Mr. Woods Translations

I always strive for the best possible results. What characterizes a good translation?

 

• Not even a native speaker can tell that it's translated.  

• The style is appropriate for the text's intended purpose and the addressed target group. 

• It reads naturally and its style and tonality are equivalent to those of the source text, while only using elements of the target language to achieve this. 

• The terminology is correct.

• It's free of errors.

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To ensure this, I draw on my decades of experience to prepare translations in another language that match the source documents in terms of  content, style and type. I don't use artificial intelligence because it generally creates facsimiles that are well off the mark in almost every way, and I of course also avoid word-for-word translations because they typically result in unnatural language and in many cases completely distort the intended meanings.

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It's also important to watch out for so-called "false friends," like when Chef is translated as "cook" when "boss" is meant or vice-versa. And when an idiomatic expression is translated literally the result can be hilariously wrong. The English expression "kick the bucket" (= die) can't be translated into German as "den Eimer treten." There are many traps that translators can stumble into. 

 

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