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Useful Tips & Resources

Preparing a text or product for translation

  • Make sure that the text is correctly written in English, use a good English-speaking writer and also proof-read the texts before sending them off for translation.
  • Use terminology consistently: The same name should be given to a part in an instructions manual, a character or object in a game, a page in a website, a title in a user interface, etc.
  • Formal or informal style: Let the translators know what style you want to use in your texts, because it may not always be apparent from your source material.
  • The word "you": Clarify who is being addressed when using the word "you" if it isn't clear, because it can refer to one person or two. In a script for a game or for the screen, if the translator doesn't have the image, they need to know who is saying the sentence and to whom.
10 things to expect from a good freelance translator

GILT stands for Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation. Many businesses who find themselves in the initial stages of taking their products to new markets might get confused by these terms because the differences between them are subtle. These terms represent all of the language and culture related processes involved in global business and the former Localization Industry Standards Association provided the following definitions:

Globalization addresses all of the enterprise issues associated with making a company [product/service] truly global. The globalization of products and services involves integrating all of the internal and external business functions with marketing, sales, and customer support in the world market.

Internationalization is the process of generalizing a product so that it can handle multiple languages and cultural conventions without the need for redesign. Internationalization takes place at the level of program design and document development.

Localization involves taking a product and making it linguistically and culturally appropriate to the target locale (country/region and language) where it will be used and sold.

Translation is only one of the activities in localization; in addition to translation, a localization project includes many other tasks such as project management, software engineering, testing, and desktop publishing.

  • AGOST, Rosa - Traducción y doblaje: palabras, voces e imágenes Publisher: Ariel
    Year: 1999
    Country: Spain
    Language: Spanish
  • ÁVILA, Alejandro - El doblaje
    Publisher: Cátedra
    Year: 1997
    Country: Spain
    Language: Spanish
  • BERNAL MERINO, Miguel Ángel - La traducción audiovisual
    Publisher: Universidad de Alicante, Servicio de Publicaciones
    Year: 2002
    Country: Spain Language: Spanish
  • CHANDLER, Heather - The Game Localization Handbook
    Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Learning
    Year: 2 edition, 2011
    Country: United States
    Language: English
  • CHAUME, Frederic - Cine y traducción
    Publisher: Editorial Cátedra
    Year: 2004
    Country: Spain
    Language: Spanish
  • DÍAZ CINTAS, Jorge - Teoría y práctica de la subtitulación
    Publisher: Ariel
    Year: 2003
    Country: Spain
    Language: Spanish
  • DURO MORENO, Miguel, (coord.) - La traducción para el doblaje y la subtitulación
    Publisher: Cátedra
    Year: 2001
    Country: Spain
    Language: Spanish
  • JIMÉNEZ SERRANO, Óscar - La traducción técnica inglés-español: didáctica y mundo profesional
    Publisher: Comares
    Year: 2002
    Country: Spain
    Language: Spanish
  • MICOROSOFT CORPORATION - Microsoft® Manual of Style, 4th Edition
    Publisher: Microsoft Press
    Year: 2012
    Country: United States
    Language: English
  • RABASSA, Gregory - If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents
    Publisher: New Directions
    Year: 2006
    Country: United States
    Language: English
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