Translation

Translation is the foundation everything else sits on. It's also the service most often bought on price alone, which is how organisations end up paying twice: once for the translation, and again for the correction after somebody in the community points out what it says.

We translate across 171 languages with a vetted network of more than 10,000 translators. Every translator works into their native language, and every one is matched to the subject matter, because a translator who is excellent at legal contracts is not automatically the right person for a mental health resource.

The work, and how it is checked

Every translation runs through the ISO 17100 process: a qualified translator produces it, a second qualified linguist revises it against the source, and the revision is documented. That second pass is not proofreading. The reviser is checking meaning, terminology and register against the original, and is qualified to disagree.

Alongside that sit your translation memory and your termbase. The memory means content you've already paid to translate is never retranslated. The termbase means the name of your program, the description of an entitlement and the clinical terms in your patient material stay identical across every document, every language and every year.

What we translate most

• Certified documents for visa, citizenship, court, registry and university requirements, from $69 per document. See birth certificate translation for how a single document runs.
• Patient information, consent forms, discharge instructions and health promotion material.
• Policy, legislation, tender responses, annual reports and board papers.
• Websites, apps, e-learning modules and CMS-managed content, returned into the same fields.
• Forms, letters, entitlement notices and the correspondence that decides whether someone claims what they are owed.

Scale, when it is needed

For the Department of Home Affairs we delivered more than 200 pieces of content across 63 languages under pandemic timelines, with over 180 professionals working simultaneously. How that was run.

That capacity exists because the network is standing, not assembled on request. For an ongoing program it also means the same translators return to your account, which is worth more to quality than any single process step.

Related: multicultural communication for content that needs rebuilding rather than converting, and language technology for connecting translation to your systems.