, and spelling before even getting into pronunciation and understanding. This approach makes no sense to me what so ever .

In summary, I became fluent in Spanish in less than two years. No books, no grammar rules, no classes. I just surrounded myself with Spanish speakers, watched movies in Spanish, and spoke in Spanish as much as possible. My advice to anyone learning a new language: Think like a baby!

As we all know, planning is one of the most valuable tools to reach success. Steve Jobs did not just wake up one random morning and build an iPhone, Barack Obama did not just wake up and just become President of the United States, and even on a smaller scale, we all have a plan for our personal success.
In business, planning takes on just as an important role as it does in life. Being an Account Manager for a worldwide translations agency, my day revolves around planning. I have a routine that I follow every day. I come to work, I make a list of things to do, and I check them off one by one as the day goes on, and I refuse to leave the office until everything is checked off. But what about long term planning? How do you forecast what’s going to happen next week? Next month? Next year?
Every Friday my company has a “Weekly Workshop”. We discuss sales strategies, negotiation techniques, and pretty much everything involved with building a successful sales force. Well last Friday we discussed Planning. The first part of the Work Shop we discussed ways we can plan for ourselves. We all pretty much had the same usual ideas: organization, follow-ups, keeping a list, etc. The second part of the Work Shop things kind of got confusing. How does a company plan for the future without knowing their clients’ future needs? We had some great ideas: such as calling the client and asking them if they could provide us with some information on their future workloads, but in the translation industry, at least within the niche we serve, a lot of projects just seem to “pop up”.
Honestly the only thing I can say I truly learned in this Work Shop, about planning, is that you have to plan for yourself. Make sure you are organized, make sure you always have resources lined up, make sure you have a backup plan if things go South and stay ready for anything that is thrown at you, because no matter how much you plan, the future of your business is in the hands of your clients.

The highest translation quality that we provide includes our 3-step translation process: Translation, Editing and Proofreading. It consists of a Project Manager reviewing all contents of the documents and assigning them to a native target language-speaking translator, familiar with the subject of the text. Once translated, the files are edited by a second translator. The editor then references the source text, paragraph by paragraph, to make sure no text was skipped or meaning was lost during the initial step of the translation process. Finally, the translated and edited documents go through a final proofreading, performed by a third professional translator. Both editor and proofreader are also native speakers of the target language.

The translation quality drops if the client chooses the translation process of translation and editing only, translation and proofreading or translation only, of which translation only will have the lowest translation quality.

When Time becomes a driver for the client, additional translators and sometimes even more than one editor have to be allocated so that a specific time frame can be kept. However, when this takes place, the consistency of a translation suffers substantially as each translator and editor has their own linguistic skills. In this case, a glossary can be very useful, as certain consistency issues can be prevented.

The driver Price is connected with quality, meaning the higher the translation quality, the higher the price. In addition, there is also a volume discount, which means that the higher the volume in word count, the lower the price per word (provided there is a comfortable turn around time -TAT-).

It is therefore very important for the Account Manager to get as much information on the translation project from the potential client as possible, in order to provide the most suitable quote for the client. Asking the right questions and listening to what your client has to say play a very important role during a phone conversation, before a  detailed quote can be processed.

In the second part, I will discuss the Desktop Services part of the quotation process together with the Follow-up process.

In my last blog I began explaining about the four most important factors a client should consider before beginning a translations project. I covered the importance of knowing the specific dialect of your target language, and how important it is to know when your deadline is for the completion of the project. Today I will focus on quality and pricing. After reviewing and understanding these four tips, you are guaranteed to have a successful project.

3. Quality: Many clients do not realize how many different levels of translation services companies can actually provide when it comes to quality. A client will sometimes send a document to 2 or 3 companies, ask for a quote, and then just go with the cheapest offer, not knowing which service they are buying. It is the Account Managers’ job to educate a client on what services they are offering to the client and at which prices these services are sold. The best possible service for a translations project is Translation+ Editing + Proofreading (TEP). All 3 of these steps should be performed by separate, certified translators, who are familiar with the subject matter they are translating. This 3- step process will ensure a top quality and consistent translation. Other services will include just 2 or even 1- step processes. Whenever a client decides to eliminate a translation step, there is a higher chance of having errors in the translation. So far, I have been going over different work flows performed by human beings. However, the worst thing a client can ever do if they want quality is use a machine translation with no further editing. A machine will never be able to add personality to a translation and will translate everything word for word, without taking into consideration the target audiences needs.

4. Prices: Let’s face it, Times are rough right now. Everyone is on a budget, and is looking to get the most out of their money. Before thinking about buying a translations project you should always know your budget. You should always use a little common sense and realize that an exotic language translation is going to be more expensive than the more common languages. Always be skeptical of companies who charge “by the page” and not “by the word”. To me this says one thing “This Company is using machine translations”. It makes no sense to charge by the page…think about it, some pages could have 500 words, and some could have 200. Why would anyone charge the same amount for 500 words as they would for 200 words? It is also smart to let the Account Manager know your budget right off the bat. This way, he or she can negotiate with you and provide the best possible service to fit your budget!

DTP stands for Desktop Publishing and it refers to the creation of documents using page layout software. Typically, this includes the combining and rearranging of text and imagery (in case there are any images) through computer software, using Fonts and Graphics of your choice, to produce documents such as Newsletters, Brochures, Manuals, Slide shows, Books, etc.

In today´s business world there are many different types of documents used, such as in the following formats: Word, Excel, Power point, Pdf, Adobe InDesign, Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe PageMaker, Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Corel Ventura, QuarkXPress and many more.

When a prospect contacts a Translation Agency to receive a quote for a certain document, any Account Manager typically will ask for the source file, which is the document in which the text had originally been created in. This is important, so that the document does not have to be recreated, which can be very expensive sometimes, depending obviously on the format used.

In a specific example: the prospect has a Manual of Industrial Machinery and would like that Manual translated from English into Latin American Spanish, as the prospect would like to penetrate the Latin American Market. The Manual itself is in an Adobe InDesign format. In order to keep the DTP cost as low as possible, and to assure that the translated Manual looks as similar as possible to the original English Manual, the prospect would have to send the Account Manager the source InDesign file/s, all Fonts and Links to the Images that are contained within the Manual.

Ask yourself this question: Have you structured your life, environment so that you are more likely to accomplish your most important priorities?

For many of us, the answer is no. We start a day with great intentions. But then people start calling and emailing, asking and directing, and soon we can hardly remember what we wanted to focus on in the first place.

Our days begin to look like frenzied, attempts to get traction while making little headway. By the end of a week, we’ve forgotten what it was we were hoping to accomplish at the beginning of the week. And by the end the year, we are frustrated that we haven’t moved forward in our most important priorities.

The solution isn’t willing yourself to focus better. That won’t work. Discipline and self-control are unsustainable because in most of our environments there are too many distractions, too many things other people want us to do, too many opportunities and temptations that draw us away from lives that reflect our true values and priorities. It’s like committing to a diet while working at an ice-cream parlor.

We need to restructure our environments like cleaning our work space, computer, reduce noise, distractions, breaks etc. so we are more likely to move forward on our most important priorities and be able to focus.

Sit down with someone, your manager, a colleague, your partner and show them your to-do list and your calendar for the day. Tell them what you plan to accomplish and how it fits in with your plan for what you want to focus on for the year. Saying it out loud and having another person hear you and reflect back what they hear creates a deeper level of commitment and accountability.

Your success focusing on the things that matter most to you, will only happen in the long term when you create the environment that supports it.

There are certain peak times in our day, when our responses and follow-ups are very crucial and we have to process many quote requests at the same time, deliver translation projects (sometimes these need to be uploaded in the FTP Server, which can take quite some time), and resolve translation issues, where the client feels there might be some translation quality issues.

During these peak moments, it is very easy for an Account Manager to start multitasking and doing 3 or 4 tasks at the same time and before you know it, you made a mistake. The danger in this is that the human brain cannot focus well, when multitasking, and mistakes are an automatic result in the work output. In addition, people take longer to complete a task, as they are involved in several tasks at the same time. This is where Time Management plays a very important role of how to overcome multitasking.

Time Management as defined by the free encyclopedia is  “the act or process of exercising conscious control over the amount of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase efficiency or productivity”. This means that one´s skills, tools and techniques are used to manage time in order to reach an objective of a certain task or achieve one´s goal.

Before multitasking becomes a bad habit, it is very important to manage time by being able to incorporate the following activities in one´s daily work routine: planning, setting goals, prioritizing, organizing, scheduling, delegating, analyzing time spent, monitoring and allocating.

My experience as an Account Manager, is to learn how to prioritize and set certain goals, so that I am not forced to multitask and hence make mistakes, while I am trying to resolve all of my work issues at the same time.

Not sure what your day in the office looks like, but a typical day at the office for me as an account manager at Spanish Translation US revolves around many different things that seem to need my attention all at once. From answering phone calls, to replying to clients’ emails, to completing my daily tasks… which believe me are many.  I constantly find myself going back and forth to each of these tasks and often find it challenging to complete one before I am interrupted by something else. With multitasking being such an important part of my daily experience I found the section on time management in Chet Holmes “The Ultimate Sales Machine” to be very helpful and interesting.

Chet’s six tips on Time Management are:

• Touch It Once: If you touch it take action and handle that task.  Do not revisit the task.
• Make Lists: Lists help you prioritize and stay focused on your daily tasks.
• Plan How Much Time You Will Allocate to Each Task: This helps you manage your daily tasks and dedicate enough time to accomplish them.
• Plan the Day: Give yourself a time frame on how much time you will dedicate to complete each of the things on your list.
• Prioritize: Always start with your most important and difficult task. As the other guru Brian Tracy says in his book “Stop procrastinating!”. By completing the most difficult task first, you will feel a tremendous sense of control and accomplishment having checked the biggest thing off your list.
• Ask Yourself, “Will it hurt me to throw this stuff away?”: Untidiness hurts your productivity. Studies show that 80% of all filed or stored information is never referred to again. So get rid of it!!

I do not have these 6 steps 100% into effect just yet, but I am really working on it. I’m sure that applying these six steps will assist me in completing my daily tasks efficiently. I know they are going to help me manage my time and be more productive on a daily basis. No doubt that I will also help me turn into a happier man!

It’s a great way to increase your revenues, since consumers are basically in a purchasing frame of mind at that time. This can work for products or services.

The key steps to a good up-selling program are to know the value of your products and services, to develop new options and to figure out what your target demand is seeking out when purchasing a product/service like the one you offer.

Know the value of your product! Value, like a coin, has two different sides: the value or profitability of the product to you, and the value or usefulness of the product to your consumer.

Figure out what others have bought, have a look at prior sales and see what products your consumers often purchased together. This will give you additional ideas and insight as to what add-ons go with what primary products.

We now have enough information to develop your up-selling pitch. This is as simple as asking your buyer “Would you like —- with that?” at the time of the purchase.

This can be applied for translation services as well by offering new options like DTP, IT, localization and content management services.

Another thing to note: There is often less price resistance at the point of sale for add-on products or services.

You are now ready to go…Happy up-selling!!!

A translation is not always just a translation.  As an Account Manager, I strive to understand as much as possible about each translation project in order to provide not only a simple translation, but one catered to the intended the audience.  The concept of providing translation services also considering the geographical and cultural perspectives of the audience is called “localization”.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the AT&T ad in Puerto Rico is a perfect example of ignoring localization.  The ad had been translated from English into Spanish. Grammatically speaking, it made perfect sense.  Their mistake lied in not taking into account the cultural nuances of their Puerto Rican audience.  The end result was creating a household situation that was very unlikely and perhaps even offensive.

Here’s another example of lack of localization with an early computer operating system in the 1980’s with something as simple as a desktop icon.  The same icon Americans interpreted to be the trash can appeared to be more of a mailbox to Europeans.  This example clearly shows that while European clients were intended to by the products, no one seemed to be consulted before the software was green lighted.  While this is a small, subtle example, it shows the importance of not throwing your trash in the mailbox, or really understanding who you’ll be communicating with through the sale of products and services.

While the importance of localization services can be easily demonstrated using marketing examples, it’s actually important for all translations.  Considering who you’ll be talking to and where they will be is important in any type of communication.  Some details that may appear small and subtle in some languages or cultures can often be glossed over when not considering the target audience.  Moreover, these services should be provided by and discussed with professionals who understand these nuances that help you conduct business in the easiest, most effective way.    We are a big world and, while many people may speak English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi or Arabic, we do not all think the same, act the same or approach life similarly.

One of the first Machine Translations took place back in 1954 in the so-called Georgetown-IBM experiment, where over sixty Russian sentences were fully-automatic translated into English. The experiment was a huge success of its time; however, the problem became very clear when the Russian term hydraulic ram was translated as “water goat“.

In 1959, IBM created a MT Software called Mark I; and by 1963, the Mark II had been already developed, which provided word-for-word Russian language translations at the rate of about 5,000 words per hour. By 1971, a MT Software had been developed on the IBM 360/67 computer that translated between 80,000 to 100,000 words from English to Vietnamese per hour!

Today, a vast amount of software programs exist on the market that provide Machine Translation. Some of them work on-line, such as the SYSTRAN system which used to power both GOOGLE translate and also AltaVista’s Babel Fish. GOOGLE had been using SYSTRAN for several years when, back in 2007,  switched to a statistical translation method. CANDIDE from IBM was the first statistical machine translation software.

Humans can translate somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 words a day, while an average MT software can translate up to 4,000 words a minute. In addition, a MT software can store translated documents and re-use phrases that have already been translated. However, there is no MT software with an output to be qualified as a “perfect” translation, and this is why we still depend on human translators.

Who is the end user?

Not understanding your client’s true needs will most likely make you lose a sale. There are many occasions when a client will not mention that all they really need is to know what that document says for their company’s internal use. Meanwhile, a sales account manager is providing this client with a rate per word for a complex three-step translation process (translation, edition and proofreading).  Most likely, this client will not move forward with the project. In this case a simple translation or translation + proofreading should work out fine.  Knowing your client’s true needs can save not only your client’s money, but also your commission for an accomplished sale… and time on both ends!

Educating the client on the service they are paying for

You would be surprised at how many clients do not have the slightest idea about what they are paying for.  I have been repeatedly told by clients that they have received a lower rate per word elsewhere.  When I ask what type of service they get for that lower rate, I always get the same answer: “I have no clue”.  In this case it is critical to educate the client on the service you are offering and compare it to what they have been offered.   This is where giving value to your service comes into effect.

What format is your prospect expecting for the final product?

I would say over 50% of the times clients send in a PDF file for quoting purposes.  At this point, a sales account manager should ask the prospect what sort of file is expected as a final product.  For example, if you notice that the PDF file that was sent is a conversion from an Adobe Indesign file, a few good questions would be: Does the final product have to be in that same format as the original source file? If it does not, will translated text on an MS Word file be sufficient? Do you have designers that will be laying out the translation on your end?

Educating the client on Desktop Publishing Services

Most documentation and media are created with specific software programs such as MS Word, InDesign, Illustrator, Quark, PageMaker etc. If you need to translate a brochure or manual that you currently have in a PDF format into multiple languages, you should try to seek out the original, editable file that was used to generate this view-only PDF version. Since documents supplied in non-editable formats usually need to be recreated from scratch, you may be spending extra time, energy and money creating a new layout or graphic file for something that already exists.

In other words, there are really many and varied options from which your clients can choose, without even knowing what and why they would pick one over the other. It is our job and responsibility, as a sales agent to help them pick the one most suitable for their project, turnaround time and budget. That is serving your clients and securing your sales.

After the first thirty minutes or so I started to read the subtitles and then it all hit me. The subtitles just did not relay the jokes the way they were expressed in English. Let’s start with the title. The translation of the word Hangover in Spanish is “resaca”, but the title of the movie in Spanish is “¿Qué pasó ayer?” which translates into “What happened yesterday?”. Anyone who has ever seen this movie knows that the title “What happened yesterday” definitely applies to this movie…but this is only the beginning. As all native English speakers know, we have a very extensive curse word vocabulary. We have sort of created the art for “toilet humor”. Now with this said, anyone who has ever lived in a Spanish speaking country knows that native Spanish speakers give us a run for the money when it comes to talking dirty. Every time there was a curse word in the movie (and believe me, there were lots of them) the subtitled translation would be “maldito”, which simply means “damn”. Sometimes the word damn just does not cut it when it comes to a “R” rated movie.

In today’s thriving translation industry, you have hundreds of companies that are competing for translation, voice-over, and subtitling projects. You would think that in this competitive market someone could actually come up with more clever ways to express these jokes in Spanish the same way they were intended to be expressed in English. Movies are expensive these days. Tickets, popcorn, a soda and your looking at a $50 night. All I am saying is that I think you should get what you pay for, no matter how bad the language is, or what language you speak.

To increase revenue and margins of an order by selling products / services at higher prices i.e. up-selling or by selling add-on products and accessories, a tactic also known as cross selling, share the idea of needing to prove our consumers that there is something in it for them. We must show them increased added value.

Value is the term that expresses the concept of worth in general. For example, value would be a high pay back for a small expense, also discussed in terms of ROI (Return on Investment). Payback is the tangible return delivered by the benefits of your products and services. The greater the value to your customers, the greater the payback.

Moving on, the formula for calculating value is the benefit minus the cost of achieving or acquiring the benefit, i.e. VALUE = BENEFIT – COST. Hence, it is important that we use meticulous questioning techniques to uncover as many needs as possible, for which we can offer, benefit oriented solutions. We need to be able to explain & sell benefits. The more needs we can uncover, the more benefits we can deliver, the more benefits the greater the payback, the greater the payback the higher the value, the higher the value, the better the chance to up sell & cross sell.

Proving value, we can use the funnel or focus questioning technique which will uncover needs. However, it is one thing to uncover the need it is another to prove that there is adequate pay back & value in fulfilling the needs.

Having uncovered the needs we must probe & find out as much as we can about those needs & the implications to the consumer if they are not met or fulfilled.

To be continued…

Plain English (sometimes referred to as plain language) is a style of writting that is simple and direct. It “emphasise clarity, brevity and the avoidance of technical language”.

Why Plain English?

“Notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained in any other document (or any part thereof)…”

All documents in plain English should be easy to read and use. Gobbledygook, jargon and legalese can be hard to understand, as it does not have the general audience in mind. It can also be time consuming and cost you money if you don’t understand what you’re reading -or signing.

Using Plain English

There are numerous government and non-government organizations that works to improve public communication by caimpaining in favor of plain English in public communication. These organizations believe that everyone should have access to clear and concise information.

In the late 1990s, President Bill Clinton made Plain Language a major initiative of his administration. In a presidential memorandum he formalized the requirement that all new rules and regulations of his government be written in this style.

The U.S. goverment has a Plain Language Website which aims at improving communication from the Federal Government to the public.

Plain Language in Spanish

Plain Language is not limited to the English language. The plain language campaign can also be found in Latin America.

Argentina

Since the mid 2000s, Argentina implemented a project entitled Comunicación en Lenguaje Claro, which is included in the technical assistance program in order to strengthening the National Public Investment System (FOSIP). It aims to follow guidelines similar to the Plain Language Movement. In its first stage, the project has focused on internal govermental communication; later it will regulate the communication between the government and the public.

Chile

In August 2004 the President of the Senate of Chile opened the seminar Transparency, language rights for citizen, in which academic leaders were involved. The seminar analized challenge of communicating legislative work to the public through clear language. The senate now face the challenge of transferring their work in a language that ordinary citizens understand.

Mexico

On October 5, 2004, President Vicente Fox launched the inniciative Citizen Language to begin to simplify the language used by the government. Its purpose is to communicate government messages in a simple, clear and precise way, to achieve full understanding and to prevent complex and obscure communication.

Plain Language in Translation

Using Plain Language means more customers can access the information and services you offer. When readers understand the material, they are more likely to respond favorably, make fewer errors filling out your forms, and comply more accuratly and quickly with requirments. And they need less support over the phone, online or in person.

Plain Language documents make foreign language translations easier and more cost effective. If your English documents are easy to read, use and understand, so will your translations. A Plain Language document typically can have up to 40% fewer words than the original. As translations are billed per word, translation costs will be lower.

For more information, visit Spanish Translation Solutions

In the US, when a transcript contains a translation of conversations spoken in a foreign language, a qualified witness must authenticate and verify the translation. See United States v. Llinas, 603 F.2d 506, 509-10 (5th Cir. 1979).

A party who wishes to challenge the accuracy of a translation is responsible for presenting another translation. The jury may then choose which version to believe. United States v. Rosenthal, 793 F.2d 1214, 1238 (11th Cir. 1986) (citing Llinas, 603 F.2d at 509).

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