I was asked by my manager to help out Creative services Dept. and find out where we could translate Instruction written in English into French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish. Can anyone help me out with this?

I was asked by my manager to help out Creative services Dept. and find out where we could translate Instruction written in English into French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish. Can anyone help me out with this?

I don't really have a solution - but a question...
what's the application? We have to send User Instructions for anything we sell in Europe that is subject to the directive that governs our products. We make them all in English but offer an option for translation into the language of the country where the parts are going.
No one has take us up on that yet.
All have accepted English.

We have never had to translate work instructions or procedures, but every now and again we have some specs to translate. There are several things to try. There are on-line translation applications, they might get you close, but are not all that great on technospeak, or informal communication.
Do you have a college nearby that teaches the languages in question?
Do any of your workers speak any of the languages?
Check with nearby companies and see if they have anyone on staff, or can recommend someone?
Check with your local job service, unemployment service, temp service, or equivelent?

I was asked by my manager to help out Creative services Dept. and find out where we could translate Instruction written in English into French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish. Can anyone help me out with this?

There are lots of commercial translation services available as this Google search (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=translation+service) will attest.

I used to search webstar for and some times the sentence. it is useful.

Raghu

Actually I know about this site. It DOES NOT give you the
RIGHT translation because I have tried it with Spanish and my co-worker who knows spanish had to correct the sentence after I got the translation from this site. So, Don't trust the free translation site

I was asked by my manager to help out Creative services Dept. and find out where we could translate Instruction written in English into French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish. Can anyone help me out with this?One of my clients several years ago determined mere TEXT instructions were inadequate, since many workers were not perfectly literate in understanding the written word. He also produced "picture books" (photographs and cartoons) with simple alternate texts in the different language. I lost touch, but he said his future plan was to create films (DVDs?) of Work Instructions with voiceovers in different languages.

Now, if you are talking about instructions to be packaged with a product for end users and consumers, I'd ALSO include picture books. "A picture is worth . . ."

The good thing is that you are dealing with Europe and not asia where translation are not nearly so literal.
Here are my recomendations based on my experiance.
Add pictures/diagrams ect with arrows and other indicators as these realy help clarify things
Use a translation service that has folks familiar with the technology or the field of the content.
To ensure that it is accurate the only way that I have seen that can give you a high degree of confidance is to have the translation material translated back to english by some one other the the first person who did the work. This process will highlight those areas that did not get translated correctly.

:2cents:

If you need something translated or written try www.elance.com . You post what you want done and people bid on it. You can see their profile and how they performed in the past. It is a mixture of professional companies or just people that need to make some extra money.
Hope that helps.

Can you recommend a translation service for us? We are a start-up and anticipate selling internationally, and could really use a recommendation. We have been looking at having our system manual back-translated also and have found that translating documents can be extremely expensive!

Can you recommend a translation service for us? We are a start-up and anticipate selling internationally, and could really use a recommendation. We have been looking at having our system manual back-translated also and have found that translating documents can be extremely expensive!If you read between the lines of the previous posts in this thread, you can infer many of us recommend devising a document that uses as many pictures and as few words as possible. If you are able to edit the document in your native language down to a short explanatory text plus good pictures (photos, engineering drawings, or cartoons), then, since most translators charge by the word or page, you should be able to afford the best possible translators, especially those who may be familiar with the body of knowledge involved and can make strategic choices on the best of several synonyms to use to enhance the understanding of the foreign version reader.

Maybe it's of interest to compare the OP's six languages to a project we're tackling right now. We're re-designing the worldwide labeling for a large group of accessory products for a first tier medical equipment maker. Each of these relatively simple professional-only products used to have a single worldwide version labeled in eight languages, plus a usage illustration and a lot of ISO symbology. Now they're being split into two SKUs each. The product version for Americas and eastern Asia at present will have six or seven languages. The version for Europe, Africa and western Asia will have twenty-six languages...though apparently only eight will have to be on the external labeling, with the other eighteen on an insert sheet.

We estimate that we would have well upwards of $50,000 in professional translation costs if we had to go outside, but the customer has existing translation resources available to us.