Information Logo
Home

Courses/Workshops
Taxonomies
Indexing
Web Site Indexing
Web Site Design
Translations

Translation
Localization
Tools
Terminologies
Open Source
Training
Clients
Resources
Articles by Tom
About Tom

Hedden Information Management

Translation Services

Subject areas and materials
Materials translated
Language combinations
Project planning
Tools and technology used
Rates

Subject areas specialties

  • Aerospace engineering
  • Automotive engineering
  • Biochemistry
  • Chemical engineering
  • Chemistry
  • Computers and software
  • Environmental sciences
  • Medicine and medical technology
  • Petroleum, natural gas, & coal
  • Pharmaceuticals
  • Telecommunications

Materials translated

  • Patents
  • Product literature
  • Technical documentation
  • Scientific papers
  • Software and software documentation
  • Web pages

Language Combinations

Thomas Hedden translates the following language combinations, for all of which he has passed the certification examinations of the American Translators Association:

  • German to English
  • French to English
  • Russian to English
  • Polish to English

Project Planning

Please or phone (978-371-2126) to discuss the requirements of your translation project prior to sending it. You need to provide the following information for a project cost estimate:

  • Language
  • Subject area
  • Type of document
  • Estimated word count (Count the words on one page and multiply by the number of pages.)
  • Deadline (Is the deadline hard or flexible?)
  • At least two sample pages for a definite commitment (faxed or e-mailed), unless this is similar to a previous project.

For normal rates and turnaround time, figure on about 2000 words to be translated per business day on average. More challenging material should be giving extra time. Ideally, projects should be scheduled as far ahead as possible. While projects can start in as little as one or two day's notice, availability is less likely on short notice.

The ideal document format for translations is an electronic text file. If this is not possible, a PDF file, scanned text, or FedEx-ed hard copy is also acceptable. Faxing should be avoided except for submitting sample pages for an estimate, due to the relatively poor legibility.

A simple translation agreement will be completed at the start of the project. The project will be invoiced at the time of completion, and payment is expected within 30 days. If the project is scheduled to take longer than one month to complete, incremental invoices will be submitted along with incremental submissions of translated work on a monthly or other agreed upon basis.

International payments are accepted either by direct bank transfer or by PayPal.

Tools and technology used

Translation memory tools

Trados
have tested others

Localization Tools used

XL8 - Windows localization projects
TOOLS: eHelp - Macintosh projects
AppleGlot - Macintosh projects
Resorcerer - Macintosh projects
SoftPolish - Macintosh projects
ResEdit - Macintosh projects
XRunner - testing tool used in X Window system

Desktop applications used

Wordprocessors, spreadsheets, and other office applications: Microsoft Office, StarOffice, OpenOffice
Publishing an layout - FrameMaker
Graphics - Visio, some knowledge of Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.
Communications - Mozilla, Konqueror, Netscape, Explorer, etc.,
Database management- MySQL, Access, Paradox/Windows, Oracle
UNIX editor - vi editor

Operating systems

Solaris, HP-UX
Linux - Red Hat 6.1, SuSE 9.0
Windows XP, 2000, NT, 9x - thorough familiarity
Solaris 2.7 - some knowledge
Macintosh - thorough familiarity

Rates

Translation rates are based on a per-word-rate for the target language, in this case English. Thus, a source language word count may need to be adjusted, since different languages tend to use different numbers of words to communicated the same information. Following are the expansion ratios suggested to obtain target language estimates:

  • German -> English: multiply by 1.25
  • French -> English: multiple by 0.9
  • Russian -> English and Polish --> English: multiply by 1.15.

Rates vary based on:

  • Technical difficulty of the subject matter
  • Language pair being translated, with the less common languages being more expensive.
  • Format of the document, with hard copy or PDFs being more expensive than electronic text.
  • Scheduling, with rush or weekend jobs being more expensive. Depending on the material, more than 2000 words/day could be considered rush.

In all cases, at least two sample pages are required before a project rate can be provided.