The TranslationPal Blog

There’s a story often told to illustrate the value of hiring expert translators: when Chevy launched the Nova model in Mexico, they failed to take into account that ‘Nova’ translates into ‘No va.’ While this story is an apocryphal tale, there are plenty of examples where businesses — up to and including major corporations — […]

With the increasing popularity of e-books, self-publishing has become a viable option for many authors. Once upon a time, self-publishing was prohibitively expensive, as an author would have to pay for a print run of his or her book with a so-called vanity press. These days, however, writers can easily create and sell their own […]

What is machine translation and how does it work? If you’ve ever used Google Translate, you’ve used a machine translation tool. Machine translation is instantaneous – you input the source language text, press a button, and within a matter of moments, the text is returned to you in the target language. It can even be […]

When people are looking for translation services, they often have one or more smaller documents that need translating. But what about full-length manuscripts? What is the translation process like for a book-length project? In some ways, of course, the process is no different from the one for shorter documents: the translator will still be looking […]

Translation is a relatively small field, and most people don’t know much about it. As a result, misconceptions abound. I could link to a dozen humorous articles about people’s efforts to translate texts using a bilingual dictionary or Google Translate, with embarrassing results. (Here’s a personal favorite!) All of us use language constantly every day, […]

If you’re new to buying translation, you may have lots of questions about how to ensure that you’re paying the right price and that what you get in return is of the utmost quality. As a translation company, we’d like to shed some light on the options you may have for buying translation, and what […]