Pour SFM Traduction, traduire les documents marketing de ses clients, c’est aussi dans la mesure du possible proposer d’en améliorer la rédaction. On trouve souvent dans les brochures une confusion entre les caractéristiques d’une offre et les bénéfices qui en découlent pour l’utilisateur. Voici un exemple récent tiré d’un projet de traduction. Il s’agissait d’une [...]

Une question fréquemment posée par nos clients concerne la traduction du mot “marge” en comptabilité. Dans les comptes de résultats des sociétés françaises, il est fréquent de voir l’expression “marge opérationnelle” ou “marge opérationnelle en % du CA”. Ces expressions sont respectivement  traduites en anglais par “operating profit” et “operating margin”. Pourtant, les clients pensent [...]

Last week I attended a Grenoble Ecole de Management conference on the future of manufacturing. The high-level panel — top executives from major French corporations and a journalist from a leading economic daily — brought in quite a crowd, and the auditorium was jam packed. One nugget that grabbed the attention of a number of [...]

Over on Copyblogger, a great reminder about getting back to basics by focusing on writing great paragraphs, something that also happens to make copy more translatable. In French to English translation, two of the things that can easily throw me off track are redundancies (which are often disguised in French by using a variety of [...]

According to this article in the LA Times today, today’s translation and interpreting market is about more than just speaking two languages — increasingly, it is about speaking two languages and possessing expertise in a particular subject area. This results in high-demand niches like « German to English waste management » or « Russian to Farsi nuclear engineering » [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the translatability of corporate mission statements here. Over at Marcomments, the discussion continues with some tips about how to write a good mission statement in the first place.  Corporate mission statements would be easier to translate into other languages if they followed a few of the tips [...]

The recent translation crowdsourcing debate has got me thinking about the many different segments on the translation market–which has made me realize more than ever what a jungle it is for buyers. Add to this an interesting discussion I had recently with a marketing executive from a multinational (dissatisfied with marketing translations purchased from some [...]

Translation crowdsourcing just keeps on cropping up on the blogosphere and in translation industry news these days. The American Translators Association recently took an official stance against crowdsourcing by LinkedIn and many individual translators have jumped on the bandwagon, forming a group on LinkedIn (Translators Against Crowdsourcing) and talking up the issue in the blogosphere. [...]

Over at Marcomments today, a post about transforming product/service features into customer benefits in your copywriting, a policy that I would say also applies to marketing translations. I would even go so far as to argue that, as a marketing translator, part of my job is to help customers make the shift from features to [...]

The mere thought of a corporate mission statement coming across my desk for translation is enough to make me cringe. This month’s issue of Fast Company (Nancy Lublin’s « Do something » column) talks about why most mission statements are « dumb » and what can be done about it. According to Lublin, it all comes down to having [...]