Christmas is celebrated all over the world every year. And even though there are some common traits in the way people celebrate, the holiday carries the charm of every separate culture and reflects the local traditions and worldview. Read on to find out how people celebrate in different countries.
Continuing our journey to find out how Christmas is celebrated around the world, it’s incredible how sometimes cultures imitate one another when it comes to fun things.
Mastering a second or third language may seem frustratingly hard. It’s not easy to memorise hundreds of words and to suffer through the humiliating conversations that may make you feel like an idiot because you can’t make a simple sentence.
Here are some of the most important reasons for you not to give up on learning foreign languages:
Communication is an interesting thing – two people can have a conversation and they can both walk away with two different impressions from it.
Black Friday is an American holiday celebrated on the day after Thanksgiving. Though recently, it has travelled all the way across the Atlantic over to Britain, where it has now become an annual phenomenon. And it doesn’t stop there – it’s spreading to other countries as well!
Globalization and further achievements in the field of transportation have lead to something new for all service providers – millions of traveling foreigners as potential clients. The hotel industry is one of the most competitive markets, where the battle for clients is always in full swing. Nowadays, hotels have to be really competitive for their foreign clients and the easiest way to do so is to simply offer them the best.
„The email is dead! Long live social media!“ Or at least that’s what they want us to believe.
Even if it’s true that the use of email for social communication has dwindled in recent years, the same can’t be said for email marketing. Many brands have invested considerable amounts into their social presence in order to promote their brand’s image, but research on e-commerce shows that 4.24% of visitors make a purchase encouraged by email marketing, in comparison to 2.49% of visitors who make purchases encouraged by search engines, and 59% by social media. Not only that, but the average cost for a visitor’s order made through email is three times higher than an order from a visitor from social media. This proves that the email is still the king of the digital market around the world.
For someone who knows more than one language, the idea of becoming a translator sounds perfect.You might think you’re a translator only because you know a language It only takes a couple of minutes and I’ll get paid by the word!” Sounds easy, right? Well, in reality, if it is too good to be true, it probably is.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what it takes to be an adequate translator.
Both combine to produce the perfect text
Proofreading and linguistic reviewing are the final dashes in the whole translation process, before the final text is sent to the client.
Sure, they are necessary only when the client has explicitly asked for them, because they are important cogs in the whole translation budgeting process.
If the text includes information from a specific technical field or a literary work, it’s necessary for it to go through both processes. In general, they are expected to be accomplished for the simple reason that it isn’t clear if the translator has had previous experience in the text’s technical field or not, and how he has used certain important terms and interpretations.
In fact, proofreading and linguistic review have a lot in common, but at the same time are completely different, making it necessary to use both of them for a successful translation.
Let us examine what the two processes that assist in making the translated text more precise in fact are, and discover the differences between them.
Proofreading
The usual professional approach: the translation has to be proofread by a person, who hasn’t worked on it.
During the process, the content is accentuated from a lexical standpoint. Grammatical and spelling errors are removed as well.
At best, a proofread is made by a professional translator who is a native speaker. It is no accident that proofreading a text is accepted as the final еditting step before the finalization of the translation.
Proofreading a text is an important step in translation, according to professional standards, translation associations and certifying organizations.
It is good to know what the better the translator is, the less the editor’s work will be.
Our professional advice is: Never underestimate proofreading! Never leave a text without a final check, no matter if it’s tied to a specific industry or not.
Linguistic Review
The linguistic review can be perceived as a subprocess of text revision, but in the field of professional translation, it is accepted as a separate one – including evaluation from a professional linguist.
The linguist focuses on the separate words in the text, their meaning and their contextual use – in other words: syntax.
A review includes a check and evaluation of the used words, in accordance with the context and its specifics.
The review is treated as a final revision of the text’s integrity in comparison to the original and the provided guidelines. It includes copy editing, reevaluation and change of the whole text structure, if necessary.
The process of text editing and linguistic evaluation require more time, because they comprise not only of a spell-, a stylistic and a grammar check, but also a thorough check of both the source and target texts.
On the other hand, the two processes contribute to a more precise translation, which means that they cost extra in most translation agencies.
It doesn’t matter if you’re going to examine the proofreading and linguistic review separately or as a single process. They still remain important steps towards the preparation of the perfect translation.
According to the quality control requirements included as a standard in Mitra Translations, each translation is proofread before delivery.
We all know some famous writers – Shakespeare, Charlotte Brontë, or contemporary ones, like Dan Brown, Joanne Rowling, and many, many more. But the question we’re asking is – are there any truly famous translators out there? How popular would her books be if there were no translators to share them with the rest of the world?
In fact, there are! Here are some of them!
Lia Wyler – Brazilian Translator
The Harry Potter series of books has been published in over 68 languages. One of the people who contributed to this is Lia Wyler. She translated these novels from English to Brazilian and European Portuguese. Rowling was very generous with her praise for Lia and has personally congratulated her for her creativity when it came to translating the personal names from English to Portuguese. In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Lia changes the name of Bob Odgen to Beto Odgen, which is a pet name for Roberto in Portuguese.
In addition to translating this beloved series of novels, Lia also translated famous authors such as Margaret Atwood, Henry Miller, Stephen King and Sylvia Plath.
Lewis Borges – Argentine Writer, Poet and Translator
Lewis Borges is a respected writer in the world of Spanish literature. However, most people don’t know that, in addition to being a writer, he was also an amazing translator. He was a mere 9 years of age when his first translation work got published in a popular Argentina newspaper – a translation of Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Happy Prince,
Throughout his whole life he has translated literature from German, English, Old English, French and Norwegian Norse, to Spanish. Some of the writers he translated are Hermann Hesse, William Faulkner, Rudyard Kipling, Franz Kafka, Virginia Wolf and Edgar Allan Poe.
Gregory Rabassa – Prominent Literary Translator
He is a translator who worked with Portuguese, Spanish and English. He has translated works from Jorge Amado, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. Cortázar was so impressed with his translations that he personally recommended Rabassa to Márquez. It took him 3 years to have One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated. At some point, Márquez shared that, in his opinion, the translation was superior to his Spanish original.
