One of the great things I’ve found being a part of the translation industry is just how much LSPs give back to their communities. As I was reading the Global Watchtower’s blog on Language Industry Philanthropy in 2009, it reminded me just how much we can do through our language capabilities and in creating a greener atmosphere.
This month, McElroy Translation announced our new Social Impact Leader, Anna Porlas O’Hara. Anna will be responsible for directing our philanthropy program, including vetting nonprofits for language translation scholarships and organizing volunteer activities and events for McElroy employees to participate in throughout the year. Anna previously worked for Hoover’s, Inc., from 1998–2007, where she participated in the Community Outreach program. As a founding member of the program, she helped create the volunteer and corporate giving program, spearheading the company’s support of the Heritage Society of Austin and the Austin Civic Orchestra. In addition, her interest in event planning and design led to a brief stint as a freelance events manager in the Austin area, during which time she coproduced a fund-raiser for a nonprofit health education website geared toward teens. Anna has a lot of great ideas and suggestions for the company, and we can’t wait to see where she takes us in 2010!
McElroy Translation has committed to making 2010 its greenest year ever.
- Editing, proofing, and quality assurance steps are now done online, cutting down printer use by half and paper use by 90%!
- There are recycling bins near every trash can in common areas.
- Marketing collateral is printed in-house on preprinted templates, which means collateral is produced as needed to diminish waste when content needs to be updated.
- Water bottles are being exchanged for a filtration system.
- McElroy provides washable glasses for use in lieu of Styrofoam.
Legal translation is one of the most challenging areas of translation as evident in Łucja Biel, PhD’s Incongruity of Company Law Terms: Categorization of Polish Business Entities and their English Equivalents. The difficulty in translating legal documentation stems from specific legal language and the differences between civil and common law. Delve even deeper and you find differences in the specifics of company law and how to classify certain business entities. Because laws are determined by each nation’s legislature instead of through a universal system, terms will be different nation by nation and, more important, specialized by language. Biel’s article touches on the difficulties that arise when doing legal translation and turns to translating from Polish to English for examples.
Legal terms stem from each individual culture and typically do not align directly with the nomenclature of other nations. There may be more than one matching term from the source to the target language, and occasionally, there is simply no equivalent translation. There are two ways of dealing with such a lack of equivalent terminology: domesticating or foreignizing. Domesticating is assimilating legal concepts to the target language’s culture so that a term is immediately understood. Foreignizing is the opposite. There are many ways to “foreignize,” which include transcription with a gloss, naturalization (adaptation of spelling), and a gloss alone. Many times foreignizing makes reader comprehension a challenge. One way to adapt the work for the target audience is to translate the literal equivalent or provide a word for word translation.
At McElroy Translation, we use a pool of translators well-versed in the nuances of legal terminology between the languages that they translate. Our translators will typically choose to domesticate the translation, or as we call it, localize it to the target language for the sake of the reader. However, in instances when a patent must be translated more literally for the sake of its end use, the translator will document the terminology in question, and give options to the subsequent reviewer, who will make a final decision.
McElroy Translation has worked within the legal industry for over 40 years, and celebrates 29 years of service with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
McElroy Translation Blog, Derek Savage
We all see the effects of globalization every day. Many of the products we see have been localized to our culture so well that you wouldn’t know where they were made without checking out the tag. The idea of globalization is so prevalent that you can hardly turn on PBS or NPR without hearing something on the topic. At McElroy, we see the effects of globalization on everything from drug labels to software engineering. I did some quick investigating specific to clinical trials and found a great article on Multicultural Issues in the Globalization of Clinical Trial Patient Recruitment.
To sum it up, global trials present a number of cross-cultural challenges including:
• Concern over accurate reporting of symptoms due to bio-psycho-socio-cultural perspectives
• Differences in governmental processes and regulatory requirements that affect submissions
• General language barriers and cultural differences affecting all forms of communication
• Difficulty in drawing valid scientific conclusions with data from ethnically and culturally diverse populations.
With more CRO’s move clinical trials into Africa, as was evident in 2009, finding the right resources for translating clinical trial protocols into languages like Zulu, Amharic, and Xhosa can be challenging. Finding the right language service provider to meet these challenges with the necessary experience and capabilities within the bioscience sectors are critical to the success of the trials.
McElroy Translation Blog, Derek Savage
Today as I was doing my daily Google, I came across an article that explains standardization vs. localization. As peers and prospects alike have to make this decision when taking a product into multiple global markets, it’s good to get a refresher on why we choose for the final product to receive a standardized translation, or for it to be regionally localized.
Standardization works under the assumption that the wants and needs in global markets are homogenous, therefore, the product offered by one said company is the same throughout all markets without modification. The argument for standardization is that technology is developed and dispersed evenly throughout the world and this will first create a national culture that will in turn conform into one global culture.
Localization focuses on the differences in marketing segments specific to each culture because values and beliefs are different due to how and where each market functions. Taking into consideration local consumer traits helps shape how the product is modified to better fit the consumer of that segment.
To learn more, visit http://globalizationexecutive.com/articles/Chapter3.pdf.