Oltrans Translation Agency Has Extended Its Membership for the Period 2020 – 2021

Oltrans Translation Agency has been a member of the European Language Industry Association (ELIA) since 2010 and has extended its membership until 2021. Despite the difficulties of 2020, we believe in the need to work together with colleagues from the translation industry in Europe. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we realized what a tremendous benefit it is to be a part of an organisation, consisting of people with big hearts, open minds and high hopes. In these challenging times, we all gave each other a helping hand and organised online meetings, where we shared what difficulties we were faced with, what mechanisms we implemented to optimise our work, how we overcame problems. (more…)

Focusing on Quality

What is a termbase?

A termbase is a list of terms that is specially compiled for a particular client, product or service.

Take, for example, a client who manufactures high tech medical instruments. This area is highly specialised and contains medical and technical terminology. Every manufacturer knows their field’s terminology best. Therefore, that is the best consultant when it comes to the translation of texts about his or her own products. In order to give the client a 100% guarantee that the translators will use the approved terms for his translation projects, we ask them to assist us in compiling the termbase.
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10 Misconceptions About Translators

If you are a translator, these misconceptions will make you both smile and grumble. If you are a client and you ever needed translation, then at least one of them has crossed your mind. This article aims to explain why these 10 misconceptions are wrong (literally – they are insulting to the professional translator).

Being a translator is a job as old as time. It is that invisible unit that globalizes the world and thanks to which no border is impossible to cross.

No. 10 – Any person who has secondary foreign language education (or mother tongue) can translate.

What is perceived as excellent command of a language – whether mother tongue or a foreign language – varies depending on the purpose of this language’s application. Most foreign language schools in Bulgaria offer their students thorough preparation and they often claim to have acquired better knowledge of the language in high school than during higher education. This, however, is a misconception because the educational programmes in the two institutions are fundamentally different. For example, thigh schools emphasize the lexical and grammar knowledge of the language in a more general sense, while universities, with their philological and pedagogical programmes, teach linguistics, phonetics and phonology, literary theory, morphology, lexicology and syntax, translation linguistics, or in other words – the language is studied in depth – professionally. Students are taught how to translate and teach, not mere language skills. Now, that is a whole other discipline.

“The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry.” 

Leonardo Sciascia
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Digital Technologies + Translator = Translation with Translation Memory

Author: Sotir Rangelov

Written translations stopped being a process of simple text writing on a sheet of paper a long time ago Thanks to digital technologies, this service is developing and even reaching levels that include the use of AI. However, here I will discuss the Translation with Translation Memory service, which has already proved its value over the last 30 years. In order for the readers to better understand it, first, I will introduce some terms. After this, I will point out some advantages and disadvantages of this service. And at the end, I will once again emphasize that, despite digital technologies, translation is still mainly a human activity.
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