The Language of Commerce is Not Universal

The language of commerce is as varied as the countries that comprise the world market. Here at Eileen Bernstein Translation, we open your door to the world market by translating Chinese, Spanish, and French documents into fluent, coherent English that is true to the meaning of the original text.  It is the human ability to determine the appropriate context and consider cultural nuances of vocabulary, phrases, and terminology that ensures accuracy. Whether you have a contract with an overseas partner drafted in his native language and you need to verify that the content matches the verbally agreed upon terms, court testimony from a client of your law practice who speaks little or no English, a birth certificate or marriage license that needs to be translated for an immigration judge, or shipping papers in a foreign language required to get your imports through customs, we do the necessary research to determine how cultural, political, and social trends will affect language choice in the translation.

To contrast machine translation with human translation, there is no direct Chinese translation for “Sell like hot cakes.” If you enter the characters for one of the Chinese idioms that approximate this concept, whose literal translation is “Goods like the turning wheel,”[1] Google translation spits out the English phrase “flow of goods.” Plucking idioms off the Internet ignores the fact that many American sayings simply don’t exist in certain other languages, and this practice results in incomprehensible documents. Not a profitable way to do business with overseas partners.

Finding the right translator for your project will be more likely if the search is based upon expertise rather than lowest per word quote. The professional should be a native speaker of the language they are translating into, conversant in the subject matter involved, and have a solid command of grammatical structure.  During proofreading, I have personally had to clean up the messes created in previously translated texts, including multiple missing sentences from court testimony and vocabulary that did not fit the subject matter in marketing brochures.

[1] Chinese Idioms and Their English Equivalents, Chen Yongzhen, (Hong Kong 1993), p. 133.

Eileen Bernstein is a former Department of Defense linguist with expertise in foreign policy/national security, business/finance, import/export, and legal translation. She currently works as a freelance translator in Chinese, Spanish, and French. Questions or comments can be sent to: eileenb.translation@gmail.com .

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[1] Chinese Idioms and Their English Equivalents, Chen Yongzhen, (Hong Kong 1993), p. 133.