The guiding principle to our translation and adaptation process is to make sure that the reader feels that the document they are reading has been custom-made for them.

To this end we use a variety of techniques and resources:

When translating from English to French, we understand and respect the cultural and linguistic distinction of Quebecois French. We use professional Quebecois translators who can deliver international French translations and can tweak their texts to make them more Quebec-specific when the project calls for it. A translator or translators are attached to a project that have experience and expertise in that subject.

To maintain lexical consistency from one project to the next and guarantee a coherent message for our clients, all our translations are run through Trados in Word. This software keeps approved final translations in special memories in order to propose possible translations of terms and expressions it recognizes. Trados is not automatic translation software. It is a translation memory management system that helps maintain the lexical integrity and consistency of translations from one document to the next.

For each client, we build a lexicon of key terms and expressions that form the terminological backbone to translations. This is particularly important for areas of knowledge or industries with highly-developed and specific vocabularies or for businesses with huge inventories of products that must be identified consistently from one language to the next and from one document to the next. For one project, we had a 750,000 word translation to which we assigned 11 translators working off a common translation memory and lexicon.

All texts go through three levels of proof-reading to eliminate errors of omission and grammatical, punctuation as well as spelling mistakes.

In order to make the reader feel comfortable with a translated text, not only must the language be impeccable, the way it’s presented on the page should be as well. We can apply our resources and considerable experience to layback headlines and copy to an existing layout or produce the French version from scratch. Most graphic artists find it unnerving to layout text in a language that is not their own. The lack of a working understanding of a foreign language results in erroneous hyphenation, improper punctuation, misplaced line breaks, and most egregiously, in positioning text where it doesn’t go! You don’t have to deal with the difficulty and the anxiety that go with this work. Let us do it for you!

Sometimes a great concept in one language just simply doesn’t work in another. Though as an English-speaker you might not be sensitized to it, it happens all the time. If you are an English-speaking North American, you might understand what’s going on in a movie from another country, but you know that you are not the target audience—the situations seem odd, the characters unfamiliar, the narrative implausible, and though you might understand the language, the entire experience seems foreign to you.

This is exactly the feeling you don’t want to leave with the readers of your translated text. When they read a translated text they should feel that it was written expressly for them, using a language that reflects their language the way they use it.

Studio 514 clearly understands this. Our translators are native speakers that know how to express ideas correctly using illustrative examples, sentence constructions and expressions that the reader will identify with.