I Need a Translator!

Sometimes people amaze me at how vague they can be when posting a job. For example, someone today showed up in my feed and basically the post read like this:

I need help translating technical documents. I will give you further details when hired.

For those of you who don't know Guru has a free 10 bids per month service, but most established professional freelancers pay for our bids. That means we only bid on jobs that are good fits for our skill set because we don't want to waste a bid on something that doesn't match.

When someone posts a vague description, most of the good freelancers will not apply. Placing "keywords" that further the description is not a good idea, but in this case the only keyword was "translation."

Translators, as you might guess, specialize in certain languages. What you also might not guess is that many translators only translate one direction. In other words, I translate Latin> English but not the other way. Usually translators do not know every language in the world. This is why if you want your book translated you need to be specific:

"I want a translator for my book. The book is currently written in English. I need it translated into Portuguese, Hindi, and German."

You will probably not find one person who can do this because you specified multiple languages. Once a book has been translated you should find someone who is a native speaker of the language to edit it. Editing a translation is an entirely different job than editing a book normally.

When someone gives you a translation to edit, you need to be able to first tell the person if the translator did a good job or put it through Google translate. Note: If a translator states they can translate any language in the world- they are using Google translate. Most translators use software to improve the speed of the translation, but these translations are still dynamic and readable.

Second, a translation edit needs to maintain all the qualities of the original text as best it can. This means you cannot do any developmental editing. The keys to a translation edit is (1) does it read smoothly or does it read like a translation and (2) are all the words used correctly? In some cases, something might not have come through correctly. Unless the editor is also familiar with the language, these should go back to the translator to fix.

You can find many freelancers to translate your work, but you need to have it checked by others. Good translations usually cost $0.10 per word or more.