How to get a quality document translation

Document translation services is the aim of search for thousands of people everyday. It is rather easy to find someone to translate your document, but there is always a question if he will be able to translate it competently. Many people think that translation is rather easy and do not bother finding what they really need. Do we need to say that this approach leads to low efficiency? Finding professional translation services is the first step to success, especially if you need legal translation services.

1.                Forget about online document translation.

There are hundreds of various automatized tools to perform a translation for any document in the Internet. They are indeed handy if you need just a basic understanding on what is written on the language you do not know (but sometimes fail even at this), but whichever is less. The machine translation is far from ideal now and it just cannot translate any complex text adequately. Documents translated with special software usually have problems with common sense of the text and they are hard to read. 

2.                Hire a professional.

The best way to get quality legal documents translation is to use the best tools and a professional translator is the one. Professionals have years of experience and provide top quality of the translation, although they cost money, but hey, no one will give you high quality for free. And professionals will also edit and proofread your document! Here are some tips you may use in order to find a good translator:

• Take a closer look at the agency service. Are you satisfied with the speed of work of the service etc? This is rather an important feature, because if the translator needs a week to translate 1 simple page document, he is probably not a professional.
• Try sample translation if possible. Different agencies offer different translations, so try it out and choose the one, which suits better.
• Find the translator who specializes exactly on your type of documents.

3.                Send the translator the complete document copy.

The process of translation is rather complex, so the translator must know the text well to perform the best translation he can. In order to get the highest result, help him to achieve his goal by sending the copy without any additions you will be making after he starts working. Of course this is not strictly forbidden, but adding new information into translated text takes time and may worsen the quality of the whole document. Try to avoid such situations.

If you are interested in finding legal translation services, subject-oriented interpreters on freelance platform 2Polyglot will assure the high-quality translation of any document you need.  

How freelancers rest

The international freelance platform for specialists of language area 2Polyglot made a survey among freelancers and has defined how independent employees rest after their work is done.

Analysis of received data

The analysis of the freelance platform 2Polyglot was compiled on a base of about 200 respondents’ opinions from all over the world without suggested answers. It did not take into consideration sex, age, nationality, specialization or other characteristics. It should be mentioned that every respondent could name several variants.

As this survey has showed, most of freelancers relax after work going in for sports, travelling or having a walk outside alone or with pets. 15% respondents watch TV, movies, anime and listen to their favorite music having mixed it with taking a warm bath with aroma candles. Many independent specialists are creative people and they mostly play different musical instruments, sing and do handicraft. 10% freelancers prefer reading books, but mostly about their work. The same quantity of respondents have answered they do not rest at all either because of lack of free time or due to the fact they do not get tired. 7% freelancers communicate with friends or with their children and the same quantity of them just sleep. A little bit less independent workers like to eat chocolate or other sweets while drinking fresh tea or hot coffee and 5% prefer alcohol instead of tea coffee and sometimes even without sweets. 4% of freelancers pray, meditate or yoga. 3% play video or table games and the same quantity of them cook after work.

Average freelancer’s portrait

Alright, enough of statistics. Let’s try to draw a portrait of an average freelancer. According to this survey, an ordinary freelancer is a bit a fat and wise person wearing sportive shorts with red eyes because of lack of sleep (or too much of it), always active (due to hot drinks) and communicative musician with a sound system, a romantic being Eastern philosopher

Unusual answers

• I color coloring books;
• Shopping;
• Squeezing other people’s big earlobes;
• Trying to keep out of a laptop;
• I don’t read anything in other language (translator’s answer);
• Making manicure before large amount of work;
• Cooling my head in a freezer;
• Only my fingers rest.

So if you are a specialist of language are, then you should register on a new freelance platform 2Polyglot for translators, copywriters and tutors.

The strongest man in the world gave an interview for freelance platform

Vasyl Virastyuk, the strongest man on the planet agreed to give an interview specially for the international linguistic online platform 2Polyglot.

On the 6-th of October on blog of the online service there was published an interview of Ukrainian Merited Master of Sports, owner of the “The strongest man of the world Award” and multiple world champion in multisport power race. He told the freelance platform about role of the foreign languages in his life, his sportive and acting career, how he encourages his sons to go in for sports and to learn languages and funny situations connected to language barrier.

Interview was posted in frames of PR campaign of online platform 2Polyglot, which is a cycle of interviews with famous personalities called “Stories with languages”, in which celebrities tell about importance of foreign languages in their careers and share their “stories with languages” sometimes even unusual ones. According to Andrey Prudko, founder of the online platform, a campaign goal is in promoting language learning and service itself. This is the fourth interview, which was taken by freelance service in the frames of the PR campaign. Recently 2Polyglot communicated with American signer Stereolizza, Spanish performer of electronic music Zhanna Ona and Russian actress Marina Dubkova. Video interview was held via Skype and it was published with the full version on blog on the site of the platform for linguistic freelancers https://2polyglot.com.

“Well, except Russian and Ukrainian I have some acquaintance with the English and Polish languages, I mean, I can understand the general sense of what is being said. Unfortunately, I was not good at English at school. On the other hand, I must say that I didn’t pay due regard to it because I saw no reason why a resident of Ivano-Frankivsk may need it. And when I started going to sporting events I have regretted that I didn’t study it. There were many sportsmen from the former Soviet Union countries such as Baltic Countries, Russia and Ukraine. That is why we could understand each other well using Russian and there was no communication issues”, states the world champion Vasyl Virastyuk.

Vasyl Virastyuk was born on the April, 22-nd in 1974 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. At the age of 10 he started going in for sport of athletics, at the age of 21 he became Master of Sports and at the age of 24 – the International Master of Sports. In 2004 he won the Award of the strongest man on the planet and made records for “Ukrainian Records Book”. Since 2009 Vasyl had roles in 4 movies.

How much money do translators earn

 The international linguistic freelance platform 2Polyglot analyzed global market of translation services and defined average translators’ income amount in different countries.

Days are passing, technologies are being improved, but despite of scientists’ forecasts, machines have not managed to replace human work. Google Translate has not eliminated routine work of a human translator for eight years of its existence and still keeps being the main competitor only for paper dictionaries despite of complicated analyzing algorithm of human translated texts on the Internet and a lot of additional features. Recently different media wrote about incorrect translation the phrase “dignity revolution” in Google Translate, which means the imperfect systems and its vulnerability.

Therefore, profession of translator still keeps being actual and definitely is going to be such several next years. That is not a secret that mow the most needed knowledge in linguistic and philological areas is possessing grammatically complicated languages, i.e. Chinese, Arabic, Japanese or enough rare ones, i.e. Hebrew. Furthermore, every day there appear more and more data requiring translation: audio, video, articles, researches etc. Besides data, there grows the quantity of specialists of linguistic area and especially, the competition is high among people who know widespread languages i.e. English, French etc.

How did it influence the translation services market in the world?

According to data of the independent research company «Common Sense Advisory”, global market of linguistic services is dynamically emerging. In 2014 there were spent $73 billion only on linguists’ services in comparison with $34 billion in 2013 where 15% of all volume where spent on translation.

            Taking into account common growth tendency and online technologies development it is not hard to define that demand growth for linguistic services will go on and according to preliminary data, will be about 10% till the end of 2015. Furthermore, the research agency forecast increase translation specialists quantity for 42% in 2020, which was 1.5 million persons in 2014.

Translators’ salaries in different countries

The income of an ordinary translator mostly depends on several factors:

·         Whether a specialist has a full-time job or works as freelancer looking for tasks on a freelance platform.

·         Translation or interpreting.

·         Success of a company (for full-time job worker).

·         Work volume.

·         Complexity and prevalence of a language.

·         Location.

It is necessary to add that the freelance translators’ income often may exceed salaries of ordinary employees due to an absence of limit for income sources and location. A freelancer may choose a task with any available payment and customer’s country of habitation and that allows to increase income from executed work. Furthermore, the quantity of tasks can be limited only by specialist’s available time. However, the work in prosperous company with high salary in such countries as the USA, Canada and Germany guarantees stable and well-paid job without necessity of permanent search of orders. Unfortunately, not every even highly qualified linguist manages to get a job in such companies abroad, but fortunately, there is another option.

Freelance linguistic marketplace 2Polyglot: the history of creating

Andrew Prudko shares his personal experience of launching international online platform 2Polyglot, which is oriented on linguistic freelancers.

The idea of creating an international linguistic platform did not appeared without purpose. As it always happens, at first, it emerges some kind of issue requiring solution and then you realize that it would be great if it this solution was a little easier and more comfortable, but you are obliged to get along on existing ways. So as we had the need to translate the website of our marketing company to different languages. But, unfortunately, in our team there were no polyglots, so we thought, “Hm-m, what if to create our own, but digital one”?

Actually, that’s how it usually works: there is a common issue, which needs solving and if you manage to solve it, you will have a successful business.

We faced an issue, which was in the fact that we had to browse through different multipurpose freelance services in order to find a convenient translator. And that usually leads to time wasting. Therefore, we started our search for a specialized marketplace where we could find a freelancer, but we did not manage to get one. Most of them have plenty of specialists’ types such as designers, programmers and so on, though the necessary one was absent.

We have realized that a lot of people and companies, which need services of translation, actually face the same issue every day. We have made a research and received data turned out to be quite interesting. According to American research company “Common Sense Advisory”, a market of world linguistic services is dynamically emerging. Furthermore, in 2014 $73 billion was spent for translation services; 1.5 million professional translators exist on Earth; rate of translation specialists increase will be 42% till the end of 2020 and 15% will be the rate of translation market increase till the end of the same year.

From this moment, we have decided that freelance linguists deserve separate platform and their profiles should not be lost among plenty of accounts of IT-specialists. Then another quite difficult task appeared, which required creative approach – choosing the right brand name. As platform is linguistic and connected with languages, then our website had to show that it possessed foreign languages knowledge. So at once the word “polyglot” emerged by itself. But the thing is that obviously, such domain name was already taken. The decision could be only in adding one word more, which could make the project name too complicated or a digit instead of a word, i.e. “four” sounding similar to “for”. But the research showed that this digit had a doubtful reputation in China, because Chinese “four” sounds similar to “death” in Chinese. Furthermore, they even often replace fourth floor fascia in hotels with “3a” or simple “F”. This tetraphobia (phobia of the 4 digit) influenced all areas of Chinese life, so we decided to express our respect towards Chinese culture taking into account that the project is international and access to Chinese market is important to us. That is why we stopped at “2” digit having decided to turn “2” into a globe on our logo confirming we work in the entire world.

From this moment the official work on creating new platform for freelance translators, copywriters, language tutors and tour guides reached its origin. Step by step website was developed and on the 24-th of March in 2015 the platform was officially launched in two languages: English and Russian. It does not look like a real polyglot, right? Anyway, it was only the first day, so as it is said, to be continued.

Then we faced an issue of choosing a convenient electronic payment system and this topic can be another separate post, because of too many details. I will only say that in the end we have chosen PayPal as other different payment systems had conditions, which did not fit our interests, i.e. high rates of fees, absence of possibility to keep money on the system without sending to a bank account and so on.

Since we have launched 2Polyglot, we have created 4 versions.., excuse me, “F” versions of the service in English, Russian, French and Ukrainian. By the way, we did not hesitate to make much translation work on the site having used services of executors registered on it. So our users helped us to develop our marketplace and we proved the necessity of this project by our own example. More than 3 thousand linguistic freelancers have registered on the site with total traffic of 25,000 visits per month since March. And this is only for “3a” months after launch! I believe that qualified services of language area will soon be associated with our platform and all who need to find freelance work will come 2 Polyglot.